FYI for anyone on OS X Catalina (and likely Big Sur): this doesn't seem to work, as it's not detecting AVFoundation support in ffmpeg. See this issue: https://github.com/cytopia/ffscreencast/issues/31
A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:
> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”
> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.
> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.
> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.
Thanks for sharing this—I'd heard about the points system but I haven't seen any personal accounts of going through the process before, so it was illuminating to read one.
Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)
Of course, such a provision is pretty rare, but it's still a bummer. I wonder if immigration policy might ever consider such situations—such a worker is basically injecting money into the Japanese economy for little cost on Japan's part. But perhaps there are downsides that I haven't considered.
SF, Oakland, or Berkeley. My family and friends are in the Bay Area. The weather is nearly unparalleled. The food variety is solid. Transit is not that bad, if you compare the cities I mentioned to the rest of the US.
I guess the tech scene is decent, but the other factors I mentioned mean a lot more to me. (I would almost prefer it if the area weren't as much of a hotspot, actually...)
I'm interested in hearing why it's a bad thing to disincentivize working more. Is it so bad for someone to not be working should they have enough money to live on? (I'm not sure if the benefits in this specific case are enough to live on, but I guess I'm thinking about the general principle.)
I'm a CS sophomore at Berkeley, and I actually had the same choice. Sure, it would have been better to go to CMU based solely on the school, but the difference in tuition and fees between the two was too great to not go to Berkeley. (I'm in-state and received little financial aid.)
The issue is that they weren't expecting there to be so few TAs, and as such the system allowed many more students to enroll than they ended up being able to support. (Granted, the registration system here is pretty old, but it's not as horrible as you describe.)