Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

Post by cat-dev-null » Sat, Mar 19, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #39

cat-dev-null wrote: post #27

Assuming one has a really good heater and sleeping bag, it legal/possible/affordable to live in a VW bus in say south Vancouver? Renting in places like NYC, SF these days seems most people are lemmingly throwing money away in an unaffordable attempt to buy faux status while going into debt and gaining no balance sheet because "everyone else is doing it." Unless you've sold a series to HBO, living below one's means is…

Sorry to be blunt, but why the f should anyone do that, especially if they have a job in tech (but even if they are not) NYC and SF might be crammed, but there is a lot of space in the surroundings. In the topic we're talking about Canada, 2nd largest country in the world And yes, working on nice companies is important, but quality of life is also important

Then you're a minority of one. Most people living in cities these days are irrationally pouring typically between 50% to sometimes as much as 75% of their income into rent, paying for the privilege of holding onto expensive real-estate they will never be able to afford rather than save money... they'll never be able to retire or have anything else more permanent.

You're making some very broad, self-centered assumptions about quality of life and perception of other people. Not everyone needs lattés or 3500 sq ft / 325 m^2.

No one cares to live in the Saskatchewan boondocks apart to get away from the city, so why did you bring that up irrelevant strawman?

Some people also value independence more than being perpetually-indebted to a company (non-single-payer health insurance / rent).

Post by logfromblammo » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:47 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #218

logfromblammo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw an answer on Jeopardy! recently that described Vancouver for one of the daily doubles. Oglethorpe math professor Philip Tiu apparently had a long enough brain fart before responding correctly that I had time to yell at the television, "How do you not know Vancouver?! You're Chinese!" My spouse immediately informed me, "That's racist." We then had a short discussion about the ways in which the Chinese nouveaux r…

It's not racist, but it is prejudiced. Racism is basically "prejudice + power". You don't have any power over the person on the screen, so your comment is just prejudiced. If, on the other hand, you were using your hypothetical sway on social media to besmirch him in some way, that would be racism. I'm American but I've never read "To Kill a Mocking Bird". "How could you have never read an iconic piece of American li…

It was a stereotypes-based joke. It's like pushing a boulder rolling downhill as it passes by. You're not so much using your own power as adding just a little to the destructive power that is already there. In this case, the stereotype is "all Chinese people own a house/condo in Vancouver", which is an abuse of the conditional probability that a property is owned by a Chinese person given that it is in Vancouver (and also clearly impossible, due to there being somewhat fewer than a billion residences in Vancouver). Imputed property ownership is not a derogatory stereotype, so I don't feel particularly bad about perpetuating it.

I was forced to read _To Kill a Mockingbird_. As a result of the forced consumption and interminable in-class literary dissection, I don't have a very high opinion of it, and only a vague recollection of the plot. Nothing could make me hate a book quite like English class.

But that's actual fact of having a national literary canon shoved down our throats, and we're looking at non-factual stereotypes here. As an American, you would have had no chance at all at answering the question, because Americans don't know where anything is outside the borders of the U.S., unless there is a war happening there, and then we can correctly identify the continent it is on about 80% of the time. To the stereotypical American, Vancouver might be barely recognizable as a city somewhere in Washington state, just as Montreal is in Vermont, Toronto is in Ohio, Windsor is a suburb of Detroit, and Ottawa is an illusion maintained by the Canadian military to distract its enemies from the real capital in Toronto.

The movie Canadian Bacon is based almost entirely on this national stereotype, and the Canadian national stereotype.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities