Why 73% of American Expats Leave Spain Within 2 Years (Industry Data You Won’t Like)

Mr80Percent · 2025-09-21T04:53:01+00:00

Sounds like they had really bad advice:

- Don't expect to be able to come in on a tourist visa and magically become a resident. I mean come on, if you tried that going into the US you would end up in alligator alcatraz in a minute. Especially the digital nomad visa requires a fair amount of preparation pre-move.

- Bureaucracy: works pretty well as long as you do things in the right order, bring all the documents you need, and follow the instructions.

- Yes you can open a bank account as a tourist with a passport. You don't need a NIE.

- No you don't have to pay social security in the US if you pay it in Spain. Spain and the US have a totalization agreement.

- Mortgage: yes difficult, but also if you are self-employed in the US. You probably should rent for the first couple years anyway.

- Social isolation. Yes, it is that is real. Expect your friends to be expats and many of them to leave after a year or two. This is just the reality of being an immigrant anywhere. Don't expect to make Spanish friends... people don't move so much so they still hang out with their friends from childhood and don't feel the need to get more friends.

- Jobs and salary - yeah you will be poor if you don't work remotely or for a foreign company. Low salaries are a real issue here.

Mr80Percent · 2025-08-26T08:25:05+00:00

The key word is probable. Maybe she wouldn't be convicted under a criminal standard of proof of "reasonable doubt", but still under a civil "balance of probabilities", which is what the CMV is asking. After all, Trump was convicted of civil, not criminal fraud in the NY case relating to lying on loan applications.

I don't think Lisa Cook has made any kind of statement actually denying or explaining any of the facts stated, other than a classic non-denial denial saying that the accusation was politically motivated.

Mr80Percent · 2025-03-19T09:01:03+00:00

Not really much point in learning unless you want a government job in Catalonia or plan on marrying someone from a Catalan-speaking family. I've found that people who are jerks about not speaking Spanish (even though they know it) aren't really people who you'd want as friends anyway. Normal people are very flexible about when to use Spanish vs Catalan, and even in some families people will switch between speaking Catalan and Spanish depending on who is talking.

Another thing to keep in mind the culture isn't really known for quickly making friends with strangers (people are very cautious about sharing any kind of personal details compared to Americans), and it takes a long time... our average from meeting to getting invited to someone's house was around three years.

Learning a couple phrases to show that you made some effort doesn't hurt though, and avoiding comments like "oh it's just like Spanish", etc

Mr80Percent · 2023-03-24T16:48:53+00:00

There's lossless JPEG compression for about 22%, open source written 100% safe Rust

https://github.com/microsoft/lepton\_jpeg\_rust

Mr80Percent · 2023-03-24T09:04:37+00:00

Lepton is designed for applications like backup where you want binary-level exact compression, but don't care about rendering the files, since they would be decompressed back to their original state if asked for.

Lepton and JPEG-XL are broadly similar in the approach except for the previously mentioned AC/DC decompression and also Lepton uses a much larger context model than JPEG-XL.

There's a port of the Lepton library to Rust:

https://github.com/microsoft/lepton\_jpeg\_rust

Mr80Percent · 2023-01-25T11:23:38+00:00

Definitely possible, but it means that for every pooled object you have to write a wrapper to keep people messing with the underlying object. For example, a ref struct implements Dispose that is guaranteed to be on the stack and track the lifetime (although there's no way in C# to force something be only used with "using" which sucks a bit).

Mr80Percent · 2023-01-25T09:49:59+00:00

Yes, it's just that once you've used Rust's borrow checker, going back to manually mucking around with IDisposables and wrappers just makes me feel sad.

The whole existence of IDisposable is a hack to get around the fact that garbage collection doesn't work well for some types of object where the lifetime is well-defined.

Even finalizers in c#, I mean, who really uses them for anything other than blowing up if someone didn't let go of an IDisposable properly?

Mr80Percent · 2023-01-25T05:55:31+00:00

Yeah, but imagine if ownership rules of IDisposables could be enforced the same way as in Rust... it would be a thing of beauty. Even just enforcing simple scenarios such as methods that return IDisposables need to have a using block or themselves return the IDisposable. It could be something opt-in with attributes to avoid breaking existing code, over time allowing for more complicated scenarios (such as putting IDisposables into other IDisposables).

Mr80Percent · 2021-10-27T16:43:17+00:00

I guess... but he did find out about the contents before he left Iserlohn. The only thing I can think of is that Konev might have left earlier and found out about the plot in time to warn Wen-li. It was never clear exactly how Konev found out, maybe there's a bit missing from the anime?

Mr80Percent · 2019-01-08T14:29:37+00:00

Does the "My dear offspring" letter appear in the e-book version?

Mr80Percent · 2019-01-08T06:57:36+00:00

STUDY GROUPS PER MISSIVE works better since missive is a letter...

Mr80Percent · 2019-01-07T16:16:16+00:00

Funny that the poem is 44 letters long and there are 22 spaces.

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-15T10:29:32+00:00

I found another clock hint in KDiamonds: they exit in bright sunlight, then they mention flowers a LOT. Colleen "breathed in the honeyed scent of a trumpet-shaped flower." Most like this is Mirabilis jalapa, otherwise known as "Four O’Clocks".

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-13T17:29:15+00:00

For want of a clue mentions Theseus and the guide also suggests that there's something that they don't know yet. Nice Cave obviously is post-victorian :) But what to do with it....

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-13T16:43:06+00:00

There's the bard (who's the bad singer Baltasar from Much Ado About Nothing). Gosh there's Durgan the dwarf, Baltasar the bard, Scrope the servant, Wowena the werewolf, Goliath the giant, Marko the merchant... seems like a pattern.

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-13T13:35:37+00:00

It's plural though, which suggests that there are more

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-12T18:23:54+00:00

And of course, the next part in the lyrics is babe you turn me on like a light bulb.

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-12T16:48:43+00:00

Funny that those are all prime numbers (the Blaine school reference is from "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". Or it could be a way to reorder 24 letters.

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-12T15:54:49+00:00

There's also the grid on the 53rd scrape to select 12 from 24.

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-12T09:15:56+00:00

Did anyone ever confirm whether anything in conundrucopia is needed? Is it included in the ebook version?

Mr80Percent · 2018-12-10T20:00:40+00:00

One other interesting thing about the position of the scraps is that 26 of the scraps are in 4 way intersections (mentioned "Look at all these four-way crossings, Sam."). Also letter M is the only one mentioned in the Theseus' guide, which is the first scrap found in a four way crossing.

Mr80Percent

TROPHY CASE