Canada welcomes you. We even have a startup-specific Visa program [0]. Toronto has a growing tech scene and is one of the most diverse cities in the world. Montreal and Ottawa are wonderful. Waterloo has a booming tech scene, and the university is becoming very well known.
Indian who moved to Canada in 2009 - currently Permanent Resident in Montreal.
If you can save a bit of money, going to university here in such a way that it guarantees you two years of continuous full-time education is the easiest way.
In Québec, we also heavily favor people who speak adequate French, often bending over backwards to award them the provicial nominee certificate, which is the fastest way to PR in Canada.
There are professionals out there whose job it is to help out people in situations like yours. Before you make any life changing decisions I would talk to one.
CEO's, Hedgefund Managers, Sport Stars, they all talk to psychologists. Give it a try.
I strongly second this suggestion. Unfortunately there is a stigma to speaking with mental health professionals, but I'm a strong proponent of doing so even when there is nothing necessarily "wrong" in your life.
Speaking as someone who just recently experienced burnout for the first time in his career (along with losing several friends in the past year), and is now taking it easy for a while, you owe it to yourself to speak to someone about what you're feeling.
You've gotten to the point where you're hiding in the bathroom with the water running so your wife doesn't know you're crying. There is no shame in admitting weakness, and you have a lot to be proud of in your position. Let people in who can help.
While you're at it, take a vacation (even if only for a few days) and clear your head. If you don't want to talk to a professional, go somewhere with your wife and talk about what you're feeling.
>If you don't want to talk to a professional, go somewhere with your wife and talk about what you're feeling.
In my experience, a friend and a spouse or a parent cannot replace a psychologist. I think the reason for that is because psychologists listen differently. In whatever you are telling them, you are hiding a call for help in a sense. A friend or a wife might not spot that call for help. Additionally, a psychologist can answer better than a spouse or a friend does, I think.
Maybe that was just my experience, but I felt I had a much better talk with a psychologist than with a friend. Probably, because the barrier is much lower. Like you don't have to worry about them judging you or whatever.
I strongly agree, and add that if you don't get along with your therapist, shop around. Like most professions, practitioners range from awful to amazing.
Not necessarily true. People might see you going to the office of the mental health professional, or leaving it. If the practice has no other purpose, it can be easy to infer you are getting some kind of mental health help.
If it is a touchy topic for you as an individual and/or if you live in a small town or otherwise have a situation where someone might see you, make the inference and make it into an issue, this can be a not insignificant logistical detail to deal with. Just because for you personally all would be fine by simply not mentioning it doesn't mean this is true for everyone.
Yes. I see psychologists as professional manipulators-for-hire. If you're having a hard time manipulating yourself into doing what you need to do, a psychologist is trained in the arts of influence and, theoretically, knows what to say to assist you in actually doing what you know you want to do. We tell them our goals, they move us into a headspace where those goals are easier to attain.
Do be wary, though. This is a very trusted position. If you sense something is not right, or that the psychologist is moving you sideways or backward instead of forward, don't go back. Find another professional manipulator willing to manipulate you honestly.
Another vote for speaking to a therapist - Also please don't give up if the first person you talk to doesn't gel. It took me three tries to find the right therapist, and it is SO worth it.
> Here is a question Piketty didn't ask: what percent of dynastic, billionaire wealth was created in a single generation in America? Not addressed at all. (And I read his book and wrote to him with my criticism, which he didn't reply to.)
Actually he has addressed this, and the answer is relatively little. Most wealth in the world is passed down from one generation to the next, growing at a rate faster than the economy in general. Many of the richest families in the world from centuries ago are still the richest families. Other than in small pockets of the world, like silicon valley, new money is pretty rare.
Some thoughts: While working in finance I was able to talk to many people who's work was related to economics. Employees at banks and brokerages, governments and regulator bodies. Most had heard of Piketty, and many agreed with his basic premises (r>g, and all it entails). His reach actually surprised me.
But I also had contact with academics, and like the article said, it's not so much that academics are refuting Piketty, but that they simply aren't studying the same problems that he is talking about. From what I've been told, a lot of academic work in economics is focused on incredibly unique and specific problems. It isn't "fashionable" to be studying something so broad and perhaps abstract as inequality.
Dean Baker (warned of the housing bubble since 2002, "Bernie 2016") gave the best response to Piketty that I heard from a left-wing economist:
* Piketty's data is correct
* him collecting it was a harder feat than one might think
* attributing r>g to some unchangeable nature of capitalism is wrong because "capitalism is infinitely malleable" (every market is regulated somehow, things change a lot depending for instance on whether you do or don't have patents)
* Piketty's policy prescription (a global wealth tax) is unimplementable and harmful in the sense of getting all the attention instead of people focusing on his correct assessment that r>g and then on realistically implementable policies which could change this.
Normalizing the concept of a wealth tax is productive even if it's unimplementable. The right has used the same approach by having think tanks promote flat consumption taxes and zero corporate tax rates.
If nothing else the absence of a theoretically desirable wealth tax serves as a justification for progressive income taxes and higher capital gains taxes.
A wealth tax isn't unimplementable because of political will but because a lot of assets are illiquid, hard to price, easy to hide, easy to move to another country (hence the call for a global tax, but what if a few countries defect?) or a combination.
As to approaches: "the left" if there is such a thing successfully campaigned for a full confiscation of property, a 100÷ wealth tax if you like, in huge chunks of the world - I don't see a weakness in persuasive ability there. Wasn't a great idea though. A smaller wealth tax is a better idea, but still not great. Baker who one can agree or disagree with has better policy ideas, or at least better thought-out and consistent ones IMO.
On the topic of that last point, Dr. Mazzucato proposes the alternative of greater licensing of government developed technology as a more realistic alternative in her book "The Entrepreneurial State". I wrote a summary here if you're curious: https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-the-entrepreneuria...
The most ardent fight against tyranny and overlords comes from aristocrats who wish to be equal - but just to each other, not to the common herd (thank you very much, goodbye my good man).
The real problem is, while many complain about 'inequality' no one has consistently defined what 'equality' looks like in a way that can be replicable, implementable, or prescriptive.
What is this world in which income / wealth / opportunity is 'equal'? Is this a world we want to live in? What are the rules of this world? What steps need to be taken on the policy front to achieve this world? Are those steps that the anti-inequality elites are willing to undertake?
> There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.
Not that this actually answers your question... ;)
This is an excellent piece and does answer my question actually. People simply conflate fairness and equality and that seeps into the discourse because it makes for easy platitudinal soundbites. Of course, taken to its logical conclusion, equality looks like this[1]. No one actually wants that world.
My undergrad was primarily in Econ, and it was a pretty common saying that "Nobody is a Macroeconomist."
After Economics moved hard away from Political Economy and into Mathematics some time ago, that kind of broad economics is rare so not really considered the same way or has the same amount of academic discussion.
But why? Doesn't that shut out a range of economic theories from the discussion? Classic political economy and its critiques (Marx et al.) I feel are still relevant and useful. If they are not to be studied in economics, then where?
Sociology tends to have more differentiation in what sources are taken as 'canon'. You can probably still find Marxist sociologists, although the field has somewhat collapsed since the 80's.
That basic premise seems flawed to me for two reasons. First is that r is like a first deriative (of the asset value) and g as a second derivative (gdp being the first derivative of the total assets of a country, while gdp growth the seocnd), so they are not direcly copareable. The second is that r is very directly measurable, while the gdp and gdp growth have huge uncertainties and inconsistencies. Here's an example: the GDP of Bulgaria. In 1996 it was about $10BN, and in 2016 about $50BN. It grew in 20 years by 5, which means an annualized rate of 8.4%. However if you look at the historical gdp growth then the average for the last 20 years is about 1% (see [1] and [2]). Why the disconnect? I don't know, but if someone tells me that r>g because g is 1%, I take that with a grain of salt.
I don't mean to come off as harsh, but your reasons are wrong. Piketty isn't some random guy who threw together some numbers and came up with a theory. His work is extensively researched and reviewed. He's thought of and responded to every objection you made. If you are interested in the topic then you should definitely read his book.
Take a look at your numbers again. You have made multiple mistakes. Your 8.4% annualized rate is wrong - You can't just take the start and end points to calculate an average. Plus, you are plugging quarterly data into yearly calculations.
Your whole argument is nothing more than the fallacy of argument from authority.
Researchers aren't flawless, and they do make mistakes, even in the very methodology they adopt. That's why peer review is a thing, and academia subjects their work to peer review.
Hell, there's a very good reason why the Royal Society's motto is "take nobody's word for it."
My greatest issue with Pinketty's work is that he fails to address the fact that compound growth is not commutative (meaning that it is always better to concentrate higher growth rates earlier on, and then benefit from then comparatively ”coast along” at lower growth rates thereafter). This means that average returns is quite senseless as a topic: one needs to take into account the temporal distribution thereof.
And in most of the years after 2008 it was well below 5%, with some years of negative growth. Also, during the period 1998-2008, the GDP increased from about $15BN to about $55BN, representing an annualized rate of about 14%.
I use Visual Studio and I don't see that changing. Do you think it's worthwhile for me to learn to use Vim? Does using VsVim give you the same capabilities as regular Vim? And does using it take away any Visual Studio Capabilities?
How much time are you giving them to prepare an answer?
If a senior member of the company scheduled a meeting and then asked me on the spot what I would improve about the company I wouldn't be able to give any good ideas.
If instead they sent me a note saying that in three days they would like to meet with me for twenty minutes, and that during this time they would like to hear my thoughts so far about working for the company and to please think about ways in which you think the company can improve. I would be able to provide many ideas in this scenario.
This would definitely help. We all have yearly "performance reviews" with our next highest-up in command. 2 weeks beforehand they email a questionnaire (roughly 12 questions) which we are expected to at least read over, though it's preferred that we fill it out and bring it with us to the meeting so we can have a proper constructive discussion. AFAIK many things that are mentioned by multiple people are implemented in some form or other, or if not, management tells us their justification against implementation. The meeting is confidential and they remind us that any feedback that is passed on will be anonymous (though I'm guessing after mentioning 10 years in a row that we need a ping pong table, they probably know who it is).
Exactly! In the past I asked high level/generic questions and often got very little out of it. Shallow responses or no responses at all in some cases.
Nowadays I send the email I will paste below to every new hire after a couple of months in the team..
Some people never bother to schedule the conversation (less than 20%) and I leave it at that. For the other folks - the big majority - I had great conversations/results from this effort. Learned a ton of surprising things, found hidden talents within the team, found and then went to fix serious problems.
The email:
Subject: Talk.
Oi <Joe>, how are you doing?
I would like to establish a communication channel between us, and as a first step towards this have a conversation - can you please schedule a 30 minutes conversation with me using https://<my-own-url>.youcanbook.me/ ? Feel free to pick any available slot there - if it is open it means I will be available and working at this time. We can talk using <videoconferencingservice> (if we happen to be at the same building we can have the conversation personally).
Before the conversation I would like to ask you to please think carefully about the following questions, and be prepared to discuss what you understand as most important:
- How can I help you?
- Is there anything you would like to tell me?
- Is there anything you would like to ask me?
- What is your profile? What are your strenghts that you like to mention? What do you like doing the most? What motivates you?
- If you were in my place, is there anything you would change? What?
- Who are the 2 people you most admire within the company? Why?
- What information you assume I don't have that you can give me and will allow me to do my work better?
- Where do you inconsistencies between what we preach and what is in our culture document at <URL> and between day-to-day practice?
- Is there anything you would change in our culture document? Is there anything missing that you judge it is important?
- What are you current attributions? Do you judge you day-to-day challenging enough and do you see the company helping you grow or do you feel you need more space?
- Is there any self-managed project ( <URL-TO-EXPLANATION> ) that you would like to establish?
- What do you understand as key to grow in our company?
- Do you receive enough feedback to grow and improve performance?
- Do you consider your leadership micromanages you, stays pretty far, or typically can find right balance in each situation?
- Do you feel your leadership cares about you?
- In your view does your leadership communicate very clearly what are the objectives to be achieved? Does it support the team in staying focused on what is most important?
- How do you evaluate the quality of the company information you receive? Do you feel you regularly receive relevant information from senior leadership to understand where we are going? How do you evaluate your own participation in setting the company direction?
- Do you feel your leaders have the necessary technical skills to manage your work effectively?
- Would you recommend your leader to other people in the company?
- What feedbacks you have to give me? What concerns you the most in my work? What makes you happy and you want to make sure I continue doing?
> Everything that you believe to be needless, may actually serve a very specific and important purpose.
It may or may not, and it may have served a purpose once upon a time but not anymore because the context has changed or because it's been superseded, it may have failed to achieve its goals or led to undesirable outcomes (either aside from its success or making the situation worse), it may have had a (now considered) horrendous purpose, …
That one must be careful with regulations and understand why they exist is more or less GP's entire point:
> deregulation is a difficult thing that must be done carefully
I like this old quip/aphorism that you shouldn't be able to ask for a law's removal if you don't know why it exists, though I'm not sure it's always feasible, especially for the older texts.
And of course the recorded purpose may not have been honest in the first place (see: many voting regulations in the US).
The problem is, it's not clear which ones those are. Regulations don't come with labels saying "this is industry-sponsored to protect incumbents", and reasonable people can disagree on whether a barrier-promoting regulation has legitimate reasons.
Sure, there may be some fuzziness here, but there is one clear outlier that should be noted: the 1998 ruling [1] against web radio was a huge one that benefited broadcasters at the expense of online stations.
I'm sure others could get similar things for other markets, but this one was a complete give-away.
I think "team fit" as you've described is probably the most important factor for me. But it's a really tough thing to interview for / create within a team.
I had a coworker who could be described as a 'social butterfly', someone who can talk to anyone for hours on end and make them feel comfortable. They would spend half an hour with each interview candidate, not asking any technical questions, but just having a friendly conversation. Then they would give a 'yes/no' opinion of whether we should hire the candidate. All of their preferred hires were very successful and fit in with the team. It was remarkable. Some people are just excellent at reading others. Most people really aren't sadly.
Of course. It's an average. Also included in that average are girls who get a $1000 weave twice a year plus monthly cuts, coloring and styling. And I'm guessing the product is catered more towards the second group.
[0] http://www.canadavisa.com/the-entrepreneur-start-up-visa-pro...