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Why don't you move abroad?

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Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#41

Post by ben_w »

lancebeet wrote: post #7

>Though secretly, it was to give hope to the students who were defeated by the education system and told “You can’t study Computer Science, because you didn’t know Carbon has a radioactive isotope.” Forgive me if I'm being elitist here, but this seems like a strange example of outrageous admission requirements. I would have thought knowing about radiocarbon dating (which I'm assuming this is a reference to) is common…

Knowing about carbon dating is a proxy for general knowledge or nerdiness, but any proxy that becomes a measure, stops being a good proxy.

The only way physics helps with computer science, is by being a convenient source of coding challenges.

In this regard, it's like treating programming languages as "languages" and only allowing people to study them if they can also master French or Spanish.

Also:

Common knowledge is much, much less STEM-y than most commentators I've seen, seem to think.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Back 24 years ago, the final mandatory exams I had at school (UK GCSE), one of the questions in the higher level biology exam was asking me to… count ~ten dots within a rectangle and none of the dots outside.

Most people have no motivation to care what carbon dating is, or that it involves radioisotopes, even if they're smart, hence (though I think things have improved since then) The Two Cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Instead of STEM, culture: Soap operas, Harry Potter, Pokemon, ball games, etc. — I have no idea what the "offside rule" is, as despite having heard people explain it, I have no motivation to care and therefore don't remember it.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#42

Post by DanielHB »

dijit wrote: post #8

it’s amazing how much of the story mirrors my own. Autodidacticism and tech were also my combination of escaping generational poverty, and I had to be the first person in 2 generations to leave the country at all in order to do it. It hopefully strikes at a hint of irony that I am british. However, unlike the author, I did not have a strong familial connection. I miss my homeland but I have no wish to return, the liv…

I also have a lot of things in common with the person in the article, as a Brazilian living and working in Sweden I can relate a lot to the things he is saying.

However I feel the main thing that made me move away from Brazil was not status, income or "success". It was the realization that no matter how "successful" I was my life was still going to suck.

Working in IT in Brazil means living in São Paulo and that is like living in SF, except all the bad parts are 10 times worse and a bunch of extra bad things on top (mainly crazy high air pollution levels and traffic). On top of that work culture in Brazil is terrible.

Even if I am "well off" (but not well off enough to stop working) I would still need to live in a cage in a São Paulo high rise enduring 2 hours of traffic every day and going every where by car. No amount of maid service, take-home delivery or stay-at-home wife (things you can get if you have a good job in Brazil) is going to make up for that.

I moved to Sweden in 2016, so things have changed a lot (remote work now being more common, work culture in the new wave of Brazilian startups is a lot better from what I hear). But now I have grown roots in Sweden and have no plans to leave. I don't have a car, 80% of my trips are done by bicycle.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#43

Post by gkanai »

Great storytelling. I worked in open source for a decade (at Mozilla during the rise of Firefox) and Mozilla hired many from their OSS contributions to Firefox. Its not an easy path, and it pays to specialize in an important niche, but it can be done. Finding orgs that support remote work even when management changes- that's the challenge.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#44

Post by keiferski »

A lot of people that have moved abroad focus on how supposedly terrible the place they came from is, but I think one of the most underrated aspects is that you think more about your origin country and what it means to be an American/Frenchman/etc. - more than you normally would, had you never left. There’s something about being outside of a thing that makes you consider it more, and see it more insightfully.

That is also probably why Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby while abroad in France. To me Gatsby is pretty much the quintessential American identity novel, and having been an American living in France (in the past, not currently), I feel like I understand the novel and “what it means to be American” more.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#45

Post by amiga386 »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #19
vegabook wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were anything but “randomly born in your country”. You are most likely the latest branch in a sedentary tree rooted both geographically and culturally for centuries, and without that tree you certainly wouldn’t exist. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel, perhaps plant a new tree, but the idea that you were born randomly is obviously false.

From your point of view you were born randomly in a universe in a random country to random parents. Yes. There is a story once you were born. But as far you are concerned you could have been born as anything in any Universe. There would always be a story backing it up.

But you are not a tabula rasa. You are made of a genetic code inherited from your parents, which strongly determines how you look and your body can do. You were clothed, fed, raised, cultured, taught by your family and others in their geographic area.

The self has a heritage even if the self refuses to accept it. You are your parents' child and not someone else, for the same reason you are also a human, a hominid, a mammal, not a fish or a tree.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#47

Post by card_zero »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #19
vegabook wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were anything but “randomly born in your country”. You are most likely the latest branch in a sedentary tree rooted both geographically and culturally for centuries, and without that tree you certainly wouldn’t exist. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel, perhaps plant a new tree, but the idea that you were born randomly is obviously false.

From your point of view you were born randomly in a universe in a random country to random parents. Yes. There is a story once you were born. But as far you are concerned you could have been born as anything in any Universe. There would always be a story backing it up.

The problem here is that you're defined by the history of environments you've been in, which provides a reason to stay in them (and a reason why the phenomenon of culture shock exists). I could not randomly have been, to take a random person, Carmen Miranda, because I am not her to any extent, so for me to "be" her, in some alternate reality, wouldn't mean anything.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#48

Post by nordiknomad »

well, below points are not matching somehow :

-------------------------------------- Just like many Indians of my generation, I spent my childhood in a single bedroom rented house. Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science. -----------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------ My father has been a software engineer since the 90s and my brother is an absolute rockstar with computers. We didn’t have cartoons in TV back in our childhood but had our hands on keyboard ever since I could possibly remember. ---------------------------------------------

So you operated the computer / keyboard using oil lamp ?

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#49

Post by hshshshshsh »

amiga386 wrote: post #45
hshshshshsh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your point of view you were born randomly in a universe in a random country to random parents. Yes. There is a story once you were born. But as far you are concerned you could have been born as anything in any Universe. There would always be a story backing it up.

But you are not a tabula rasa. You are made of a genetic code inherited from your parents, which strongly determines how you look and your body can do. You were clothed, fed, raised, cultured, taught by your family and others in their geographic area. The self has a heritage even if the self refuses to accept it. You are your parents' child and not someone else, for the same reason you are also a human, a hominid, a…

If I am made of genetic code, why do they say I die and no longer exists even though the body remains?

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#50

Post by forinti »

I've had this lingering regret of not moving to Europe when I was young and nobody depended on me, but I am also sure that I would have had to endure racism and xenophobia there (although I do have a European passport).
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