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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I think something even stronger would be true if you asked about non-CA US states. Why would Canada, at 1/10th the US population, have more of an independent tech locus than does Texas (which has a population comparable to Canada)? Is this just a difference of nations re-distributing wealth internally but not between nations?

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Austin is a huge tech town, and rapidly growing. I get a lot of recruiter emails to go there. Same with KC, but to a lessor extent.

I was just in Montreal - the difference in prices with the US was staggering. You forget how wealthy we are, sometimes, even compared to the rest of the developed world. (Had an incredible French meal with 2 bottles of wine over 3 hours and it came out to ~$90 a head American)

I don't think you're disagreeing? There will be reasons to have some local tech workers and entrepreneurs in all large cities, including Austin, Dallas, Toronto, and Montreal. But there will also be global nexuses of them in places like SV, and the higher wages in SV vs. Dallas/Toronto reflects the value of the nexuses (and is the economic mechanisms that induces workers to move there).

I'm not clear what you're saying here, possibly because I don't often have 3 hour French meals. $90 sounds neither outlandishly expensive for a fine meal, nor cheap.

It's very cheap

Canada is very risk averse. There's money, but it's not flowing properly.

Agreed. And I'd say different countries have different "adoption curves" relating to technology. Think x-axis as being how developed an idea/technology is and the y-axis as how much the country bets on it.

Canada is more "courageous" in some senses, but very conservative in others. I'd describe its adoption curve as flat in the beginning and then bending upwards.

Canada's diversifying its job investment portfolio around jobs in high-tech and pulling that funding out of natural resources. You're starting to see that across the country. Calgary's starting to become a mini tech center for example.

Calgarian who works remotely for Mozilla here: If I were to stay in Calgary and work for somebody else, I'd probably have to accept at least a 40% cut in total comp.

I am effectively priced out of the local dev market at this point.

Can't we say similar things (transitioning from natural resources to tech) about Texas? Are you disagreeing with me?

Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston) has successfully attracted a huge amount of company headquarters and regional offices. There's a great cost of living, an existing talent pool, and great local entertainment culture, plus no income tax and great weather. Canada has none of this.

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