Bun-bun! 👹🐇

I can relate! All hooman needs are unimportant!

You cannot for example just get rid of your US citizenship - you have to pay to get rid of it…

I wanted this to be false but I see that there is currently a minimum renunciation fee of $2,350. I assume there are likely other consulate fees that may bring it closer to $2,500 at the very least. What a scam.

Edit: typo

the one where Fry and Bender join the army for gum and get sent to fight balls

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?

…Or to post on shower thoughts

In case you don’t want to give NYT clicks. https://archive.is/a4hDO

Sydney Charlet had no job, rent due on an Upper West Side apartment, and an idea.

She had just moved to New York from Los Angeles and brought her Tesla Model 3.

She learned quickly that a parking spot on the street was not guaranteed and that the city’s alternate-side street cleaning schedule, which usually sets aside a 90-minute window for the city to sweep each side of a street on a rotating schedule, does not make parking easy.

Drivers must either move their cars, sit in them and watch for the street sweeper, or face a $65 ticket.

Ms. Charlet, 29, turned her idea into a side gig and posted it on TikTok.

“I’ll sit in your car for the fraction of the price of a parking ticket,” Ms. Charlet said in a video, as she waved a business card calling herself “The Car Sitter.”

The video was reposted and in comments and replies, New Yorkers took the occasion to share their own parking tales and misadventures.

Even if you’re not hiring someone like Ms. Charlet, anyone who has tried to park on New York’s streets knows that even when a space isn’t pay-to-park, it still comes at a price.

In the early 2000s, Cynthia Russo, then a stay-at-home mother, would pile into her Toyota Tercel with her 1-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son to deal with alternate-side parking on the Upper East Side.

In those days, Ms. Russo’s schedule was built around avoiding a ticket she said she could not afford.

To make the time bearable, one of her two older neighbors would keep her company and they would pass the time baring their souls.

“I used to tell my husband it was like ‘car confessions,’” Ms. Russo said. “My kids were in the car the whole time — they were oblivious.”

The neighbors opened up to her, and it came naturally to Ms. Russo to listen, she said, but she never told them why: She had previously been a therapist.

Bash Halow, 60, a business adviser who lives in Chelsea, hit on an idea in a moment of desperation. If he sees an open spot on the opposite side of the street, he offers a person on the street $20 to hold it for him while he circles around.

One day, several years ago, that person was an older lady with a push cart.

“She unhesitatingly agreed,” Mr. Halow said. “Six minutes later, as I rounded the corner to grab the spot, I see this guy trying to park in the spot and the lady standing in the middle, not budging.”

The woman used an expletive to tell the man to get lost.

“I’m saving this spot for my friend,” Mr. Halow recalled her saying. “That’s what really touched me.”

He paid her at least $60 on the spot.

For others, great parking spots come easier but cost more than money.

Will Simon, 55, who lives in Park Slope, some years ago came upon what he called “a perfectly good parking spot.” The problem was that it was occupied by chunks of concrete from a hole that Con Ed had dug in the street.

He took a few minutes to move the concrete and scored the spot. But Mr. Simon said that he, in general, has never seen parking as a chore. He said that people who complain about parking bring the suffering upon themselves.

“You should have to earn your cars,” Mr. Simon said, adding that the city owes him and other drivers nothing. “I’m able to store a 5,000-pound hunk of metal on public property.”

For those who can, it may be easier to just ditch a car.

Stuart Campbell’s wife racked up parking tickets when she was a flight attendant living in Greenwich Village, he recalled.

“Eventually her car was impounded — an old Hyundai, which was not worth much,” Mr. Campbell said. “When she went to retrieve it, she discovered the fines and fees were higher than the value of the car, so she never picked it up.”

At 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning in August, Brian McBride, a sanitation worker, parked his street sweeper in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. Alternate-side parking had just begun but he waited before moving his mechanical broom down the choked streets.

Anthony Saporito, a superintendent at the Sanitation Department, said drivers get a five-minute grace period after alternate-side parking rules begin before department workers start sweeping — and ticketing.

Mr. Saporito followed the sweeper in a Sanitation Department vehicle with a clipboard of blank tickets perched on the dashboard. He pointed out the two, then four, then dozens and dozens of vehicles that had failed to move.

“If that car wasn’t there, he could have just had a straight run,” Mr. Saporito said of Mr. McBride, who, though deftly handling the sweeper, could clean only so much of the curb around a single parked car. “But no, he had to cut out. He probably missed about 10 feet on the back of the car, and he probably missed 10 feet on the front of the car.”

Every parked vehicle, except one with a permit for people with disabilities, got a ticket. The road, littered with leaves even in the dead of summer, kept its dusty appearance compared with the gleaming, wet asphalt where the sweeper had just passed with its whirring brushes.

Mr. Saporito wrote tickets, printing foot-long slips from a machine attached to his hip before stuffing them under windshield wipers with a neon orange envelope. The Sanitation Department issued 515,582 alternate-side parking summonses in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended on June 30.

“A lot of people will say, ‘You know what? I’ll roll the dice and I’ll get a $65 fine once every couple of weeks rather than having to pay to put it in a lot,’” Mr. Saporito said.

In neighborhoods filled with longtime residents, people remain “rule followers,” Mr. Saporito said. It’s the newcomers who push the boundaries.

“Now, I can’t tell you how many times when I was a supervisor here, I’d pass this car and it would say: ‘If you need me to move it, here’s my phone number. Call me. I’ll come move it,’” Mr. Saporito recalled.

He pointed to the gold badge on his chest and said: “Does this say ‘Mom’? You want me to do your laundry, too?”

Late night host Jimmy Fallon asked Ruffalo during his show last night why he wasn’t in the “Avengers trailer”, saying: “Every time you’re on the show you give a spoiler or you get in trouble.”

The actor cheekily replied: “They decided that it was better to get rid of me than for me to tell the end of the next movie.”

Saved you a click

I’m lucky! Mine (2015 pro) has been awesome, except for when it was going through a Demon AVR. Its fine when direct to the TV or through the Onkyo. It has flaked out before though, and I never updated to the “experience” version that introduced ads on the home screen.

I think that’s the same OLED I have. B7 or C7. It’s starting to band on red, but I got at least… 7 (?) years out of it, and the bands are only mildly annoying. Similarly, I have never connected it to the internet, and don’t use any of the apps.

It’s not very bright, but I’ll take that over washed out or blotchy blacks. I’ll shop for a used OLED like this when I’m ready.

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.

Quite so. Got it working now. Free is free!

You’re right. It worked after some time and the entire bundle was required.