Re: underestimating tech salaries, thanks for the corrections; I may have discounted similar information before because even senior software developers I know personally locally are <$30,000/yr, and “start at $100,000/yr” sounded much too good (this is retrospectively obviously a bad heuristic and I will now strive to do better). In retrospect, checking the salaries of relatives who migrated to the USA should have corrected this.
re: moving to 1st-world country as a goal, my wife has this as a goal (FWIW it’s a common goal for a sizable fraction (which I haven’t researched) of Filipinos, which should indicate just how lousy Philippines is), not so much mine. I personally feel that I should strive to make the Philippines better, and initially thought that staying here would be the best method, but I probably need to re-consider that, which is why I need to consider the option of working abroad, whether permanently or temporarily. I worry about decaying values if I leave the Philippines (i.e. would Gandhi drink a pill that has a 1% chance of making him indifferent to India), but maybe I just need a credible way of maintaining the values of my future self.
re: freelancing, yes, that was my analysis. My wife and I talked several months ago with a couple whose husband had successfully transitioned to a freelance software job here in the Philippines, although exact numbers never got mentioned (but it was obvious they were comfortably well off). So I took to guessing that maybe a freelancer would get 50%->80% of what a regular USA jobholder would get, and used my (flawed!) understanding of USA salaries to consider this. So maybe I should recompute this after all… Looks like freelance is a better option than I thought before.
As for my family’s land, I’ll have to check; it’s possible it doesn’t have Internet or electricity, haha (Internet access is expensive in the Philippines, and my understanding is that it’s one of the more expensive rates in the world). FWIW I and my wife and children live at my wife’s uncle’s, since the building is rented out as residential units and my wife’s current job is managing it; Internet is paid for by my wife’s uncle since they communicate by Facebook and Viber (my wife’s uncle emigrated to the USA), so I don’t strictly speaking need to be at my own family’s land as long as my wife keeps her job.
re: resume, I have a pdf copy. I was going to say that I don’t have a website to put it up on, but then I remembered that I do have amkg.github.io, which means I really really really need to be a lot more aware of my options and resources, because seriously, a REAL PROGRAMMER (TM) without a website? Okay, I’ll put it up there after I dredge up the instructions for updating that site.
(side note: NetHack is good rationalist training, because a lot of deaths there are in retrospect pretty stupid when you get “Do you want your possessions identified” and found out you had very valuable items you forgot to use because you didn’t stop and think through your real options and take a good long look at your available resources… I need to treat real life more like NetHack, hahaha)
re: cryonics, I remember researching that maybe a decade ago and deciding that the total cost was too much for my salary then (and I’d have to contend with the possibility of relatives preventing me from being cryonically preserved anyway); I can’t remember where I put the computations for that, though, sigh. Come to think of it, I haven’t re-computed for my conditions now (I’ve been assuming the cost for me a decade later would be higher than the cost then, and cancel out my increase in purchasing capacity), which I obviously should do (damn cached thoughts), at least for my children if not for my wife and I… It’s amazing how stupid a brain can be, I should have rethought that earlier.
re: CFAR, yes, that’s my impression so far. Libraries in the Philippines are few and far between, but there are other ways to get the information (e.g. this website). I’d still like to attend one at some point in the future if only to see if they’ve gotten better, but obviously that has to come after I’m the smiling agent sitting on top of a heap of utilons.
Re: underestimating tech salaries, thanks for the corrections; I may have discounted similar information before because even senior software developers I know personally locally are <$30,000/yr, and “start at $100,000/yr” sounded much too good (this is retrospectively obviously a bad heuristic and I will now strive to do better). In retrospect, checking the salaries of relatives who migrated to the USA should have corrected this.
re: moving to 1st-world country as a goal, my wife has this as a goal (FWIW it’s a common goal for a sizable fraction (which I haven’t researched) of Filipinos, which should indicate just how lousy Philippines is), not so much mine. I personally feel that I should strive to make the Philippines better, and initially thought that staying here would be the best method, but I probably need to re-consider that, which is why I need to consider the option of working abroad, whether permanently or temporarily. I worry about decaying values if I leave the Philippines (i.e. would Gandhi drink a pill that has a 1% chance of making him indifferent to India), but maybe I just need a credible way of maintaining the values of my future self.
re: freelancing, yes, that was my analysis. My wife and I talked several months ago with a couple whose husband had successfully transitioned to a freelance software job here in the Philippines, although exact numbers never got mentioned (but it was obvious they were comfortably well off). So I took to guessing that maybe a freelancer would get 50%->80% of what a regular USA jobholder would get, and used my (flawed!) understanding of USA salaries to consider this. So maybe I should recompute this after all… Looks like freelance is a better option than I thought before.
As for my family’s land, I’ll have to check; it’s possible it doesn’t have Internet or electricity, haha (Internet access is expensive in the Philippines, and my understanding is that it’s one of the more expensive rates in the world). FWIW I and my wife and children live at my wife’s uncle’s, since the building is rented out as residential units and my wife’s current job is managing it; Internet is paid for by my wife’s uncle since they communicate by Facebook and Viber (my wife’s uncle emigrated to the USA), so I don’t strictly speaking need to be at my own family’s land as long as my wife keeps her job.
re: resume, I have a pdf copy. I was going to say that I don’t have a website to put it up on, but then I remembered that I do have amkg.github.io, which means I really really really need to be a lot more aware of my options and resources, because seriously, a REAL PROGRAMMER (TM) without a website? Okay, I’ll put it up there after I dredge up the instructions for updating that site.
(side note: NetHack is good rationalist training, because a lot of deaths there are in retrospect pretty stupid when you get “Do you want your possessions identified” and found out you had very valuable items you forgot to use because you didn’t stop and think through your real options and take a good long look at your available resources… I need to treat real life more like NetHack, hahaha)
re: cryonics, I remember researching that maybe a decade ago and deciding that the total cost was too much for my salary then (and I’d have to contend with the possibility of relatives preventing me from being cryonically preserved anyway); I can’t remember where I put the computations for that, though, sigh. Come to think of it, I haven’t re-computed for my conditions now (I’ve been assuming the cost for me a decade later would be higher than the cost then, and cancel out my increase in purchasing capacity), which I obviously should do (damn cached thoughts), at least for my children if not for my wife and I… It’s amazing how stupid a brain can be, I should have rethought that earlier.
re: CFAR, yes, that’s my impression so far. Libraries in the Philippines are few and far between, but there are other ways to get the information (e.g. this website). I’d still like to attend one at some point in the future if only to see if they’ve gotten better, but obviously that has to come after I’m the smiling agent sitting on top of a heap of utilons.