Thread

everything reminds me of 2012 right now

travel or Travel? 2012 was an awful year.

it was good because i finally escaped the prison island. things have been up and down since then but it was all downhill until that point, starting in 1999

You **_escaped_** prison? 😮

I think the prison island here is the place called by certain Russian 'small island' 😏

no, "The Prison Island": Australia. you probably hear of what has been going on there since 2020 i simply couldn't find meaningful, ongoing employment. age 36, not enough money for even a pissy little motorcycle. scraping landscaping work in the mountain town my sister and her husband were living in. i was starting to get a substantial improvement in my clientele but they were scattered across Brisbane so wide that it was impossible for me actually do my work. i was a freelancer too. never was able to get any job, not once in australia i sent an application and got even a fucking trial. it was always either shitwork, even i was working as a rent boy for one of those years (1998), or my tech support business. oh, i may have picked up my first job at a finance department of some sort doing data entry on spreadsheets. anyway, too many details but suffice it to say that my income and ability to be economically mobile, despite having spent time in actual prison in bulgaria 2014 for darkweb and homeless in amsterdam from then until 2017, i finally nailed down an internship of sorts with a guy in serbia who wanted a shitcoin upgraded. ~2 years, then covid, then 2021 i got some well paid shitcoin jobs, 6 months, then i was with a contractor and all the shitcoiners rugged me by adopting Rust (Go was the darling before that, one of the primary implementations of ethereum is written in go), and then someone wanted me to build a tor-style distributed VPN protocol, and after that i came to madeira, and i landed a shitcoin job for 18 months and now i'm working on nostr stuff. this island has insane rents and land prices, too many people, absolute shit food supply unless you own property and run your own animals and gardens. and if it's warmer, dryer and less cloudy, it's full of noisy people and yapping dogs nonstop, not to mention that a taxi to my nearest supermarket cost 15 euros. i'm over it. yeah, maybe another prison island at this point.

I can relate. Similar experience in the US. Truly, the only employment to be had is working for the government. No one my age is meaningfully employed. Anyone who has an actual income is either directly employed by government or one or two steps removed. There's no free market at all, and its so obvious that its infuriating that people persist with this idea that we're a free market economy. No one's being honest with themselves. Prison country, basically. I haven't been to Europe, but it seems like the whole "west" is a prison.

yep, that's my assessment also. staying in england and now here in portugal makes me nervous, but being a semi-independent territory (not quite sovereign but EU member) things are not quite so well enforced, mainly because the population here is aging fast and the old people don't have the patience or will to comply, the police are lax about most things, only really the portuguese gendarmes are "strong" - mainly on collecting taxes from tradesmen driving their vans and trucks on highways. my taxi driver neighbour told me about their checkpoints and aggressive revenue enforcement. the only countries in the EU, or adjacent/candidates for accession (i think macedonia is, and slovenia, maybe croatia but serbia and bosnia are not). bulgaria is probably the most free country in the EU, but it's slid down so far since i first arrived in 2013. probably Lichtenstein, but you have to be pretty rich to live there. lichtenstein is one of the few remaining monarchies in the world, i think bhutan is also. balkans non-EU members are poor countries, but for food, and heating, they are pretty much ok, in the rural areas, most places are on wood heating and there is plenty of supply of wood in the hills and mountains. sounds quite sketchy the situation with serbia right now, with USA insisting they stop running an oil refinery that is going to be owned by non-russians in 3 months time, all the processes are in flow, but USA is bullying them again. it is going to be quite the uproar if they don't relent. i'm sure russia is going to leverage it as much as they can, as Medvedev, i think it was "serbia seems to have forgotten who their friends are".

I don't understand why any country would want to join the EU. Are they retarded?

EU gives some perks (and lies) on the beginning and then they fleece you; many are misled that way.