It certainly wasn't intended as a straw man argument. I was speaking to the broader issue that any data that's gathered anywhere can be used against people. Even if it seems like there are good reasons to store it.
I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it:
> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
I wonder how it would come across with the right voice. We're focused on building out the video layer tech, but at the end of the day, the voice is also pretty important for a positive experience.
I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world.
So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us through all our media channels with very little friction.
So unless you're in health care or some other regulated field that a US startup can't just expand into easily, it's a tough go.
Yeah but Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US.
All that US-centric stuff overshadows us constantly. And it's not just in the startup landscape.
We literally have laws on the books [0] that force our media companies to maintain a certain amount of Canadian content on TV/radio/streaming/etc so we're not only consuming US content.
This isn't a comment on whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact, and it has a real impact on our society at all levels.
> Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US
Have you been to Israel?!?
NBA and NFL is everywhere, the Israeli dream before tech began booming in the 2010s was "immigrate to Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami", and Jewish Americans like Seth Klarman, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Lauder, and Bill Ackman have had an outsized stake in media and entertainment ownership before the Mizrahi cultural boom in the 2010s.
Literally the only reason Canada fell behind was because the political leadership in countries like Israel decided to work on building a domestic tech VC ecosystem in the 1990s-2000s while their Canadian equivalents during that era had no economic vision aside from resource extraction.
Additionally, the Canadian equivalents of Shlomo Kramer (Checkpoint, Palo Alto Network, Imperva, Cato Networks, Cyberstarts), Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks, Cyberstarts), and Gili Rannan (Sequoia, Wiz, Cyberstarts) - David Cheriton (Google, Arista), Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook, Slack, Groq), Joseph Tsai (Alibaba), Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Chip Wilson (Lululemon), and Ryan Cohen (Chewy) - are all hard MAGA. Heck, even Big 5 banks like Scotiabank are pro-Trump [0] because their LatAm business benefits from Trump power projection in the region.
There are a lot of "odd" things that happen to non-US citizens businesses that no one likes to talk about in public.
Indeed, if you are a Canadian Business getting market traction: the common scenario is acquisition by a US firm, or utter destruction by policy shifts and replacement by an opportunistic competitor. =3
> There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about.
Uhh, we don't have universal coverage for everything health up here, we still have private benefits that our employers pay for as part of our compensation plans.
Well, it's fully possible to be self-insuring in these areas. Prescription assistance is probably the one significant benefit as physio, mental health and the like can be of limited reimbursement (judging from what I've seen).
The key issue is that the core of one's health insurance is not dependent on the employer or even being full-time employed. This provides tremendous flexibility. And I suspect not having things like pregnancy being seen as preexisting conditions is a big win for parents-to-be.
Age or low-income (I think) provide provincial or federal assistance independent of employment also. Medical expenses are also far easier to deduct on taxes in Canada vs. the US.
Doesn't it seem likely that tax treatment has more to do with this than benefits? People are reading this like YC isn't investing in companies HQ'd in Canada, but there's no evidence of that! I look at a set {US, Singapore, Cayman} and what I think is "this is about taxes". Maybe especially tricky for YC since such a huge fraction of their portcos are pre-revenue.
The key question is whether they make non-US-ians move to the Valley to participate. Or, rephrasing, leave their home country to move to whichever piece of YC is cutting the check.
You are correct but I think you missed the point of the post I was responding to, which was claiming that employers don't need to worry about paying for health insurance for employees in Canada, which is inaccurate.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
> opening a folder in vscode shouldn't be dangerous.
You're not "opening a folder" though, you're opening a codebase in an IDE, with all the integrations and automations that implies, including running code.
As a developer it's important to understand the context in which you're operating.
If you just want to "open a folder" and browse the contents, that's literally what Restricted mode is for. What you're asking to do is already there.
I've been using VS Code for many years and I try pretty hard to be a security aware dev.
I checkout all code projects into ~/projects. I don't recall ever seeing a trust/restricted dialogue box. But, I'm guessing, at some point in the distant past, I whitelisted that folder and everything under it.
I've only just now, reading through this thread, realized how problematic that is. :o/
This has been going on forever, everywhere.
Laws have always applied selectively, particularly when it comes to whatever group is responsible for enforcing them.
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