rtlfe

> If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat.

I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.

> Are you making that decision because the quality of care you've received is better in the Canadian system than the American system

That would depend completely on their job in the US. If they're a line cook, care was better in Canada. If they're a software engineer, it's better in the US.

I wish. Nanny would be probably double that where I live.

> cost of child care in California, which has _the_ highest cost of labor in the US, is $956/mo

The link you provided says $1,412. And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County.

https://insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/INSIGHT_C...

I hope this person never has a kid. Enjoy your rent doubling to get enough space and either losing your partner's income or spending $3k a month on day care. Plus whatever crappy insurance you're getting for $400 a month is going to leave with $10k+ in bills for just birthing the kid.

> My rent at the time was about a thousand a month.

Sounds like this was either a long time ago or in city/town where not many people want to live.

I doubt this hypothetical person making $80k has a Cadillac health plan. They could definitely be looking at costs like $1500 for a dental crown and $1000 for an MRI before they hit their deductible.

> because not anybody wants to be a programmer?

Almost anybody who works in retail, manual labor, etc would jump on a job offer for 5x more money, better hours, and better working conditions. The reason they don't is they can't get the offers because the skills are hard to learn.

Yeah for the average adult without much experience debugging and hacking other things, "learned to code" probably means something more like "can write fizzbuzz in 30 minutes with significant effort" than "can debug complex systems under pressure" or "can turn business requirements into production code efficiently." The former will obviously open far fewer doors than the latter two.

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

I was able to excel at CS in college because my parents shoved a DOS computer in front of me when I was 5 and challenged me with math and general problem solving at every opportunity. My whole childhood was basically debugging and critical thinking. If you didn't have that growing up, it's really hard to start learning the skills when you're 30.

In the US many data analysis jobs are at tech companies, so they require living in expensive cities and competing with software engineers for homes, but pay only like 1/3-1/2 of what software engineers make.

> you have to choose your specialization wisely

The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.

> I quite like being a programmer.

This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.

> Apple has now forced these companies to maintain their stuff

No it hasn't. They can rebuild without improving anything.

> - We use cash to rent a building, order pallets of inventory, and sell that inventory locally to walk-in customers.

> - We use cash to buy shares, hold onto them for a bit, and sell those same shares and make money off the spread.

Those two sound like pretty much the same thing.

> You can't combat this enormous societal change by making an individual effort to let your kids do more by themselves.

Maybe not, but you can do things like:

* Live downtown instead of in a suburb

* Ask your school / DOT to close the street in front of the school during dropoff and pickup hours

* Walk with your kid to school instead of driving them

* Support higher-density development in your area

There's a huge difference between "find it satisfying" and "love what you do."

> I believe strongly that you can only have a happy life if you love what you do in your day job

This is bad news for the huge amount of people with jobs like trash collector or grocery bagger.

> I would say charging at work

I don't know the numbers offhand, but Vancouver has a pretty low rate of driving commutes compared to most North American cities.

I like this approach a lot better than the municipal curb-side charging stations that a lot of cities are building. The former naturally scales up and down with overall demand for cars, while the latter further entrenches cars as the dominant transportation method by making it virtually impossible to convert those curb spaces to other uses.

No heat seems bad, but I'd bet SROs with shared bathrooms would be extremely popular in NYC if they were legal.

I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a startup trying to do this: https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-housing.htm...

Aren't legal jobs drying up? I've heard a lot about how it's not the golden ticket everybody thought it was 20 years ago.

There are a lot of jobs in medicine that aren't pediatric oncology.

You're just nitpicking vocabulary. This is exactly what I meant, and I would consider the laws and regulations that result from this process the "design" of a city.

> Even in cities that don’t require that, rents are still expensive

Maybe you've got some good examples from other countries, but here in the US the only major city with reasonable zoning is Houston which has quite affordable homes.

> Defense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively.

The most important things prosecution does are: decide who to prosecute, decide when to ask for bail, decide what sentence to ask for. This all has a lot more to do with societal values than making a strong case.

> Almost everything is more expensive in Canada

Everything except the most expensive things. Paying 20% more for cheese is fine when you're saving 95% on healthcare.

Major cities are where the problem is most obvious. The cities need low skill workers to keep running, and those workers can't afford to live anywhere near those jobs.

> So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?

Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.

> This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body.

It actually is. Rents are expensive because zoning laws severely limit density and require lots of car parking.