> It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey

Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...

As someone who's been through that dance twice, it's 5 years from the time (well, day) you press "Submit" if you're applying online, or $RANDOM days of Royal Mail nonsense if you choose to apply by post.

I agree though, the Home Office doesn't have a way of knowing where you were fore sure 5 years ago unless they got someone to go through your "days in and out of the UK" list and vetted/cross-referenced it. And even then it'd likely be incomplete and they'd have to guess.

My surmise is that they look at the level of effort you've put in to filling out that detail, and if the total days in/out isn't particularly a borderline case, then they just wave that bit through.

I would have thought that the point is that you're supposed to be there continuously for some considerable duration (and having worked through other processes of legal immigration) before applying for citizenship.

So the idea of trying to figure out exactly which day five years in the past you have to mention seems odd to me. If there's really no care being paid to the intervening time... well if you're trying to exploit a loophole like that I think I'd prefer that it's difficult... ?

i think they meant online, which could be different?

Schengen is NOT a EU achievement.

Nations can sign Schengen, but are never forced to join the EU, nations can be EU members but are allowed to refuse the Schengen treaties.

I'm almost 50 and from Europe, never had to think about this stuff for a second.

As a 29 year old that experienced EU citizenship then had it cruelly taken away by some stupidly thin margin of voters… feckin Brexit.

I get how lucky I was for 25% of my life expectancy.

Most of those work restrictions are put in place to protect local labor. They just don't want tourists taking jobs from locals in tourist places without a permit, and without paying taxes. They really don't care much you're doing remote work for a corporation in California or writing a book.

Last time I looked was a few years ago, but I was surprised how hard it was going to be to legally live in France while keeping my US tech job. My employer was happy to do what they had to to make it happen, but there just didn't seem to be a route in the French immigration system.

The options seemed to be:

- Get a job in France and get a work visa. This is very difficult due to economic protectionism.

- Come on a tourist visa and not work.

- Be provably independently wealthy and get some variety of golden visa. This meant proving that you had enough assets to live (lavishly I might add) long term without working.

No easy option for "I want to come to your country, get paid USD by a US company, but pay taxes to you!"

I think there have been some new developments regarding digital nomad visas since then. Still, seemed crazy given what a good arrangement it would have been for France.

Illegally = like smoking weed in Amsterdam

Except few countries, all EU countries tolerate this

Indeed, the author describes a lifestyle I can hardly imagine, and then markets a product motivated by the resulting use cases.

> Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period.

> Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.

WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.

Anecdotal evidence: timezone-aware precision might be only necessary for those pushing it to very edge of the allowances, but travel log spreadsheet was very very real for me, and everyone else in my own immigrant bubble. I still have it somewhere.

UK officials seem to operate on vibes though, not obsessive precision - I witnessed missed presence days being successfully propped up with a good sob story, but I can imagine it still being useful if you need to appeal a case where vibe turned against you.

Then was a short rest between making oath and Brexit, and here we are at that shit again - spreadsheet is back, and there's a script for Schengen rolling days.

The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants.

Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.

Yes, but…

Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate).

Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?

> A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time.

That’s true for many, but my passport isn’t very strong, so I still have to deal with a lot of paperwork for most transits.

He needs to plan travel very carefully in order to not accidentally undermine his citizenship application.

But it is a ridculous requirement. Like having a millsecond-hand one a pendulum clock it appears to be to precise for the timeframe involved

Why not just make it a before-date if you care for someone having been here for a time? So just proof that you have been here X years ago or longer. Totally sufficient and much easier to have at hand.

But this is of course the point. It isn't policy where the state requires a certain thing and all people who fulfill the requirement have a shot. Instead the state makes the process of demonstrating the requirement hard on purpose as a means of reducing the people who get the benefit.

And this idea isn't just unique to the described process. It is everywhere. A bit of friction in certain places is placed there on purpose and it can also be a net positive for that friction to exist. But beyond a certain level it can turn people with rights into beggars.

Germany lets you get a Chancenkarte with a deposit of 1000EUR/month to look for a job upto a year.