> Foreigners who have been in the following countries in the prior 14 days: Iceland, Ireland, Angola, Italy, Iran, Estonia, Austria, Netherlands, San Marino, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Vatican, France, Belgium, Portugal, Malta, Monaco, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg.

Thanks for the list. Angola looks an outlier, though. Would it be Andorra instead?

Yes, it says "アンドラ公国" which is andora principality.

Darn it I even looked it up but spelled it as "Andola" (Who'd have thought that I'd make a classic Japanese L-R mistake!) which didn't register a result on google.

Thanks for the correction!

Ditto. We have been hearing so many negative things about the US that it really scares even to think going there, being it as a tourist, on business, whatever.

Mugabe honest?!

I don't know about Crew but Toptal seems just like remote body shopping. Seems the freelancer gets locked in working for toptal. Not a real freelancing scheme like odesk and such.

Not really, you have full control over your availability. You can dial it up or down however you like. A lot of people start with hourly jobs on Toptal while keeping another gig or a day job and then switch to full time on Toptal when they're ready.

Disclaimer - I work for Toptal

They could just have rebranded themselves as "cheap" or "bottom" because that's what those platforms promote. I appreciate the efforts they've tried to improve the platform(s) but they're dealing with something no one was able to fix yet: solve the lack of scalability of work-people matching.

Even SV clients get as cheap as they can. I had one -- from SF bay, not exactly SV -- which agreed to pay me 75$ to create a function to write text into images at two different possible positions (bottom and centered). Ok, cheap, but it was a 1h or 2h work. Done. Then he started asking more positions, gradient backgrounds, a command line interface, then a REST interface... when I asked him JUST 250$ for the whole deal, he went nuts.

Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.

  In many other European countries it is difficult 
  (or impossible?) to find subscriptions with similar
  pricing.

It's pretty much leveled, give it or take it a few. Here's a current Portuguese pricing plan: €30,99/month, unlimited data, 4G+ connection (up to 300 Mbps, though 150 Mbps is a more realistic figure).

You can use one of those "world sim" cards to get cheaper connectivity when you cross the border. Check http://airbalticcard.com/ for example.

Oh the languages again. Many people don't know that it was the US, and not the UK, who mostly contributed to the spread of English -- of course one might argue that US talk English in first place due to the UK. That world-wide'fication started after the WWII. In Europe, for instance, the number of students learning English as first foreign language only surpassed French ones by the 50s and 60s in most countries (sorry, can't point now to the document in which I saw this info).

Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.

We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).

No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.

You should look into the business of kpop. They don't give a flying fuck about English, when they have Japanese and Chinese markets.

If you make your music in English you run the risc of being mostly unknown in the second d and third largest economies in the world.

wodenokoto, don't get me wrong. I'm not even a native English speaker, let alone an US or UK citizen. But this issue is just overwhelming.

I recon that Asian countries, not only Japan and China, but also India, for example, are not so exposed to US as Europe, or America (continent) or Africa. I guess this has as much of cultural as historical -- for instance, Japan has always been a pretty much isolated culture historically speaking.

When medium articles are too long to read.

That was just kidding, though.