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by belltaco 2500 days ago
Or he can set up a sister office in Vancouver, and hire people from all over the world(including Huntsville, Alabama).

In person conferences can happen in LA or Vancouver with tourist visas.

And have the same time zone.

More and more companies are doing this, that's why the article mentions Toronto.

1 comments

This is why over the long-term, restrictive immigration laws will cause tech jobs to move abroad. There is no fundamental reason why the global tech industry has to be so concentrated in Silicon Valley. The workforce - which is heavily international - is there at the moment, but if American immigration policies restrict the workforce, the companies will eventually move operations to wherever their workers are.
Bingo. And once talent does move offshore, it’s going to be really really hard to get it back. Because let’s face it: SV is a horrible place to live in. Housing is too expensive, poor public transportation, endemic homelessness and the chance that an earthquake will wipe out the whole region.

If another city say Bangalore or Vancouver does get the critical talent required to kickstart the Tech boom and be a viable competitor, tech companies will migrate wholesale and never look back.

(1) While we are at it, let’s stop externalizing costs to some other territories. And to really make things equal, we are going to price all other things equally at a global level with certain cost adjustments to account for shipping and geography and similar factors. Oh let’s not forget that all labor needs to be allowed multinational freedom of movement and migration to anywhere, similar to how much freedom multinational corporations enjoy. And probably going to need to unify all 195 nations into 1 global state too.

Then this little immigration and globalization issue will finally disappear, which would be fantastic for everyone.

(2) Or we can continue opening up the globalization box piece by piece because each change is really great for some groups and really bad for other groups, which only serves to heighten social conflict and wars like the trade war that has been happening. There will never be enough assistance provided for groups that are negatively impacted by globalization; governments are much too slow acting reactively and proactively.

You realize that most of the changes that you and others want to make are just as unrealistic solutions as the above, and only one is a permanent solution? Right? And as a result of the fragmentation of the world we find ourselves in, incremental changes will not solve anything really. You can move the tech hub or dominant economy somewhere else and it will end up getting restricted again because there will never be enough relief from crowding unless the tech hub becomes more decentralized like most other industries. Further, even being decentralized there will be incumbents created in Canada that will eventually find the changes to be undesirable just like the USA.

Canadians will eventually say China is ok but Indians are externalizing too many degree education costs. And there might be another trade war, and someone thinks they have the answer by moving the dominant economy somewhere else and the same issues will surface again.. and round and round we go in circles until people have finally had enough of kicking the can down the road, throwing the garbage over the wall, and the globalization wars and option 1 happens.

If human civilization survives long enough, option 1 (one world government) will definitely happen, because it makes a lot of sense in a highly interconnected world. But it's very hard to say how far off it is.