Unfortunately there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable. The PNW also burns regularly now, never mind the enormous earthquake looming under us that we're terribly unprepared for. Even the northeast is starting to get buried in smoke in the summer and hit by storms like Hurricane Sandy. Tornado Alley knocks out much of the midwest. What's left of the US? Desert and mountains?
This has been well-studied by disaster recovery and business continuity boffins. There are sites that are known to be (1) effectively disaster-free, whether earthquakes, severe weather, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, etc, and (2) sufficiently connected to commerce and the economy that you can reasonably build and fully operate a business from there. Climate change has relatively little impact on the suitability of these sites, both in theory and in terms of modeled scenarios.
The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).
Phoenix and Las Vegas may be a great place for a secondary data center. But for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly. I have seen them referred to as places people weren't meant to live, more than once.
Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.
South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.
Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.
On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.
Yea, the potential disasters in the south west are mostly man-made in the sense of underinvesting in the electrical grid to make sure the months of 100+ degree high temps don't kill you, or a snap freeze in the winter doesn't take down power either.
The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.
Your overall point still mostly stands, but per capita GDP isn’t super helpful when talking about middle class Americans because of wealth inequality. The median US income is less than half of that. And the cost of living in Bangladesh is probably something like a quarter of the COL in the US. So while there’s still a pretty stark difference in wealth, it’s not quite as stark as you’re implying.
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): This adjusts for cost of living and inflation rates between countries, giving a more accurate comparison of living standards.
In 2023, GDP per capita in terms of PPP for Bangladesh and USA was $8,242 and $74,578 respectively (per World Bank).
It is hard to compare one country to another because they are different in so many ways. Each has positives and negatives.
Clearly the USA and Bangladesh are different. Comparing their GDP is simplistic and doesn't really speak to quality of life in either place. Much less does it take into account that two people in each country may in turn have vastly different quality of lives.
In short, using national statistics tells us very little about your life, or my life, or any specific persons life.
The person I responded to (correctly) criticized per capita GDP, citing differences in cost of living. I felt that referencing PPP would be helpful since it attempts to factor in cost of living differences.
I'm not sure this "comparisons are hard" speech is adding much. Differences in wealth are real, measurable, and meaningful, even if they can't be boiled down to a single number. Obviously there are other factors to quality of life; nobody here stated anything to the contrary.
I lived in the US for around ten years after college and moved back early during COVID. I'd always wanted to go back, and had the possibility of keeping my American salary and working remotely; it seemed like a no-brainer, given how unstable things were feeling in the US at the time.
FWIW, my view of Canada has dimmed considerably. The two things that I felt really set us apart when I left and over those ten years were (and these are intertwined) the stronger Canadian social safety net and the sense that, in general, Canadian culture was kinder, more progressive, smarter, and less racist. But the last few years have really put that to the test. Meanwhile, in my time in the US, I really started to appreciate the aspects of American culture that are lacking up here.
It's been kind of heartbreaking. I was seriously thinking of exploring going back to the US permanently. And then last November happened, and it's too unpalatable at this juncture, once again.
You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.
> The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?
Of course not. But a person living in New York City - making the much higher median household income of 75K USD - also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there. And yet across almost every metric New York is considered a better place to live with higher quality of life than Alabama.
> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.
So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?
Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.
I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.
Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.
Yeah, you're probably - in most regards, depending on various things - better off living in NYC than Toronto (having lived in both). But that's at least a conversation worth having, a comparison worth making. Comparing Canada to the poorest places in America like the person I was replying to was solely on the basis of average wealth only makes sense if you've never been within spitting distance of either.
One major change that happened with immigration is that the provinces (particularly - but not exclusively - Ontario) slashed funding for schools and encouraged them to make up for it by profiting off of a near infinite supply of foreign students.
Education is a provincial responsibility; the feds basically rubber stamped student visas, under the assumption that provinces were to be trusted for only accrediting responsible schools; schools that would import the best and brightest from around the world and train them to be valuable contributors to the country. That assumption faltered - instead, private strip-mall colleges began bringing in absolutely anybody with a pulse who could pay sky-high foreign tuition fees. Conestoga College in Kitchener-Waterloo, most notoriously, increased their foreign student enrollment by ~1500% - to nearly 30,000 students, 3/4 of the student population - putting enormous pressure on the city (which is not a very big city).
I think it's fair to blame the Libs for being asleep at the wheel while this happened, but I wish more ire was directed towards the provinces for this.
If you're posting on Hacker News, you probably have a skill set that'll allow you to get a job covered by a TN.
You go to border control, tell them you're applying for a TN, hand them a copy of your identification, resume, credentials, and offer letter. Then you wait for a couple of hours while they process you, and you're set for the next few years. Rinse and repeat until your job sponsors you for an H1-B or you marry an American citizen and can apply for a Green Card.
Of course, there's other ways - talk to an immigration lawyer - but that's the simplest.
Not a lawyer, but isn't that kind of dicey? The TN is non-immigration and temporary - it's not supposed to be used if you have any intention of permanently migrating. I'd worry about it putting your TN status in jeopardy.
True but that doesn't really impact your ability to apply for a Green Card from TN. You have to wait 91 days [0] since your last entry before making an adjustment of status application.
Every year thousands of people in statuses like F-1, O-1 and TN get employment based green cards. The idea that you have to be in H-1B or L-1 status to get an employment GC is simply 100% false.
In the conversation of moving to the US for work 90% of visas are going to be non immigrant so saying all non immigrant visas are equivalent is needlessly obtuse.
An H1b allows the person to enter the country with the intention of getting a GC and can do so without having to leave the country.
A TN visa is re issued every single time you cross the border and can be denied by a border guard on any amount of misrepresentation
Secondly, your advice about the 90 day rule without context is both bad advice and can get someone's visa cancelled and stuck out of the country.
For future readers. Don't take this advice, ask a lawyer and if you intend to get a GC don't go on a TN unless you want legal complexity.
It could be true that the immigration law is so opaque and changes so quickly that both our statements could be true depending on the year / circumstances...
With that being said for source you can review this site and many others that will say the same thing about intention to permanently reside with a TN visa
Nothing in that article contradicts anything I have said.
Not a great article either. Very boiler-plate and doesn't mention the 90 day rule for either TN to EB GC or marriage based GC.
> Lastly your statement of incorrectness also sites no sources so I guess we just both have our opinions at this point
Those figures are not public but it's a reasonable statement considering NAFTA has been in place since 1994, over fifty thousand Canadians have been awarded green cards over the last five years[0] and I am one of those people.
> A bug in the SSH integration feature caused input
and output to be logged to a file on the remote
host. This file, /tmp/framer.txt, may be readable
by other users on the remote host.
Curious about how this happens. What does "framer" mean, here?
Here's the commit where it was reversed, if you want to take a look and dive in. Looks like unfortunately a logging feature that he has was set to 1 instead of 0 and wasn't reset before compiling.
I'm not up to that, but I have a working S-Tree builder and basic AVX2-using `lower-bound` for it (as described in the Algorithmica article linked to in the post) up and running in SBCL. Haven't played with any of the fancier optimizations yet, much less done any benchmarking. Should put it up in a gist or paste site to share...
It's stretching the definition of "3D-focused graphics chip", but an early example might be I, Robot. An 8-bit 6809 CPU drives a custom polygon-pushing graphics processor. It's primitive but must've been mind-blowing in 1984.
You don't want a maximally "efficient" vacancy rate (i.e. 0), because that makes it basically impossible for people to move around - and that gives enormous power to landlords to gouge tenants.
So what vacancy rate do you want, ideally? Not sure, but you'll notice from your own source that 6.9% is around as low a vacancy rate as the US has had since the turn of the millennium.
FWIW, looking at vacancy statistics across the whole of the country can be misleading. They include houses that are vacant for any reason - including properties that are condemned, under renovation, or in the middle of nowhere where there are no jobs.
That latter point is key. As more and more economic activity has moved to white-collar coastal cities and away from rural or suburban blue-collar middle America, it's no surprise there are going to be vacancies in regions where the economy's been hollowed out. So we can conjecture that the record low vacancy rate is even more problematic, because those vacancies are likely less equally distributed to areas that need them.
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