Decent internet that would allow me to stream every so often, reasonable variety of food/things to do, milder weather, LGBT friendliness, and cheapness (in relation to living in, say a large city in the American West coast). Also safety to some extent.
I could hop to/explore the EU, where I would feel completely comfortable and I could absolutely do with some minor bureaucratic hassle but I would be concerned about being able to working with a US job if I have that marked a difference in time zone (I don't know if that's actually a reasonable concern).
>variety of food/things to do, milder weather, LGBT friendliness
Wrt LGBT, I worked with people from Chile who moved to Argentina because the Chilean culture is very conservative/religious. In that case, Buenos Aires is known to be very LGBT friendly. I think Uruguay is also a good option (liberal/atheist culture), but simply because of the size, you'll have much more options to socialize in BA.
Wrt food, BA has lots of options from all over the world, simply because it's a very cosmopolitan city. Maybe not to the point of NYC (it's hard if you put the bar there) but certainly the city is also known because of the quality of the food, expect to gain some weight.
But of course, everything in life has trade offs, and this is where BA loses some points.. It's not cheap to buy technology there. That's why people who can travel, buy their gadgets and branded clothing in other countries.
Speaking of security, I was born and lived there most of my life, and the only time I was mugged, I was walking at 3am in 2003 (close to the biggest economic crisis in its history) in an insecure neighborhood outside of Buenos Aires (I had a fight with my girlfriend and left her house, and I thought: I'll walk home... This night could not be any worse, anyway... hehehe, I was proven wrong)
So unless you do something stupid, as I did, it should be relatively safe. But even then, you should take some cautions: do not use expensive jewelry or watches, be cautious when walking at night in places you don't know, do not leave unattended items (eg, your laptop at a bar while going to the wc).. Etc, some simple things that I've seen people who go there from other places sometimes omit to their regret.
I've lived in Buenos Aires all my life. This is my biased pros/cons list:
- It's a beautiful city with a lot of art and beautiful places.
- Food is great
- Most of the people is nice and open minded (same sex marriage is accepted here)
- We have a lot of good IT professionals and great entrepreneurial ecosystem (including cryptocurrencies)
- Argentina is a beautiful country to do some tourism
- Our timezone is great, we are close to NYC time for example
Cons:
- Prices. I've been travelling a lot this past years and I found Buenos Aires might be as expensive as other big cities.
- Inflation, it's really hard to deal everyday with it. I've lost sense of prices to be honest
- Some places are really insecure. Also, you might have problems on safe areas too. I live in a good neighborhood and someone broke into my apartment when I was out.
I moved away from Argentina 5 years ago (wow, time flies) and I agree with all the points above.
Many people in the First World assume that Buenos Aires is a cheap place because it is in South America, but many places in South America have actually higher costs of living than Europe/North America, with lower incomes. An apartment in a nice neighborhood with a reasonable size is ~USD1000[1], while local income for a Sr Software Engineer is around ~USD27K[2] (sounds low even for BsAs standards, but not outrageously so) and taxes are outrageously high (over 50%[3] for an individual, 137.4%(!) of the profits for companies[4]).
How on Earth does that work? Companies have to pay all of their profit + more in taxes? Or is it some misleading figure which compares expenses like employment taxes to the profits?
It's a great question. It seems like at least since 2005[1] the amount taxes owed after deductions have been >100% of profits, which might partly explain the prevalence of off-the-books earnings in the country. It seems to be the second highest tax rate of commercial profits in the world, at 106% for 2016[2].
From the breakdown of that rate[3] it seems the three highest contributors to that rate are
- Turnover tax by City of Buenos Aires of 3% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 53.21%)
- Employer paid - Social security contributions of 23% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 25.94%)
- Tax on financial (check) transactions of 0.6% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 17.25%)
Keep in mind that the last one affects every transaction, so you can _easily_ pay more tax than what you earn just by moving money back and forth.
I looked into moving to Argentina recently but found some complaints on forums about the speed and reliability of the Internet. What are your experiences with the Internet in Argentina?
Well. Sadly I don't have any benchmark (or some serious analysis) to share with you but I can tell you this:
- I pay about 40usd for a non symmetric 12Mbps connection. It works ok - at least for me - I can stream music or watch something on Netflix without any problems.
- My ISP has a max of 50Mbps (non symmetric)
- You can find some corporate symmetric connections (I'm not aware if you can have those at home) but I suspect they are like a regular connection in some other more advanced countries
iPlan perhaps doesn't even use it's own fiber, apparently there are more companies offering it. But it's legal to call your company FiberTel in Argentina and then sell cable not fiber, so the situation is pretty opaque to me.
The full price is 1200 pesos, around 75 bucks. So not cheap. But to have something that works reliably up and down it's peanuts, the cheaper options are not as reliable and have asymmetric speeds. Stable videoconferencing is a must.
I have an iPlan fiberoptic line 10/10 and it's a really stable 10/10. I don't need big downloads all of the time just a reliable connection for (video)conference. Other parts have 100/100 or 50/50.
One (perhaps non-representative) data point: I have teammates who live in Villa La Angostura and Cordoba and I chat with them using Google hangouts every day. Their bandwidth has never been an issue for video chat.
I have some questions:
Are you planning to release a firefox extension version? Is this going to be free? I wasn't able to find anything about pricing on the site.
Lol....best Uruguay definition I've ever read