For the large majority of Canadian residents there is nothing technically stopping them from traveling to the US for healthcare, paid out of pocket. Some people do that, in some situations, particularly for those who live just north of the border, but it's uncommon. Some reasons:
- From the experience of people I know who have needed urgent care (heart attack, cancer, anorexia, broken bones, etc), my Ontario provincial health system works pretty well, and was often excellent. The people I know received timely, high quality treatment (despite all the bad press in the news these days), at zero out of pocket cost.
- The areas that Canadian healthcare is most falling behind on are (a) access to primary care, and (b) treatment of serious things that probably won't kill you (e.g. joint replacements, cataract surgery). For (a) few people are going to travel to the US to see a family doctor. For (b) this is mostly seniors, who usually decide to grind through another 6 months on the hip replacement wait list rather than pay US$50k today.
- US healthcare is very expensive if you're paying list price. Waiting longer and getting free care in Canada often looks pretty good by comparison. Any reimbursement from your provincial health insurance will be a small fraction of the total US bill. Maybe you could save a month on getting treatment for your cancer or whatever, but is that month worth US$100k or whatever out of your family's life savings? Most people decide "no".
- Where will you live in the US while receiving treatment (e.g. for cancer)? Will your job allow you to be away? The cost of travel and lodgings adds to the cost of the already expensive healthcare. And if you feel crummy (e.g. because you have cancer and you're on chemo) you don't want to have to go through airports and live in hotel rooms, you want to be in your home.
- If despite all the above you decide to be a medical tourist, why would you choose the US? Once you're hopping on a plane and paying cash, there are often better countries in the world. I have heard of people going to Mexico, Lebanon, and India for treatment, and much lower cost than the US, while still getting high levels of care.
The notarization process is super painful, no doubt. I had originally written shell scripts to automate the process for my company, but recently switched to the excellent command line tool 'xcnotary' (https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary). it's available through Homebrew.
Thanks for sharing this, I've also got a fairly stable shell script to do the same but I'll strongly consider moving to this next time I have some work to do on the related build since some of its features seem nice.
Java is not commonly used for consumer desktop applications, where it often is necessary/desirable to invest in fully native apps for Windows and MacOS. But desktop Java is quite common in business desktop applications, for example, medical devices (like radiology image viewers).
I’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.
One downside of getting US citizenship is that if you later move to another country (your original country or a third country), you will obligated to continue to file US income tax returns, and potentially pay US income taxes. Depending on your circumstances, your tax filing might be trivial or it might be complicated, and you may or may not actually owe taxes to the US. So this might be a minor annual hassle, or it might be a painful, time consuming and expensive process. It is possible to later give up your US citizenship, but it takes time and costs money.
"if you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien living outside the United States, your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you live"
Yes, but terminating your GC status is much more easier than relinquishing your citizenship. After all, the visa is designed for that (to be something that you hold on to while in the US and give up when not maintaining permanent residency status anymore).
It also increases the reporting regulations for most international banks. So it's very possible that you'll be prevented from being able to bank in the country you move to.
I love Eclipse for working in Java, and I love IntelliJ for working in Kotlin.
My impression is that people who don't like IDEs haven't put the effort into figuring out how to use them effectively -- modern IDEs have incredible power to increase productivity, but you have to learn how, and you have to make some accommodations in how you work.
I say this from experience: I started my career coding C/C++ in Emacs and I didn't get the fuss with IDEs. Then 10 years ago I started working in Java in Eclipse and I realized what I had been missing. But in order to realize the full benefit of the IDE I had to adjust to how the IDE wants to work, e.g. spend time configuring the automatic code formatter, and let go of some of my formatting quirks that the automatic formatter couldn't handle.
My general experience is that Java needs an IDE because the language forces a bunch of boilerplate and a file/directory structure that is very difficult to navigate without a bunch of tooling. However, in other languages, the gap between the IDE experience and the well-configured vim/emacs experience is much narrower.
I programmed Java for 15 years in mostly eclipse. The past 3 years I've been doing go in vim. Just recently I switched to Gogland for go, which is a full blown IDE. It's been life-changingly good. I forgot just how nice it is to have proper tools that just work. So even in a "simple" language like go, an IDE can make a huge difference if you care to learn it.
I've had mostly the opposite experience: I've used vim and emacs/evil-mode for 10 years or so now and now, since my day-job involves lots of pair programming, I've had to use tooling that other people are comfortable with (e.g. Atom/VSCode/Intellij) and, the only places I find a clear win over my old tools are places where I rely on Intellij's features (auto-implementation of interfaces and other boilerplaty issues with Java). When I've worked in Javascript/PHP/etc., I've never found the overhead of an IDE to be worth it.
Also, I haven't written much go, but my general impression is that the language trends on the verbose side because of the lack of things like generics and it's error-handling strategy, so I'm not too surprised that it's more pleasant to use an IDE for go than it is to produce it manually.
Also, most of my side-projects are in Common Lisp and, I've yet to find a "mainstream" programming environment that's more pleasant to work with than my SLIME/emacs setup for writing CL.
Unless I misunderstood you, this does not sound like the opposite experience, but the same experience. You say that (for Java) you found the IDE, IntelliJ, better than the editors vim, Emacs, Atom, VSCode.
No I was saying that I found that certain kinds of languages (verbose, boilerplate-y languages like Java) benefit from an IDE to automate the boilerplate away while more concise languages (like Common Lisp or Haskell) benefit very little from having an actual IDE vs. a simple text editor.
Only because IDEs in other languages are weak as hell. It is not directory structure/boilerplate. It is code completion, analysis, discovery and all other similar goodies. It is just so much slower to produce the same functionality as you are used to.
Even basic things - ability to see all callers, all available methods, warnings on bad constructs and yeah, templates for often needed sysouts ...
Refactoring. Oh just a simple thing, like simplest of all available refactorings, rename something with zero worries about forgetting some place or changing one more ... I missed this ability so much ...
I can generally use macros in vim + vim integrations for things like ag or rg to do refactorings fairly easily: sure, it's not as automatic as Intellij, but it's not bad either.
Also, depending on the language, the tooling in Emacs can get all the other IDE features you are talking about: for haskell there's ghc-mod + intero, for common lisp there's slime, etc. if you install the appropriate plugins and then use something like Syntastic/Flycheck, you can have all the nice editing abilities of vim/emacs as well as most of the useful parts of an IDE's language support.
Eclipse for Java is ok, but Eclipse needs and lackluster made me write many emacs lisp extension (and not because of eclipse ergonomics, for handling build time parameters), that says something.
Here's what Chris Lattner said about Kotlin this past June:
"Lattner: Swift and Kotlin evolved at about the same point in time with the same contemporary languages around them. And so the surface-level syntax does look very similar. … But if you go one level down below the syntax, the semantics are quite different. Kotlin is very reference semantics, it’s a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.
"If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and it’s objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. And a lot of people would have been happy with that for sure, but that wouldn’t have gotten us the functional features, that wouldn’t have gotten us value semantics, that wouldn’t have gotten us a lot of the safety things that are happening [in Swift].
"I think that Kotlin is a great language. I really mean that. Kotlin is a great language, and they’re doing great things. They’re just under a different set of constraints."
