A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells.Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else.Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death.Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
Obtaining a remoteable job is much like obtaining a job with any other specific benefit: the market is going to arrange things so that jobs with the benefit pay less in other ways, on the average, than jobs without it. And given the paucity of remoteable jobs, you've drastically cut down your options.
Living in a faraway country means that you are far away from relatives whom you might want to visit.
Living in a faraway country means either learning the local language or being at a serious disadvantage.
Living in a faraway country means living in another culture. Very basic things that we take for granted in our country might not exist in others. Do you even know the correct way to bribe public officials? What's your social life going to be like when few people watch the same TV shows or read the same books as you? Are you sure you like the other culture's food, and want to follow their holidays instead of your own? Is the other country going to be more tolerant of weirdos, and are you going to be perceived as even more of a weirdo than you might be in the US? If you have kids, what's the school system like? Are people with your religion going to be as accepted as in the US? Do people in the other country resent (or even just look down on while being glad to take the money of) foreigners?
If a job is available for you in the foreign country, it's equally available to local residents. If you could program by long distance, the company you work for could just hire a programmer from the country instead, and he wouldn't demand American salaries.
If you do lose your job, how are you going to find another one? Fly to America for the interview, while unemployed?
Did you actually consult with a tax lawyer? (The US still taxes expatriates.)
Foreigners might get more latitude for being weird. The locals will chalk up some degree of idiosyncratic weirdness as cultural differences, and won't expect full familiarity with the local social conventions.
-2Decius
1. The US can only tax people who have assets or their person in the country. Everyone else is on a pure voluntary basis.
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.