And for the click-averse:

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

-Credited to Arthur Schopenhauer

I haven’t yet. Actually, the corrupt bureaucracy has withheld residency status so far without bribes. That said, here was the path I thought I was on when I moved.

The idea is to have been in the country for most of the year (no less than 14 days out of country), at which time you can apply for residency. Once you have residency, you must maintain it for 5yrs.

Citizenship for Permanent Residence Holders

1. You have been a holder of Permanent Residence for a minimum of 5 years.
2. You have been resident continuously in Belize, this means that upon being granted Permanent Residency you have not resided outside Belize for periods that exceed thirty consecutive days or accumulate to a total of three months in any twelve month period.

I didn’t want to muddy the waters with the reality of what happened once I moved, as the OP was about motivating factors. Power corrupts. And ultranationalism is infectious to other countries.

Edit: If I could do it over, I would form an offshore company or similar and get a work permit. Two attorneys have recommended this, even though on paper it costs more; there’s less headache running to renew visitor status every 28 days (they claim 30-120 days, but no immigration office will renew you for more than that unless you bribe or are over 70 years old). It’s been humbling (scary) going through this process legally and being afraid on several occasions that an angry official will wave their hand and deport me. I can only imagine being deported because of my skin color or where I shop would be even more scary.

Epic

I’m living it

When my country first elected a rapist con man president, I started looking. I was born and raised in (and never left) New England, and so I also wanted a place that’s warm year round. It took me four years to tentatively settle on Belize, in late 2019. I made my first visit in Jan 2021, as the pandemic messed up my 2020 plans. By October, I had sold EVERYTHING and moved with two cats.

Reasons (or things I didn’t even know I wanted):

-No DST messing up my sleep schedule.
-No more days with 17+hrs of darkness.
-CARIBBEAN!!!
-Every Belizean I met (exception: gov’t employees and police) is friendly and warm. In N.E., people avoid making eye contact and answer greetings in a way to stop further conversation, but in Belize, the people genuinely want to know how you’re doing and remember everything you tell them.
-No car required
-Culture with proud participation from the public; holidays with vibrant parades, and entire village ecstatically engaged in all aspects.
-Tarantulas walking in the street (my partner and I love them!)
-Path to citizenship without $0.25M investment
-Citizenship there comes with a CARICOM passport, meaning can live and work in most Caribbean nations.
-Food! Fish caught 30 minutes before it hits my plate.

Things that pushed me away from the USA:

-Truck nuts
-Nazi and/or Confederate flags on trucks everywhere
-Cost of housing doubled from 2017 to 2021
-Consumerism -Embarrassed to be a US citizen

The Elders tell of a young ball much like you. She bounced three meters in the air. Then she bounced 1.8 meters in the air. Then she bounced four meters in the air. Do I make myself clear?

Cheaters

Exactly!

You probably shouldn’t feel comfortable discussing private details on discord. You may not know, but your chats can be scraped pretty trivially.

I think they arrested one guy? And that one guy was most likely being an asshole and pushed his luck past the brink.

Think again, señor:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Shortly after they began guarding a Los Angeles federal building Friday, U.S. Marines detained a man who had walked onto the property and did not immediately hear their commands to stop.

The brief detention marked the first time federal troops have detained a civilian since they were deployed to the nation’s second-largest city by President Donald Trump in response to protests over the admin[…]

The man, Marcos Leao, was later released without charges and said the Marines were just doing their jobs.

Such an asshole…

🐾

Neither one is right. Effect is typically a noun. Affect is a verb.

*affect

Lol. 😂 I hear you. I feed at 10am and 10pm (with a 90 minute variance to keep them from getting to good at timekeeping). After almost a decade, I figured out a way to sleep in! Course, they still whine at night starting at 8pm sometimes, but my vet says my cats are unusually fit and a good weight, so I know I’m not starving them like they want me to believe. Their chirps and whines have gotten more and more elaborate and detailed on the last three years.

That fourth thing is hunger. It only comes when the cat is fed on a schedule, as opposed to free-fed with multiple piles of food out all day. Feed in a schedule and you’ll suddenly see (healthy, right-weight) interested felines licking empty bowls.

They’d probably claim liability as a reason not to hand out food. Solution: draft a form waiver for all recipients to sign.

I looked into these so-called “responsible” indexes a few years back. It seems that whenever I dug into them, they invested in companies that didn’t seem to fit the description. These don’t change that assessment. You don’t have to look past the second page to see the primary holdings are not “socially responsible” companies at all.

SRI holdings:

NVIDIA
TESLA
HOME DEPOT
COCA COLA
ASML HLDG
NOVO NORDISK
INTUIT
DISNEY (WALT)
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
BOOKING HOLDINGS

Tesla? Come on. Coca Cola? Implicated in more environmental destruction than some oil companies, not to mention their irresponsible use of local water resources, including locking up a sole source of water away from local tribes and villages. Novo Nordisk? A socially responsible pharmaceutical company? Dream on. Intuit? They lobby to make the tax code impossible to understand without professional help, and also to ensure we can never file our taxes for free. Disney? Too many issues to list here. Verizon? Known for red-lining; being complicit in gov’t domestic surveillance; making empty promises to get gov’t subsidies, pocketing the money and not bothering to do the required work: stealing taxpayer money. All of the holdings are financial backers of Trump and the GOP, and most of them happily removed all mention of diversity or equality from their public facing materials to cozy up to this administration.

If you really want social responsibility in a stock, you’re going to have to do the research yourself and find individual stocks that meet your definition. Any day, one of those companies could change their direction, could be exposed as participating in activities you wouldn’t have expected, or simply be bought and or taken over by a non-scrupulous competitor or parent company.

Otherwise, you just have to accept that our money will be part of the problem, and sigh, hoping that your investments at least hold up long enough for you to retire, and hopefully you don’t feel too guilty.

I know we want to invest in funds that aren’t evil, but I’m not convinced that social responsibility and trading publicly are compatible. At the very least, of not likely you’ll find these kinds of finds are anything more than ugly companies packaging the same ugly stocks and trying to appeal to your conscience.

ETA: the climate change one is just as bad, full of Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

Edit2: just invest in the total market, a la Bogleheads, and spend the proceeds responsibly. That’s the best you can do. Social responsibility is defined by the individual.

Edit3: Consider a solar panel company. Green energy is good right? What if you find that they source their materials from a country known for human rights abuses, in the backs of exploited workers? Or they pollute? Or they simply post on ex-Twitter about their favorite fascist leaders? Does that change the SR value to you?

I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.

In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.

Ahh

I’m not sure what’s extenuating (maybe you meant extraordinary, which I still disagree with) about being in -20°F by herself when just barely past kitten stage. All scientific papers and opinions I’ve ever read about cats puts them at the least domesticated of human companions, able to survive without us just fine.

The domestic cat retains a behavioural repertoire that makes some individuals very successful when living independently of people, and all cat populations show a degree of genotypic and phenotypic flexibility that enables them to move between states within a few generations, or even within a lifetime (Bradshaw et al. 1999)

The states being referred to here are states of domestication versus true wildness.

The very recent history of ‘true’ domestication, beginning perhaps as little as ~200 years ago, means that domestic cats effectively remain genetically ‘wild’ (Tamazian et al. 2014). Few genomic alterations in domestic cats are attributable to domestica- tion, excepting genes affecting memory, fear-conditioning and reward learning (Montague et al. 2014). Domestic cats have retained the genetic basis for effective hunting (Bradshaw 2006), including sensory traits such as a broad hearing frequency range, high visual acuity and accentuated vomeronasal capacity (Montague et al. 2014).

ETA: links and quotes