Tag: News

• Vaishali Gauba dreamed of being a journalist in the US but wasn't able to secure an H-1B visa. 
• Years later, Gauba secured a work visa in Canada after moving there to study. 
• She said she likes Canada's quality of life and found the visa process is friendlier to immigrants. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Vaishali Gauba, 29, about her experience navigating the US and Canadian immigration systems. Business Insider verified her visas. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to the US when I was 17, with ambitions of being a journalist.

I grew up in Gurugram, India, and moved to New Jersey in 2012 for my undergraduate degree. I studied journalism, media studies, and business management at Rutgers University.

I worked with major US news outlets during and after college and wanted to keep working in America, but couldn't secure an H-1B work visa. I returned to India feeling defeated. Five years later, I relocated to Canada.

In Canada, I found a clearer path to securing a work permit, and I'm less worried about being uprooted by the immigration system.

I interned at US media companies at university

I came to the US on an F-1 visa, which is for full-time students.

During my studies, I worked for the student newspaper, The Daily Targum, and also did news internships at CNBC, NBC, and CBS, which each lasted around four months.

I remember having to get permission from international student services and the journalism department to do the internships, as there were restrictions around working off-campus for F-1 students. The work had to be related to my field of study.

I remember feeling anxious about needing to get so many approvals to work as an international student, but thankfully, I was permitted to do the internships.

Working at big-name publications felt like a milestone, but it was also difficult to balance the internships with two college majors.

I wasn't able to secure an H-1B visa to stay in the US

I became accustomed to the reality that anything related to my professional life required a lot of paperwork. I knew that to continue working in the US, I needed to apply for optional practical training, which allows F-1 students to work for a year in a field related to their studies.

I graduated in May 2016, and after my OPT was approved, I started on the CBS Page Program, a rotational program for graduates.

I had several assignments there, including on the evening news and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I talked with Stephen Colbert at the show's rooftop parties and saw many celebrities on the job.

But my time there was limited. The Page Program lasted a year, around the time my OPT expired. After six months on the program, I asked CBS about the possibility of sponsoring me for an H-1B visa but was told they don't offer sponsorships.

I didn't realize this when I started working there, but I wanted the experience and to work on my OPT, so I would have done the program regardless.

I applied to other jobs, but many applications included a question about whether I'd need a visa sponsorship now or in the future. I felt that this one question was already filtering me out as a candidate and I wasn't getting called for interviews.

I spoke with two lawyers about my options. They told me about the O-1 visa for people with "extraordinary" ability in certain fields. I tried gathering references for the application, but as time went on, I felt my chances were slim.

This is partly because the lawyers shared case studies of people who received O-1 visas with me, and I felt they were more arts-orientated than journalism-orientated. I felt the lawyers weren't confident I had a good chance, so I decided not to apply.

Extended family members and lawyers suggested I continue my education to stay in the US on another F-1 visa. I eventually decided against this as I didn't think I could learn anything about news from a school program I wasn't already learning at CBS.

I went back to India feeling defeated

I started to feel lost. I remember lashing out at my dad on the phone when he suggested I come home, but in the end, I had a gut feeling that it was time to return to India, so I left the US in August 2017.

It felt like a defeat. I knew I wanted to be a journalist in America, but I couldn't do it. I'd given so much to the US in terms of time, energy, and money, and it was hard to accept that I had to give up on it because of visa stuff.

I spent the next five years in India, working in journalism before pivoting into a brand and communications position. In 2021, I began freelancing in PR and marketing strategy.

I planned on doing a master's in digital media to boost my PR career. My boyfriend at the time, who's my husband now, moved to Canada for his MBA in 2021, so I started exploring master's options there.

I've found the Canadian immigration system to be more immigrant-friendly

I came to Canada on a study permit and started my master's program at Toronto Metropolitan University in September 2022.

I applied for a work visa in September 2023 after finishing my studies. While it took a long time to get my study permit because of the backlog created by COVID-19, the work visa process took less than a month and was fairly easy.

Graduating from my master's program made me eligible for an open work permit, which isn't tied to a specific employer. I'm self-employed as a freelancer.

Unlike the US H-1B process, I didn't need an employer to sponsor me, and there was no lottery system.

While I'm aware that some people have a hard time coming to Canada, my overall experience of Canadian immigration processes has been smooth. I feel it's more favorable to immigrants than the US processes.

I couldn't get a work visa in the US, but there was a clearer and more stable path to getting one in Canada.

When I left the US in 2017, Donald Trump had just become president. My understanding is that it's become harder to get a work visa in the US since.

My work visa expires in October 2024, and I'm open to options for settling in Canada beyond that. Moving back to India is still a small possibility as my partner, and I have family there, but I like the quality of life in Canada, and I'm less concerned about my life being uprooted here than I was in the US.

• Gila Pfeffer is a humor writer who splits her time between NYC and London.
• The following is an adapted excerpt from her memoir, "Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences."
• It chronicles her journey as a cancer previvor and survivor, determined to reverse the cycle of death in her family.

Eleven years after my mother died in 1994, when I was 31, I learned that a simple blood test could confirm whether I was a carrier of a BRCA gene mutation. Named for the first two letters of "breast" and "cancer," a positive result would place my odds of developing breast cancer at 87%.

As an added bonus, BRCA carriers have a 66% chance of being hit with ovarian cancer. Those sound pretty high until you consider my insanely strong family history of cancer, which cranked my risk up even further. A blood test would be nothing more than a formality, a scientific breakthrough to tell me what I instinctively knew. I would 100% be BRCA-positive.

Testing wasn't a common practice yet

It was 2005, and genetic testing was far from commonplace. The famous Human Genome Project, an international effort to generate the first complete sequence of the human genome, had only recently achieved its goal by producing a sequence that decoded 92% of human DNA.

There was growing buzz around mainstream genetic testing and although we were still years away from at-home spit tests like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, this development could tell me exactly what my body was up against. After a decade of playing defense, I'd finally have the chance to shift to offense. I could see a path to reversing my family's health trajectory.

Pregnant with my third child and sick of everyone in my family dying too young, my self-preservationist instincts went into overdrive. I already thought about my own mortality way more than your average 30-year-old, but my obsession didn't stop there. I had my younger sisters and baby daughter to worry about, too. Because my sisters were still children when our mother died, the primary impact on them was that it rendered them motherless.

For me, an adult, it was a wake-up call to get ahead of breast cancer. As the family matriarch, I felt a responsibility to take preventive measures not only for my own sake, but to set a good example for my siblings.

At the same time, my friend had a prophylactic double mastectomy

Shortly after I learned about genetic testing, my friend Stephanie told me she was scheduled to have a procedure called a prophylactic double mastectomy. That's a lot of syllables that amount to electively removing healthy breast tissue before cancer can take root. It was the first I'd ever heard of it, and my immediate reaction was, "I want that."

Reconstruction is usually done at the same time, unless a woman chooses to "go flat." Unlike the modified radical mastectomy my mother eventually underwent, the prophylactic version leaves the outer skin and sometimes the nipple and areola intact. It would be years before Angelina Jolie would make "prophylactic double mastectomy" a household phrase by writing an opinion piece in "The New York Times" about her choice to have the same procedure.

Stephanie and I met when I moved to Highland Park a few years earlier. Our kids were around the same ages, and we were both stay-at-home moms and active volunteers at school. We also had a family history of breast cancer in common, but her mother, who'd been diagnosed in her 20s, had caught it early and survived. By the time Stephanie told me about her upcoming mastectomy, she had already tested positive for the BRCA1 gene.

I went to visit Stephanie while she was recovering at home. My intention was to fulfill the mitzvah (good deed) of Bikur Cholim (visiting the sick), but it was also a reconnaissance mission. Other than a dental implant, I'd never had surgery and came armed with a million questions. How long was the operation? Had she had any reaction to the anesthesia? How much pain was she in, and where? Did her new boobs look natural? And most important of all, on a scale of one to infinity, how relieved did she feel now that breast cancer was no longer a threat?

I knocked on the door and went inside as I announced myself.

"Hellooooooooo! You have a visitor!" I sang as I walked across the foyer. Her mother greeted me and pointed to the living room.

"How's she doing?" I mouthed while unzipping my coat. She gave me a double thumbs-up, touched her palms together, and looked heavenward.

"Thank God," she said quietly.

"So?" I asked Stephanie as I plopped my pregnant self down on the couch, careful not to disrupt the intricate network of tubing that stuck out of her from all angles. All of my questions rolled into one: So??

"I'm OK! The pain meds are working, and my back is pretty sore, but mostly I feel relieved. I'm telling you, Gi, it's like a weight's been lifted. No more worrying. I'm free!" She beamed, all dimples and shining eyes.

She showed me her post-surgical sites, like a guide preparing a tourist for a hike through rocky terrain. Her chest was wrapped many times over in white gauze, and clear plastic bulbs the size of lemons hung off tubes on either side of her rib cage. They were filled about a third of the way with a viscous, rust-colored liquid.

"Surgical drains," she explained, giving each one a little flick with her fingers. "They collect the extra blood and other fluids to stop them from accumulating in my body. I have to dump the contents a couple times a day and keep track of how much comes out to make sure it's less each time."

She showed me a little notebook with a list of dates and measurements in decreasing amounts. "It's a little gross, but they're only there for a few more days, until they stop filling up with gunk."

"More like a lot gross," I said, recoiling slightly, which got a laugh out of Stephanie. I'd been peed on by my kids and caught their vomit in my bare hands without batting an eye, but medical gore made my insides churn.

Of the several options for reconstruction, she'd chosen silicone implants with an overlay of muscle taken from her upper back to give her "foobs" — fake boobs — a more natural look.

"All I have to do is sit on my couch propped up with these pillows, some physical therapy to regain range of motion in my arms, and I'll be good as new," she reassured me. "Better, even."

I asked for the BRCA test, and my doctor agreed

During my next prenatal checkup, I asked my doctor to arrange a BRCA test. The OB-GYN practice had started to see an uptick in requests for this type of blood test. She agreed that for me, it was a no-brainer.

"I'll make sure to have the test kit here for your next check-up," she said. "But are you sure you want to do this while you're pregnant?" She was concerned about the psychological toll of potentially finding out I was a carrier at a time when I was already hormonal enough.

My doctor was cautious but never alarmist. It was hard to say how old she was. Her wiry gray hair was always pulled back into a messy ponytail, and she favored socks with Birkenstocks and rimless glasses, which probably added years to her actual age. What mattered to me was that she'd been in the expectant-mother game for a long time.

"Absolutely," I said without reservation. Whatever the test results, I was already plotting my next preventive steps.

"Have you decided what to do if it turns out you're BRCA positive?" she asked, wheeling her little stool over to her desk to make some notes in my chart.

"Either way, I'm getting rid of these," I announced, grabbing a swollen breast in each hand. "No question. I don't want this threat looming over me anymore."

Excerpted from Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences by Gila Pfeffer. Copyright 2024, Gila Pfeffer. Published by The Experiment.

• It's been two years since I saw my best friend, and we never talk on the phone. 
• Instead, we text each other throughout the day, and I still feel close to her. 
• I wonder if it's a healthy habit, but it works for us and our priorities. 

My best friend and I haven't seen one another in person since we last saw each other about two years ago. That being said, we "talk" every day by constantly text messaging one another about anything and everything going on in our lives. Sometimes, we have simultaneous conversations via text and DMs.

We have a three-hour drive between us and do our best to visit when possible, but going a couple of years between visits isn't unusual for us. Life just keeps getting in the way. As we each have children, marriage, and work to balance, it's just easier to communicate with one another via text.

But I have wondered if our relationship is somehow false if we don't actually have regular telephone conversations or see each other regularly.

I think talking on the phone would lead to us feeling less close

I've entertained the idea of making time for regular phone calls, but I think it would lead to us connecting less often. The way we text allows us to contact each other at any time of the day, including the middle of the night — with the understanding that we may or may not see it but will reply as soon as we can.

This allows us to talk about things as they happen — whether funny, relatable, or upsetting. Plus, texting at the moment allows us to capture the nuances of the situation when we might forget them later on or no longer be in the mood to talk about it.

More than anything, I think we're such good friends because our values are aligned in that we prioritize our families. Phone calls that felt obligatory would detract from our ability to be present with our children and husbands. They also take up time, which is something we each have so little of outside our responsibilities.

With a quick text here and there all day, we remain part of each other's lives in a more manageable way. That said, we like texting in between quality visits, which we just happen to be sorely overdue for.

I never liked making phone calls

I had a close friend a few years ago who preferred to talk on the phone. I would send her a text, and she would call me. We were friendly enough to joke about it, and I would ask her playfully, "Why did you call me?" She would then bother me about preferring texts and say, "But why didn't you just call me?"

Sometimes, I didn't have the mental bandwidth to have a proper conversation on the phone with her, so I would avoid it by not texting her when I really wanted to. We ended up drifting apart, and I look back now and wonder if it's because we each had a problem meeting each other's needs in a friendship.

When I look at the list of recent calls on my phone, they are primarily to my son's father. As we co-parent, my son calls his dad every night before bed. When he is with his dad, he'll call me every night. The only other time I make a phone call is for doctor's appointments that I can't make through an online portal.

I used to call my husband before we got serious, and I missed him in between dates, but he loathed it. The only reason he put himself through it was for my sake. Now that we're married and live together, I rarely ever have to call him — though we text throughout the day.

This type of friendship works for us

My best friend and I prefer to text each other instead of calling each other. That's our mutual preference of contact that we've unspokenly agreed to. It works for us, but it might not work for you and your relationships,

But if you care about someone who wants to hear your voice — whether it's a friend, significant other, or family member — then you should give them what they need.

At the root of our texting, my friend and I know that if we felt the need to call for some reason, the other would pick up their phone. Through texting, we are giving each other what we need: to feel close to one another while still being able to juggle everything else in our lives.

• Lithium-ion batteries are the most common type of battery found in electric vehicles.
• Scientists found they contain PFAS or 'forever chemicals' found in air, water, snow, soil, and sediment.
• Research calls for better battery technology and recycling to mitigate PFAS pollution.

Scientists have uncovered a new source of hazardous "forever chemical" pollution: the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries found in most electric vehicles.

Some lithium-ion battery technologies use a class of PFAS chemicals, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, that helps make batteries less flammable and conduct electricity. Scientists found high levels of these PFAS in air, water, snow, soil, and sediment samples near plants that make those chemicals in the US, Belgium, and France, according to a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Communications.

PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they build up quickly in the environment, people, and animals and don't break down for thousands of years. They've been linked to a host of health conditions, including liver damage, high cholesterol, low birth weights, and chronic kidney disease.

The findings underscore how switching to cleaner cars and renewable energy is key to solving the climate crisis, but comes with its own set of trade-offs that are still emerging and understudied. While the environmental and health impacts of mining lithium and other minerals used in batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and other technology are well documented, it's only now that researchers are uncovering lithium-ion batteries as a source of PFAS pollution.

"Slashing [carbon dioxide] emissions with innovations like electric cars is critical, but it shouldn't come with the side effect of increasing PFAS pollution," Jennifer Guelfo, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Texas Tech University and coauthor of the study, said in a statement.

It's an issue of global concern because lithium-ion batteries are used worldwide, the study said. The same class of PFAS has recently been detected at low levels in European and Chinese water, but the source of the pollution was unclear.

The specific class of PFAS that Guelfo's team found is called bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides, or bis-FASIs. Scientists tested more than a dozen lithium-ion batteries used in EVs and consumer electronics like laptops, and found bis-FASIs at various concentrations.

It's hard to know just how widespread the chemicals are in specific lithium-ion batteries because there isn't enough research yet, Lee Ferguson, associate professor of environmental engineering at Duke University and coauthor of the study, said.

Guelfo said bis-FASIs is comparable to "older notorious" chemicals like PFOA, in part because they are extremely difficult to degrade and studies show the chemicals change the behavior of aquatic organisms at low concentrations. PFOA has been phased out of production in the US but continues to pollute drinking water.

The study was the first "cradle-to-grave" evaluation of the environmental impacts of bis-FASI use in lithium-ion batteries. The effects of bis-FASIs in humans hasn't been studied yet.

The scientists detected bis-FASIs chemicals at parts per billion levels — much higher than the limits the Environmental Protection Agency set for PFAS in drinking water in April. Strategies to get rid of PFAS in drinking water can also remove bis-FASIs, the study said, which should become more widely adopted due to EPA's regulations. However, chemical makers and some water utilities have challenged the agency in court.

Other routes of exposure to bis-FASIs exist. Air emissions data suggest the chemicals can travel to areas far from manufacturing sites. They can also leach into the environment from landfills, where the majority of lithium-ion batteries end up.

The study said only about 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, and by 2040, there could be some 8 million tons of lithium-ion battery waste.

Guelfo said scientists, engineers, manufacturers, and policymakers need to develop battery technology and recycling solutions that don't exacerbate PFAS pollution.

"We need to be carefully evaluating these chemicals that are being used in sustainable energy infrastructure," Guelfo said. "We should be evaluating them now before it becomes a more widespread problem. We an opportunity to really maximize the idea of sustainability."

Companies including 3M, Solvay, and Arkema either hold patents for bis-FASIs or advertise its production or use, the study said. Scientists focused their research on areas near the companies' manufacturing plants in Minnesota, Kentucky, Antwerp, Belgium, and Salindres, France.

3M has manufactured PFAS for decades and last year agreed to a $10 billion settlement with US cities and towns over their claims that the company contaminated drinking water with forever chemicals. 3M said it will exit all PFAS manufacturing by the end of 2025.

The company's settlement followed another agreement by Chemours, DuPont and Corteva to pay $1.19 billion to help resolve thousands of lawsuits.

A thing that is real: craving McDonald's. A thing that is not real: craving a salad from McDonald's. Customers know that. McDonald's does, too, and it shouldn't forget it.

The fast-food chain's forays into healthier alternatives have been rotten. At The Wall Street Journal's Global Food Forum in June, Joe Erlinger, the president of McDonald's US, detailed the company's missteps in meatless burgers and salads. The McPlant burger fell flat in tests in San Francisco and Dallas, he said, and won't be appearing on American menus soon. (Vegan options are doing better for the brand in Europe.) As for salads, McDonald's might be down to serve them widely at some point after ditching them in 2020 during the pandemic, but only if consumers show up for them, which they haven't in the past. "What our experience has proven is that's not what the consumer's looking for," Erlinger said.

You go to McDonald's for a cheap, craveable quick bite, not a healthy, more expensive item.

To state the obvious: obviously. McDonald's whole thing is that it is not some beacon of health. People are showing up for an affordable, decent burger accompanied by some (hopefully) affordable, decent fries. No one walks up to the golden arches jazzed that they're about to make a super great choice for their body.

"You go to McDonald's for a cheap, craveable quick bite, not a healthy, more expensive item," said Darren Tristano, the CEO and founder of Foodservice Results, a food-industry consultancy. A higher-quality alternative may get tossed on the menu so that if people are going out to eat in a group, there's an option for a health-conscious person in the mix, preventing their veto, he said. "But ultimately you're not going to see a group of kids going there and buying four plant-based burgers."

In general, McDonald's is exceptionally good at scaling an established trend and bringing it to the masses, said Danilo Gargiulo, a senior research analyst at AB Bernstein. But it's not really a trendsetter or an innovative company. If you consider the extent to which plant-based meat has failed to take off in the US, it makes sense that it would be a flop at McDonald's, too. Beyond Meat, which partnered with McDonald's on the McPlant, earlier this year revealed a turnaround plan to try to revive its brand, including cutting at least $70 million in costs. Its rival Impossible Foods has undertaken multiple rounds of layoffs over the past couple of years.

The issue with salads isn't that they're not popular in the US — it's that there are plenty of places to get them that aren't McDonald's. There's no good reason to get your roughage from the same place that makes the Grimace Shake when you can go to Sweetgreen, Cava, or Panera. Or you can just spin something up from ingredients you got at the grocery store, reserving your McDonald's trip for when you're in the mood for a treat.

Consumers give restaurants a sort of permission to offer certain items. At McDonald's, diners are on board with breakfast sandwiches and Big Macs; they're not so on board with a mediocre salad.

"They will only give you credit for the things they think you can produce," Tristano said. "You're not going to see an eggs Benedict at McDonald's."

Over the years, McDonald's has been able to fold in some noncore items — namely, coffee and chicken. But that makes sense. Coffee, including specialty coffee, is already popular. McDonald's has had regular drip coffee available for decades, but it didn't open its first McCafé until 1993, in Australia. The first McCafé in the US opened in Chicago in 2001.

McDonald's developed chicken nuggets in the 1970s and added them to the menu in 1983. It put the McChicken sandwich on the menu in 1980, later pulled it because of poor performance, and then put it back on again after the success of the nuggets. Today, McDonald's is selling as much chicken as it is beef, if not more, doing $25 billion in chicken sales annually. Still, it's the crispy chicken and the nuggets that are going gangbusters, not the leaner grilled chicken, which it also pulled from menus across the US during the pandemic.

It's not just consumer demand that's keeping McDonald's menu limited to the more-traditional, less-than-body-boosting items — it's its franchisees, too. It doesn't want to have to offer items they have a hard time selling, let alone put in the investment to make them. Keeping the menu limited helps them serve faster and keep costs down.

No one goes to the Apple Store looking for a charm bracelet. And no one goes to McDonald's looking for greens.

In the landscape of fast food, McDonald's is unique and it isn't. Tristano said Wendy's, for example, hasn't had much success in expanding its menu beyond chili, which it can use its leftover meat to create, though it does have salad. Gargiulo said Burger King had done a little better on some fronts because in its DNA is a focus on a little higher quality. Its Impossible Whopper remains available in the US, though some of its other vegan options, such as the Impossible Croissan'wich, have been taken off the menu.

"Part of what McDonald's excels at is their ability to operationally make things efficient. And even if you look at the kitchen, the equipment and how it's laid out and how their workers are optimizing the space as well as the time that they are using everything is, it looks like a Toyota production system," Gargiulo said. "Burger King has always been a little bit more irreverent. It's been a little bit more the smaller brother attempting to be something better than McDonald's."

Consumers have certain expectations for McDonald's, just as they do of any brand. For McDonald's, they'd like it to be cheap, they want it to taste OK, and they want to feel like they're getting bang for their buck. But if they're worried about their waistlines, at this point it's pretty clear McDonald's is not the place to go. No one goes to J.Crew looking for a new car. No one goes to the Apple Store looking for a charm bracelet. And no one goes to McDonald's looking for greens.

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• I moved from the US to Denmark in 2020 and have been raising my kids here. 
• It's common for families to take three to four weeks of vacation in July and August. 
• There are no overnight camps, and high season prices can be very high. 

I'm an American living in Denmark, and for the first time I am having to play by the cultural and legal rules of Danish summer vacation. Let me explain.

My oldest child just turned 6, which is when you start school in Denmark, as opposed to 5 years old in the US. If you have preschool-age kids there is always a variation of "summer day care" where institutions join together, and you can be flexible with the weeks you take. When your child starts attending public school, schools close down during the summer period. While it's up to the individual schools to decide their holiday period, many Danish families take the same three to four weeks of vacation in mid-July into early August.

In Denmark, enjoying a long summer vacation isn't just a perk — it's a right under the Danish Holiday Act, called Ferieloven. It embodies Denmark's philosophy toward work-life balance and ensures that every employee, regardless of the nature of employment (permanent, temporary, full-time, or part-time), gets ample time off to unwind. A long summer vacation is a very important part of Danish culture, and Denmark consistently ranks among the best in the world for employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but as someone coming from the US, where the average employee gets two weeks of vacation a year, it takes some getting used to.

If you have a full-time job in Denmark like I do, you get five or six weeks paid holiday a year. While The Holiday Act allows flexibility in when it can be taken, it attributes a "main holiday" period between May 1st and September 30th, where employees are encouraged, but not mandated, to take three consecutive weeks of their accrued leave. I have not been used to taking vacation time, and also still have a bit of American work ethic mixed with a fear of being away too long. I've been so precious about parsing out my vacation days in Denmark, that it's actually backfired and I've lost the time I didn't take.

Many offices shut down in August

For those on a team, you will need to plan your time off well in advance because your Danish colleagues will be. The Holiday Act says that employees should ideally inform their employers about their leave plans three months in advance for the main holiday period. If you are one of the people working through the summer, as I've done the past two years, it's a very quiet time, which can be nice, but it is difficult to get anything done that requires co-dependencies.

Danes do not respond to calls or texts during this period, a work-life balance quality I appreciate but found shocking when I first experienced it. This is why some Danish companies not only urge everyone to take those weeks but even close down during those summer months. At first, I struggled to understand how Nordic companies can run effectively, given how long the summer holidays are, but they do.

Traveling during the high season can be expensive

While there are many upsides to the summer vacation "high season" period, one of the downsides is that many holiday activities and destinations in Denmark, such as amusement parks or bath hotels, are packed and price gouged during this time. Flights out of Denmark are also double the price. Many Danes choose instead to go camping or head off to their summer houses, which are usually within an hour or two drive from home.

Growing up in the US, I spent a full eight weeks at summer overnight camp in Wisconsin every year from age 4. I loved the skills I was able to acquire, like horseback riding, sailing, and water skiing, but I was starved for parent visiting weekends. In Denmark, there are many free and paid day camp options, but no real equivalent of an overnight camp other than a weeklong scout camp, likely because families prefer spending their holidays together.

Now that I'm a working parent in Denmark, I'm very grateful for getting to experience a new way of spending the summer holidays together with family. I just need to learn how to take the time off and really unplug.

Someone picturing their local government might imagine a Norman Rockwell-esque portrait of a small-town mayor and a collection of other humble public servants. Or they might see a corrupt political machine governed by men in smoke-filled rooms. But no matter the form these local institutions take in one's mind, in most cases, people take "local government" to mean a public entity — whether it actually serves the public or not.

But not all local governments are public entities. Millions of Americans live in neighborhoods with their own forms of local representation, taxation, and public service provision. These private quasi-governments are called homeowner associations, or HOAs.

An HOA-governed residential area may comprise just a few homes, or it may be a sprawling empire of thousands of households. Either way, anyone who buys property in HOA territory becomes a member of the association, with all the rights and responsibilities that implies. The benefits of HOA membership may include access to shared goods like trash collection, well-paved private roads, and landscaped common areas. Members may pay dues or be subject to strict regulations that limit their property rights. Even if the costs outweigh the benefits, HOA members tend to be stuck with them — unless they move away.

Nowhere are these miniature states more prevalent than in Florida. While California has the most HOAs of any state (50,000), Florida has far more HOA residents as a percentage of its population. A little over a third of Californians reside in an HOA-governed community; close to 45% of Floridians live under one of the state's estimated 49,420 HOAs.

A new state law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last month, is a long-overdue effort to protect individual property owners from the most power-mad of these quasi-governments. The law limits the extent to which HOAs can regulate and penalize decisions by individual households; as The Guardian put it, the law is about "curbing the Karens." HOAs will no longer be able to set draconian rules about parking, leaving garbage cans at the curb, or growing a vegetable garden, and the rules they do set will have to be more transparent. In addition, HOA board members will receive mandatory training.

The bill's introduction was likely prompted by a prominent embezzlement case involving the board of one Florida HOA, but owners have long been frustrated with HOA rules.

The law's provisions are sensible reforms that more parts of the US should adopt. But they do little more than smooth out the rough edges in the HOA model, when the larger problem is the model itself. Widespread HOA governance reinforces segregation, inflates housing costs, and depletes the commons.

If we want to rein in these private governments, end the housing crisis, and finish the job of racial integration, it will take more than some modest adjustments to HOA governance. We may need to break the system of privatized governance entirely.

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HOAs sprang from the suburban boom of the late 1950s — the first association on record was formed in 1959 in Rossmoor, California. The model spread rapidly. By 1970 there were 10,000 HOAs nationwide. By 2023 there were some 365,000, with more than 75 million Americans residing within their territory.

To understand why the HOA-ification of America is so pernicious, we must first understand what made HOAs so appealing in the first place. In his book "Crack-Up Capitalism," the historian Quinn Slobodian writes that gated communities — which are invariably managed by HOAs — represent a form of "soft secession," an effort to create "alternative political arrangements at a small scale."

More than a few prominent market fundamentalists have been drawn to the notion of a private-sector substitute for local government

This form of "soft secession" has proved appealing to some prominent libertarian intellectuals. You might find it counterintuitive that minimal-government types would embrace a type of government that allows busybodies to regulate the color of their next-door neighbors' homes. But as Slobodian shows, more than a few prominent market fundamentalists have been drawn to the notion of a private-sector substitute for local government.

Consider one of the characters in Slobodian's book: Gordon Tullock, an economist and public-choice theorist who spent much of his career at George Mason University. Tullock devoted an entire chapter of his book "The New Federalist" to describing the HOA of Arizona's Sunshine Mountain Ridge, a community of 250 houses he then called home. In Tullock's telling, in exchange for an annual fee and residents' adherence to community rules, the HOA paid for road maintenance, private fire protection, landscaping, trash collection, and private security to supplement the protection offered by the Pima County sheriff. The association also provided its residents with "the usual privileges of a citizen in any free state," Tullock wrote.

A Sunshine Mountain Ridge resident "can complain to the board, either by going to the regular meetings of the citizens of this little community or circulating petitions, run for office, or organize other people to run for office as a sort of party," Tullock wrote.

Tullock praised the resulting quality of life: Sunshine Mountain Ridge, he wrote, is beautiful, provides high-quality services to its residents, and wields outsize political power in the county government. He also celebrated the neighborhood's homogeneity: "It seems that people, on the whole, like living with other people who are similar to them."

If Sunshine Mountain Ridge was mostly home to people like Tullock, that was "emphatically not true" of surrounding areas "where almost 1/3 of the population is Mexican," he wrote. Given that part of the HOA model's appeal is its success in maintaining residential segregation, it's not entirely surprising that the HOA boom took off in the years following the fall of Jim Crow.

That explosive growth was driven at least in part by market demand for the sort of exclusivity Tullock lauded. A 2019 study by the economists Wyatt Clarke and Matthew Freedman found that HOA home prices were, on average, higher than non-HOA home prices in the surrounding area — and that this "HOA premium" was strongly correlated with the size of an area's Black population as of 1960. The more Black residents a region had in the last decade of legalized, explicit racial segregation, the larger the gap between non-HOA home prices and HOA home prices. One can surmise that HOAs in these areas tend to be more exclusive in part because they were designed to exclude. Readers will not be shocked to learn that Clarke and Freedman also found that HOA residents were more likely to be white or Asian than non-HOA residents.

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The "secession of the successful" into HOAs, as the former US labor secretary Robert Reich once put it, has consequences for everyone else. The legal scholar Sheryll Cashin has argued that HOAs erode the social contract and encourage residents to think of themselves as property owners first and citizens second.

"As more and more citizens separate themselves into homogeneous private communities, their ties to the larger polity will become attenuated and they will increasingly resist governmental efforts to address problems that they do not perceive as 'theirs'," Cashin wrote in 2001.

For example, as Cashin noted, HOA members may be particularly hostile to public taxation, especially local property taxes. After all, they already pay HOA dues that fund private infrastructure in their communities; why pay again to subsidize public infrastructure outside the neighborhood? (Cashin observed that several states, including New Jersey and Texas, had laws allowing HOA residents to subtract the cost of privately provided infrastructure from their taxes.)

By acting as a bulwark against new housing supply, NIMBY HOAs contribute to the housing crisis and make inequality worse.

Similarly, HOAs can and do use their political influence and land-use bylaws to prevent the construction of multifamily and low-cost housing in the territories they govern and the periphery. America needs millions of homes to meet demand and ease the upward pressure on housing costs, but many HOAs have rules to prevent building even small additions, such as accessory dwelling units — much less large developments like apartments. It's difficult to estimate just how much homebuilding HOAs have thwarted in supply-constrained areas. But one thing is certain: By acting as a bulwark against new housing supply, NIMBY HOAs contribute to the housing crisis and make inequality worse.

Even for the HOA members, the supposed upsides of these associations can become a burden. Many Americans who live in HOAs face steep fines for trivial infractions, and some have even faced eviction for seemingly minor violations of neighborhood codes. For instance, a couple in Texas was sued in 2022 by their HOA for $250,000 — for the crime of feeding ducks near their home. These are the kinds of abuses that Florida's new law is intended to halt.

But Florida's reforms will do little to address the structural problems with the HOA model. Little wonder, since Florida's far-right state government is an indirect beneficiary of those harms; the state's evolution into an HOA republic has likely been a factor in its transformation from a swing state into a laboratory for reaction.

The growth of these little private governments has helped entrench segregation along racial and class lines, fueled the atomization of American public life, and worsened the material quality of life for millions of Americans. That's a far more pressing issue than HOA standards around lawn care.

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Ned Resnikoff is the policy director of California YIMBY and co-leader of the Metropolitan Abundance Project.

• I want to provide a better life for my son than I had while growing up.
• Over time, I've started making a higher salary, but still have side hustles to supplement my income.
• It's taken time to find the right work-life balance to make money and still spend time with him.

I didn't grow up with much. My dad single-handedly raised me, and we were lower-middle class. I always wished we had the same things my friends had. Many of my friends lived in houses and got cars when they were 16. Meanwhile, we would get eviction warnings on the door of our apartment, and we definitely couldn't afford a second car.

Now, I have my own son, and I want to provide a much better life for him here in Las Vegas. But to reach my financial goals and give both of us better lives, I've had to sacrifice some quality time with him. He's 15, and I've been playing this delicate balancing act for years now.

A strong work ethic isn't always enough

After getting sober in 2012, I had a rough financial start due to ruining my credit and racking up debt over nearly a decade of substance abuse. Before getting sober, I worked some jobs that paid really well, but they were detrimental to my mental health due to the high-stress environment.

My mental health is a top priority in my sobriety, so I chose not to return to those industries. This meant starting fresh and finding entry-level positions based on my skill sets.

With this new lease on life, I realized I could do better for myself and my son. I set goals for fixing my finances so that I would actually have savings and a retirement fund. I hoped to eventually buy a house and make sure my son had a college fund. Most of all, I wanted to ensure I made enough money so we never had to experience financial distress again.

I've always had a strong work ethic, which I definitely got from my parents. The problem is that our effort at work doesn't always translate to what we're paid, and I made about $30,000 a year until 2015. I knew that wasn't nearly enough to reach my financial goals.

I knew that in order to even get close to reaching these goals, I had to start doing some side hustles. This involved putting in many hours outside my full-time job, and I still didn't get much closer to what I was looking to accomplish for quite a while.

It takes a lot to be financially stable these days

I'm not the only one struggling with financial goals of building up retirement and savings accounts or buying a house. Many of my fellow millennials see and feel how much things have changed over the years.

Between 1960 and 2017, the median price of a house rose 121%, while the median household income rose only 29%. As recently as 1990, the home price-to-income ratio was under 3.0. As of 2022, homes cost 5.5 times the average household income.

Even with an income over two times what I was making in 2015, I still have multiple side hustles to attempt to reach my goals.

I've had to learn how to balance my side hustles with spending time with my son

I wasn't fully present for my son during the first three years of his life due to my addiction. I've been sober for 12 years now, and I still hold a terrible amount of guilt for that lost time. The added pressure of taking time away from my son in order to make more money has been one of the hardest things I've encountered in my sobriety.

When I was making a lot less money, I had to work many more hours on my side hustles. There would be weekends where I'd do freelance writing for eight hours each day while he watched cartoons and played video games. During those days, I could barely afford to buy Christmas or birthday presents for him while also paying for the necessities, so I worked and did what I had to do.

As the years went on, I gained more skills and better understood my value as an employee. My next job paid me about $50,000, and then I moved to a job making $65,000. Today, my salary is over $70,000 a year, and I absolutely love my job, but it's still not enough to reach all of my goals.

I still do multiple side hustles to supplement my full-time income, but getting higher-paying jobs over time has made them less of a necessity. To put it into perspective, I used to put in 20 or more hours on side hustles, and now it's maybe five to 10. Sometimes, I even take weeks off. I also received an inheritance that gave me some additional breathing room and a chance to build a solid financial foundation for us.

Looking back, increasing my income allowed me to spend much more time with my son compared to the early days of my sobriety. It's taken time to find the right balance of making enough money while also spending enough time with my son. The irony is that my son is 15 now, so he's at the age where he doesn't even want to spend as much time with me. My hope is that if anyone asked my son if he thought I worked too much and neglected him in the future, his honest answer would be, "Absolutely not."

I accept that we can only do so much with our economic conditions, but I also know that time is our most precious resource. I could have all the money in the world, but that wouldn't mean anything if I couldn't maintain a healthy relationship with my son because I was too busy.

• The US Marine Corps has equipped its MQ-9 Reaper drones with a new electronic warfare pod.
• The pod "can mimic things that are sent to it," Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said.
• The announcement follows the drone's struggles against the Houthi Rebels.

The US Marine Corps has equipped its MQ-9 Reaper drones with a new electronic warfare pod that can "mimic" signals to help hide them from enemy sensors, a top US Marine Corps general has said, The War Zone reported.

Speaking at a Brookings Institution forum last week, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said: The pod "can mimic, I'll be careful here, it can mimic things that are sent to it that it detects, turn it around and send it back."

"So it becomes a hole. A black hole. It becomes mostly undetectable," he added.

The 634-pound pod, known as the Reaper Defense Electronic Support System/Scalable Open Architecture Reconnaissance (RDESS/SOAR), will allow the Reaper drone "to somewhat disappear off of enemy radar."

The US first tested the pod, which was developed by General Atomics and L3Harris Technologies, in 2021.

A press release from the time describes the pod as "a broad spectrum, passive Electronic Support Measure (ESM) payload designed to collect and geo-locate signals of interest from standoff ranges."

It says that its addition to the Reaper helps it become "an even more versatile surveillance aircraft given its ability to conduct electronic sensing well enough to provide high quality intelligence but also keep safely away in friendly or international airspace."

The comments from Smith come off the back of the US Navy's intense battle against Yemen's Houthi rebels around the Red Sea.

The 36-foot-long Reaper struggled somewhat against the Iran-backed militant group, which claimed to have shot down a number of the drones.

"The Houthis have gained access to surface-to-air missiles that have the performance to reach those speeds and altitudes against a large, unstealthy aircraft, courtesy of Iran," Peter Wilson, Senior Defense Policy Analyst at RAND, told Business Insider.

And the MQ-9 would face a far sterner test against the air defenses and detection capabilities of an enemy such as China, so the new pod could prove vital in helping keep the drone relevant.

The Marine Corps began operating MQ-9 Reaper drones in 2018.

According to the US Air Force, the Reaper is mostly used for collecting intelligence and "secondarily against dynamic execution targets."

Peter Wilson noted that the drone is in itself "very useful" and "can be honored."

"It was one of the most successful unmanned combat air vehicles used during our protracted counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and in dealing with ISIS and also even in Afghanistan. But there, the locals didn't have the kind of weapons that the Houthis have gained access to through Iran," he said.

• Brittany McAnally and her family left California for Slovenia because of her husband's military job.
• She said kids have more freedom in Slovenia than in the US, and preschool was more nurturing.
• McAnally said she found returning to the US was a "reverse culture shock."

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Britanny McAnally, a freelancer based in Germany, about her experience living in Slovenia and the US. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a stereotypical American. I'd never left the US until I moved to Slovenia, and I didn't have a passport until I was 28.

I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. I lived near Nashville with my husband and two children until we moved to Monterey, California, in 2015.

I'd never heard of Slovenia

I had an adventurous side. I knew I wanted to see the world beyond the US.

One day, my husband, who is in the military, came home and said: "We're moving to Slovenia," because of his job.

I didn't realize Slovenia was a country. At first, I thought he meant Slovakia. Even though Slovenia is between Italy and Croatia, it wasn't popular with American tourists at that time.

We moved to Ljubljana, the capital, with our two- and three-year-old sons in December 2016. I had a sheltered upbringing in a small town. When we first arrived, I was immediately surprised by how much English people spoke. I thought people would only speak Slovene.

I didn't realize many people speak English in European countries, as well as their own language. It was mind-blowing.

It was great for my kids

Ljubljana is a beautiful city. It's the perfect place to raise kids.

When we lived there, I did freelance social media and website management work, which was flexible around my children's schedules. I worked with US clients, so a lot of my work was late in the evening. It meant I could be around for my children when they came back from preschool.

I was able to be more present for my children.

America has a lot to offer kids too, but I'm so glad my kids experienced a new culture. Here are the main cultural differences I noticed.

It's safer for pedestrians and cyclists

In Ljubljana, we could walk everywhere. It was more pedestrian-friendly than the US, and there are more places where cars aren't allowed.

Often, coffee shops were near playgrounds, so I could have a coffee and watch my children play. I was happy to let my son, who turned four in Slovenia, play independently 200 feet away while keeping an eye on him. It helped him learn boundaries in a safe environment.

He learned how to ride a bike there. I felt more comfortable cycling on roads with him than I would have in the US because I trusted the drivers to look out for cyclists and pedestrians. They're more used to them.

I let him take his bike to a skate park and ride down a barrel. I wouldn't have had the courage to let him do that in the US, but seeing other parents allow it gave me more confidence and pushed me as a parent.

My kids had more freedom to explore the city without worrying about cars, and they became much more confident and independent over the course of the year.

Preschool was cheaper and there was less focus on security

Both my kids went to preschool in Ljubljana.

In the US, preschool was focused on security. When I first went to visit my kids' preschool in Slovenia, I accidentally wandered through the kitchen instead of the admin office. It was no big deal.

That wouldn't happen in the US — there are more security checks, for good reason. But in Slovenia people were less concerned about needing security in daycares and schools.

In the US, it's not uncommon for parents to pay $1,000 or more a month for preschool. In Slovenia, I paid around 300 euros, which is around $320, per child for a month for full-time preschool.

Parents in Slovenia attend preschool with kids for 2 weeks

My three-year-old, who was in the older kids' class, started two days after my first visit. At that point, we didn't even have a house.

In Slovenia, parents attend preschool with children for one or two weeks to help them acclimatize. On my two-year-old son's first day, we went to school for 30 minutes. We'd go for longer each day until we built up to half a day. When he could manage that by himself, we'd work on building up to a full day.

Parents don't do that in the US. We drop them off and say goodbye. There's nothing wrong with that—often, parents don't have the flexibility with work or parental leave to take two weeks off like they do in Slovenia. In the US, we're a busy culture. There, they were more sensitive to their children.

The Slovene approach made starting preschool easier for my son than it had been in the US. It was more nurturing for him. I even started learning a bit of Slovene from interacting with the kids.

My kids got organic food at school

I loved the food. In preschool, my kids got fresh, organic food. In the US, there is a focus on kids' nutrition, but food is more likely to be processed.

My kids tried foods they probably never would have tried if we hadn't moved there.

Moving back to the US was a shock

After a year, we moved back to California, in 2017. The US will always be my home, but I experienced a reverse culture shock.

It bugged me that I couldn't walk anywhere, even to a coffee shop. The pace of life was busier. I'd see people drinking coffee in their car while driving, rather than enjoying it in a coffee shop. I missed the slower pace of life.

In Slovenia, we could go on a vacation to Croatia easily. Back home, we could drive to other parts of California or Nevada, but we weren't experiencing new cultures in the way we could in Europe. That bummed me out.

I'd go to shops and find myself overwhelmed by how many options there were.

We returned to Europe

I got pregnant and had my third child in California.

After a year in the US, we moved back to Europe, again for my husband's job, first to Vilnius, Lithuania's capital in July 2019. I didn't know anything about the country before we moved. But, as soon as we arrived, I realized it was beautiful and clean. I fell in love with it.

Three years later, in 2022, we moved to Garmisch, Germany. We live near Zugspitze, the tallest peak in the country, and my kids have learned how to ski. We're still here now.