Leaving China

Spain (the government and regulations around renting places) was unfriendly to newcomers as its a very socialist country and not very welcoming to digital nomads. Everything there is built in a way to expect a local bank account, local job, etc. From the moment of trying to get a local ID card it was clear that you were not really wanted there. Processes made purposely difficult and requirements differ from police station to police station. Beautiful country, but given that I do not intend to stop working remotely as a contractor it made basic things there very difficult. Spain is quite corrupt however so if you have money you _can_ get around these issues via some lawyer agencies who get you through the door in a matter of days of what otherwise can be a half-year wait in queue, but I just found the system fighting me too much.

Finland is great though, everything runs efficiently, most of everything can be done online, just like in Estonia, but much like Estonia, very difficult to make friends and the culture in general is quite closed and people keep to themselves a lot. Most people I know here have had the same friends since highschool. So when it came down to Finland or Estonia, I just chose the one I already had friends at.

You have Bretons that are ethnically close to Irish/Scotish, Alsaciens who are ethnically Germans, Basque who are similar to the Spanish Basque, Corse who want to be independent...

A better example of a country that more or less encompass an ethnicity would be Germany, or Japan. But even there you'll find exceptions (Ainu in Hokkaido, Okinawa being also ethnically different as Ryukyu vs Yamato...)

Maybe because historically the US has been behind a lot of things?

> Trust is a delicate thing. Once you lose it,

Exactly, people simply do not trust the US in countries where they have meddled in. Rightfully.

Ridiculous to make this into a sob story about people vilifying the US "unfairly".

> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic

Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.

It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.

The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.

This is also what gives rise to this famous graph https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2016/10/unn... The gap between labor productivity and labor compensation.

Or just look at a graph of who owns what https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart... You can see it clearly, in the 80s the top 0.1% take off and the bottom 90% of people start to lose.

Even our language clearly shows what's going on. Look at when the term "Rust belt" became a thing: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Rust+belt&year...

Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.

There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...

Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.

The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.

It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).