Ha! you're right. But this stuff is fun, you gotta admit!
497 karma · joined September 30, 2010
Michael@silvertrek.net
A study of early 21st century literature shows a tendency to burn their dead, instead of interning it in a space capsule. "Early space goers faced high costs to obtain orbit" an unnamed source at the International Space Consourtium said "which likely resulted in them burning the bodies before sending them into space." What is unknown is how many allowed the remains to drift once reaching space and it seems the practice of sending towards Sol didn't begin in earnest until Priest Johobath's teachings began to spread in earnest.
"Despite the seeming uncouth behavior, it was likely an established tradition. Much detailed information probably will be discovered once we crack the code surrounding the Facegoog group's information trove." reported the Cyborgisty in a statement.
"Timesaving negativism" said the earringed grenadier, with dispensable piebaldness, "can be the intermediator for chronic endometritria!"
"Ah nay!" the cinematographer megachiropteran replied! "it is only with maths--integrals, triangles, that can cause such excitation, can intoxicate!"
But I, though their admirer, now married had to disagree: "it would be a series of masculine calumnies to give such clitoridean, directional advice to women! We cannot precipitate such peripatetic thoughts!"
Now, I'm married to a Swede, and we moved with the express intent of learning the language to speak it to our children. It is a commitment, but as languages go it is close to English.
I don't know that I can give you a lot of advice, since your life is bound to be so much different than mine, but I can tell you what we did.
I own a small business (14 employees, <1MM in revenue) that does essentially technology-oriented bookkeeping. I'd say we're a startup, except that we're bootstrapped and capital comes from customers, not from VCs--not sure if that excludes us or not. A couple of years ago, my wife and I decided to move with our 4 children to Sweden for a year, where she has two sisters. We wanted our children to be able to speak Swedish, not just English, and I wanted to see the world a bit more. (I actually commented on a hacker news piece while there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731296)
Things got a little crazy when we found out before we moved that she was pregnant with number 5--and that if we moved he was going to be born in Sweden. We had only 10,000$ saved up, but we decided to take the plunge knowing that I could work remotely on my business here and I had 60k income. Note that her being a dual citizen was critical--we knew she would be able to take advantage of the free health care.
It was an awesome year, with some powerful struggles--living above the Artic circle in a foreign country made me look at things in a whole new way.
The three things that made it possible were 1) We had a support group (her sisters) in Sweden willing and able to help us 2) I had a remote job and 3) she was a citizen.
We came home broke, and I lost a few customers by not being able to focus as easily, but I have no regrets. My company didn't go bankrupt, both me and my children now speak fluent Swedish, and we have an amazing circle of close friends that we would otherwise never have gotten to know.
I can't say it's easy, but the moment my wife & I decided _as a team_ to do it, I knew it was possible.
The iron price recently dropped, but for many years it's been high, and it is currently quite hard to find somewhere to live, especially because of the price controls on rent.
However, the Centrum includes a large part of the city's population. The town is not a sprawling suburb town. Many of the workers at LKAB live in multi-level apartment buildings owned by the city/county, and most of those are in the affected area.
I own Silvertrek Systems, which is a technology-oriented bookkeeping business, basically. We've been remote for a while, with one employee in Alaska and one in Minneapolis, and the rest of us in "World Headquarters" in Battle Ground, WA, a suburb of Portland OR.
We have a fairly strict meeting once a week, (one hour, same time every week, all hands on deck) but other than that people work when they want to, with the requirement that there's at least a 4 hour overlap with the people they work with. I work M-Th from 1pm to midnight to make this happen.
Skype, Google Hangouts, Basecamp, AWS Windows Server, Freshdesk, T-mobile's awesome international service, and a few other tools make it possible.
>> Why
Quite simply, we wanted to experience living abroad. My mom was born in Sweden, and my wife is a double citizen, (although born and raised in the US). We've always spoken Swedish to our children, and we wanted to get a good base for them. It's so much easier for them to get a grasp of a second language when they're young. My wife's sister lives in Kiruna, so that's where we landed, in Artic, with Northern Lights dancing overhead during the months that we aren't listening to birds chirping under the midnight sun.
This isn't really happening--people have choices of where to live, and they can move if they want to. It isn't as easy as say living in Stockholm to relocate, but it's not like they're stuck. And the it's not depopulating, either, they're just moving a coupla kilometers down the road.
>> painfully slow
Ha! I sometimes feel that way too, but it doesn't really need to move faster because of the location of the iron ore under the city, and I think it makes sense to move slowly in this sort of situation. It would be a good reaction to a slow rise in sea level, too. If you give people early warning, and a long time-horizon, property values will slowly go down by the coast, and people will slowly move.
The interesting part of this article to me was the part that discussed the anthropologist's findings, towards the end of the article. It confirms what I've seen anecdotally as well--the men are mostly ambivalent, some slightly optimistic, and the women are slightly anxious. It's a big project, but the timeframe of multiple years greatly reduces the stress on people. The businesses are changing plans slowly to accommodate, as are government offices and government-owned housing authorities, but there is no rush.
I've already seen a bit of the effect on my emotions--the first time I traveled here, I got on and off at the old train station, which is now on its way to demolition. Physical places that hold memories are for me a sort of safety, and seeing them go is slightly painful. It would be hard, I imagine, to watch my parent's home be destroyed.
Overall, the move makes me confident of mankind's ability to cope with climate change. Kiruna is only a small town, and it's moving only a short ways away, but it is a massive undertaking that requires a lot of money and (perhaps more difficultly) a lot of cooperation. If Kiruna can do it, larger towns can too, at least when faced with an obvious existential threat.
Don't write it off. This might be Xerox Parc's mouse, waiting for Jobs.
But they don't own Visa or Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard do. And yet the banks play the Visa/Mastercard game.
Edit: apologies, didn't read the "PM" after one. Of course 1300 is a prime of the same pattern, however unlucky it may be.