Immigration-specific groups. Not in a major way like completely shutting down immigration or install a per-country cap or something. Since Australia does skill-based immigration, my understanding is that they are limiting the types of ppl they allow in. I’d love to be proven wrong though, if I’m not right plz correct me

Maybe try looking up info from governmental websites first? A lot of countries (not US, cough cough) seem to have fairly straightforward immigration guidelines, so they’d probably write up what types of person they are looking for & the standard procedures

Old Reddit posts could be second

And… depending on the country, for some places it may be better to just DIY, some places having a lawyer might be extra helpful

I’m sorry OP I couldn’t answer your questions directly since I am in a same boat, so I can only share my experience trying to get there… Maybe some of this would be useful

Where did you decide to move to, and what were the things you looked at when deciding to move there?

So the only immigration-friendly countries I can find are Canada, Australia, and Germany. Not a big list to begin with, but for US citizens there might be more options with other EU countries. Canada has… issues, someone else in the thread mentioned about their experiences. Australia apparently is closing its doors. Sweden used to be fine but I heard things went really South for them a few months ago.

And if you’re a lurker on Reddit you probably know r/IWantOut? Country-specific wise I know r/Germany has a phenomenal wiki for their stuff, and Canada has r/immigrationcanada. Unfortunately a lot of good information is still on Reddit so yeah

Other countries… I don’t think Asian countries do much immigration at all, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe some EU countries are fine depending on heritage and/or where you are from. I have no idea what’s going on in Africa, if anyone knows something plz let me know.

Where can I start? How can I realistically make it happen?

For your privacy plz don’t answer in this thread, but 1) how old are you, 2) what type of education do you have, and 3) what type of work do you do? Having a college education and an in-demand career goes a long way, although this is also country-dependent. And yeah under many circumstances your employer could help you with the process. Certain parts of Canada and Germany obviously have language requirements, but a lot of other countries accept English. I heard some places allow investment-based immigration, but 1) it’s expensive AF and 2) not sure if countries that allow this plan are remotely desirable for US citizens…

Also side note: please DO NOT give up US citizenship unless you have a really good reason to / already have something in your bag. I’m not a citizen here, and most US citizens have no idea how excruciating it is to immigrate to this country

ELI5 about the Chinese real estate market in general? This is how they got to where they are today:

• Investing in China sucks. The stock market is extremely volatile and there seem to be a lot of shady activities, banks get bank runs so you couldn’t even put too much money in banks, etc
• In contrast, real estate is heavily subsidized by China’s state capitalistic approach, so it became a really “stable” investment… because government subsidized it
• Because of this, everyone buys or want to buy real estate in China. In fact, people are willing to buy places that would almost never be lived in, because of possibility of appreciation… so we’re approaching NFT-level bullshit here
• Additional point: because of the above point, Chinese investors would buy real estate even when abroad & the RE market is not nearly as favorable. Obviously this causes some frictions… like a good chunk of Canadian citizen blaming Chinese ppl on raising home prices
• Chinese economy is now facing hardship, so the real estate bubble is finally showing signs of leakage in the past few years

I am not an economist and cannot offer insight as to whether this would turn into an 2008 moment… Nevertheless, I am aware that Soho is an extremely well-known developer, and that the Chinese economy is to a large extent built on top of real estate. And despite how much I dislike China, it is one of the world’s largest economies, and large economies don’t just go belly-up without inflicting heavy damage on the whole world… So this is not good news by any means.

Hey OP, I am similar to you in most aspects but I’m a lot younger, so please take it with a grain of salt…

I also live in Texas, and honestly I thought a lot of less privileged folks or ppl with family ties would love to be in your situation and just leave? It’s not just about politics. Even if tomorrow Texas becomes a liberal stronghold, it will still take possibly at least a decade to fix ERCOT, the climate issue, and flooding issues (if you live in Houston)… This clusterfrick alone was enough to prompt me to never live in Texas again once I’m done with grad school

Besides, my understanding is that there are a few left-leaning metro areas which have suburbs (or live in the city!) that don’t cost that much more to live in compared to mid-/upper-mid-class TX suburbs, so there’s probably no financial disincentive to move either

Oh boy it’s my time to shine!

I’m working in aging right now. Heard of Dr. David Sinclair since he was the corresponding author on a paper I was curious about… So this is what his lab is doing.

Two important disclaimers:

• Success in cellular research rarely translates to something viable in the clinic. A lot of chemicals don’t behave the same way in cells as in actual animals or humans. Heck, a good number of phase 2 drugs even fail, and these haven’t even made it into phase 1… so I wouldn’t be too optimistic about them.
• The journal Aging is not the most prestigious journal especially for someone working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to be honest. I’d be more excited if this was published in Nature Aging or Nature Communications or something. If this ever gets published in New England Journal of Medicine (a very prestigious journal only for clinical studies) then we have some news.

The link between cell senescence and aging is something actively being studied tho.

And, if anyone is curious about this topic: I’m also very actively following Dr. Vadim Gladyshev who is also from HMS and is working in aging, I believe he is doing some wet lab-biology on a similar area as well. Feels like his research is sometimes a bit ahead of his time but I think his work has great potential.

Tried it myself with hardened Firefox, can confirm that’s the case. It’s even worse, my first search is “getting run over”…

Probably says more about the type of ppl frequenting YouTube than YT doing some shady stuff. Which honestly sounds more dystopian to me

P.S. Just realized youtube.com blocks Tor Browser, not cool Ytb.

Ohhh so that’s why… So the rice actually does do something? But I think the marketer who designed this needs to be sent back to high school to retake biology or sth

Great article… Pharmaceuticals is interesting since the needs of corporations functioning under capitalism and their customers disconnect a lot

• Making effective drugs is mad expensive (billions of USD), so companies are strongly incentivized to squeeze as much profit as possible everywhere on top of the already bad enough corporate greed levels
• Thanks to patents, new drugs are almost always monopolies, so the pharma who makes the drug can charge (almost) as much as they want and make a lot
• Whereas making drugs without patents is not profitable as the article suggested… so these are done mostly by factories based in India and other not fully developed countries
• Funnily enough most ppl need cheaper generic drugs, not the ones most pharma companies are innovating and will make mad profits from
• And for the people mentioned above, pharmaceuticals are basically a need not a luxury, but somehow it’s dependent on the ebbs and flows of free market capitalism

My unhinged opinion is… Most of the pharmaceuticals research are done by (mostly) publicly-funded research labs anyways… so might as well just let the government do something about this? I wouldn’t be surprised if some folks in academia wouldn’t mind moonlighting as CEO at a nonprofit drug manufacturer or sth

I stand my opinion on this… Some people are defederating Meta because they are anti-capitalist; these are the same admins who defederated mastodon.cloud as well as instances from Medium/Mozilla/etc on moment’s notice, so I think they will certainly defederate from Tumblr. Most people would probably want to at least wait & see since Tumblr isn’t as nefarious as Meta is

Interesting, I did drive for Uber Eats during the pandemic a bit…

I guess the main “backlash” is because these few companies have to pay minimum wage now? Drivers are gig workers so have been treated as independent contractors so far: a.k.a. no employee benefits, absolutely no minimum wage… The flexibility might sound alright to some on first glance, but the more you think about it the worst it gets. And yeah these companies basically made money by giving the false pretense that you can have a flexible work schedule but then squeeze profits out from both ends

So to get back to this… I guess these companies are arguing about this law not just because they are greedy for a few extra bucks, but because mandating them to pay minimum wage might straight-up bankrupt their businesses? I don’t mind tho… Uber got to where it is today by being a loss leader & drove out the cab companies. Might as well let 'em taste a bit of their own medicine for all the shitty gig economy they brought to us

Surprised no one else mentioned this… the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances…

To answer the second question… I don’t know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I’m aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.

Self-hosted SearXNG. Very easy to self-host, and (for the most part) works just fine

From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for all

Honestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.

So it certainly doesn’t help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn’t realize it was such a big deal… I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.

Also, for large general instances, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some “fun” discussions.

Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously