Where do you live in Canada? In southern ontario (where Toronto and most of the people are) there's no snow for 8 months out of the year. And backyards/sidewalks are really only impeded for maybe 2 months (if you're able-bodied). Meanwhile you can totally have a pool, a vegetable garden, a place for your kids to play, etc. the rest of the time.
I recently moved from an apartment to a house downtown with a tiny backyard, and it's a huge improvement. We didn't really use it in February/March. But the rest of the time it's awesome.
Alcohol sales (and drinking age) vary across provinces - I don't think any will let you sell your homemade liquor, but Ontario is very restrictive, while Quebec (for example) is relatively relaxed.
The repo maintainers are going to be on the hook to rebuild every dependency every time any package in the dependency chain changes. That sounds like a nightmare versus the current scenario where only one package gets revved when a library has a bug.
If you have an automated build system (like OBS -- the Open Build System used by openSUSE) where dependencies are rebuilt automatically and security fixes can be pushed to maintainence automatically.
It's important to have role models you can identify with. Recognizing and celebrating the achievements of female directors is important. When you don't include female directors in lists of great movies, when female directors don't win awards, it reinforces the idea that women are allowed to enter the industry, but they can never really thrive and succeed in the same way a man can. Scholarships and quotas help at the top of the funnel, but if the middle of the funnel is still awful and discriminatory you're just feeding more people into the meat grinder.
> It's important to have role models you can identify with.
Anyone that cannot identify with someone as a role model just because s/he has a different sex, is incredibly sexist and doesn't deserve to be accomodated in any way.
> when female directors don't win awards, it reinforces the idea that women are allowed to enter the industry, but they can never really thrive and succeed in the same way a man can
IMO, it just reinforces the idea that women need to try harder to become better.
> I'm a clinical psychologist who was in charge of the largest randomized controlled trial of online cognitive behavioral therapy for depression (n=500).
Peer-reviewed study, please?
> every person is a special snowflake argument
Right off the bat, you sound like a condescending asshole. I would never go to more than one session with you if this is how you treat patients.
> Exercise works really well for curing depression.
You really think you _cured_ someone's depression by telling them to take a walk sometimes? Granted, I find strenuous exercise is really helpful, but there are also days where you cannot will yourself out of bed to go to the gym. Having some asshole psychologist tell you that it's your fault just makes things worse.
> Did you know that by breathing calmly you will cure yourself from panic attacks? Forever.
Yeah, tell this to my girlfriend, who gets _more_ anxious when she's trying to take deep breaths.
> I've been a fairly happy person all my life
Because you never experienced significant trauma, you don't have an imbalance of chemicals in your brain, basically you just won the goddamn lottery. Do you take advice from people who win the Powerball about how to get rich?
> I'm actually working on building free online treatment for depression right now
This sounds really admirable. Looking at the website, it's so cluttered and confusing I don't think anyone could benefit from it. And it seems like you're recommending that people contact you over Telegram? Like anyone? Just your formal patients? This is a giant ethical and HIPAA minefield, offering professional medical services via text message.
Do you have any insight into when Zeller's was good and what went wrong? HBC seems to have done a much better job turning around The Bay locations (albeit very gradually) and apparently they also own Saks?
I'm pretty young and all of my experiences were a combo of dirty, badly stocked stores, products that I didn't care about, bad fluorescent lighting, and employees who didn't give a shit. I also don't really shop at Walmart, but Walmart seems kind of sterile and organized, at least. I honestly did not know why anyone would ever go into a Zeller's - they had clothes and housewares and groceries and stuff, but somebody else seemed to do all of those things much better.
Zellers (no apostrophe, even though it was started by a guy named Zeller) was able to stay 'on top' of the Canadian department store game for quite some time. They were founded in the 20s, profitable well into the 90s, and had a niche and a format that was poorly understood by existing department stores. Their only real competition was K-Mart.
HBC bought them out in the early 80s and then started shovelling more acquisitions on top; Bonimart, Fields, Woodward's. They had enough capital to start fixing things - in the mid to late 80s your parents probably remember "Club Z" and pushing aggressively against their remaining competition to make sure they had the lowest price in town.
In the late 90s, just as Walmart was starting to show up in Canada (by buying up the burned-out corpse of Woolworth's) and threaten pretty much every brand under the HBC umbrella, HBC centralized decision making and planning in HBC's Toronto offices and under HBC execs.
K-Mart basically collapsed at this time from the same pressure; HBC opened up the purse and bought a lot of old K-Mart locations, intending to convert them. Eatons also died, and their assets were acquired by Sears.
I worked at Zellers to put myself through school briefly during this general time period, and I remember hysteria and confusion in all ranks of retail and management staff. Communication with HBC was generally command-and-control with no mechanism to individually fix brand-wide or regional problems.
Actual Bay stores in the late 90s were also doing poorly, and it was likely that Zellers was seen as a losing anchor that needed to slash margins further to compete with Walmart.
I will miss the chain. I had never really gone in prior to working there, but after working there I had gained enough weird institutional memory to be able to quickly find whatever I was looking for even in Zellers I had never visited before.
It is now basically a race in Canada to see if HBC or Sears will pull out first. Neither one of them are doing particularly well.
Reach out to some local companies that look interesting? Job search sites are a pretty poor resource in most cases - you'll do better from referrals within your network. Even cold-calling/emailing/LinkedIn messaging people at interesting local companies and trying to meet with them would be worthwhile. They might not have a role, but they'll have connections in the industry who can help you.
If you don't have any EE experience, it might be worth doing a second degree - graduate or undergrad. EE is pretty different from writing code.
I love that people who don't work in tech can still afford to live in Toronto. I don't think we're doing as well as we could to combat income inequality, but I'm glad we aren't throwing billions of dollars at overinflated startups. Hell, the biggest recent Canadian startup success story is Shopify, which actually sells real products and has revenue. Not just "slap some ads on it and we'll turn a profit".
I love that people who don't work in tech can still afford to live in Toronto.
Isn't the average cost of a home nearing $1M in the GTA core? From what i've read, Toronto isn't that far behind SV when it comes to real estate price inflation.
Rents don't fully reflect current property values. Landlords that didn't buy before the current mania are banking on property value growth to get their return on investment.
For reference, ~100 people died in terrible conditions building the Hoover Dam. It was a tremendously unsafe worksite. The environmental impact of the project was barely considered.
I think all things considered we've made good progress.
On a relative scale the number of accidents building the Hoover dam was high but not spectacularly high when compared to the number of people dying in high-rise construction and road building.
I recently moved from an apartment to a house downtown with a tiny backyard, and it's a huge improvement. We didn't really use it in February/March. But the rest of the time it's awesome.