vdance

Strange question, maybe? I'm an expat living in Romania and I always appreciate and marvel at the efficiency of Romania to have/enable providers to sell an unlimited 4G mobile service plan, that (for me) also works in the middle of nowhere here in RO for 5 euros per month. Thoughts? BTW, it makes buying a service plan in KS, USA that barely works in various areas feel a bit like a scam...

are there really people this naive lingering on this forum?

must me nice in your bubble that $84,000 as a one time payment is reasonable. normal people can't get a loan for something like this, and obviously don't have cash stored away for something like this, and like the article mentioned, the op won't get covered by insurance even though he's done his part and paid insurance premiums. he clearly had no other options. glad you drive a $33k car. seems like the op doesn't.

hmmm - "As with all things, often it doesn't work out" ...

not really sure where your source is on this -- I lived abroad for five years and met many, many people doing this same thing (especially in Bucharest) -- both in I.T. and in other fields -- it's very do-able, as the author describes -- and as you suggest, it helps if you don't have family

I did this with a few differences. It was 2004, so a few services from these days were not as "available" from a quality perspective -- particularly, VoIP. I left to France with a PSTN phone device that answered calls to my business number, and forwarded them to a French PSTN fixed phone number -- all at international rates, which were a bit more expensive back then. I did later move to a VoIP service, when the quality was reasonably acceptable.

Time differences in Asia would be different than France - maybe a few hours too many for me. I particularity loved the time difference between France and the US (~8 hours). Everyday, there was a whole day of work before my clients in the US would wake up. If needed, I could make a few calls before I had dinner and went out.

I had a 3 year established list of clients when I moved there, so that helped. A fairly stressful aspect of living abroad was that all my clients came in "locally" by way of local google advertising. And as it happens, when someone picks up the phone and calls a number that seems local to them, they tend to assume they're talking to someone who is physically present in their city.

Many clients were turned off after realizing that I was working abroad -- and not telling them (which I tried a couple times) was very strange as well -- it's just a balancing act. So my suggestion would be to get into a borderless niche business, if you can -- something like doing "websites for x" -- where a company would much rather work with someone with niche products and expertise, rather than someone local. Then the subject of where you physically are never really comes up, or makes sense. SAAS would work in that way too, of course.

For me - a dating website. Having lived in two foreign countries, I can see that my story might be impossible otherwise. It's just that, from my experience, when you meet someone on a dating website and you tell them you're a foreigner and you're pretty bad at their language, it creates a sort of "expectation" or "context" that can be nice for the first meeting (which was a drink for us). It switches the date from an awkward, "try-to-impress-her" meeting to "hey, this is kind of fun and weird" date, and can work with the right person. I brought a translation dictionary to dates before I knew French really well. With this particular girl, I remember it taking an extraordinarily large amount of time for us to even go through details like family, etc. But, she was patient and intrigued I suppose, because we only communicated in my garbled French. On subsequent dates, I remember taking walks around the city. I can't remember too many exact details because it was 7 years ago -- just that she was very patient and quirky and I truly felt like a little kid absorbing up the French.

I learned French in my mid-20s -- in France. I spent a year learning French at a school and literally couldn't even understand fluent, spoken French by the time my ex-girlfriend moved back to the US. I stayed in France and began dating a French girl who didn't speak English at all -- so we had these weird intellectual/juvenile sounding conversations in the beginning - with me basically speaking confusing, garbled French 100% of the time. Point is, after about one month together with her, I understood spoken French very well, and could articulate some fairly complex thoughts. It just felt like the language came crashing into my head once I had to "articulate" what needed to be articulated and "hear" what needed to be heard. It's one of the strangest feelings of immersive learning that I can remember. Like DonPellegrino mentioned, I never really cared about gender and proper grammar, because... when your girlfriend doesn't know your language, you just have to force the thoughts out somehow. This might sound obvious, but if you have a partner who speaks another language fluently, just speak in your native tongue and ask them to speak in their native tongue. From my experience, the most powerful part of learning a language is just "slowing" it down in your head. You'd think you could just watch television to do this -- but in my experience (multiple languages now), you can't. It just seems like you need to be engaged intimately with another human being to get these results.

First post here at HN... but I would try a shame tactic (per codegeek's helpful name research). In a nice bright box just above your normal content, send the following text back to his IP address ...

"Hello, my name is <insert his name here once you are certain> and I've stolen the content that you are viewing right now -- someone's hard work. I stole it in a very intentional and fairly disrespecful way. Sometimes we get life lessons and this may well be one of mine. Instead of using my skills to do good with the precious time that I have in this beautiful world, I've chosen to write a fairly nefarious script to copy every single page of someone else's website and suck it back into my website, so that I can profit from someone else's work. The message you are reading right now may go away for a day or two, if I change my IP address. But rest assured, it will be back once my IP address is rediscovered. This event will also follow me forever on search engines when people search my name -- future employers, friends, family. I have been doing this for <x> days and have been asked to stop. I haven't yet, but time will tell.... (<insert-pretty-date-here>)

In the meantime, if you would like to visit the real website go <here>..."