My life experiences have made me incapable of empathizing with this view. My fellow citizens have never had my back, and I disagree with most everything they hold dear, as they disagree with most everything about me.
I don't hate America or its people, I'm just not that into them.
Patriotic people love to tell others "If you don't love America, leave it". Well, as my patriotic act to those great patriotic Americans .. I left.
But enjoy singing some bad national anthem and crying while waving a flag or maybe killing someone who disrespects your flag, or whatever it is the patriotic kids do today.
We really have no country or stable home right now. Once we get to Spain we will love being there, but we will still hold no sense of patriotism.
I'm not willing to fight, murder, or die for a nation. Some people are wired that way, violent ideation of being a hero, dying for god and country or whatever, but it ain't me.
That level of detachment is only affordable to you because of the generations of people that fought, murdered and died for the nations on which you now can so comfortably live. Perhaps you think that work is done. Maybe you are right, at this moment, but if history is any guide, it could all change in an instant and you could need people who are willing to fight for your way of live.
By most western standards my family teeters on the line between middle and upper middle clas.
We sold all of our US property last year; and now we are shopping for 4-6 unit buildings within 100km of Barcelona to get our Golden Visas. Our goal is to get citizenship and access to the EU then renouncing my US citizenship.
It isnt about money, I am juwt ashamed to have an American passport and know my tax dollars are being spent on war and murder in the name of christ and oil profits.
I was born an American and would prefer not to die that way.
>By most western standards my family teeters on the line between middle and upper middle clas. (...) we are shopping for 4-6 unit buildings within 100km of Barcelona
I'm not sure this is what upper middle, much less middle, class is.
A family that can pay several millions for houses abroad just to get a visa to change citizenship is way above middle class, or even upper middle class for that matter.
Pew Research defines middle class: $53,413 - $106,827 year, and upper-middle class: $106,827 - $373,894.
The amount of the US where you can buy a detached single family home with a white picket fence and 2 car garage for significantly under half a million dollars is probably not as much of a majority as you seem to think.
Not everywhere is the bay area, where you'll struggle to find this for under $1.5M. But $500k is not that much for a house these days in a lot of the markets where huge percentages of the population live (from the tri-state area, to Boston, to Seattle, LA, Austin, etc.) and lots of middle class people live in houses valued at more than this.
To be fair to the poster, they said that they sold their US propert(ies|y) which if they are older Americans probably releases an amount of capital that substantially covers the cost of the building they may acquire in Spain.
But yeah, when the median US household income is about $68k, early $200k a year puts you far outside the middle class, even if it doesn't feel that way. [ yes, cost of living in NYC or SF has some impact on this, but not much, given the median household income in those cities not actually being much above the national figure ]
Just a nit, but the San Francisco median household income is around $112k [1] for the same year as the $68k you mentioned [2]. I think 50% more counts as “much above the national figure”.
Sure by these measures I'm rich, but I don't feel that way. Our current income isn't really indicative of the whole picture. Since I was diagnosed as Bi-Polar 20 years ago, I have averaged 2 months of unemployment per year, and just spent 13 months without income due to my inability to cope with the stress of the world.
Today I'm rich. Tomorrow I could be living in a van for 6 months like I did after the 2001 bubble burst.
I think it's helpful to consider that just because you are upper class does not necessarily imply that you are rich.
I know plenty of people with upper class hobbies. I couldn't say for sure if they are rich, but they certainly don't live a lifestyle that I was ever familiar with growing up.
Even taking a year off to de-stress... Someone without financial means couldn't make those choices.
And I've known bipolar people too. They worked when they could, and went on disability when they couldn't. They were never rich. Even when they worked, they were always struggling.
I'd never met anyone taking about buying a house in the Spanish hills until becoming a techie.
> I'd never met anyone taking about buying a house in the Spanish hills until becoming a techie.
I'm still not sure that's the differentiating factor here. OP made clear their moral objections, and sketched out part of a picture in which what makes this possible is not so much "typical tech money", but possibly "having owned a home in the US for long enough".
I have extremely non-tech but upper-middle class friends who in the past have discussed buying entire villages in Spain and Italy (they can be had for as little as $2-300k on the low end. These are not people who ever made "a lot of money", but they have owned homes for long enough that if they sold their house, they'd have capital to put into such a move.
Please don't take this personnaly as I'm not targeting you specifically with my comment: but I don't know how I feel about wealthy foreigners coming to a place, buy property and extract rent from locals, who may not even be able to afford ownership in the first place.
> Please don't take this personnaly as I'm not targeting you specifically with my comment: but I don't know how I feel about wealthy foreigners coming to a place, buy property and extract rent from locals, who may not even be able to afford ownership in the first place.
Weird statement. Don't worry, I wouldn't take your uncertainty about your own feelings personally.
However, I do understand you, and this is something we've struggled with. My wife is a Turk, and at first when we realized "hey, if we sell my house in Mendocino, we can live like princes in Istanbul, or kings on the Aegean", and once that novelty wore off, we decided that we weren't those people.
The argument itself can apply to anywhere. In San Francisco, I spent 10 years living in illegal punk warehouses where I was not a gentrifier, but then I spent 10 years living in Oakland, where I was a gentrifier, even though I'm from California.
Where does the line get drawn? Is it OK to have the $$ to buy a nicer place anywhere in my own country? What about my home state?
I guess the line could be at: I made money in the US and benefited from being a US citizen, but now I pack my things and go live elsewhere so I can benefit from the wealth differential in that country and extract rent from people there.
I guess if a bunch of wealthy people came to Detroit and bought properties and extracted rent from much poorer citizens with less upward mobility and nearly no chance to own a property of them own, that would be the same problem.
Yes! Also, not tied to golden visas, but in Italy we have this going on: https://1eurohouses.com/ . It is legit and not the classic Italian scam (it's sanctioned by the government).
I wish! Greece was my secone choice (I used to study Lyra in Crete, and Rembetiko Bouzouki (Rembetiko style) in Thessaloniki and Athens.
We almost bought a flat in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens! Politically/Energetically It’s what Berkeley was like in the early/mid-90s.
The day Trump was elected we were in Barcelona, and decided never to go back to the USA, flipped a coin between Spain and Greece. I always lose coin flips!
>It isnt about money, I am juwt ashamed to have an American passport and know my tax dollars are being spent on war and murder in the name of christ and oil profits.
You know Bush isn't president anymore, right? That hasn't been a a popular (and I would say erroneous, even when it was popular) talking point for more than a decade.
I do find it interesting that expatriation trends seem to pivot in years with presidential elections, according to that chart.
> You know Bush isn't president anymore, right? That hasn't been a a popular (and I would say erroneous, even when it was popular) talking point for more than a decade.
The US performed military operations in eight different countries just during the Obama administration, some of the conflicts where not inherited, like the war in Syria and Yemen.
Those wars were payed by the US citizens regardless of whether they agreed with the war or not.
Obama invaded Syria "in the name of Christ and oil profits"? That justification was a myth, even when the Trotskyites-cum-Conservatives asserted it as truth 15 years ago.
Creating a belt of failed states in Central Asia has been a long-standing policy, if Wesley Clark is to be believed. I can only speculate what the real goals are, but "because Jesus" or "because Bush is dumb" was always fodder for the low-info crowd who watched the Daily Show.
> Obama invaded Syria "in the name of Christ and oil profits"? That justification was a myth, even when the Trotskyites-cum-Conservatives asserted it as truth 15 years ago.
Yes Bush isn't president, but the failures and hatreds of the entire Bush family are still incredibly relevant today. If you don't believe that, look at the 10s of thousands of Afghans currently walking through Iran and Turkey to find refuge in Europe).
When you're the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, your decisions outlast your position.
I think the refugees are motivated much more by the financial incentives those governments provide. They usually pass through multiple safe countries to get to places like Germany. A modernized Plantation of Ulster has been the policy of every Western government since the 60s.
War and, I guess, the weather, are convenient narratives for these highly unpopular policies.
I just realized, I never mentioned Bush, you did. See, I didn't even have to mention Bush, just his legacy, and you instantly knew what I was referencing.
Spain is a NATO country involved in many American wars in the past 30 years.
If you oppose US wars and hegemony you should have followed Edward Snowden and moved to a country that actually oppose American influence in the world.
Re: Nato, fair point. There is still a difference between being bullied into submission to American hegemony and being part of the us empire.
I really, really detest cold weather and drunk people, both of which Russia has in abundance. Russia and China are just as offensive to my own moral compass as the USA.
Once we attain citizenship I’m going to try to convince my family to move to Esbjerg, at least for a few years.
Yes, I love it there. My two closest friends moved there to study marine archaeology and within 3 years another 7 had moved there. We were married in Fanø. I’m old, I like the quiet.
Ideally we would spend our winters somewhere warm and the rest of the time in Denmark.
It's certainly nice in the summer. Long but not too long sunlight, warm but not oppressive. I guess if you just spend summers there it wouldn't be hard to arrange.
Summers really are lovely there. Now that I'm finally vaccinated I'm hoping to go spend 3-4 weeks hopping back and forth between Fano/Esbjerg and Copenhagen. My treat to myself after over a year of Covid-induced unemployment now that I'm vaccinated and working again.
>Spain is a NATO country involved in many American wars in the past 30 years
Which doesn't mean much. NATO is not some alliance, it's the US calling the shots and others doing as told, or else (insert diplomatic, economic, etc. pressure).
This is correct, Spain supported the wars in Irak and Afghanistan, both with hundreds of thousands of casualties, most of them civilians.
It's an improvement over paying taxes in US but still a dubious moral choice if you claim concerns over your taxes being spent on wars.
> From the bottom of my heart, fuck off. If you get blackmailed, abducted, squeezed or raided in any way, the U.S. will have the privilege of not caring.
Guess you have never lived abroad? If you think the US doesnt care about you when you’re in country, you dont even exist when you’re out of it.
Imagine being in the middle of a coup, calling up your consulate for guidance only to find out that they all left the country or are hiding in their bunkers. Been through that before.
> Imagine being in the middle of a coup, calling up your consulate for guidance only to find out that they all left the country or are hiding in their bunkers. Been through that before.
What, exactly, was your expectation? That they'd send out Navy SEALs to rescue you?
Oh no. I understand that america’s military exists mosty to force christianity on the world and to maintain high oil prices, not to protect little old me.
I just expected them to, you know, pick up the phone or have a hotline with a recording of suggestions.
I left the usa a long time ago, and the only interaction I need with them is a new passport every 2 years when I run out of pages for stamps.
Imagine being an expat in the middle of a pandemic, the U.S. donating millions of vaccine dosages to the country you live in, vaccines that your tax dollars helped pay for, and you can't get vaccinated because the U.S. won't stipulate that some of those millions of doses should go to the approximately 30,000 U.S. expats in the country .
> Sysadmin is a System Administrator, which performs operations manually.
For decades before DevOps was coined, Sysadmins were automating infrastructures with tools like Kickstart, Jumpstart, CFEngine, ISconf, Rancid, netboot/pxeboot/dhcp, etc. I first provisioned infrastructure with CFEngine in 1996 or 1997.
> For decades before DevOps was coined, Sysadmins were automating infrastructures with tools like Kickstart, Jumpstart, CFEngine, ISconf, Rancid, netboot/pxeboot/dhcp, etc. I first provisioned infrastructure with CFEngine in 1996 or 1997.
So, you did DevOps work in 1996, long before the DevOps term was coined.
I've been writing software since I was about 10, and a sysadmin/systems engineer for almost 30 years now. You could be very successful with the right mindset, understanding of process and deep-knowledge of operating systems, networking, file systems and dns.
A good friend of mine suffers dyslexia and dyscalcula, and was just never able to jump past the standard unix shell scripting skillset, not for lack of trying. His understanding of Unix internals, TCP/IP, DNS and TQM-oriented process development is mind-blowing.
He just retired from a successful, 30 year career architecting and implementing secure messaging systems for several large banks. If you bank with Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Wachovia then you've probably communicated with your bank through systems he built.
> It doesn’t tell me anything about what you do; and it implies that sysadmins never used to code either.
Back when Luke wrote Puppet, he himself admitted that he was a mediocre developer with a good idea. His premise was that most SysAdmins weren't developers and that they would be more effective with a DSL that wrapped a templating engine and an executor then really learning how to code to build their own tools.
This set just an ugly trend. Next came Chef, which was written by someone (Adam Jacobs) who was pissed off at Luke because he felt entitled to 100% of his time. This was an incredibly dramatic exchange, Puppet Issue #1010 (I can't seem to find any of the old tickets anymore). Adam was making bank off of Puppet consulting, Luke was barely scraping by.
So Chef came along, it was supposed to bridge the gap between Puppet and developers. It was also garbage, but after a few years you could sort of kind of do real development on it.
Then we got Ansible, meh. Salt Stack which was more for managing api driven saas infrastructure but had/has a lot of the bad architectural decisions made by Puppet.
Now we have Terraform, which is OK, but also garbage. On top of that there's the Terraform CDK, which sort of lets you code, but is really just a golang-like DSL that generates HCL or Json. We also have Pulumi, which like the TFCDK, is a golang-like DSL that .. generates HCL to be run by Puppet.
All of this garbage because Luke felt that Sysadmins couldn't code.
> All of this garbage because Luke felt that Sysadmins couldn't code.
If I had a euro any time I heard a sysadmin tell me 'they can't code', only for me to see them write perfectly good Python... A euro for every time a sysadmin tell me they really want to program more, but they think they're underqualified to even start learning, even though they write higher quality, more maintainable and better designed code than most fresh CS grads I've met... But they're stuck writing YAML and HCL and maybe some shell scripts, because that's what the industry tells them they are qualified to do.
Years and years of gatekeeping 'real programmer' jobs behind silly algorithm trivia and CS degrees is to blame, IMO. Ansible-style DevOps is more of the same, pretending that programming is too difficult. So here, have this cursed undebuggable, untestable DSL that is totally not a bespoke programming language.
> If I had a euro any time I heard a sysadmin tell me 'they can't code', only for me to see them write perfectly good Python... A euro for every time a sysadmin tell me they really want to program more, but they think they're underqualified to even start learning, even though they write higher quality, more maintainable and better designed code than most fresh CS grads I've met
And if i had an euro for every sysadmin who told me "i'm not a developer, you do it", i'd be rich. "Sysadmin" includes Windows-only, GUI-only, ClickOps style admins, which still exist. Do you think they can or want to code? Heck, there are even networking admins that prefer to use GUIs over CLIs!
Not everyone can or wants to write code, even if some people underestimate their skills, some people are afraid.
Judging by how popular Powershell has become in these 'GUI-only' ecosystems: yes, a lot of them can and want to.
But I'm not saying everyone always should code. I'm saying that not only wrangling Ansible and Terraform is already programming, it's a difficult kind of programming (no tests, no debugger, usually directly on prod), and that we should stop pretending that it's not. That the industry should stop it with the self-fulfilling myth that sysadmins don't want to program by continuing to build 'DevOps' tools centered around lame DSLs. Give sysadmins real programming languages, libraries and guidance on how to program, not shrink-wrapped tools that pretend they're purely configuration driven yet implement a full-blown programming langauge on top of YAML.
Man, I am in full agreement with you on every single point. The pure animosity between Dev & Ops was really a negative self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating trope that did a great deal of harm, both emotionally and professionally.
One thing that really helped my teammates and friends was asking them to do code reviews of my work, and them realizing "hey, if I understand this, I can fix it, if I can fix it, I can write it!"
Another was Ruby. Sure, Ruby sucks, but it's easy, almost anything you did just worked. This was why Puppet was written in Ruby (Luke spent months trying to do it in Python, then when he tried Ruby he had a working prototype in 2 or 3 days). Ruby was a great transition language.
