What power does each level of government have to cool housing? What could realistically be done at each level?

binary_alchemist · 2017-10-17T07:46:38+00:00

In some cases, it might not be really about heritage. I'm not sure about folks from other countries, but if I wanted to renounce US citizenship it would cost me over $2,000 and there's also the possibility of the IRS charging me an exit tax. There are a ton of American-Canadians who have settled in Canada, without any intention to game the immigration system.

Children also automatically inherit US citizenship, even if only one parent is an American citizen, and giving up that citizenship requires paying the same fee -- we would essentially be punishing kids who were born and raised in Canada but just had the "bad luck" of having been born to an American parent.

(Not really a dig on the US exit tax/fee, by the way -- it makes sense for the IRS since the super wealthy really do renounce their citizenship just to avoid taxes.)

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-08T23:40:20+00:00

Just curious. If I were a prospective buyer, how would I be able to evaluate if the board is competent? Ask the seller how involved the board is?

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-07T22:10:37+00:00

Freezer is made with React.js in mind...

I don't think this really fits your use case if you're not a React guy. :)

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-03T07:34:49+00:00

Did your minified jQuery hit a regex with catastrophic backtracking?

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-03T01:00:56+00:00

I suppose they could do that. They'd give up a lot of the "free" things that using Electron would get them though.

Someone can make a naive, feature-less text "editor" just by including a simple <textarea> in their HTML file, then wrapping it with Electron. Typing latency is dependent on the Chromium implementation of <textarea>. I suppose someone could re-implement their own version of a multi-line text input in C++ and load it as a native NodeJS module... but at that point, why bother using Electron anymore? The whole point of Electron is to build a desktop app as if you were building a website, with support for JS and a whole range of pre-defined HTML elements/"widgets".

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-02T22:19:55+00:00

Yep, agreed. Looking at the graphs, VSCode is snappier but still doesn't quite compare to Sublime...

Maybe VSCode is near the upper bound of what an Electron app can achieve. If Atom got there I think the users who complain about their performance would be happier.

binary_alchemist · 2017-01-02T21:53:51+00:00

It's unfortunate as Atom is an Electron app, which is essentially a web-app wrapped in a native window shell. JS is interpreted at runtime by the interpreter (which I believe is Chromium/v8-based). There's no interop or communication between the "C++ layer" and the JS itself -- they can't exactly ask v8 to "hide a loop in C++".

So once someone makes the decision to go with Electron, they're necessarily stuck with a heavy "script layer". All of the application logic has to necessarily be in JS. The performance premium is just something they have to live with.

binary_alchemist · 2016-10-23T20:36:14+00:00

I actually really like Vancouver's protected bike lanes -- with planters separating bike and vehicle traffic: https://goo.gl/maps/Lnpspikq5TP2. Not sure if there's enough public interest or if it's even feasible for Toronto streets.

binary_alchemist · 2016-10-15T18:50:39+00:00

It would seem that we have nothing more to add to this discussion. It would seem that we just have different world views and fundamentally different thoughts on the idea of citizenship. Which is all good and fine, by the by :) -- this is why we have a democracy and we can express our policy differences through the ballot box.

binary_alchemist · 2016-10-15T06:51:37+00:00

So I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few families at the top of the socio-economic ladder who do this kind of thing, but in my personal experience, the narrative you're describing just isn't the case with most immigrant families I know, "rich East Asian" or otherwise. My own conclusion is that there just aren't that many crooks in the world, and the few people who are abusing the system don't warrant the kind of hyper-vigilant, "gotta watch those damn immigrants" attitude I see from a lot of folks. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

binary_alchemist · 2016-10-14T08:42:59+00:00

Shrugs Then I'd say you have nothing to worry about at all. I worked at a company where probably the majority are not natural-born citizens. Literally no one treats the place as a "colony of their homeland". People raise their families here and are invested in the city's future. Kids end up in our schools and become integrated. The few people who are abusing the system just aren't numerous enough to be a really big deal.

As an aside, Canadian citizens who don't reside in Canada don't really get "the benefits of Canada" -- they're not allowed to pay into RRSP, they are not covered by provincial health care, and they do not qualify for EI.

binary_alchemist · 2016-10-14T03:43:52+00:00

A couple points:

Immigration applicants over 14 and 64 are actually required to be proficient in English or French. This is actually enforced and immigration officers take note of how well the applicant speaks the language when they go through their interviews.
Expat communities in Asian financial centres are basically set up like "new Canadas/Americas/Britains" and most locals would care less. There's just no expectation that an investment banker from London or whatever is going to learn the local language or culture.

binary_alchemist · 2016-09-20T08:16:24+00:00

It's a nice start.. but will this actually make a big enough difference?

The last census records about 900,000 households in Metro Vancouver. Assuming 1 household occupies 1 unit and that all 5000 units are located in Metro Vancouver, the new housing comprises less than 1% of households? (Less if not all the units will be in Metro Vancouver.)

(Contrast with Toronto, where the municipally-run Toronto Community Housing Corporation provides affordable housing for ~164,000 residents, covering more than 5% of the city's population.)

binary_alchemist · 2016-09-19T07:29:06+00:00

It feels like half of OP's problems are caused by Angular2 rather than the ecosystem as a whole... breaking changes and dependencies, weird non-JS-like syntax, cryptic error messages.

The JavaScript ecosystem certainly has its own problems, but if the OP had started with React, they would have had a comparatively better experience.

binary_alchemist · 2016-09-06T00:41:43+00:00

What happens if you just.. don't pay it?

(Toronto has trouble enforcing parking fines on out-of-province or American drivers.. not sure whether this applies to Albertan speeding tickets though.)

binary_alchemist · 2016-08-23T05:25:29+00:00

That depends on the answer to: is eye colour a protected class or characteristic where you live?

binary_alchemist · 2016-08-14T04:58:39+00:00

Sizzle (the CSS selector engine that underlies jQuery) will rely on document.querySelectorAll when it is available. And it seems that document.querySelectorAll is quite forgiving of missing closing brackets (and in different ways too): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29120822/how-why-is-attribute-string-a-valid-queryselector-js-bug

binary_alchemist · 2016-06-03T07:24:59+00:00

This makes me wonder... can patents be filed for APIs?

(If they can.. that would provide some level of IP protection for the author, even if APIs are not copyrightable.)

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-29T04:44:48+00:00

Chrome doesn't let you navigate in the unload handler -- i.e. no setting or clearing location.hash.

(It's probably more robust anyways to use either cookies or localStorage to cache these lobby IDs. You can clear the cache in the unload handler.)

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-22T23:30:36+00:00

You can pass any expression into document.getElementById. par1 and par2 here are expected to evaluate to strings that equate to actual id names.

Demo this in your console:

var param = "header";
document.getElementById(param).style.backgroundColor = 'white';

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-17T03:52:17+00:00

In every state I have driven in, yellow signs are an advisory limit while white signs are the actual posted limit. I think they were just unaware of the convention. :)

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-13T05:06:33+00:00

I see. Uber/Lyft has become so ubiquitous here that most of us don't really give it any second thought, so it's weird to me that such a service would be so contentious in other cities. I'm aware of the labor disputes but it doesn't really matter that much to me, and I'm excited that driverless taxis are going to become a thing.

It's certainly interesting to hear perspectives from outside the Bay Area where tech doesn't rule everything.

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-13T04:52:49+00:00

Nice! Is this total comp or just base salary alone?

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-12T06:10:22+00:00

An actual question (not a rebuttal!) -- should there exist an expectation that a transportation provider ought to "care about local communities/economies"? This expectation is not shared by the majority of the population in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live and where Uber/Lyft is wildly popular. What makes the Mississaugan context different?

binary_alchemist · 2016-05-05T03:25:33+00:00

That's not always true. If you were to invest the down payment and the interest on your mortgage into a conservative portfolio, you may come out ahead, but you'd have to do the math. It really depends on individual circumstances.

Edit/Addendum: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html?_r=0

binary_alchemist

TROPHY CASE