cowofwar posted:

PhD stream
4 yr science undergrad
4-6yr PhD
2-3yr post-doc

Outcome: more post-docs at ~$35-$50k/yr. No job security. Possible tenure track faculty position for 6% of graduates at average age of ~40 at around $100k

MD stream
2-4yr science undergrad
3-4yr MD
2-6yr residency

Outcome: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

JawKnee posted:

poo poo I thought that got voted down

Cultural Imperial posted:

Lol

Jumpingmanjim, how are your banks doing?

quote:

The Big Four banks have employed extreme leverage and pitiful loss reserves to maximise return on equity and profits. In 2013, against the entire loan portfolio, these banks were highly leveraged: ANZ (30.3x), CBA (30.3x), NAB (29.4x) and WBC (31.3x). Against the residential mortgage portfolio, the banks were geared: ANZ (71.4x), CBA (76.9x), NAB (52.6x) and WBC (83.3x). The average capital charge providing for bad and doubtful debts was: ANZ (1.4%), CBA (1.3%), NAB (1.9%) and WBC (1.2%).

quote:

A couple of months ago, Prosper Australia fielded a walk-in, an anonymous bank risk manager who alleged the Big Four had manipulated prudential regulation APS 210 by lending each other short-term collateral and deceptively declaring it to be Tier 1 capital. Hence, it is possible a significant proportion of the banks’ already tiny capital buffers are bogus.

Cultural Imperial posted:

China's real estate market is collapsing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-18/china-dream-ends-for-handan-as-steel-slump-spurs-property-losses.html

Cultural Imperial posted:

Holy poo poo man did you install Google thesaurus

Cultural Imperial posted:

https://twitter.com/SBarlow_ROB/status/557201616122941440?s=09

Phone posting so can't embed

quote:

Two professionals should be able to afford a [HOUSE LARGE ENOUGH FOR SEVEN PEOPLE AND A LIVE-IN NANNY] [WITHOUT TAKING ON ANY DEBT] [WHILE WORKING A TOTAL OF TWO DAYS PER WEEK]! This is a message we can all get behind.

The actual expert advice offered: Eric should work three days a week.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. day, please take a moment to remember Eric and Ilsa and others who are unable to fend for themselves.

quote:

BMO: Calgary's high-flying housing mkt has caught a serious chill...Prices dipped 1.5% [in 1H January], likely the start of a correction.

Baudin posted:

Am I the only one who thinks the entire article is a troll aimed at raising the blood pressure of most people interested in income inequality? I'm having a hard time taking any of it seriously.

quote:

Weddings are getting out of hand

ALAN KOHLER 3 HOURS AGO 1
INDUSTRIES PROPERTY ECONOMY AUSTRALIAN NEWS
In light of the problem with housing affordability, perhaps the least sensible modern trend is the rising extravagance and cost of weddings.

There was a time, back in the 1970s when I got married, when wedding fashion was tending towards simplicity. You might have thought, and I did think, that this would just continue until the whole thing would eventually just became a sort of hippie expression of love in front of two families and a few friends, followed by a party at the pub.

But no, definitely not.

Big weddings are back with a vengeance, and are more the special, once in a lifetime, very expensive day than they have ever been.

Anecdotally, from my limited observation, it’s getting out of control. Statistically, numbers are hard to come by: the last definitive survey of the wedding industry was in 2011 by the research house IBISworld, which found that the average cost of a wedding was $36,000.

Since then the component costs -- hen’s party, buck’s party, catering, venue, dresses, flowers, fancy cars, photographs -- have all gone up in price … a lot, out of step with falling inflation.

The average price of a wedding now is probably approaching $50,000, which anecdotally sounds about right. Some I’ve been to obviously cost much more. That’s a deposit for a house.

So given the difficulty young couples now have in affording to buy a home anywhere closer than 50km from the city, the question arises: why are they blowing their deposit on a party?

Or perhaps more to the point, why don’t the parents give them cash for a deposit instead of an expensive wedding that is over in a day?

I suspect the answer, as it is for many modern perplexities, is Facebook. Social media, and Facebook in particular, seems to have done three things:

1. Dramatically widened everyone’s circle of friends, and therefore the number wedding invitees,

2. Allowed wedding photos to be published widely instead of kept in an album for rare private viewings later, and

3. Allowed not only those who have gone to a wedding to feel either inadequate or superior, but also hundreds of Facebook ‘friends’ who aren’t invited.

These are powerful social forces. Weddings used to be quite small, but now 100 guests is your starting point, and even then family numbers are probably getting squeezed by the proliferation of Facebook friends who need to be invited.

The fact that wedding photos are now widely published either on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is a huge change. It means there is immense pressure on the location and the clothing. To some extent weddings have become little more than elaborate photo shoots.

But I suspect the most important thing is envy, one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It’s much the same as when the publication of CEO salaries led to an explosion in their salaries because each could see what the others were getting and no company wanted to be seen as a low payer.

It used to be we only peeked at celebrity weddings in magazines, but the new ability for those planning a wedding to see what everyone they know has done, and a lot of people they don’t know as well, is leading to exponential growth in their extravagance and cost.

A wedding is supposed to be that ‘most special day’, but how can it be the ‘most special’ if Natalie and Jordan’s wedding was better? It’s simply not on.

This, I submit, is a key reason why housing has become unaffordable: newlyweds can’t raise the deposit because they blew it on the wedding.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Very profitable as always, they're using the Lehman Brother's method of leveraging like crazy:

Cultural Imperial posted:

gently caress James Cheng.

Reverse Centaur posted:

Um, excuse me, without Cheng we wouldn't have this new shining jewel in the middle of downtown

etalian posted:

Cheng is the best architect in the world for glass replacement companies.

Baronjutter posted:

To be fair that's a massive improvement vs what was already there. Who the gently caress thought it was a good idea to make like a 6 story windowless concrete bunker.


Also last time I was in Vancouver we went into that theatre accross the street. They wanted like $15 for a non-3d movie. gently caress off, Vancouver.

OSI bean dip posted:

I am about to go to a wedding in a few weeks where they're spending $50,000 on a wedding in February--yes, loving February. The couple both have jobs where one is a branch manager for a bank and the other quit their job at the bank to go work at a sporting goods store. Their parents are footing the bill but in their case one of them is a manager for a paper mill and the other works as an assistant for a dentist's office. She invited pretty much everyone and their families so I'd wager it's about 300-400 people attending.

I love the couple to bits but the fact that they're spending so much on the wedding is absurd. My sister got married in June at a PGA-level golf course and they only spent $14,000 on a wedding where 150 people showed up.

Baronjutter posted:

I hate that department stores don't have windows. Just have windows, I hate shopping when I can't see outside. I've been in a few department stores that actually had windows and it make the whole experience so much better. I dont give a gently caress about your insane lighting consultant finding the perfect lighting balance to promote consumption, give me a real window.

The huge new awful walmart complex in Victoria has a bunch of fake windows like those. The city said they had to have X % glazing because a windowless box is ugly, so they just made windows with like a meter void space behind them then wall, just like in the picture.

Lexicon posted:

^ Yea, finally! Someone else agrees with me that Uptown is a travesty.

Side note: an awful lot of empty commercial real estate there, and that's not counting the massive lunar crater adjacent to the thing.

Baronjutter posted:

Finally!? I thought Uptown was universally hated. Horrible design, even worse layout, and saanich hosed up hard not demanding better pedestrian/cycle access. Confusing, ugly, lovely stores, no reason to ever set foot.
Are you hanging out with a lot of Albertan transplants or Langfordians or something? Making statements that could be interpreted as "Glorifying Uptown" or even excusing is very un-Victoria behavior and should be reported.

That said, my wife's work keeps hearing rumours they might move to some of that vast unleased office space in uptown, which despite uptown's awfulness would be an amazing upgrade from Millstream Village.

Lexicon posted:

We must run in different circles. I've got family in Victoria - not at all Alberta connected - and they all seem to like it, or at the very least are indifferent to it.

Baronjutter posted:

To be fair that's a massive improvement vs what was already there. Who the gently caress thought it was a good idea to make like a 6 story windowless concrete bunker.


Also last time I was in Vancouver we went into that theatre accross the street. They wanted like $15 for a non-3d movie. gently caress off, Vancouver.

PT6A posted:

The liquor budget is probably the big one. It would be easy as pie to spend $200/head on good wine alone, which doesn't make it a thing to be done, I'm just saying that's probably the big driver of the cost. I'm not going to have a big wedding, because I want the people I care enough to invite to be drinking Champagne and Grand Cru Burgundy on one of the most important days of my life.

I can't even think of 20 people I'd invite to my wedding, to be honest... There'd be my parents, maybe five of my good friends, and that's about it.

sbaldrick posted:

Why are you spending 200 dollars a head in booze, buy the cheap stuff for everyone but you.

etalian posted:

It owns when people spend massive amounts of money, on for the marriage to end in a divorce 1 or 2 years later.

cowofwar posted:

I got degrees at both SFU and McMaster Health Sciences Centre so I have 12 years of experience in concrete bunkers. Interestingly, both buildings are situated in very beautiful areas and provide great views. So there is some interesting contrast at play.



The hilarious part is that they built four floors and planned for a fifth, but they ended up not being able to build it due to foundation or infrastructure concerns of some sort; which is why the staircases go up an extra floor to nowhere.