Isolation breeds difference, but not diversity.

> Nobody's "from there" really

I once had a Native American on one of my teams. That, and a lot of my fellow Brazilians here are at least partly of the original people.

Which came from Asia, through an ice bridge between Asia and North America a couple ice ages back, so, in the end, I guess we are all Africans.

Doing research prior to moving is extremely important.

At the time I moved to Ireland, I learned a vicious gang war was happening in the northern regions of Dublin. Up to April 2016, when I arrived, four (four!) people had been murdered in that unprecedented violent event.

Expecting a place the size of Europe or the US to be culturally homogeneous would be a huge mistake.

You still might need a resident visa.

At least Europeans won't send them to labor camps in El Salvador.

edit: burn karma burn

I'm always surprised by how many American tourists have to turn back because they thought they wouldn't need a visa.

They are nice people fleeing an oppressive regime. We must work hard to integrate them into our societies, despite the large cultural differences.

I'd say even if you are on the 99th percentile, the quality of life will be much better. You'll make less money, but you also won't have to spend on things like health insurance, good schools, and so on. Your house might be smaller though, unless you opt to live further from urban centers, which will demand a car, but it'll be a safer and more efficient one.

I'd even go as far as saying the authoritarianism has a causal relation with the impending recession, the acceleration of the de-dollarization of foreign commerce, and the unavoidable collapse of the "Pax Americana" that came after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Moving to Europe is a smart move, but, having complete freedom, I'd think about someplace in the southern hemisphere. I believe Chile and Brazil will be stable for the next 20 years or so and have good overlap with US timezones. And both are quite far from most of the impending clusterfuck happening in Eastern Europe.

> and your social/family life will suffer big time

Not sure about family, but you can get new friends here. When I go to the office, on my walk back home, I often pass by some very nice pubs overflowing with extremely happy and friendly people, and that is when I leave at 17:00.

You'll also get nice things like the metric system. And, in Ireland, one of the sanest political systems on the planet. It's so sane it's almost boring.

> In practice almost no companies let you do this.

And, if they do, they might have legal issues brewing they are not aware of.

ReactOS is a better Windows 2000 than Windows 11 will ever be.

The main issue for open-sourcing old software is copyright. Not all companies buy the copyright of the tools and libraries they incorporate in their software, making it difficult, if not impossible, to open source them.

Also, getting the source code for external libraries was not common until open source became the norm. Making something open-source often requires rewriting parts of it.