I was just transferred from the silicon valley to Vancouver so I have to comment...:
1. Vancouver is well regarded as one of the least affordable cities.
2. I stay in the same role but got a 40%+ pay cut so that offsets the "Cost of Living Including Rent".
3. If you compare other bay area cities (Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Fremont...) where tech workers live to Vancouver, it's not as dramatic.
4. While I support universal health care, which is good for average people in society, it's not necessarily a pro for tech workers. US tech companies buy good health insurance plans for their employees. I used to walk in my company's on-site health centers to get same-day health care in the US. In Canada, I have to wait for days to see the primary care provider and drive one hour to another provider to get exams.
Yes, I agree on all points. I have researched this a lot as I'm also planning a move to Vancouver for life reasons. I was just replying to the plainly false claim that cost of living in NYC/SF is the same as that in the most expensive cities in Canada.
Side note: if you're willing for me to ask you some questions about your move I would be really grateful.
It's still bad. I got a 40%+ pay cut after being transferred from the Bay Area to Vancouver. It seems local companies pay even less than US big techs. And just search and see how Vancouver is regarded as one of the least affordable cities.
Though I don't worry too much about the pay -- it's still a decent amount. It just sometimes makes me feel unfair when I'm doing the exact same job as my US colleagues.
This is false. Your source says it's for work permits. Though I still doubt IRCC would process an application in 10 days.
My wife and I have been US tech refugees in Vancouver after our US working permits were indefinitely held for security checks. We are targeting Canadian PR through Express Entry (EE) in case we are not able to return to the US. I have to note it's not a sure path to PR for US tech refugees.
EE heavily favors French speakers and workers with local education/working experiences, and penalizes "old" people above 30. It also subsidizes certain fields (healthcare, transport...) that's not favored by the market. If you can max French points and have a bachelors degree, you are in. If you are not in these favored categories, learn French (which a lot of new immigrants are doing) or wait for years to accumulate Canadian experiences (and hopefully the rule doesn't change).
We have masters and PhD degrees, my wife has gained 1-year working experience here, and we have maxed English scores, but we haven't qualified only because we entered our 30s.
PNP (provincial nominee) is a more guaranteed path to PR, but it requires company sponsorship and the chance still depends on your paid level and other factors. Our US employers view our relocation to Canada as temporary so they don't do it. The alternative is switching to a local position/company. But tech positions here in Vancouver are very limited (at least compared to US tech hubs). I personally don't really want to sacrifice the career just for immigration.
I don't think a hand-crafted app necessarily estimates things more accurately, but a sensible pre-LLM developer would probably not list so many dubious citations to trick people into believing it's accurate.
(Speaking as a former international student in the US) I don't know about other fields, but most CS (and STEM) graduate programs I know don't require internships. So students use CPT for summer internships.
The other option, pre-completion OPT, requires USCIS approval (in contrast, CPT is totally authorized by the school). This can take 2 months or even longer. It also deducts the 12-month post-graduation OPT, leaving students less time to switch to another worker status.
Many people abused CPT for employment by attending so-called day-1 CPT programs. Ironically, working is the entirety of such programs, so literally the new rule doesn't forbid using CPT under such programs.
I also fully sympathize with those who choose day-1 CPT. International students have to secure a worker status before running out of OPT (1yr standard + 2yr for STEM). For many, this isn't easy. H-1B requires a lottery so one can be unlucky -- it's also increasingly restricted by the admin. O-1's bar is much higher. For Indian and Chinese, even if they qualify for a green card, they have to wait for the national backlog that can be several years.
Words like cedar/robin/linen come from either the physical or cultral environment that I (as a Chinese) wasn't exposed to when I was a child. Cedar and robin are all species native to Europe, and I guess they also appear in many Western fairy tales or historical stories.
Also, both because of the familiarity and how English form words, English assign very specific non-compound words to them (rather than "xxx tree/bird"), making it more difficult for people from a completely different language family to learn them.
But of course this is not only English. In Chinese a child is taught to act 孝 (filial piety, respect and obedience to parents) and know how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents. I'm sure it's OK for a foreign learner not to master them.
Cedars, fwiw, are not found in most of Europe either. Small parts of the Mediterranean (also parts of the Himalayas, bizarrely; closer than you think!)
They likely show up in Western works a lot because they’re mentioned in the bible a good bit.
Well, I'd appreciate Karen is willing to talk and explain whatever inconvenient policies they have. A faceless bureaucracy is even more desperate.
My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.
This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?
That's not my understanding. This is what the bill says: Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies [the age group].
So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).
Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.
The California law is horrible because it forces everyone to let tech companies and governments decide what's suitable for children, rather than let parents decide. It's telling parents to give every app their child's age and trust that the apps will do the right thing. It also legitimizes personal data collection (in this case, the user's age) for every app and service on the Internet that wants to know your age.
The password-based app installation lock I proposed in my original comment doesn't require any kind of age checking at all, so it naturally doesn't fit the California law. The device owner (in this case, the parent who buys the device for their child) gets to decide what apps can be installed on their child's phone on an app-by-app basis using a password set by the parent. The app store doesn't need to know, and the apps don't need to know.
You have a point. Though I suspect that average parents are either too lazy or not tech literate enough.
I do want to note that this California law alone doesn't say anything about content restriction. I won't be surprised if there was/will be another bill to assign the responsibility (which may be more controversial). But the current law is only about the age gating mechanism. And on the positive side it removes the need for actual age verification (like using ID) which other regions still insist on.
The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recognizes that parental self-assertion at the point of account creation is enough.
Since tracking children is generally illegal, you can also voluntarily lie and label yourself as a child when you don't want to access such content.
We have decided as a society to age-gate the purchase of a very small selection of goods and services, but this did not require a law that says all merchants have the right to know your age. And in this case, it's not even just all merchants, but anyone that serves you any kind of information. The real world equivalent of this California bill would be more like: anyone you've ever talked to has the right to know your age.
A more reasonable approach would be for parents to keep tabs on (or for stricter parents, control) who their child is associating with and where they're going, and advise their child on who/what to stay away from if they're out alone. And of course that takes parenting effort. The digital equivalent of this are things like password-gating app installation in the OS and website-blocking in the WiFi router. But I will say, I don't think these kinds of analogies are good because the Internet is too different from the physical world.
And let's not underestimate the tracking power of a legally mandated data point: the age contains about 6 bits of information that can be used to identify your user account on the Internet across apps and websites, even if your inputted age is fake.
1. Vancouver is well regarded as one of the least affordable cities. 2. I stay in the same role but got a 40%+ pay cut so that offsets the "Cost of Living Including Rent". 3. If you compare other bay area cities (Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Fremont...) where tech workers live to Vancouver, it's not as dramatic. 4. While I support universal health care, which is good for average people in society, it's not necessarily a pro for tech workers. US tech companies buy good health insurance plans for their employees. I used to walk in my company's on-site health centers to get same-day health care in the US. In Canada, I have to wait for days to see the primary care provider and drive one hour to another provider to get exams.
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