They want you to move so bad they'll give you cash, a house or a special visa

Plus: home food printing, 3D-printed vitamins, catching crooks with cookies, and more!

Economically speaking, a digital nomad is a cash pipeline. They earn money from one place and spend it in another. 

Take me, for example. I'm currently living temporarily in Oaxaca, Mexico. American companies give me American dollars for the work I do, and I spend nearly all of it here in Mexico. My money comes from advertising spends and subscription fees in the United States and ends up in the hands of Mexican farmers, Oaxaca restaurant owners and their employees, the person who owns the house I rent and his employees, local Mezcal makers, bakeries and their employees, local taxi drivers, people who work at the local markets and grocery stores and so on. 

For the Mexican and Oaxacan governments seeking services and income for their constituents, I am a gold mine. I spend money on locals just like the locals do — but I don't take a job from a local.

With the pandemic and its impact on tourist businesses globally, plus the rise of remote work, governments of all sizes have caught on, creatively offering incentives to lure nomads and expats. These range from special entry requirements to cheap homes to cold hard cash. 

These offers have become competitive. Here's how governments are paying you to move. 

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Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas

1. Home food printers

A Hong Kong based company is marketing a printer for printing on food with edible ink. What's amazing is that they're marketing it for home use (and also small businesses). The printer can print on solids (like cupcakes, cookies cake and macarons) and also on liquids (including beer and coffee foam). They're Kickstarting it at around $800, but claim it will retail in August for about $2,000. Here comes the video!

2. 3D-printed gummy vitamins

A UK startup called Nourished is taking a totally new approach to vitamins: custom-printed gummy vitamins. You basically tell the company what vitamins you need to take, then they "print" all them into custom supplement gummy disks. Customers are shipped a 3-month supply each quarter. The vitamin gummies are vegan and sugar-free. Here comes the video!

3. Food-printed 'wanted poster' cookies

The owners of a bakery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called the Canfora Bakery got burglarized. So to catch the perp, they printed a security-cam picture of the burglar on sugar cookies using a food printer and gave the cookies away for free to spread the word. People posted pictures of the cookies on Facebook, which led to tips that the police are following up on. 

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Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotion

Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

1. How holograms, deepfakes, and AR are raising the dead

2. IoT Security: Be Aware of What You Connect at Home

3. How to measure contact center operational efficiency and productivity

4. Don't be overwhelmed by 5G and big data. Here's how to plan

5. All about attack surface management (and how to achieve it)

6. Why security pros can’t ignore big data monopolies

7. What is good cybersecurity governance in health care?

CURRENT LOCATION: Oaxaca, Mexico