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> Like a typical American, I only speak English, though I know enough German and Spanish to navigate public transit

YMMV, but from my experience, I'd suggest budgeting ~2 years to get to reasonable fluency wherever you wind up going, and ~5 years to feel like you've got the hang of your adopted culture. (That's starting from scratch; these days with everything available from home on the internet you might be able to shorten it a bit?)

In bocca al lupo!

[greggarious]

Thanks I know it would take a long time hence thinking hard where I will end up.

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Of course, the flip side is having put in those ~5 years, you will have also gained social and political changes which I see as unlikely as occurring in the Old Country on a time scale shorter than ~25, if ever.

(you mentioned NDP: I'm not up on CA politics, but would guess that'd put you firmly centre-left here, with Socialists and Greens as major parties who are even further left)

[greggarious]

And in the USA it engenders such severe and persistent harassment you need to emigrate if your candidates win and your opponents lose.

(Congrats to Ed Gainey, and Mike Doyle should make sure the door doesn’t hit him in the ass on the way out.)

I’ve started to just describe myself as “left libertarian” to avoid getting into semantic slapfights with adjuncts who argue over the views of dead White Russian men instead of dead white Americans.

(People forget that George Washington was an independent and things have been going downhill in this country ever since IMHO)

The greens here are morons who got signal boosted in such a way they killed a generation of nuke plants that could have bridged the gap to solar and opened the door to fracking as they took cushy organizing jobs that do nothing but unionize other cushy nonprofit jobs while the minimum wage hadn’t been raised since I made my first emigration attempt in approximately 2009, after the Pittsburgh G20