Being a Canadian who moved to the US because the salaries were far higher than what I could find at home, I agree with the sentiment.
However, I think it's a bit more complex than: low salaries lead to no atmosphere of innovation. It seems to be a bit of a cycle. We have less competition than the mega tech centers in the US which leads to lower salaries, which leads to brain drain, which again results in less competition, and this is a cycle that continues. To break out of it, we need either a.) more competitive salaries, or b.) more companies to form, or move up to Canada. I can't see a.) happening unless there's a motivation to do so (why pay more than you have to?).
It seems to me, this is an effort to attract large companies such as Google and Amazon (perhaps for HQ2) with the hopes that this might lead to the formation of other small companies and startups splintering off of large companies. If this were to happen, and Toronto became a larger tech hub a la Seattle or the Bay Area, I would expect salaries to go up. I'm holding out hope that Canada will be able to increase its tech presence, and thus result in higher, more globally competitive salaries, but perhaps I'm being too optimistic.
Nobody wants a 'smart city'. It'll just be another
data mining project except now they will literally
be optimizing your entire life for their profits.
You can make 3x there? Why are you still here then? Instead of making up numbers, here's a more balanced opinion on salary differences between Waterloo and Silicon Valley: https://medium.com/@srlake/debunking-the-myth-of-higher-pay-...
Also I think it's funny when people position "number of startups" as an important factor. Just because your city has 30 five-man startups crammed into a coworking incubator doesn't mean I want to work for any of them.
I'm not making up numbers, just speaking from personal experience.
That article is extremely dumb. The title does not match the slogan. Is it salary or quality of life? You make way more in SF than Toronto, but your QOL might suffer because of exorbitant rental rates. That's not new information.
>To prove this, we are going to look at the money you can put in your bank account at the end of the year after paying taxes and living expenses.
We're obviously talking gross not net because net is subjective.
I know that silicon valley pays a fair bit, but cost to live there is also rather high. Is that true for most jobs across the US? I know developers in the US who are starting around similar salaries to myself, or lower in some cases.
I agree with the rest of your points. Was hoping this to be more interesting than it was.
We have no atmosphere of innovation because our salaries are garbage compared to the US. This is the problem, every single time. Most of my Canadian graduate friends work for US companies, some remotely. We literally do not have economic reasons to stay here. No amount of lip service will ever transform 100k into 300k.
>“consequences of AI, the consequences of automation,” and the “economic imbalance of those who own the robots and those who are displaced by them.”
Wasn't this shown to be a meme? That automation has already been happening very slowly, it's not going to be some sudden iRobot level change. Example: as a web dev now you only need one full stack guy to launch a production app, does the job of the designers, devops, frontend etc through various tooling that helped him automate processes that other developers would have done in the past.
>Canadians have a tendency to travel, Trudeau said, and that results in a global outlook on how cities work and their different approaches to things like traffic and how people live in urban environments.
More like I can make 3x for the same job here.
I refer to my previous comment with respect to the waterfront, when will this tech bullshit be over? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15550745
This all reads like crap propaganda without saying anything, just some nice meaningless buzzwords. Actually it's even worse, looks like a paid for advertisement by Google and they have Trudeau in their pockets using him as an advertising puppet.
Trudeau is a prime minister who was born into riches and surrounded by royal families since birth. This guy hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about with anything related to real life much less tech or fucking AI.
Nobody wants a 'smart city'. It'll just be another data mining project except now they will literally be optimizing your entire life for their profits. You can't meme a city into existence like all those cute little renders. Cities/villages have to rise up organically and then be tamed and incentivized to grow, not built with extreme robotic precision using data from the ground up. At best it's going to be some hip little place with crap corporate chain bars for working professionals just like it currently is cause that makes the most money, anything else is a pipe dream. Completely sterile and devoid of life, like all these projects turn out to be.
>If the initiative proceeds, it would include at least 3.3 million square feet of residential, office and commercial space, including a new headquarters for Google Canada, in a district that would be a test bed for the combination of technology and urbanism. [0]
[0] - https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/google-sidewal...