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3mo ago
The MM2H minimum property will get you something very liveable. I paid approx 1m MYR (250k USD) for a 5br in a gated community in an upper middle class 'local' area in outer KL. Expat centric areas tend to trend higher and the minimum buy in Selangor is 2M but that'll get you something exceedingly liveable. 10% is required down payment.
I prettymuch haven't been anywhere without good AC. Unless you're somehow managing to move into a 50 year old house in a shitty area, there'll be AC. Air quality is fine. Humidity can be annoying during the spikes but generally polite society avoids going outside midday.
Social scene is good. I mostly rely on BJJ for my non-family socialization and it's very strong and English speaking. My personal social circle is mostly local/Malaysian Chinese but I'm like 40 mins away from the peak expat region. Dating culture is quite conservative but also foreigner friendly if you're dating to marry and seem to have your shit together. Generally the 30% or so Chinese are more inclined. The 50% or so Muslim Malay population are friendly but you'd be expected to convert to Islam to get married (On paper at the very least, mileage may vary depending on girl/family) since there is legally no such thing as non-Muslim Malay. It's not Thailand/ideal for sex tourism but it's also not ultra conservative.
As a white foreigner I feel pretty solid. Malaysian internal racism stuff tends to focus more on skirmishes between the local Indians/Chinese/Malays. There's definitely prejudice against the abundant unskilled foreign worker population from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh etcetera. Rohingya get a lot of complaints in the media, but I've never experienced anything I'd consider anti-white.
I'm on a spousal visa and have no real intention of ever working in the country. I don't feel 100% firm in never getting kicked out but I would be highly surprised. The politics have had a lot of reform/cleaning up since the massive embezzlement scandals about 10-15 years ago. There's very strong positive discrimination for Malays in government and govt adjacent business, but they're nice enough and don't tend to be receptive to particularly radical Islam. The Chinese have had friction historically due to being overwhelmingly economically successful inside the country, but there's never been sufficient political will to do anything dramatic like in Thailand or Indonesia.
I think Malaysia is in a good position to take advantage of the world pivoting more towards China. Singapore has reached capacity for non-financial investment and the bordering region of Malaysia is picking up a ton of overflow. I'm more bullish on Malaysia for the next 50 years than Australia.
Only real healthcare engagement was birth of my youngest child. Cheaper (approx half) and higher service than Australia. I'm looking at moving my parents over presently as they're getting elderly and cost of in-home care is considerably lower here, though I don't know enough about the trade-offs if somebody's got a particularly intense/difficult to treat condition.
Can't imagine relocating back to Australia in foreseeable future unless the country randomly collapses or avoiding a war or something.
Food culture is good, usually pretty comparable to Australian cafe culture. Grocery availability is good but haven't had to deal with any particular sensitivities on my part.
I'd done 2 month long trips before pulling the trigger so I felt pretty solid before moving. IMO if you're on the fence about Asia just look at chaining 2 weeks in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and get a feel for each of them.
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3mo ago
I haven't done a MM2H deep dive personally but have been looking into it for my parents. You can use up to half of the money you put in the bank towards a mortgage down payment towards the property. They do require a property purchase but the value required for the deposit and the property varies by state.
Allegedly they don't track the state-residence requirement for the Borneo states MM2H particularly rigorously and people do get away with buying over there and spending most of their time on the peninsula. Not that there's anything wrong or particularly rudimentary with Kuching or Kota Kinabalu they're just a bit small and boring.
What do you want to know? I've lived here about 2 years now. IMO best deal in the world in terms of COL and real estate. The culture/politics a bit funny but rarely infringe on me.
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3mo ago
Spousal visa for me. I met my wife in Australia but she's a Malaysian citizen. I've got friends using the MM2H golden visa which is solid if you're not looking to work in the country but requires a solid 6 figure investment to get.
Your mileage may vary but the first year or so in the country I was able to chain 3 month entry visas without flagging anything. All I had to do was leave every 8 weeks or so, stay out for a couple days then get a fresh 3 months on return.
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3mo ago
In big metros and in the population under 40 years old English is prettymuch universal in Malaysia. Fluent, first/second language level.
I've picked up 3.5/10 Mandarin (since my wife is Malaysian Chinese) and like 2.5/10 Bahasa Malay (Considerably easier to learn than Mandarin but I really don't have many opportunities to actually use it) over the course of a year and a half here, but aside from elderly family members of my wife and my nanny essentially everybody else I interact with has 7+/10 English
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3mo ago
Yeah I moved to Malaysia and my effective COL is about a third of what it'd be in Australia for comparable lifestyle. I'd be juuust covering FIRE in Australia but considerable buffer here.
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3mo ago
Yeah but so many random books are part of the canon now. How many books on slavery or Jim crow will be mandated in most states for random bludgeoning with.
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3mo ago
Yeah it's the cheeks for me but the third person view looks pretty generic Squenix final fantasy protag to me
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3mo ago
A lot of that is that Jewish hate became cool amongst certain groups and then lowest common denominator figures got about it in very gauche ways. I'm all for questioning the power of Jewish people in major western countries but 'baby eating cabal of Satan worshiper' stuff just gets gauche very quickly
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3mo ago
I think the initial face reveal in the trailer looks disconcertingly young but the game play model just looks generic pretty girl but not illegally young. Mostly since the initial face reveal has chubbier cheeks
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3mo ago
I feel like in the very initial prerendered part of the trailer she looks chubby cheeked enough to be disconcertingly young but the other angles/actual gameplay model looks perfectly adult
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3mo ago
I mean there's the whole ephebophilia thing that comes up here a bunch and you can argue as long as you want about 18 being a fairly arbitrary line and the whole '17.99999999 years old you sick fuck' situation. Personally I feel like arguing the point always veers off into a ditch so I ignore it but I also feel if I lived in a society where legal consent was at 17 I'd probably barely notice a difference.
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3mo ago
Yeah if you gave maximal credence to incidences of sexual assault and dropped the thresholds to leering and verbal harassment it might be plausible. Especially when that kind of statistical inflation tends to be the norm in sexual abuse data advanced by those on the Left
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3mo ago
Also part of the issue with using Pakistan statistics is that there's a different culture of punishment and protection of women. UK women were likely in a bit of a quokka situation when exposed to essentially tribal attitudes directly
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3mo ago
And when Wikipedia is trying to operate on an idea of being an impartial open source collective of human information. Then on certain issues they hardcore advocate for certain opinion driven stances.
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3mo ago
Whenever a study is pushed that attempts to tie conservatism with low IQ it'll generally get thousands of updoots on the science subreddits
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3mo ago
Yeah most of the women I know with such takes were the ones socialized to have essentially zero exposure to sports and doubly zero to co-ed sports.
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3mo ago
https://www.transfermarkt.com/g-statistik/wertvollstespieler/marktwertetop
Just eyeballing the current top 20 most valuable players I'd say approximately half are African descent. NFL has gotten more black in recent years as quarterbacks have had a surge of African representation as well. Meanwhile the NBA has gotten more European but that's likely due to club preparation being superior to the USA model.
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4mo ago
People even feeling bold enough to 'fact check' this kinda stuff under their own names whilst even relatively marginal pushback on Gaza would get you deplatformed
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4mo ago
I've achieved FIRE with kids due to hitting startup lottery and relocating to a mid COL country. Geographic arbitrage is a huge part of making it work realistically
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4mo ago
Yes but sticking some random foreigner since they're better at playing the job application game into the admin job slots doesn't seem to correlate with notionally improved performance. Then it creates a series of horrendous incentives where the entire filtering system is riddled. Your Gulf states have a better understanding of what to outsource and what to internalize than most Western ones
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4mo ago
As somebody who considers myself a proficient amateur phrenologist and observer of weird ethnic divides. Giving the average man on the street in an area countries over from your particular diaspora shit for not instantly identifying and being invested is silly
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4mo ago
Yeah any system will be gamed relentlessly by those who want to participate in Western economies. The court system ensures that the pressure from marginal outliers en masse erodes whatever reasonable original point, especially when combined with activist judges
What productive work can be given to a camp in a Western country at this point, though? Most of the menial stuff left is either customer service or care work for the elderly/children, neither of which scale particularly well in that format.
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