Many people also are looking for SMALLER SCREENS (5") but without sacrificing specs (they want a small phone, not an under-powered/under-featured phone).
This.
My first smartphone had a 3.8" screen or so and specs near the top of what was available at the time (I didn't buy the most expensive thing available, but it did cost around $500). It was a great phone and I used it for 5 years (it still works, and I still use it occasionally when I need a secondary phone).
By the time I was shopping for a replacement, everything 4.0" and below was crap, the kind of stuff you can't run more than 2 apps on and which becomes obsolete within a year. So I thought I'd go for a 4.5" phone. There I had trouble finding many options where you had at least 1 GB of RAM (the minimum needed for decent performance). The ones that had decent hardware specs didn't have the 4G support I needed (a lot of them had just China-specific 4G frequencies). So in the end I settled for a 5" phone, since it had all the specs I needed - this was much bigger than I wanted initially.
At some point, screen size and performance became correlated. For the life of me, I can't understand why. There's no reason why you can't put 4 GB of RAM and a powerful CPU in a 4.5" form factor as well as in a 5.5" form factor. Apple seems to be the only company that still gets that people want smaller phones (all the examples I've mentioned are Androids). I want a phone that fits in my pocket. If it has a 4" form factor, I don't care if it's not super thin.
I can't even think of another famous non-american pure research organization other than CERN.
The Max Planck Institute(s)? CNRS?
To me at least it seems that in Germany, research is more concentrated in the institutes (people even do their PhDs there, I think) than in the universities - you have the public-funded Max Planck Institutes and the public/private (industry) co-funded Frauenhofer Institutes.
In France, you have CNRS, which is a huge publicly-funded research organization, it's hard to get a job there, but once you do, you're more or less set for life. Or so they tell me.
Having universities as the main engine of research seems to be a more Anglo-Saxon (USA, UK, Canada, Australia...) way of doing things.
Pay has to be competitive. Canada has to be the worst example of this. Canadian math and computer science departments essential are producing engineers for US companies. A friend just messaged me from California, I realized I was the only Canadian born engineer I knew still working in engineering in Canada and I work remotely for a US company! (sample size 100+ Canadian born colleagues from university or work, 200+ engineers I know well enough in Canada to know their background)
Canada has good research and education in engineering, but a lack of high-end jobs in the private sector. I don't know what exactly it is (lack of investment? overly conservative investors? not enough entrepreneurs?), but it's very frustrating to see even successful Canadian tech startups relocate their headquarters to the US at some point (I've seen this several times) and essentially become American companies.
Google, Microsoft and others are famously "all-inclusive" workplaces designed to continue the college campus atmosphere.
Ever since I was on campus (in undergrad) I've steered clear of companies who touted "the campus atmosphere" - because "it's like a campus" means you never leave. I remember ATI recruiting when I was in 4th year. "You know, it's like a campus, we have restaurants, we have a gym, we even have like bedrooms with comfy beds where you can rest..." - ah, wait a second, you want me to sleep there? Goodbye. (ATI, now AMD, no longer has the building with the gym, or so I hear. They had to sell it.)
Some rich old dude left a bunch of money when he died for prizes to be awarded in four categories...and these prizes became pre-eminent in those fields. OK, so what? Why does that mean that we have to have a "Nobel prize for [insert name of pursuit here]"? Why don't we have a Nobel prize for movies (since there is already one for literature...why was film left out)? Who cares, we have the Academy awards, the Cannes film festival, the Golden lion in Venice, etc.
Similarly, in technology, we have the Turing Prize, the IEEE Medal of Honour, in mathematics we have the Fields Medal and so on. Why do we have to have a "nobel" something for it to be worthy? That's just hype.
...was the original problem here. Since 99% of all internet services are delivered "for free", primarily as a result of the internet's decentralized nature, the service providers had to find a way to make money. It went from banner ads to now mining all of your personal data for profit.
Why doesn't e.g. Netflix get mentioned with the GAFA quadruplet? Because you pay 9.99/month for Netflix, so Netflix doesn't care who your friends are and how to sell that to advertising companies. The problem is that even if people would now be willing to pay 9.99/month for Facebook, Facebook wouldn't want it that way - they've seen they can make much more massive profits by mining people's personal data. There's no going back now.
If they really wanted to accelerate a move, just implement a program where a US citizen with a certain skillset and education can walk into any Canadian embassy and turn in their US passport in exchange for a Canadian one. Overall quality of life seems much better there, so it would just be a matter of convincing people of that.
Bad idea, a lot of people would do it on impulse (say in reaction to Trump winning another election or whatever), and then be very unhappy when they realize it's not what they wanted and that they cannot go back (I doubt the US would implement an equivalent scheme).
Besides, I don't think Canada wants to just be swamped by hundreds of thousands of Americans all of a sudden, it's difficult to keep a separate identity as is. Also, Quebec would be super pissed for upsetting the franco-anglophone balance.
Ontario healthcare is not particularly as good, so plan on going private for that.
How exactly does one "plan on going" private in Ontario with health care when providing private health care is essentially illegal?
The only things you can "go private" on are things OHIP doesn't cover, unless you plan to cross the border to the US every time you want to see a doctor.
Because non-white males don't fish? Never seen a black or asian dude fishing?
P.S. I wish that bigots on Slashdot would at least have the courage to not post as ACs...if you think you are so righteous, then reveal your nickname (not even your real name!) to the world.
signed,
What Every Canadian Worker Wants To Say, But Won't.
Including the ones that arrived yesterday, a bunch of them as "brown pigfuckers" and "fake refugees"? What's next in your plan, after genocide in the GTA? Strip a third of the population or so of their citizenship?
Nature did it with meat. Meat is not special. We have to learn how to replicate the mechanisms - which involves first understanding the mechanisms. Both of those are daunting tasks, but not fundamentally impossible.
What is the basis of your statement "meat is not special"? I mean regards to intelligence? Maybe meat is fundamentally special when it comes to producing high-level intelligence?
I'm not implying any supernatural mechanisms here. Just that what "meat" does may not be reproducible in silicon. Has anyone built a computer that grows a destroyed circuit back? Meat is pretty special. It regenerates. It reproduces. It learns.
It evolves. What else on Earth does that?
Perhaps the only way to build artificial (human/animal-level) intelligence is to build an artificial biological brain. Maybe computers are a total dead-end approach, and we should be pursuing synthetic biology instead. I mean, I don't know, but there is no basis on which to declare that whatever is done in meat can be replicated using some other substance.
Perhaps the Canadian government could invest in a few startups in an effort to keep them within Canada. (Socialism! Scary!) It wouldn't have to be a permanent program. Once a few companies succeed, Canadian VC won't see it as a large risk. It just needs to be demonstrated that success is possible outside of Silicon Valley.
There are various government programs for helping startups (at least in Ontario), I've no idea if the money being offered is enough. I think part of the problem is that there aren't that many Canadian VCs, and people who want to invest in VC funds in Canada will invest in US funds since they are so much more numerous, bigger, varied, successful, etc.
One idea I've seen floated around is co-investment into VC funds, e.g. the government promising to match any investment in a company that a VC makes, or funds where 40% of the money is public and 60% private, etc. I don't know if that would make any difference or be successful though.
There were a lot of engineers going to Wall Street the around the time of the housing bubble. The finance industry was paying way more than anywhere else. Things seem to have flipped now that tech is booming again.
That's true, however in Canada this is still happening, the banks are strong (they didn't implode or explode during the financial crisis, since they were...conservative, like most Canadian companies), and they like hiring people with tech/science degrees, and there just isn't that large of a tech industry as in the US. The U. of Toronto keeps chugging out electronics graduates at all levels all the time, they are good, however the only major electronics employer is AMD (the former ATI) and they're not very stable. Besides them it's mostly smaller companies or smaller offices of large multinationals. It's no wonder these people end up in the US, W. Europe, and even East Asia.
Americans don't get any special treatment if they want to apply for permanent residency, but yes, for temporary work visa it's much easier if you're American than if you hold any other citizenship.
I don't think the cold or the darkness really matters when trying to KEEP talent, as they would already be used to it. Trying to ATTRACT talent, well that might be a different matter.
Paradoxically, in many cases it's the reverse. Immigrants from poor countries are looking for a place where they can get their foot in the door and get permanent residence/citizenship, and the ease of immigration/job availability will trump weather concerns. However once an immigrant from Iran or China for example gets their Canadian passport, it's much easier for them to get a job in the US (and they always have the fallback option of returning to Canada). At this point they might actually make decisions based on the climate and other "first world" considerations.
I moved to Canada as a kid, and I always hated the long winters - one of the reasons I ended up moving back to Europe for a couple of years (and then realized that in Northern/Western Europe, the weather is worse! At least for my tastes).
If the Canadian government wants a high tech industry, they need to invest in some scientific research. Sure, it's a gamble that will take decades to pay off if it ever does. It's no coincidence that The Bay Area has four national labs, and the most high tech jobs.
Canada invests a lot in research (at least in my field), and the universities are quite good. The University of Toronto is on par with any Ivy League university in the States for example. The problem is that a lot of people have nowhere to work once they do their degree if they want to stay in their field of specialization. I've seen tons of people who have Master's and PhD degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering end up as business analysts at banks and consulting firms, doing nothing related to the fields in which they became experts in, because that's the only thing that is open to them if they don't want to move to the US.
The problem is not government investment in research. The problem is private sector investment in innovation. Canadian companies are conservative. Investors are conservative. Any start-up that wants to make it big in Canada will naturally orient itself towards the US market (which is easy due to NAFTA etc.) and will then end up being bought up by an American corporation or investment fund which then will often move the headquarters to the US. I've seen that happen, Canadian start-ups moving to Silicon Valley because of the investors there, nothing to do with government support.
Just note: Quebec (Montreal) has higher taxes and lower salaries than Ontario (Toronto) in general, although in Montreal the cost of living is cheaper and there a lot more subsidized things (e.g. public transit, university tuition is cheaper). Quebec is in general more socialist than Ontario (and pretty much all of the other provinces), with all the good and bad that that entails.
I think money-wise, Toronto & southern Ontario compares well to the US, yes the taxes are slightly higher but you get full health insurance coverage for that tax money, etc. From my own perspective as a Torontonian, the main draw to the US would be 1) a cooler job - the things you can do in Canada are quite limited compared to the US and 2) the climate, e.g. California is just so much better in terms of that than pretty much anywhere in Canada. Regarding 2), unless the job was super-cool, I would never move to a part of the US where the climate is similar (e.g. the the northern states).
If they could offer a faster, simpler route to citizenship, that'd get me there pretty quick.
Unfortunately, there's no such thing (except in certain cases). The only route to citizenship is to first get a permanent residence permit (PR). Once you have your PR, getting citizenship is easy - you have to stick around long enough (3 or 4 years, I forget the exact amount, being most of the year in Canada) - nothing else is required (except, I think, a clean criminal record) - and you can apply for citizenship (once you do, you get it within 6-12 months typically).
Getting the PR is the difficult part. The easiest way is express entry, if your occupation is on the list of jobs the federal (or a provincial) government deems unfilled by the Canadian job market. In a best case scenario, you would get your PR about 6 months after applying. If you just apply straight for PR without fulfilling the express entry requirements, you might have to wait for years until your application is approved.
Public transport for routine US living, outside of the few extremely urban closed packed cities is just not practical for regular active families.
Which is because of the way US cities are designed, which was my point (they are, by and large, a disaster of urban design). However, they can be re-designed, slowly.
However, the rest of your comment is a common but misguided criticism of public transit-orientedness (granted I was not completely clear myself). I did not say "ban all cars" and "no one should have a car". It's not really a problem if everyone in a large city has a car. It's a problem if they are using it constantly. It's a bigger problem if they are FORCED to use it constantly because of the way the city is designed. You doing grocery shopping using you car is not, usually, the problem. The problem is everyone using their cars to commute to work.
Mind you, grocery shopping and all that is possible without personal car ownership. I did it for 4 years living in a midsize European city:
You usually don't buy humongous packages of things like you do in North America. You buy smaller packages more often. This is anyways more practical, since people live in smaller houses and apartments than in N. America. Since the market is dominated by small package buyers, large packages are not as common and not as economical as in N. America: In America, a case of 50 of something is usually much cheaper, per thing, than a case of 5 of something. In Europe it's only marginally cheaper (reflecting only the savings on the packaging).
You learn to haul things with your hands. I would carry 3-4 full large plastic/fabric sacs of things from the store (on the streetcar). If you can't haul just manually, there are wheeled carts to buy, it's what all the old ladies use.
The stuff you can't carry can usually be delivered by the store. Not just furniture, but also midsize appliances which one would transport by car if one had it.
For the odd occasion, there's the taxi ride from the store (lots of minivan taxis parked right outside of IKEA), or car-sharing services for those who know how to drive.
As I said, people going in their cars to get your pounds of logs and whatever and do their once-a-week large shopping excursion are not the problem...that's fine. The problem is people driving themselves to work or to buy a loaf of bread, that is, when this is done en masse.
I'll just get a little red wagon and have my dogs and cats pull me.
Oh wait...
No, take the bus, streetcar, & train.
The answer for large cities has always been to make them more transit-centric and pedestrian-centric and less car-centric. Build a lot of public transit infrastructure, and incentivize people to use them, while dis-incentivizing the use of personal cars. Whether petroleum-fueled cars or EVs, it doesn't matter, this is still the case, because it's not just about air pollution, climate change, peak oil/gas, or dependence on fossil fuel exporting dictators, but also about traffic congestion and efficiency, personal health, safety, and just general livability.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't switch over all cars to EVs. We should. However EVs should not be used as an excuse to stop investing in public transit and re-designing cities to make them far less car-centric. Large cities built around the car have been, and are, a disaster in many ways.
tl;dr: There will be a point where there just isn't enough work for everyone.
Maybe. Or maybe people are being a bit uncreative when thinking about these things.
Go back 250 years, and tell people that in the future, only 2% of the workforce will work in agriculture. Most people would probably call you mad, while aristocrats who would believe you would probably call for the progressive castration of more and more peasants.
Go back 150 years, and tell people that in the future, millions will be employed directly and indirectly by various entertainment industries (Hollywood, professional sports, etc.) that will exist for no reason but for giving people a pleasurable way to pass their free time. They would laugh at you, and tell you "but that's not real work!"
Go back 20 years, and tell people tens of thousands will be employed today as "social media coordinators" and the like. Heck, I don't think that's "real work", and I still wonder why on Earth someone would pay someone $50k per year to sit on Facebook and Twitter all day.
tl;dr: in a 100 years, machines might be doing 98% of what we today consider "real jobs" and the professions that most people have might look to people of today as glorified hobbies or just being completely useless; but to the people of the future these will be real jobs with real value.
Airline employees don't have to pick them up if they're in your carry on. This is probably one of those great ideas some union guy had "and we can blame it on the TSA".
Union guys are already protected from overweight baggage.
Most airports will refuse to check-in bags weighing over 32 kg (even if you're willing to pay the overweight charges - most airlines accept up to 20 kg before starting to charge you extra fees), because that is the max. weight their employees are insured to lift, i.e. the insurance company wont pay for injuries resulting from lifting heavier things, so they don't lift heavier things.
I was told this once when I had a ticket which had unlimited baggage. As far as the airline cared, I could bring a suitcase weighing 100 kg. However the lady at the airport forced me to remove some stuff from a bag weighing 36 kg - I could have as many bags as I wanted she said, but none could be over 32 kg - firm airport policy.
I don't like the way you can "buy" a product, and then the manufacturer remotely disables some of the functionality you paid for.
Not upgrading is not a viable option, because you need security patches.
This is the problem with the "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows that will be continually updated" philosophy. Using Microsoft's previous (and "normal" for the vast majority of software vendors once-upon-a-time) product release philosophy, they would now say something like "Paint will not be included in a future version of Windows, i.e. Windows 11 (or whatever)" and users would know that once they purchased Windows 11, Paint would no longer be there. Instead, Microsoft has decided to randomly uninstall programs from your computer because they feel like it. That is why Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows - that I will ever use.
Stop taking computer science and go back to business you lames
+1
Note to all students: please avoid STEM degrees, go study something useless or something everyone else studies, so that I can enjoy high paying jobs and be in demand...I still have 30+ years to work, you insensitive clods!
Slashdot Mirror
Many people also are looking for SMALLER SCREENS (5") but without sacrificing specs (they want a small phone, not an under-powered/under-featured phone).
This.
My first smartphone had a 3.8" screen or so and specs near the top of what was available at the time (I didn't buy the most expensive thing available, but it did cost around $500). It was a great phone and I used it for 5 years (it still works, and I still use it occasionally when I need a secondary phone).
By the time I was shopping for a replacement, everything 4.0" and below was crap, the kind of stuff you can't run more than 2 apps on and which becomes obsolete within a year. So I thought I'd go for a 4.5" phone. There I had trouble finding many options where you had at least 1 GB of RAM (the minimum needed for decent performance). The ones that had decent hardware specs didn't have the 4G support I needed (a lot of them had just China-specific 4G frequencies). So in the end I settled for a 5" phone, since it had all the specs I needed - this was much bigger than I wanted initially.
At some point, screen size and performance became correlated. For the life of me, I can't understand why. There's no reason why you can't put 4 GB of RAM and a powerful CPU in a 4.5" form factor as well as in a 5.5" form factor. Apple seems to be the only company that still gets that people want smaller phones (all the examples I've mentioned are Androids). I want a phone that fits in my pocket. If it has a 4" form factor, I don't care if it's not super thin.
I can't even think of another famous non-american pure research organization other than CERN.
The Max Planck Institute(s)? CNRS?
To me at least it seems that in Germany, research is more concentrated in the institutes (people even do their PhDs there, I think) than in the universities - you have the public-funded Max Planck Institutes and the public/private (industry) co-funded Frauenhofer Institutes.
In France, you have CNRS, which is a huge publicly-funded research organization, it's hard to get a job there, but once you do, you're more or less set for life. Or so they tell me.
Having universities as the main engine of research seems to be a more Anglo-Saxon (USA, UK, Canada, Australia...) way of doing things.
Pay has to be competitive. Canada has to be the worst example of this. Canadian math and computer science departments essential are producing engineers for US companies. A friend just messaged me from California, I realized I was the only Canadian born engineer I knew still working in engineering in Canada and I work remotely for a US company! (sample size 100+ Canadian born colleagues from university or work, 200+ engineers I know well enough in Canada to know their background)
Canada has good research and education in engineering, but a lack of high-end jobs in the private sector. I don't know what exactly it is (lack of investment? overly conservative investors? not enough entrepreneurs?), but it's very frustrating to see even successful Canadian tech startups relocate their headquarters to the US at some point (I've seen this several times) and essentially become American companies.
Google, Microsoft and others are famously "all-inclusive" workplaces designed to continue the college campus atmosphere.
Ever since I was on campus (in undergrad) I've steered clear of companies who touted "the campus atmosphere" - because "it's like a campus" means you never leave. I remember ATI recruiting when I was in 4th year. "You know, it's like a campus, we have restaurants, we have a gym, we even have like bedrooms with comfy beds where you can rest..." - ah, wait a second, you want me to sleep there? Goodbye. (ATI, now AMD, no longer has the building with the gym, or so I hear. They had to sell it.)
A "standard" Belgium? As opposed to what? An "imperial" Belgium?
Yes. Imperial Belgium is much bigger, as it included the Congo. The Congo is very big.
Some rich old dude left a bunch of money when he died for prizes to be awarded in four categories...and these prizes became pre-eminent in those fields. OK, so what? Why does that mean that we have to have a "Nobel prize for [insert name of pursuit here]"? Why don't we have a Nobel prize for movies (since there is already one for literature...why was film left out)? Who cares, we have the Academy awards, the Cannes film festival, the Golden lion in Venice, etc.
Similarly, in technology, we have the Turing Prize, the IEEE Medal of Honour, in mathematics we have the Fields Medal and so on. Why do we have to have a "nobel" something for it to be worthy? That's just hype.
...was the original problem here. Since 99% of all internet services are delivered "for free", primarily as a result of the internet's decentralized nature, the service providers had to find a way to make money. It went from banner ads to now mining all of your personal data for profit.
Why doesn't e.g. Netflix get mentioned with the GAFA quadruplet? Because you pay 9.99/month for Netflix, so Netflix doesn't care who your friends are and how to sell that to advertising companies. The problem is that even if people would now be willing to pay 9.99/month for Facebook, Facebook wouldn't want it that way - they've seen they can make much more massive profits by mining people's personal data. There's no going back now.
...just "Despacito" playing 24/7 at a nearby cafe with the bass jacked all the way up.
If they really wanted to accelerate a move, just implement a program where a US citizen with a certain skillset and education can walk into any Canadian embassy and turn in their US passport in exchange for a Canadian one. Overall quality of life seems much better there, so it would just be a matter of convincing people of that.
Bad idea, a lot of people would do it on impulse (say in reaction to Trump winning another election or whatever), and then be very unhappy when they realize it's not what they wanted and that they cannot go back (I doubt the US would implement an equivalent scheme).
Besides, I don't think Canada wants to just be swamped by hundreds of thousands of Americans all of a sudden, it's difficult to keep a separate identity as is. Also, Quebec would be super pissed for upsetting the franco-anglophone balance.
Ontario healthcare is not particularly as good, so plan on going private for that.
How exactly does one "plan on going" private in Ontario with health care when providing private health care is essentially illegal?
The only things you can "go private" on are things OHIP doesn't cover, unless you plan to cross the border to the US every time you want to see a doctor.
fucking white males.
Because non-white males don't fish? Never seen a black or asian dude fishing?
P.S. I wish that bigots on Slashdot would at least have the courage to not post as ACs...if you think you are so righteous, then reveal your nickname (not even your real name!) to the world.
signed, What Every Canadian Worker Wants To Say, But Won't.
Including the ones that arrived yesterday, a bunch of them as "brown pigfuckers" and "fake refugees"? What's next in your plan, after genocide in the GTA? Strip a third of the population or so of their citizenship?
Nature did it with meat. Meat is not special. We have to learn how to replicate the mechanisms - which involves first understanding the mechanisms. Both of those are daunting tasks, but not fundamentally impossible.
What is the basis of your statement "meat is not special"? I mean regards to intelligence? Maybe meat is fundamentally special when it comes to producing high-level intelligence?
I'm not implying any supernatural mechanisms here. Just that what "meat" does may not be reproducible in silicon. Has anyone built a computer that grows a destroyed circuit back? Meat is pretty special. It regenerates. It reproduces. It learns. It evolves. What else on Earth does that?
Perhaps the only way to build artificial (human/animal-level) intelligence is to build an artificial biological brain. Maybe computers are a total dead-end approach, and we should be pursuing synthetic biology instead. I mean, I don't know, but there is no basis on which to declare that whatever is done in meat can be replicated using some other substance.
Perhaps the Canadian government could invest in a few startups in an effort to keep them within Canada. (Socialism! Scary!) It wouldn't have to be a permanent program. Once a few companies succeed, Canadian VC won't see it as a large risk. It just needs to be demonstrated that success is possible outside of Silicon Valley.
There are various government programs for helping startups (at least in Ontario), I've no idea if the money being offered is enough. I think part of the problem is that there aren't that many Canadian VCs, and people who want to invest in VC funds in Canada will invest in US funds since they are so much more numerous, bigger, varied, successful, etc.
One idea I've seen floated around is co-investment into VC funds, e.g. the government promising to match any investment in a company that a VC makes, or funds where 40% of the money is public and 60% private, etc. I don't know if that would make any difference or be successful though.
There were a lot of engineers going to Wall Street the around the time of the housing bubble. The finance industry was paying way more than anywhere else. Things seem to have flipped now that tech is booming again.
That's true, however in Canada this is still happening, the banks are strong (they didn't implode or explode during the financial crisis, since they were...conservative, like most Canadian companies), and they like hiring people with tech/science degrees, and there just isn't that large of a tech industry as in the US. The U. of Toronto keeps chugging out electronics graduates at all levels all the time, they are good, however the only major electronics employer is AMD (the former ATI) and they're not very stable. Besides them it's mostly smaller companies or smaller offices of large multinationals. It's no wonder these people end up in the US, W. Europe, and even East Asia.
Americans don't get any special treatment if they want to apply for permanent residency, but yes, for temporary work visa it's much easier if you're American than if you hold any other citizenship.
I don't think the cold or the darkness really matters when trying to KEEP talent, as they would already be used to it. Trying to ATTRACT talent, well that might be a different matter.
Paradoxically, in many cases it's the reverse. Immigrants from poor countries are looking for a place where they can get their foot in the door and get permanent residence/citizenship, and the ease of immigration/job availability will trump weather concerns. However once an immigrant from Iran or China for example gets their Canadian passport, it's much easier for them to get a job in the US (and they always have the fallback option of returning to Canada). At this point they might actually make decisions based on the climate and other "first world" considerations.
I moved to Canada as a kid, and I always hated the long winters - one of the reasons I ended up moving back to Europe for a couple of years (and then realized that in Northern/Western Europe, the weather is worse! At least for my tastes).
If the Canadian government wants a high tech industry, they need to invest in some scientific research. Sure, it's a gamble that will take decades to pay off if it ever does. It's no coincidence that The Bay Area has four national labs, and the most high tech jobs.
Canada invests a lot in research (at least in my field), and the universities are quite good. The University of Toronto is on par with any Ivy League university in the States for example. The problem is that a lot of people have nowhere to work once they do their degree if they want to stay in their field of specialization. I've seen tons of people who have Master's and PhD degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering end up as business analysts at banks and consulting firms, doing nothing related to the fields in which they became experts in, because that's the only thing that is open to them if they don't want to move to the US.
The problem is not government investment in research. The problem is private sector investment in innovation. Canadian companies are conservative. Investors are conservative. Any start-up that wants to make it big in Canada will naturally orient itself towards the US market (which is easy due to NAFTA etc.) and will then end up being bought up by an American corporation or investment fund which then will often move the headquarters to the US. I've seen that happen, Canadian start-ups moving to Silicon Valley because of the investors there, nothing to do with government support.
Just note: Quebec (Montreal) has higher taxes and lower salaries than Ontario (Toronto) in general, although in Montreal the cost of living is cheaper and there a lot more subsidized things (e.g. public transit, university tuition is cheaper). Quebec is in general more socialist than Ontario (and pretty much all of the other provinces), with all the good and bad that that entails.
I think money-wise, Toronto & southern Ontario compares well to the US, yes the taxes are slightly higher but you get full health insurance coverage for that tax money, etc. From my own perspective as a Torontonian, the main draw to the US would be 1) a cooler job - the things you can do in Canada are quite limited compared to the US and 2) the climate, e.g. California is just so much better in terms of that than pretty much anywhere in Canada. Regarding 2), unless the job was super-cool, I would never move to a part of the US where the climate is similar (e.g. the the northern states).
If they could offer a faster, simpler route to citizenship, that'd get me there pretty quick.
Unfortunately, there's no such thing (except in certain cases). The only route to citizenship is to first get a permanent residence permit (PR). Once you have your PR, getting citizenship is easy - you have to stick around long enough (3 or 4 years, I forget the exact amount, being most of the year in Canada) - nothing else is required (except, I think, a clean criminal record) - and you can apply for citizenship (once you do, you get it within 6-12 months typically).
Getting the PR is the difficult part. The easiest way is express entry, if your occupation is on the list of jobs the federal (or a provincial) government deems unfilled by the Canadian job market. In a best case scenario, you would get your PR about 6 months after applying. If you just apply straight for PR without fulfilling the express entry requirements, you might have to wait for years until your application is approved.
Public transport for routine US living, outside of the few extremely urban closed packed cities is just not practical for regular active families.
Which is because of the way US cities are designed, which was my point (they are, by and large, a disaster of urban design). However, they can be re-designed, slowly.
However, the rest of your comment is a common but misguided criticism of public transit-orientedness (granted I was not completely clear myself). I did not say "ban all cars" and "no one should have a car". It's not really a problem if everyone in a large city has a car. It's a problem if they are using it constantly. It's a bigger problem if they are FORCED to use it constantly because of the way the city is designed. You doing grocery shopping using you car is not, usually, the problem. The problem is everyone using their cars to commute to work.
Mind you, grocery shopping and all that is possible without personal car ownership. I did it for 4 years living in a midsize European city:
As I said, people going in their cars to get your pounds of logs and whatever and do their once-a-week large shopping excursion are not the problem...that's fine. The problem is people driving themselves to work or to buy a loaf of bread, that is, when this is done en masse.
I'll just get a little red wagon and have my dogs and cats pull me.
Oh wait...
No, take the bus, streetcar, & train.
The answer for large cities has always been to make them more transit-centric and pedestrian-centric and less car-centric. Build a lot of public transit infrastructure, and incentivize people to use them, while dis-incentivizing the use of personal cars. Whether petroleum-fueled cars or EVs, it doesn't matter, this is still the case, because it's not just about air pollution, climate change, peak oil/gas, or dependence on fossil fuel exporting dictators, but also about traffic congestion and efficiency, personal health, safety, and just general livability.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't switch over all cars to EVs. We should. However EVs should not be used as an excuse to stop investing in public transit and re-designing cities to make them far less car-centric. Large cities built around the car have been, and are, a disaster in many ways.
tl;dr: There will be a point where there just isn't enough work for everyone.
Maybe. Or maybe people are being a bit uncreative when thinking about these things.
Go back 250 years, and tell people that in the future, only 2% of the workforce will work in agriculture. Most people would probably call you mad, while aristocrats who would believe you would probably call for the progressive castration of more and more peasants.
Go back 150 years, and tell people that in the future, millions will be employed directly and indirectly by various entertainment industries (Hollywood, professional sports, etc.) that will exist for no reason but for giving people a pleasurable way to pass their free time. They would laugh at you, and tell you "but that's not real work!"
Go back 20 years, and tell people tens of thousands will be employed today as "social media coordinators" and the like. Heck, I don't think that's "real work", and I still wonder why on Earth someone would pay someone $50k per year to sit on Facebook and Twitter all day.
tl;dr: in a 100 years, machines might be doing 98% of what we today consider "real jobs" and the professions that most people have might look to people of today as glorified hobbies or just being completely useless; but to the people of the future these will be real jobs with real value.
Airline employees don't have to pick them up if they're in your carry on. This is probably one of those great ideas some union guy had "and we can blame it on the TSA".
Union guys are already protected from overweight baggage.
Most airports will refuse to check-in bags weighing over 32 kg (even if you're willing to pay the overweight charges - most airlines accept up to 20 kg before starting to charge you extra fees), because that is the max. weight their employees are insured to lift, i.e. the insurance company wont pay for injuries resulting from lifting heavier things, so they don't lift heavier things.
I was told this once when I had a ticket which had unlimited baggage. As far as the airline cared, I could bring a suitcase weighing 100 kg. However the lady at the airport forced me to remove some stuff from a bag weighing 36 kg - I could have as many bags as I wanted she said, but none could be over 32 kg - firm airport policy.
I don't like the way you can "buy" a product, and then the manufacturer remotely disables some of the functionality you paid for.
Not upgrading is not a viable option, because you need security patches.
This is the problem with the "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows that will be continually updated" philosophy. Using Microsoft's previous (and "normal" for the vast majority of software vendors once-upon-a-time) product release philosophy, they would now say something like "Paint will not be included in a future version of Windows, i.e. Windows 11 (or whatever)" and users would know that once they purchased Windows 11, Paint would no longer be there. Instead, Microsoft has decided to randomly uninstall programs from your computer because they feel like it. That is why Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows - that I will ever use.
Stop taking computer science and go back to business you lames
+1
Note to all students: please avoid STEM degrees, go study something useless or something everyone else studies, so that I can enjoy high paying jobs and be in demand...I still have 30+ years to work, you insensitive clods!