>Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.

Hence why I will never connect my TV to the internet

One usecase I've always wanted is being able to combine multiple tunnels into one shared connection, for instance airVPN allows 5 simultaneous users per sub, it would be awesome if I could run 5x connections and combine their traffic, but I dunno how I would do this with wg / nmcli

VPNs are level 3 while interface bonding is level 2. You’d have to create a vxlan over wireguard. It sounds like a nightmare but it would be interesting to implement.

Not only Eddie, their account control panels and site in general look like something from the 90s, and it seriously hampers their business. I can't recommend them to anyone that isn't highly technical. And even then, as a technical user, why do I manually have to select one of 10-20 servers within a city or region, why am I being asked to manually load balance? Why is there no Wireguard over port 53 or 443?

It makes more sense when you know they're privacy activists first, businessmen second. But Mullvad shows you can be pro privacy and still offer great UX and a sleek site and client.

Btw, if you're managing things in CLI, you could take a look at their Hummingbird Suite. AFAIK it has a killswitch.

What sucks with Proton is that you can't share the VPN account with friends, because it is tied to your Proton account. They should create a vpn.proton.me subdomain that you can create a special managed account on that can only touch the VPN settings.

>Btw, if you're managing things in CLI, you could take a look at their Hummingbird Suite. AFAIK it has a killswitch.

Hummingbird doesn't support wireguard iirc, which is a deal breaker

PIA is not to be trusted after their buyout, IMHO

Just because you can hit a backend without a rate limit, doesn't mean you should. In my experience, government IT is very humorless about this sort of thing. Far better to blend in with normal traffic than to stand out as a bad actor.

"Your honor, the defendant took steps to hide their activities, showing that they knew it was wrong"

Especially given how the response time doesn't matter much here! If you're just looking at 2-character license plates, that's 676/5=136 requests to check them all, and you could easily space that out to something like one request per minute to scan the space every two hours.

"I don't use social media. Next question"

Rejected. Next!

Cool. Good luck with your tourism industry. Viva la Mexico!

"Excuse me, what is the required amount of social media activity to enter the US?"

??? Tons of US citizens vote from abroad every year?

They are provisional ballots, not counted unless things are close. And sometimes not even counted then.

If things aren't close they don't need to be counted.

It's a fact of voting that most folks can vote in every election they can for their entire lives and never make any difference whatsoever, as in, change zero outcomes.

We have social pressure and propaganda otherwise to get people to do it, because if too many people rationally stay home then the system works poorly (in aggregate, that does change outcomes). It'd be much better to just mandate voting, because it is individually irrational and it's not great to base a system on tricking everyone into behaving irrationally.

This feels different because they're not bothering to even count them, but it's not materially different from any voting.

(barring the "sometimes not even counted then" part, of course)

I do understand that, in principle. But having a mathematical reason to let some 'difficult' votes go uncounted gives ammunition to those who would put political pressure on vote counting for their advantage, while also making people in general feel disenfranchised. (We have a huge problem with turnout in the US in general, and the message you're presenting only adds fuel to that!) This is why I wrote "sometimes not even counted then", because we do have a kind of apathy towards these small and easily disenfranchisable groups, and once you open it a crack, it becomes easier for some partisan to drive a wedge into it (see Bush v Gore 2000).

Also, it's a mistake to think that the only result of voting is to produce the winner of the election. The margin matters also. A politician winning by a large margin (or even a majority) can claim a 'mandate'; one who only wins by a plurality will have more spirited opposition.

We've seen this in the most recent US election; imagine if small percentage of those who didn't vote in the solid blue states because their vote didn't matter (a refrain I've heard from many people) actually voted, and Trump swept the swing states but lost the popular vote. The entire political landscape would be different, and we might even have momentum in the coming years to abolish the Electoral College.

So if we are fans of liberal democracy, we should be doing everything in our power to structure the system to make people feel as though their voice and vote matters.

That's a good point—counting them may not matter, but might meta-matter.

The nordics? New Zealand? Any number of small countries (Belgium, Czechia) that still have a functional government that actually serves the people

Belgium is not not exactly known for its functional government. They have a lot of them and can't seem to quite keep them together.

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1862716/542-days-brussels-brea...

I wouldn't say every American should try to be an expat. I think we'd be better off as a society if everyone traveled abroad more. I know most can't afford that, but I'd be totally down for a state funded 'study abroad' program for bright students. Other places have ideas we can learn from (and vice versa)

The average American thinks the U.S is the best country in the world. I say that as an American. To your point if people saw how the rest of the world lives and how happy many of those 7.88 Billion people are they would start being more vocal about our endless cycle of work until you are 85 to be able to pay your property taxes.

If an average American chose to have the standard of living of the average 7.88 billion, they could retire very very young.

> The average American thinks the U.S is the best country in the world.

If it wasn't, then why would the American school system teach American students that it is?

Have you heard of the word 'propaganda'?

For pete's sake, it's not legal in many states to even cover slavery, the indian genocide, or japanese internment in a way that actually holds the US responsible

>Taxes are also very high. In addition to the usual income taxes, you pay a wealth tax and the threshold is very low (around 55k EUR in savings/assets) so this isn't only targeting very rich people. This makes it a pretty bad place to live if you care about investing and saving for the future.

This was a deal breaker for me as someone on the FIRE path. It's neighbor, Belgium, is much better in this respect.

FIRE people are funny, I wouldn't retire in belgium even if I was paid for it personally. Do you just order by tax rate and move wherever the number is the smallest ? I never heard of anyone moving to Belgium for anything other than family or cross border workers

Because Belgium didn't have capital gains tax it was actually common to (fake) retire to Belgium for wealthy individuals. There's supposed to be a capital gains tax from 2026 though.

Belgium is one of the top 20 countries in the world for quality of life and social safety net.

There are ~200 countries doing worse.

Quality of life for integrated citizens or for FIRE leeches ? The truth from quality of life polls can be far from the truth of migrants on the ground. If you're leaving CA for Belgium to save money and enjoy a nice "quality of life" you're in for a treat lol. People aren't interchangeable units of meat that can be integrated and fully acclimated to new cultures/nations.

I could understand Amsterdam/Berlin for the vibe and the fact that everyone speaks english. Portugal/Spain/Greece/Italy for the weather, the nordic countries for nature and the overall lifestyle... but Belgium, really ? no offence but it's like Luxembourg, if it wasn't for tax reasons nobody would ever willingly move there

Maybe... but you're still in Belgium. :)