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Depends on if you are talking corporate tax rates, personal income tax, etc.

http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/comparison-of-us-a...

Though it feels like some of the statistics are biased towards Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Canada provides a comparison of personal income tax with Canada being higher than the US.

Canada Single no kids - 31.6% US Single no kids - 29.1%

Canada Married 2 kids - 21.5% US Married 2 kids - 11.9%

My experience is that I have less disposable income in Canada (based on my living previous in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas), but I have more available services including healthcare.

davidcrowon Blueseed or Canada?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_s...

"A 2007 review of all studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the US in a Canadian peer-reviewed medical journal found that "health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent."[7] Life expectancy is longer in Canada, and its infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., but there is debate about the underlying causes of these differences."

davidcrowon Early Stage Startups Don't Need Money, They Need Customers

Traditionally this is from savings, family and friends, borrowing against your home, etc. And it feels like there is more opportunity to this capital in other places, i.e., anecdotal evidence that lots of folks in other places will put up $5-20k to invest in a friends startup. This doesn't happen as much in Canada (tight accredited investor definitions, higher taxes, higher real estate prices and home borrowing).

davidcrowon Toronto Startup Heatmap - where are the startups in Toronto?

I wonder if we need to more broadly define Toronto, i.e., not just "the City of Toronto" when talking about startups. If you're based elsewhere, let's say, Palo Alto or Boston or NYC, do you care about the regional differences between Waterloo, Guelph, Toronto, Mississauga and Hamilton? Or because you fly into Toronto Pearson (YYZ) are these all defined as one larger geographical area.

davidcrowon Ask HN: Best Cheap web hosting

Dreamhost http://dreamhost.com/

Amazon AWS Free Tier http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Heroku Single/Free Web Dyno http://www.heroku.com/

AppEngine http://www.labnol.org/internet/host-website-on-google-app-en...

Lots of free to very inexpensive solutions that let you build on modern infrastructure.

davidcrowon Don't look stupid: Stop calling parts of Canada Silicon Valley North

I hate this label so much. It makes people (journalist and policy makers) look silly.

davidcrowon Single People Should Not Do Startups

It is even better when using anecdotal evidence to support an unbased board generalization. It was designed to be a sarcastic humourous post.

davidcrowon Single People Should Not Do Startups

total sarcasm

davidcrowon Ask HN: What do you use to host your Personal Site?

Dreamhost

davidcrowon Ask HN: What one should do to gain most out of a startup conference?

Contact the people you want to meet before the event. Try to get on their radar. Try to schedule a hallway coffee, or find them around the event.

davidcrowon Ask HN: Is it a mistake to base my company on the MSFT stack?

Check out BizSpark http://bizspark.com for a Microsoft marketing program that gets startups access to the stack for zero upfront costs (yes that's carefully worded).

Microsoft has a history of acquisitions, but they tend to be based on talent, shared customers, market access or defensible technologies. Don Dodge covered this a while ago http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/micro...

You bring up a good question about the risk tolerance of potential hires. No opinion on it.

davidcrowon Incubators, Incubators, every where - Is there an incubator bubble?

“trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble

So while flippant, the goal was to point out the disparity in the perceived value generated by incubators and the investment to build them. And wholeheartedly it was flippant and designed to garner attention, but not out of context. Sorry.

davidcrowon Incubators, Incubators, every where - Is there an incubator bubble?

It's more of a meta incubator. You can buy my e-book: Lean Incubator - Get Incubators to Market Faster to Get Startups to Get Products to Market Faster - Local Mobile Social Cloud Edition

davidcrowon Grow 2010 - Vancouver startup conference Aug 19-21, 2010

Supported by the C100 and Bootup folks in Vancouver. Looks like a great conference with most Valley folks traveling up the coast to Vancity.

davidcrowon Ask HN: What SaaS apps have a great UI ?

Guestlistapp is great, the integration to 3rd party tools is extends the service and federates additional services (particularly for best-of-breed services like Campaign Monitor, though I'd like to try it with MadMimi).

I keep hoping for additional functionality, i.e., can't wait for the next release.