At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe. We will instead host it in Europe most likely.

I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.

You could host it in Mexico or Canada, they're pretty nice!

For many travellers it would be hard to find a flight plan without a stop in the US though.

From which countries do you need to transit through the US to get either to Canada or Mexico?

And since many US airports do not have facilities for 'sterile transfers', people will require a US C1 Transit Visa to travel connecting through US.

idk this. Thank you.

Aren't there still violent conflicts with drug gangs where citizens are killed still going on in Mexico?

That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.

If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.

Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?

Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)

I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.

Those guys were pretty smart

Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.

I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.

[0] https://www.houches-school-physics.com/ecole-de-physique-des...

I work for a US company that almost exclusively hosts internal get-togethers in Cancun.

It's much better value for money than anywhere in the US.

I was in a conference in a resort in Riviera Maya some years back. 10/10 would recommend. I was amazed to see you could even drink the tap water.

I've been in conferences in Ciudad de México and it was a very pleasant experience. I honestly haven't been anywhere else in Mexico.

Excuse me, it's Ciudad de América now. /s

Ouch, one of the Zingers I got was clearly a child porn joke.

It can be noted that Finnish and Hungarian are more distant than English and Persian.

What is absolutely astonishing, however, is how similar they sound, at least in terms of prosody. To my Hungarian ears Finnish, at least if heard from distance, sounds eerily familiar.

Compare this to e.g. Spanish and French, languages so close to each other but sounding so different. I wonder if there is some deep reason why prosody is well conserved in the Finnish-Hungarian pair and apparently entirely meaningless in Romance.

In terms of words or grammatical structures?

In terms of words https://histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html

I'm part of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and spent 7 years in school trying to learn Finnish. I spent 3 years learning German, and got about as far with that. Or as a friend of mine said who moved to Germany: German just feels like a dialect compared to Finnish.

Swedish and German are very closely related languages, so you probably had tons of implicit intuition about how Germanic languages work that didn’t have to be studied.

Yep, Swedish and German is as closely related as English and German. It's possible that English and German are even closer as they share the same Germanic branch (west Germanic), which Swedish does not share. I bring this up since it can be easier for the English speaking community of HN to relate to the closeness of German, and for a while consider being "easy as a dialect of English" to understand, in contrast to Finnish which is really difficult.

Random off-topic question: do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people? I’ve always been curious about this.

> do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people?

They're definitely Finlanders. Rooting for Finland in Finland - Sweden sportsball games, general disdain for Swedes as "sissies", etc, etc.

Source: I'm an immigrant from Sweden to Finland; my son is a Finland-Swede.

Alternative source: I think I've read somewhere on the internet (or seen in some YouTube video?) an offhand quip along those same "Sissy Sweden-Swedes" lines by the internationally most well-known -- at least among the kind of people frequenting HN, I'd assume -- Finland-Swede, Linus Torvalds.

Finlandssvenska is a strong identity that stands on its own. Kind of like Quebec. Definitely they don’t hold any fealty to Sweden

But you must be immersed with Finnish? Do you struggle with it?

It's reasonable to think I'm immersed with Finnish, but I live in a part of Finland that is Swedish speaking, even by law (https://satwcomic.com/difficult-love). I have a Finnish speaking manager since 6 years back. We've never spoken anything else than English.

Diomond hands now everyone! It will go higher!