Is the opportunity “once in a lifetime” or can you find alternatives like Europe?

Generally speaking, opportunities are difficult to find and if you let go of one, depending on what kind of opportunity it is, you might get another one in a few years, or decades, or never. Depending on what line of work you’re in, European opportunities aren’t comparable to American ones either. Tech industry in Europe is in a laughable state, for an example.

Who the fuck thought it’d be a good idea to hold the world cup in the US, a country that doesn’t even give a fuck about football?

Now I’m not an American and definitely not a Latino, but I’ve heard there’s a huge amount of Latinos who hate Latinos and want them all to stay out of the country (I.e fuck you, got mine), which is part of why they vote republican. Also all the Cuban refugees who really hate Cuba so they also vote republican just to make sure democrats don’t ease the sanctions on Cuba - which are of course making life hard for people who have not yet escaped Cuba. Hell I bet without the sanctions a lot of people wouldn’t be leaving it in the first place.

If all that is true, honestly, this is a peak leopards eating faces moment.

The fact you need to prove citizenship to register to vote is the least of their election problems.

Is it? Potentially millions of citizens can’t vote. There’s exactly one party pushing for voter ID laws and it’s not the one that young people without driver’s licenses would likely vote for.

I’m Estonian, we also have ID requirements, and an ID card is cheap. Passports aren’t expensive either, but ID cards are more useful in day to day life.

The US is fucked. There’s no standardized photo ID that everyone has to have. People only get passports for travel and the country is literally so huge and diverse you can travel more than most people have money to and see many different environments without leaving it. I reckon you could spend a year in NYC alone and not see everything there is to see. In 2006, 20% of Americans had passports, in 2011 it was 37%.

The most common form of photo ID to have is the driver’s license. But some people don’t get one. People also have social security cards, almost everyone has one, but that’s not a photo ID.

Luckily they now have something called a passport card (pretty much just an ID card but allows travel to like Canada and Mexico I think?), that only costs 30 bucks to get. The actual book form of passport is 130 for application, and if you’re an adult and it’s your first passport, there’s a 35 dollar acceptance fee, which all together is actually too much for some people.

They also have free voter ID cards which are nowhere close to free.

There’s just a lot of bureaucratic inefficiency in the whole ID system in the US. It’s fucked. If you’re poor and can’t get time off work to get a cheap form of ID, you might be fucked. If you don’t have transport, you might be fucked.

Really, they should fix all this first and THEN mandate photo ID for voting. Right now it disproportionately affects people who have a hard time getting a photo ID, i.e poor people. Then there’s the whole single voting day for in-person voting. It also disproportionately affects the working class - people who might have a hard time getting time off work. Wait, why is this an issue, your employer is legally mandated to give you time off to vote? Because in red states, in areas that vote blue, they only put one voting station for a whooooole bunch of people so you’d have to drive a long distance AND wait a long time in line. AND it’s only 1-4 hours depending on state AND not all states have these laws.

The whole country is rigged to not let poor people to vote as easily as the wealthy, unfortunately.

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Yes, because a third party vote is going to do so much in a FPTP system.

I believe you mean Johnson & Johnson, which is a different company.

No idea about the morals of SC Johnson, I hadn’t heard of them till now, but have used a product or 2.

Don’t trust anyone whose name is Rand, first or last.

Or Paul for that matter, but that’s an entirely different issue. Paul knows what he did.

It’s called CECOT and while it’s had a massive positive impact on El Salvador’s crime rate, it feels like a giant human rights violation at the same time.

Give him a bunch of tattoos and send him to CECOT.

You actually got me there, I had to google his mother’s name thinking this is the worst prank from the universe ever.

The bread and circuses plan from Rome worked.

Might get interesting when DOGE removes the bread for a lot of people.

2028 might be the only time to even consider a dark skinned woman tbh. People wouldn’t have voted for Obama if they hadn’t been fed up with Bush’s bullshit war (which Obama then of course did almost nothing to pull out of). If the American people are EVER going to vote for AOC it’ll be because the economy is shit from an old white man fucking everything up for everyone.

Now that depends very heavily on the car. An 07 Honda? Mechanically you’re probably right. If it’s rusting, I’ll have to disagree with you though. Japanese cars do have a tendency to rust more than their western counterparts (at least applies to a lot of the ones made in the 90s and 00s).

I’ve seen some mid-00s Audis’ powertrain issues make grown men cry, metaphorically speaking.

Well, Tesla aside, all manufacturers manufacture some percent of their USDM cars outside of the US. For GM it’s over half. Even Honda, Toyota and Subaru USDM cars are more likely to be US-made than GM. Stellantis and Ford however are in 2nd and third place in Tesla so not TOO bad. Source

Unfortunately, that’s mission accomplished for team red, as that’s one fewer brown person growing up to take yer jerbs.

This was not a suicide. The Trump regime and her classmates murdered her.

You’re a bit out of luck right now in that the best paying industry for people with no specific training is currently experiencing (hopefully but unlikely the tail end of) a large downturn. Otherwise I’d suggest getting into software engineering, but as of late 2023 or so, it’s been hell getting a job in the industry unless you already have experience. I was lucky enough to have a bit over 4 years of experience when I got canned, but it still took me 3 months to find a new job. Of course, I was a lot lazier and pickier in my job search than you probably are. To make matters worse, you’re in the UK. I can’t say for sure, but I believe UK is actually not particularly attractive in terms of the salary vs cost of living tradeoff. But as I’ve seen from your other comments, you’re in the UK because that’s where you could get a citizenship, as opposed to something like an EU country where you wouldn’t be a citizen AND would ideally have to learn a new language.

The other reply mentioned the sysadmin career path. It’s pretty laid-back most of the time, honestly. Well paid too. You won’t compete with really sweaty Google/Meta/Tesla/whatever software engineers on salary, not even close, but you’ll have time for your family. I think that’s more important. You’d likely have to learn many of the relevant skills before even interviewing, but there’s no need for any sort of a degree. If you’re lucky enough to find a job at a company where there’s a whole team of sysadmins, or at least like one senior sysadmin besides you, you can easily learn on the job too. Hiring for IT related positions is usually based more on team fit and your overall cleverness than anything else. If you can hold a conversation, be witty, and understand what is being said even if you have no specific experience in what you’re talking about, that’s more important than a degree or even experience. I’ve won several jobs just by… talking. Helps if you have a ridiculously wide sphere of interests. I’ve bonded with interviewers over opinions on cars, programming languages and Linux Distros.

Can’t really recommend any other careers, I lack experience with most of them.

Or you just haven’t sold your soul out to a well-paying corporation yet. I don’t know your story and I can’t judge you. I technically make enough to lease a Tesla, but I was feeling iffy about them 7 or 8 years ago because of the quality they had then, now it’s a full-on nope for me, unless Musk is somehow relieved of his stake and employment in Tesla.

Oh I love AWD too, but for the first several years of my driving career, I had FWD and RWD cars, never had any trouble even if roads were unplowed, unless there really was a freak snowstorm. Thing is, all roads get plowed here eventually, so it’s not like you’re going to have to drive through a week’s worth of snowfall. It’s one or two days at most.

On a daily basis, the most useful thing about AWD, really, is the ability to accelerate away much faster than everyone else when the light goes green. Then you won’t have tailgaters for a while. The most fun thing, however, is that drifting is somehow really different from RWD drifting.

As for Disco Elysium: I haven’t played it. I really wanted to play it, but I didn’t feel like pirating it and was broke when it came out. Working a dead-end job, etc. Now that the original creators have been driven out of the company, I don’t feel like paying for it, so I might pirate it after all, but now I have so little free time I still haven’t finished my first playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, which I started in August 2023.

I think I’ll download it, install it, start it up once just to see what it’s like, and then play it in a few months when I have more free time again. Might have to finally get a Steam Deck so I could play it in bed, as I already sit behind my computer screen for some 12-14 hours a day.

If you’re into Disco Elysium, you’ll be delighted to hear that executive producer Kaur Kender is a downright controversial figure. Started up writing really explicit and vulgar novels - controversial in their own right, but I don’t think he got in any legal trouble for that. It was just crime novels with sex scenes, detailed violence (IIRC), etc. But things got really heated when he wrote a novel involving CSAM. At no point did he condone it, nor were any children hurt, but he was censored for it. This really launched him into fame or infamy. I haven’t read the book, but to quote Wikipedia: The Finnish Pen described it as a “grotesque thriller” and an important book discussing taboos central to the entertainment industry, including death, serial murder, pornography, and pedophilia.

He was also acquitted for the CP charges, on the grounds of, well, free speech and the fact that no children were harmed and there was nothing graphic.

Around this time frame you could find him rapping with a bunch of other Estonian rappers, about legalizing weed, and the effect of fentanyl on our society. Because apparently it’s almost easier to get fentanyl than weed and it’s fucking a lot of people up - something I have no experience with personally.

Books from him that you might want to read: Independence day, Comeback. But no idea if you can even find them in English at this point.