Everyone has something they can’t stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it’s hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!
I’m an American who has been living abroad for 7ish years now. I often read comments from people who say they would do it “but the taxes are brutal.” Absolutely not the case. I dug deep into tax programs when I left and can comfortably say I am better off financially now than at any time I ever lived in the States… A major part of that is my tax strategy.
I love talking about this but most people don’t really care or realize how significantly it can change their lives… Eyes just tend to glaze over.
As in, you’re still in some way paying U.S. taxes as well as those where you are abroad, or that the taxes abroad are brutal…? I’m not sure I follow which way you mean, mainly as I’ve never had the opportunity to live in another country.
As a US citizen you are technically always responsible for paying taxes no matter where you live. The US has a citizenship-based tax system (you owe on worldwide income regardless of where you live). Most other countries in the world have only a residency-based system (you owe only if you are actively living in that particular country). You are still required to file every year and you’re going to need someone more sophisticated than the dude at H&R Block or a free Quickbooks whatever. You need someone who is comfortable working with expats.
“Doesn’t that mean I have to pay taxes for both the US and my new country then?” No. The US has dual taxation agreements with most countries. That means that, basically, the US will not charge you taxes for things you’ve already been taxed for.
The main goal of paying less in taxes is to reduce your taxable income. The biggest chunk of this will happen with the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. That essentially says that the first $120k you earn in a year is tax free. You can qualify for it by staying out of America for 330 days per year. There is no requirement to have residency anywhere else… You just have to be outside of the US.
That $120k rises every year. When you make more than that and do start to owe taxes, you will start to owe from the lowest tax bracket as well.
If you make $120k and do this, you just got a $30k raise in the form of taxes you no longer owe… You can pretty much travel the world for free using this money.
Now, I said that most non-US countries have a residency-based taxation system. That generally only starts to kick in after living in that country for 181 days. If you stay there for less time, you don’t owe them any money.
There are also countries who don’t have income tax or do but actively tell you not to pay it.
Living in a combination of these places, and bouncing around every few months you avoid any real responsibility to anyone.
If you do earn more than $120k per year, you can reduce your taxable income even further by doing things like maxing out your 401k contribution… That gets you to $142500 or so tax free. And again, you’d start paying taxes at the lowest rate above that.
Any other thing you mention in your US filing that can reduce your taxable income also contributes… Getting married, depreciation value on a home (US or not), investment losses, etc…
Working remotely from the US also gets you a higher salary than if you had just taken a job in the UK or Germany or Japan or something… So you can have the higher salary and the higher quality of live at the same time. You give up some employment protections and European style summer vacations but I’m personally ok with it.
Also, if you are working for a US company remotely, you can add these expected deductions to you W4 and never get charged for them in the first place… You’d have a MUCH higher weekly salary and wouldn’t have to wait for your tax return every year to take advantage of these benefits.
So spend summers in Italy, autumn in Japan, winter in New Zealand, and spring in Mexico. You earn an American salary, take advantage of lower cost of living, travel the world, and its all basically free… Good luck trying to get me to move back to the US.
There’s more but these are the major points.
My uncle did this in retirement. Dual citizenship US - Italy. Moving to southern Italy village of less than 20k population means 7% flat tax for 10 years. He’s probably saving 100k per year in taxes. Which pays a lot toward a nice villa, a sailboat, dinners out, and travel money.
I don’t know all the details (yet). I also have US/Italian/EU citizenship, so it’s something I thing about. I think about living in a sailboat in the Mediterranean often.
It’s all very interesting. Your method is even more intriguing.
Have any good resources in the topic you can share?
For what it’s worth, I haven’t paid more than ~1% effective tax rate in years. This past year I owed like $50 total… For the whole year. Something like 0.03% of my actual income.
If you want to stay stationary, 7% is pretty decent but you can do better bouncing around.
I’d really love to see some starting point information I can digest on this subject. If you have any please share.
Instead of complaining about the public educational system. How to improve on existing methods to spread ideas of curiosity and learning methods/mechanisms through FOSS means.
Do you have any particular examples for FOSS projects in this space?
https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
There are repos like this.
Or there are repos like this: https://github.com/parthsuresh/stylegan2-colab
Where the latter has lots of materials to essentially train and run your own ML models. Teaching a lot of advanced topics simply in a way, using tools like Google’s colab. Using tools like Discord to handle discussion thereafter, seeking volunteers to improve or foster discussion in general.
There was one project, that was a simple react app, but meant for those in the Arts. Connecting famous works with news headlines of their time period. Allowing you to connect the dots around time frame and artistic movements in a more visual and impactful way. With a simple understanding of
npmas an Arts Major, you could greatly improve your learning experience.I feel all the materials are already there out in the open. Yet many do not take advantage or know how to access them or know how these projects can help them. Even with the age of LLMs, I’ve felt it hasn’t impacted the curiosity variable I mentioned either. When I say improve, I have wanted to build a tool which acts like the index to create your own lesson plan using all these FOSS software. Where FOSS is important because it provides the code for tinkering as a lot of kids, especially me, learn better with hands-on learning.
I just feel a lot of contributors out there do a great job already in teaching and providing. But, I’d love to talk about how we can integrate these into actual curriculum, and not some school club or after-school activity. I am no educator, so this is the part where I’d like to learn more about. And if that’s not a possibility, then how can the process of looking for these tools and learning how to learn be shared instead online.
Ah, I get what you mean! I thought you were referring to FOSS projects that make other education easier, not educational FOSS projects. It’s definitely an incredibly cool time to be alive and have an internet connection!
benefits of ritual and separating them from superstition.
I think it’s interesting to explore different frames of mind. I used to be christian, but then I read the bible. afterwards, I embraced paganism which has a more positive and welcoming community generally. eventually, the seeds of reason became rooted in my mind and I grew to be the atheist I am today. I still appreciate the experience of group ritual, as it feels good to explore different aspects of my personality. I guess the roleplaying is therapeutic. mixing that with my interests in mythology makes for plenty of content to examine. what encourages different rituals to develop? what are the notable effects of ritual in general? is superstition somehow beneficial to the community? I find that digging around to explore these questions can keep me busy for hours, which I enjoy thoroughly. unfortunately, no one I know shares the same interests. most folks seem to be superstitious about it, lol.
Those are very interesting thoughts. Do you write about it anywhere? Or do you have any good resources that give an overview over some of your questions?
I don’t write about them, but that’s a great idea. there’s a number of papers I’ve read and some academic YouTube channels I’ve found informative. I don’t have access to them conveniently right now as I am on mobile. (I’m still pretty new to Lemmy and don’t know if there’s a way to DM when I find those resources)
You can send DMs, or you can reply to the comment - that way others could read them too :)
This is a very, very cool topic. Ritual too often gets dismissed as just hokum/superstition, but if you think about ritual activities as means of creating different perceptual states (imagination+ IMO) or as means of creating/strengthening certain interpersonal bonds or reinforcing certain group norms, it gets VERY interesting.
It’s kind of why I like a chaos magick maxim I’ve heard before - “Belief is a tool”. It’s very easy to cross over into woo-woo territory, but if you’re able to keep your head on straight while also being able to temporarily suspend disbelief for a bit, you can have some pretty neat experiences.
I couldn’t of said that better! some of my favorite symbols to integrate in ritual are Baphomet and Santa Muerte. Throwing a healthy dose of sexual activities in the mix can really make for a good time! After all, “Nothing is true, everything permitted.”
Are you me? Same religious/spiritual journey here. I tell people now I’m an atheist that practices paganism, because religion is something you do, not something you are.
I think one of the coolest things about human experience is that we all come up with stories that answer the same questions, just slightly differently. It’s because being human leads you to want answers to the same questions regardless of time or space. Why am I here? Why do bad things happen? What comes next?
Doppelgangers unite, lol!
I enjoy getting together with my coven to perform rituals, as it is a bonding experience and the food is good. Celebrating the changes of the seasons helps me to be more mindful of the natural world and to appreciate it’s beauty. Satanism is also appealing to me because the use of rituals seem more poignant.
Anything. No one listens to me, actually listens. So I just make jokes and deflect.
same here. it’s bad when ya gotta turn to chatbots to feel heard. (and even that’s a stretch sometimes)
Cyber security stuff, but like the nitty gritty details and technical stuff. It’s something I’m really passionate about, but if anyone brings up something and I start going into details, their eyes glaze over.
I guess most people like the headline, tldr version only. Lol
I’m not deep in the topic, but I have done some security hardening for embedded devices. Whatever you have to share, I’d love to hear it!
There’s so much lol. I used to be a security software engineer. But people never fucking listen and will constantly fight you so I just gave up and went back to just software engineering.
At my job before last I told them we needed to enforce HTTPS and they said, but what if someone can’t use HTTPS for some reason?
This was an app that held tons of protected health information. I jumped ship as soon as I found another job.
Oh my god this is why we can’t have nice things ffs
Oh man, an HTTPS certificate should absolutely be required for that. Even aside from hackers, I don’t want my ISP to be able to read that stuff! Very disappointing.
Null models for weighted bipartite networks, and why people choose dumb network summary stats because they are lazy
Linguistics and the prescriptive bias of assuming a word’s meaning based on its blatant etymology
How skill makes games less fun and we need to embrace more chance in board games and video games
How cool it would be if we wrapped copper wire around the moon and used the earth-moon system as a huge electrical generator
Trains are awesome and we should have more of them
Well, you can’t mention all those interesting topics and not talk about them more!
I can really only talk about:
How cool it would be if we wrapped copper wire around the moon and used the earth-moon system as a huge electrical generator
You’re referring to induction from the magnetic field of earth, right?
What domain is your area of application for bipartite networks?
Also, most current linguistic work In familiar with ignores etymology i. favor of statistical usage models, but you might have a more particular focus.
I love linguistics too. I like to make up new words and assign them meaning based on blatant etymological rules. Then I drop them in a sentence like it’s no big deal.
My topic failure - My son totally nerds out over amplifiers and guitar pedals. He frequently tries to talk to me about noise and resistance and power supplies and other words that i can’t even remember. I really want to listen but i know my eyes glaze over and he gets irritated.
Cryptography, because it’s not fleshed out enough in many peoples’ minds for them to have the same interest.
Cars. And I really like to talk reliability and engine design and other design related stuff, most car people don’t even care about that. (Obviously there are plenty who do)
I drive a Honda insight which is a 3 cylinder 1L. Most car guys do not care about something so small but I think it’s very interesting that it was designed for such a specific purpose, and works quite well
I think that’s cool! Little tiny engine powering a modern car. Likely with a gear ratio designed to make it feel peppy up until ~60mph
I’ll gladly talk about cars with you!
Lol cool, what’s your favorite car and why
That’s a tough question, but I’d say the Pontiac GTO. I just love the way it looks, especially the stacked headlights
That’s a very pretty car indeed, I just realized I don’t have a favorite right now. I really like old fairlady Z cars and old BMWs, love the look of the e30 m3
Old radio shows! I’ve been listening back through episodes of Suspense (about 400 so far) and there’s some great stuff in there. There’s some stuff that doesn’t age too well, but there’s also some surprisingly relatable stories. It’s also fascinating to hear ads and snippets of news segments of the time, and to get a window of what people were worried about at that time. Not to mention that some of the episodes are just plain good thrillers that can be genuinely chilling. I can’t wait to get through these and move on to The Twilight Zone.
One of my favorites has been “Please Believe Me” (https://youtu.be/J8kbEL1332A?si=ro-K9VK3X3Zi5DMI), the performances are so good.
I love otr as well! Gunsmoke, mysterious traveler, escape etc… My dad got me into them as a kid, and I’ve never found anybody else who even remotely gives a fuck lol.
It’s a shame, people should know that there’s hours of great entertainment just waiting to be found! I don’t think I could listen to Dragnet straight through like I do the horror/mystery stuff, but the puns with the completely deadpan delivery get me every time. Is Gunsmoke a full continuous story? I need to give that one a listen.
It’s episodic, but occasionally references will be made to older episodes. You can totally listen in any order.
The Horus Heresy.
I haven’t googled it yet, but it sounds interesting. would you mind elaborating please?
You have made a grave mistake friend. Brace youself for hours upon hours of lore about plastic miniatures.
you aren’t kidding! friend of mine paints those minis and he was going on and on about it when I asked. what have I done?! 😂
If I wasn’t busy forklifting for the next few hours, I’d do a super long write-up, but it’s the story of how the Emperor of Mankind’s favored son betrayed him and forever divided the galaxy into loyalists and traitors, creating what is now known as the Warhammer 40K universe. I’d recommend giving it a Google and/or watching some lore videos on YouTube. And… definitely reading the novels “Horus Rising”, “False Gods” and “Galaxy in Flames”. Only about 1300 pages or so total. Definitely worth it!
I asked my buddy who paints those minis a little about it and holy shit. what a can of worms! interesting stuff, thank you for sharing!
Oh heck yeah!
I started getting into Warhammer 40k lore at the end of 2022. I only started doing so, because I kept hearing online about the sure tapestry of unparalleled mythos that 40k beholds. I checked out a dozen or so videos from all sorts of 40k lore people, but above all, I fell deeply in love with the animated series works that YT Janovich has produced. He does a hell of a lot of lore reading/combing and script writing to produce his videos. That really gives his videos a lot of production quality imo.
I’d love to hear any recommendations for a few of your favorite 40k lore YT channels. Especially 40k animated series.
I haven’t actually watched many lore videos on YouTube, but I hear Luetin09 is supposed to be one of the best. I’ve been looking for animated series though, as I think 40K would be a very good fit for that format. I’ll check out Janovich right away! Warhammer TV also isn’t available in my country, but it seems most of the content is the fan-made stuff on YouTube anyway.
I’ll give Leutin09 another look. I mostly stuck to their origins/timeline videos to better understand what the heck has happened in the WH 40k universe.
Psychology and physiology.
I swear my neuroendocrine system’s a lemon. I’ve had to learn basic and not so basic maintenance just to get the thing to run well enough to keep a job. I’ve struggled my entire adult life, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about trauma, stress, energy metabolism, brain parts, neurotransmitters, hormones, nutrition, inflammation, healing, spiritual work, things that alter the Big Five more than the literature says it will alter, etc.
What was the latest psychology or physiology thing that you learned about, that blew your mind?
The theory of relativity (special and general).
It is more that 100 years now, and it is perfectly true according to all current physicists, but still hardly anybody (outside of physicists) knows it. What a shame.
For example, GPS wouldn’t work without it - your position would be wrong by a few miles all the time.
My mind was blown when I learned that a difference of just a few centimeters in height is enough to detect time dilation. I always thought the effect was so subtle that it could only be detected on a galactic scale, but it turns out we deal with it every day!
It’s so weird to think about, time is one of the few “constants” we have in life, but it’s really not so solid.
a difference of just a few centimeters in height is enough to detect time dilation
I’m sorry, what?
https://youtu.be/hzLTgtFaPLY?si=QOJa4sQJ6Aqijhjn
You can skip to about 3 minutes for the relevant experiment, it’s wild. They also talk about the GPS stuff in that video.
I wish any of my friends were into fantasy /Science fiction. I can’t sit down and have coffee with a friend to gush about the latest Brandon Sanderson book or talk build orders in Homeworld
Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and the original edition of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG - the lore, the artwork and tracking down the books missing from my collection!
