Wow, get off your high horse. 50% of Canada's population hold a degree and more, we are quite knowledgeable, thank you very much. If this is the kind of elitism we would get if the Silicon Valley-ites were to return, then you can fuck right off.

Ok then, where's your Silicon Valley? Where are your world-leading tech companies? Do you have anything at all you can point to as world-leading, like we do with Google, Amazon, Intel, etc.?

Hey, if you're happy being a backwater full of degreed people who don't actually produce anything that anyone's ever heard of, that's fine. If you enjoy having Silicon Valley-level housing prices but no Silicon Valley-level jobs or economy, that's fine too.

> who don't actually produce anything that anyone's ever heard of You know I could make the same argument that I don't spent any money on these "world leading tech companies" their value to me is effectively zero.

Is zero value somehow supposed to impress me?

This is rather stupid. How exactly did you write this post without using an Intel or AMD CPU? (Both American companies) Do you never use any search engines? (Google and Bing(MS) are American, as is DDG, which just reuses results from one of those two.) You don't have an iPhone (this is quite possible, as Samsung/LG/HTC/etc. are not American)? And how are you getting by without using American-made software from Microsoft or some variant of Linux (which is largely contributed to by both Red Hat, an American company) and various other American contributors on the Debian side? Even if you don't spend any actual money directly on some of these things, you're certainly deriving value from them.

It's rather unfortunate that the same companies you talk about are keeping their money in tax havens, they hire foreign born workers and most of the manufacturing they do happens in China or Asia. In the end a non college educated American loses to this high skilled labor and cannot afford to live in Silicon Valley which has a broken real estate system, people commute from far distances and BART is in end-of-life stage.

You're absolutely right about all that. I never said it was perfect here, and in fact things are definitely getting worse in many ways.

However, we're comparing present-day US to present-day Canada, and I'm not seeing any advantages to living in Canada, except for living around friendlier people. Economically, there don't appear to be any advantages at all to professional tech workers, only big disadvantages.

If you think Silicon Valley has a broken real estate system, have you checked out the real estate situation in Vancouver? Personally, I'd love to live in Vancouver, but there's no way I'm going to get a job there that pays enough for me to buy a house that costs several million dollars (CAD), given that even crack houses there cost $1M.

At least here in the US, there's still a lot of cities besides SV where there's a lot of tech jobs, the pay is really high for them, and the housing costs are bearable.

Right but Silicon Valley is still the best place to live and own instead of moving somewhere else, I know there's reverse immigration (Book: The rent is too damn high or something), but are there good schools, good neighborhoods? I am kind of spooked by just looking at this Election Campaign which has revealed the dirty underbelly of this country to me. I would still consider long term stability where I know the society is accepting, and I think down the line the economics can be improved if you think about it, because there are good cities, well educated people, but lack of enterprises and small business/startups to employ these people. I saw 500 startups just open a 30Bn fund for Canada and see small but solid indicators that things are changing. Finally! http://qz.com/656320/dear-prime-minister-trudeau-a-modest-pr...