I have received checks in Germany in the last decade, specifically when a health insurer refunded premiums but did not have bank details on file for me.
Targeted at foreign diplomats, requires a special app, and mobile phones to be deposited away from their owners while shopping – has anyone decompiled the app to see what it is up to?
Why wasn't Circle using deposit networks? Did they take out private uninsured deposit insurance?
Circle's competitor Paxos is using IntraFi Network and Reich & Tang Deposit Solutions for BUSD according to their reports (https://paxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/BUSD-Monthly-St...) and has obtained insurance for most of their balances in excess of FDIC insurance limits.
> I'd love to travel and work but I work for a U.S. employer and need to keep a U.S. address, which is an expensive requirement if one doesn't already own property!
How much of a resident do you have to be in the U.S.?
Just an address you can receive mail at: https://www.postscanmail.com/. They have a ton of locations, if you want no state income tax + high CoL (for employers doing adjustments): Seattle.
Note there's some issues with using these types of addresses (specifically those designated as Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies by the USPS) with some banks and credit card issuers. Probably your employer would be fine with this.
I'm on Penang, Malaysia right now. Sort of stumbled into the digital nomad lifestyle: was living in Berlin and decided it wasn't going to be a good place to be during a pandemic, so I flew to Singapore back in March '20 and just kept going since then.
Nomad tax setups vary, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your citizenship(s), residency/ies when you started nomading, income, location and type of employer/clients, and where you want to spend time.
The answer depends on where you live. If you're based in California: you could subscribe to a mailbox service to keep your address off the public record and use a California LLC as the operating company for your business. You need to disclose either Members or Managers. Choose the latter and use a New Mexico LLC as a management company (they are often used for this purpose as they are cheap to form and maintain and you can stay anonymous to everyone but the IRS and your registered agent service provider), et voilà, you're in business without any public link between your identity and your company.
You probably would agree that reducing suffering inflicted upon humans is generally speaking a good and ethical thing to do, right?
To understand why many people think the same re. animals, perhaps trying a different starting point might help: why single out humans? There's fairly good arguments (https://www.animal-ethics.org/the-idea-that-only-humans-are-... and the linked papers are a good resource) to be made that many other species have a similar capability to have positive and negative experience (sentience) which are not just citing 'common sense' or similar weasel-words, instead actually looking into the neuroscience of pain and other suffering.
I don't know about Mir, but UnionPay works just fine internationally in many places, especially in markets that cater(ed) to Chinese tourists many if not most merchants accept it. There's even UnionPay card-issuing banks outside Mainland China, for example in Thailand.
I arrived in Singapore on the last non-stop flight from Berlin back in mid-March. They have been quite generous with visit pass extensions, however I didn't want to outstay my welcome, so at the end of August I moved to Dubai and I'm actually getting a residence visa here.
Preferably I would like to fly to Mainland China soon for business and also personal reasons and would be willing to stay in 14 days' quarantine for that, but it's still proving difficult due to visa paperwork (a so-called "PU letter" is needed) issues.
You could open an Estonian company you fully own and manage using the e-Residency programme https://e-resident.gov.ee/. Caveat: not all payment service providers that usually accept Estonian clients will also work with a company managed from abroad (iirc Stripe requires you to live in another country they support) but at least one most likely will.