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I'm in the process of opening a business in Vancouver (that I will only own a tiny chunk of), and I'm just praying that we get up and running and successful before everything goes to poo poo here, if only so I have the ability to use the success to convince somebody else to give me money to open something similar in a different country as my ticket out. I'm currently making a lot more money than my friends who have moved to London/NYC/etc, but I don't see that being true long term if I stay here. 
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Apr 4, 2014 20:54
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FrozenVent posted:What. I only have anecdotal evidence: 1) i lived with a swiss secretary, aussie engineer, french statistician and austrian marketing something or rather. The swiss secretary who had no post-secondary education switched between 3 different jobs in 5 years. She had no problem finding a job the first two times - she was a contractor. Her third job was permanent. The Aussie engineer switched jobs twice in 3 years because of ending contracts. He's back in Australia now working as an engineer. The Austrian is now some kind of exec at a pharmaceutical. She had a marketing degree. 2) I had a colleague with no formal education who worked as a project manager. He position was eliminated as part of the 2009 depression cuts. He was working again in 3 months as a project manager for another company. 3) I have aussie friends who are accountants, one of which has had a steady job with a media research company and another who has jumped between 4 different companies. Each time he left, he spend approximately 1 month looking around for a new job. 2 of these changes in position occured during the 2009 depression cuts. 4) I know several canadian teachers in London. You can't throw a rock without hitting a goddamn canadian school teacher. The UK government school system keeps hiring and hiring them. 5) I know an american working as an accounts clerk who got her job during the tail end of the 2009 cuts. She's an american university drop out. She's still in her job and she's a loving imbecile. She managed to move to the UK on her husband's visa. Her husband is american and working in tech. 6) My friend's partner who is a canadian with no formal university education managed to find a job in Cardiff last year, of all loving places. His job is pretty sweet and I must say I totally underestimated his abilities. My friend moved to Cardiff with a large pharmaceutical.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:04
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Cultural Imperial posted:I only have anecdotal evidence: I only have anecdotal evidence, but everyone I know in Canada is either employed, in school or retired.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:06
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Brannock posted:Is Toronto not a real economy? How long would it take you to find a job if you lost yours today, in Toronto? If the answer is > 2 months, then I'd say no.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:06
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FrozenVent posted:I only have anecdotal evidence, but everyone I know in Canada is either employed, in school or retired. Well if winning arguments on an internet forum brings you joy, I hope I made your day!
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Apr 4, 2014 21:07
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So should I like send you my resume, Cultural Imperial, and you could recommend what country would want me to capitalize on their economy with my amazing skill set? Maybe I could do data-entry in London, or do interior painting in New York? My wife has a few years insurance experience, probably the most career-like experience in our family. She might be able to get something I guess? I've got 2 years retail, 1 year architecture, and 4 years doing an incredibly niche fire safety job basically only applicable in my region. Honestly the only chance I have at moving out of Canada is to become an "english teacher" in a lovely country that doesn't demand any english degree or credentials. There's nothing I could do in any of these booming cities that I can't do here for the same wage but without the insane cost of living. Those places are not for normal people. Most people are not IT workers or engineers, they aren't marketing analysis or psychologists. I know it's hard to imagine when most all your friends and peers are within this class, but the vast majority of people in most countries are just workers. We don't have a "career" we have a job. We wait tables, we drive a truck, we drywall homes, we answer phones. We have nothing special to offer a huge expensive city that wouldn't end up earning about the same wage, but now in an expensive and potentially crappy new location. I had friends move to London and Toronto to find better opportunities, they ended up being stuck in the exact same dead-end jobs as they were here, but dealing with crushing cost of living and stress. Years ago I looked into maybe moving to Europe but quickly found they don't want me, getting in my self even temporarily would be very hard, bringing a family would be impossible. I'm not a refugee and I'm not an "elite" and I'm not a 20-something on a working holiday. And what happens when every unemployed or under employed or "under capitalized" canadian tries to move to London or New York? Right, only the "best" make it, only the "best" get the jobs and once again we're back to square one with the "best" people having it all while the rest of us deal with the poo poo (generally created by these glowing go-getters) Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 21:17
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Baronjutter posted:My wife has a few years insurance experience, probably the most career-like experience in our family. She might be able to get something I guess? Lloyd's of London. It's in London, dude. I've got the kind of qualifications where I can pick up the phone and be working overseas in three weeks, and I think the whole "run away before the economy collapse!" line of thinking is completely irrealist. As Baronjutter said, most people don't have that kind of portability of skills. Given half a decade to prepare, yeah, it's probably doable to move to a non-lovely country for your average joe. As a reactive response to economic changes? gently caress no. As to why I'm not working overseas? I can make better money here, with better conditions. We're not a real economy, though, somehow?
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Apr 4, 2014 21:23
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lol loving cmhc http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/corp/nero/sp/2014/2014-04-04-1155.cfm?WT.cg_n=TWT_COR2 quote:All of this brings me to another question — is CMHC, like Fannie and Freddie, “too big to fail?” Well, I would argue that we are certainly too important to Canada’s housing finance system to fail, and we therefore have a sacred responsibility to prevent that from happening. We are subject to active supervision by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, or OSFI, as well as oversight by the Ministers of Employment and Social Development and Finance.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:23
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The CMHC has a sacred duty to be financial prudent and only take on the safest of risks. A strong stable CMHC!
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Apr 4, 2014 21:26
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If you guys value your current life styles so much, then my advice will be worthless.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:31
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Cultural Imperial posted:If you guys value your current life styles so much, then my advice will be worthless. you haven't answered my question from earlier really. What about those who are too poor to simply up and move? What about people toeing the poverty line? You have the tendency, occasionally, to post that you cannot wait for the crash to come - namely because you want those responsible (largely for engaging in behaviour that encourages this kind of situation) to suffer. Do you feel any empathy for those who will suffer despite not being responsible? Because you come across and crassly removed from any such thoughts.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:49
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Cultural Imperial posted:I only have anecdotal evidence:
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Apr 4, 2014 21:57
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LemonDrizzle posted:Dude, speaking as a (fairly well educated/paid/employed) brit, you've got some pretty serious grass-is-greener going on here. Well I left because I couldn't stand living there any more. E: My main regret is that I didn't leave Canada earlier in life. I think id be further along in my career if I had. namaste friends fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 21:58
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JawKnee posted:you haven't answered my question from earlier really. What about those who are too poor to simply up and move? What about people toeing the poverty line? I have no solutions for those living at the margins. I think it's very unfortunate that their provenance will be ruined by those who can't understand that rapacious greed isn't without consequence. I worked in the dtes for years. I have a limitless supply of bile for the nouveau house riche who dream up solutions to that area that are primarily for protecting their *equity*.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:04
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LemonDrizzle posted:Dude, speaking as a (fairly well educated/paid/employed) brit, you've got some pretty serious grass-is-greener going on here. For the most part, I agree with him. There's simply no future as a young person with a middling degree in a place like Victoria or Brampton. If you have the means, circumstances and ambition to get out to Toronto at the very least - but ideally one of the alpha++ or +, you'll have a far more successful career, even if you do come home in the end. And if you have a non-middling degree - CS or finance say - well of course you especially want to be there. Don't confuse my endorsement of CI's position with my happiness that the world is this way. It simply is, at least in my experience. Life would be far better for everyone if opportunities were less geographically concentrated. As for the working poor - it will never not suck being part of that group. That goes without saying, and I'm not sure what expository value exists in bringing that up.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:04
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What the gently caress is "alpha++". Is that like Michelin stars for cities or are you guys just making poo poo up now
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Apr 4, 2014 22:15
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Paper Mac posted:What the gently caress is "alpha++". Is that like Michelin stars for cities or are you guys just making poo poo up now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
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Apr 4, 2014 22:21
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Ah, so that's the kind of poo poo they teach you to say with a straight face in b-school:quote:A roster of world cities was outlined in the GaWC Research Bulletin 5 and ranked cities based on their connectivity through four "advanced producer services": accountancy, advertising, banking/finance, and law. A significant number of my colleagues and acquaintances are highly-compensated biologists, doctors, and engineers, most of them have international work experience, and I've never heard that term before. The list would look pretty different for other professions.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:27
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Well how do you expect me to say "best place on earth" to any effect?
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Apr 4, 2014 22:40
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Surely you jest- you'd rather be an accountant in London than a biologist in San Diego? You can surf at lunch. In winter.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:57
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Edit - NM
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Apr 4, 2014 22:58
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Paper Mac posted:What the gently caress is "alpha++". Is that like Michelin stars for cities or are you guys just making poo poo up now If you don't live there you're beta as gently caress
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Apr 4, 2014 23:18
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Pull up, thread! Noooooo!
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Apr 4, 2014 23:21
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London or New York have to be the most dystopian hell holes for any lower class person. The percent of people who graduate with a professional degree and may benefit from moving halfway around the world is so low you might as well be giving advice to people to "work harder". This is not good advice.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:22
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Paper Mac posted:Ah, so that's the kind of poo poo they teach you to say with a straight face in b-school: The only place I've ever seen the term is on Wikipedia and those bullshit BPOE-lists The Economist and other outfits put out (something the Vancouverites at least will be familiar with). It's definitely a douchey term, but I'm on my phone and there was already usage precedent. Shamefully withdrawn. I still stand by the point.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:52
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I just had an epiphany from this alpha thing: FIRE is the bro economy. Stay with me here. I was recently reading an extract from Michael Lewis' HFT book and I think I can make the case here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/flash-boys-michael-lewis.html?from=homepage Ok so briefly this RBC trader guy (Katsuyama) gets sent to Wall St. and fails massively. RBC allows him to investigate his massive failure and by exploiting the labour of people smarter than him, he discovers HFT is frontrunning all his trades. They are working on a tool to stop this from happening, by deliberately slowing their trades so that they arrive at various exchanges roughly simultaneously. Exhibit A: quote:The tool needed a name. The team stewed over this, until one day a trader stood up at his desk and hollered: “Dude, you should just call it Thor! The hammer!” Someone was assigned to figure out what Thor might be an acronym for, and some words were assembled, but no one remembered them. The tool was always just Thor. “I knew we were onto something when Thor became a verb,” Katsuyama says. “When I heard guys shouting, ‘Thor it!’ ” In order to investigate the HFT problem and build tools to defeat it Katsuyama hires some Irish guy (Ryan) who is supposed to be an expert in HFT. Ryan has entered the field with the following stellar qualifactions Exhibit B: quote:Eventually he met another Irish guy who worked in the New York office of MCI Communications, the big telecom company. “He gave me a job strictly because I was Irish,” Ryan says. After a while he figures out what a millisecond is and loses alpha status. The relatively swift Ryan has this to say about the traders he works with Exhibit C: quote:“Physics is physics — this is what the traders didn’t understand,” Ryan says. In approximately 2011 Katsuyama realises the parlous state of affairs among those even more alpha than he (alpha++, one might say). For anyone who doesnt spend far too much time reading stupid bullshit on the internet, HFT was reported by notable crackhead trader blog ZeroHedge in 2009. By 2011, algorithmic trading was a well-documented running joke that exemplified the most absurd and kafkaesque aspects of the American stock markets among anyone paying attention to them Exhibit D: quote:Eventually Brad Katsuyama came to realize that the most sophisticated investors didn’t know what was going on in their own market. Not the big mutual funds, Fidelity and Vanguard. Not the big money-management firms like T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. Not even the most sophisticated hedge funds. The legendary investor David Einhorn, for instance, was shocked; so was Dan Loeb, another prominent hedge-fund manager. Bill Ackman runs a famous hedge fund, Pershing Square, that often buys large chunks of companies. In the two years before Katsuyama turned up in his office to explain what was happening, Ackman had started to suspect that people might be using the information about his trades to trade ahead of him. QED
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Apr 5, 2014 00:28
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FIRE is well documented as being full of idiot bros.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:44
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The only chance we have for a soft landing is to interdict cocaine and stripper inputs and curb their population.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:49
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Or we could just wind CMHC rules back to what they were circa 2000. Not that this derail isn't fun, but... can we get back on topic?
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Apr 5, 2014 00:53
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I can literally pick up my laptop and move anywhere tomorrow and still be making the same wage I always do, and I'm not doing it.
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Apr 5, 2014 01:13
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HookShot posted:I can literally pick up my laptop and move anywhere tomorrow and still be making the same wage I always do, and I'm not doing it. Yeah but don't you live in Whistler? You're already living the dream  (in the winter, at least).
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Apr 5, 2014 01:36
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Lexicon posted:Yeah but don't you live in Whistler? You're already living the dream This is true, though it'd be nice if my rent wasn't $2100 a month for a three bedroom haha.
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Apr 5, 2014 01:47
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HookShot posted:This is true, though it'd be nice if my rent wasn't $2100 a month for a three bedroom haha. That's pretty good for whistler.
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Apr 5, 2014 02:20
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Kalenn Istarion posted:That's pretty good for whistler. Yeah, it really is. It's a nice three bedroom, too (well, technically it's 2 bedrooms and a really small third one that I use as an office) not one of those shitholes people try to rent for like 3k. I've seen 3 bedroom places advertised for 6k. The more I live in Whistler the more I want to settle here permanently. Just waiting for the housing market to collapse so all the people here have to sell their vacation homes for a fraction of what they paid! Prices have already gone down like 30% since 2010 or something, which is insane.
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Apr 5, 2014 04:03
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HookShot posted:Yeah, it really is. It's a nice three bedroom, too (well, technically it's 2 bedrooms and a really small third one that I use as an office) not one of those shitholes people try to rent for like 3k. I've seen 3 bedroom places advertised for 6k. The skiing is obviously sweet - do you not get tired of the bros though? Maybe it's not as bad as it seems it would be if you actually live there?
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Apr 5, 2014 05:42
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No, it's completely fine. The most annoying thing is on weekends when the Weekend Warriors all come up, but because I race I'm usually on the cordoned off race track all weekend anyway so I don't really care that much. My husband doesn't ski at all on weekends though since he figures what's the point when he can ski with no crowds on weekdays. Also I spend virtually no time in the village. Usually the closest I'll go to it is the Purebread by the IGA on the far side of the stroll. I've been to the actual village maybe 10 times the whole season, and usually it was just to walk through to get to Rocky Mountain or the Westin for a meeting or something. I have to admit though, when we went to the Walmart in Squamish last week for the first time in probably four months and I forgot how CHEAP everything is in places that aren't Whistler. Little things, like the bags of bite sized candy being like $3.50 instead of $6, and cheese that wasn't $15 for 900g, that sort of thing. I mean, we shop the sales and stuff so our grocery bill isn't really much higher than it used to be when I lived in Mission, but yeah, there is a price difference for things.
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Apr 5, 2014 05:50
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HookShot posted:I have to admit though, when we went to the Walmart in Squamish last week for the first time in probably four months and I forgot how CHEAP everything is in places that aren't Whistler. Little things, like the bags of bite sized candy being like $3.50 instead of $6, and cheese that wasn't $15 for 900g, that sort of thing. I mean, we shop the sales and stuff so our grocery bill isn't really much higher than it used to be when I lived in Mission, but yeah, there is a price difference for things. Maybe Calgary's more expensive than I realized, but I routinely pay $10-15 for around 300g of [good tasting] cheese. Is that really obscene? Granted, it will take me about 2-3 weeks to make my way through that cheese unless I specifically cook dishes that use a lot of cheese.
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Apr 5, 2014 06:05
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HookShot posted:No, it's completely fine. The most annoying thing is on weekends when the Weekend Warriors all come up, but because I race I'm usually on the cordoned off race track all weekend anyway so I don't really care that much. My husband doesn't ski at all on weekends though since he figures what's the point when he can ski with no crowds on weekdays. Also I spend virtually no time in the village. Usually the closest I'll go to it is the Purebread by the IGA on the far side of the stroll. I've been to the actual village maybe 10 times the whole season, and usually it was just to walk through to get to Rocky Mountain or the Westin for a meeting or something. We were actually just up there when I posted that. Wasn't even thinking about the fact that I posted about whistler while in whistler. Duh. Anyways, we bought groceries at the store in the village and it was surprisingly not nuts. I mean, it wasn't cheap, but it was in line with the (overpriced) urban fare near our place in Vancouver, not completely out to lunch. We found it more expensive to buy food in Hawaii, for example.
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Apr 5, 2014 07:53
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PT6A posted:Maybe Calgary's more expensive than I realized, but I routinely pay $10-15 for around 300g of [good tasting] cheese. Is that really obscene? Granted, it will take me about 2-3 weeks to make my way through that cheese unless I specifically cook dishes that use a lot of cheese. Groceries are expensive in Canada period, but cheese is an order of magnitude more expensive than it should be and it's artificially high on purpose . My wife and I spend a decent amount of time in the Yucatan in Mexico and you can get good fresh groceries for a family there, a bottle of tequila and a case of beer for around $100 USD and it's enough to last the week (not the beer, that lasts a few days).
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Apr 5, 2014 13:20
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Can you code in SQL and XML? Do you like public policy? Then come to St. Paul, MN and I'll hire one or two of you filthy Canucks.
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Apr 5, 2014 14:13
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