What's wrong with my comment? Quite literally: Cloudflare has been adopted by 50% or whatever of the web and they run a rudimentary WAF type product that is IP block happy. This is a recipe to get every VPN and Tor node in the world blocked.
What confuses me is that in 2010 all devs were finally on the "don't block stuff based on regex" train, and now all a sudden nothing matters just Cloudflare is God with some handwavy explanation of how they "did a risk analysis".
FYI for anyone on OS X Catalina (and likely Big Sur): this doesn't seem to work, as it's not detecting AVFoundation support in ffmpeg. See this issue: https://github.com/cytopia/ffscreencast/issues/31
A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:
> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”
> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.
> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.
> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.
Thanks for sharing this—I'd heard about the points system but I haven't seen any personal accounts of going through the process before, so it was illuminating to read one.
Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
Of course, such a provision is pretty rare, but it's still a bummer. I wonder if immigration policy might ever consider such situations—such a worker is basically injecting money into the Japanese economy for little cost on Japan's part. But perhaps there are downsides that I haven't considered.
When a company wants to hire a remote worker in a country in which they don't have a local legal entity, they often turn to an agency which does have a local legal entity and acts as the official employer (covering pay, tax, benefits, etc) on behalf of the real employer. Do such agencies have branches in Japan? How do the Japanese immigration authorities view them?
Gitlab [1] uses Safeguard Global [2] to act as official employer in a number of countries (including Japan). I'm sure Gitlab is not the only employer using Safeguard's services, and I'm sure Safeguard is not the only company offering this service.
Besides the method skissane mentioned, if you have sufficient capital (roughly five million yen / 50kUSD last I checked) you can get a "business operator" visa, open a business, and have your foreign employer pay into the business. If the "business" runs a profit you should be able to get your visa renewed continually. It's a little more legally complicated to set up, but has advantages like not requiring a college degree or ten years of proven experience in one profession.
I was considering that route to self-employment before I learned about the change in the HSFP visa.
> (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
If you are a resident of a country it's only reasonable to expect you to pay taxes there...
You can try for a student visa for Japanese language school for two years. If you're willing to pay for a plane ticket to a nearby Asian country, you could probably renew it in perpetuity every three months. There are also other visas like entertainment or modelling that you could try to obtain for three months. You can even teach English part time and try to get a visa that way.
As you make friends and build up a network you're certain to find a way to make it work.
In practice, visas are easier for people from Western developed countries. The only major risk of overstaying a visa is getting a random stop from police and at worst you just get deported. It's really not as restrictive as it seems. I've met plenty of people who visited Japan on a whim and ended up staying for years.
> Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
And I remember seeing somewhere else that some other countries in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean either have similar visas or were planning for them.
Political correctness was mentioned in the article:
> Typical campus discourse is often a minefield for newcomers, said a Norwegian student. “I find that Americans are generally very politically correct, and as a European, I think I’m used to being blunter and saying things right out. ..."
Politeness too. There are some cultures which are extremely blunt, no diplomacy or being indirect. For instance just going into a meeting and saying that someone's idea is dumb and they should do it X way instead. Most americans I know perceive this as "being a dick", but this is pretty normal discourse where they come from.
I believe you're suggesting a contradiction here, but I think the juxtaposition is actually quite insightful if we consider the differences between these two things!
What the world values ought to be a mostly objective question, though one that isn't easy to answer. An accurate measure of what the world values probably implies success, even. Our values are expressed by the totality of our collective actions, and are certainly not guaranteed to be consistent with what we say. The obvious (but certainly not perfect) proxy for what we value is what we choose when there are costs involved.
But other people's ideas of what matters strikes me as a completely different thing. These are constructs and abstractions that we use to help model our own individual decision making, and unfortunately we're often all-too-eager to share these with others even when they're by no means universal. If I tell you that "what matters is security and predictability" or "what matters is family" or "what matters is the pursuit of creativity and novelty", all I'm really saying is that I have this axiom that floats around in my head with a tenuous connection to reality even in the context of my own life but is clearly meaningless relative to yours! These things are not to be chased, because they’re not real.
SF, Oakland, or Berkeley. My family and friends are in the Bay Area. The weather is nearly unparalleled. The food variety is solid. Transit is not that bad, if you compare the cities I mentioned to the rest of the US.
I guess the tech scene is decent, but the other factors I mentioned mean a lot more to me. (I would almost prefer it if the area weren't as much of a hotspot, actually...)
