After all the nice birthday wishes and e-mails I got today I guess it's time to give something back. How about relief from sarcasm? That's right, unless you happen to be unfortunate enough to live in Taiwan, in which case you'll have a hard time escaping my sarcasm, you should be pretty safe from my sarcastic comments for the next couple of years. (I can hear the first smart asses out there ask "What about your blog?"--well, that's really your own fault now, isn't it? ;-)

So, what are the reasons I'm staying in Taiwan instead of going back to California like it was planned? As always my reasons are manifold.

Let's start with the intelligent U.S. immigration politics. As you may have heard the run for this year's H-1B visas was generally a little underestimated, which prompted the USCIS to resort to a (more or less) random draw procedure that favored holders of U.S. MSc diplomas. I'm not going to dive into this topic cause others have done that plentiful, but I would be very interested in the opinion of a qualified economist. To me it looks like the U.S. government is passing on a lot of income taxes and pissing off their own companies, forcing them to move their workforce elsewhere. There may be more to it but I don't see it.

Then, the more I thought about the U.S. and my future in general, the less I saw myself living in the California. The poor health care and social system, the unhealthy and repetitive cuisine, the amount of driving and traffic, or paying for unjustifiable wars with my taxes are just a few things that bugged me more than I allowed myself to believe.

The longer I stayed in Taiwan, the more I felt that I would be happier here than in the U.S., especially since I can do the same great job here. It's pretty cool to work for a company that proves flexible enough to adapt so easily to the changing minds of their employees. :-)

I think I've said the same thing when I went to California last year: Feel free to come visit me at any time! At the time it didn't work very well; few people actually took the opportunity to do so, but I'm very happy about the ones that did! If you like a beautiful country with nice people and delicious, albeit slightly "unusual", food, this is your chance! (Today someone at Logitech offered to take me to a nightmarket to eat snake one of these days. I'll try to gather a few photos of dishes I've tried and come to like around here. I'll make sure the snake is on one of them! :-)