Moving

[Iniika]

As one who's chasing a skirt all the way to Japan and then, eventually to San Fran myself (if all goes well and the gods shine mercifully upon me) I can only say that life is an adventure much to short to keep ones self forever in one place. Go for it! I love San Fran (aside from the abundance of homeless). It's got a great flavour and character to it. If I could at this moment I'd up my tail and move there myself.

[Ryadn]

As one who's chasing a skirt all the way to Japan and then, eventually to San Fran myself (if all goes well and the gods shine mercifully upon me) I can only say that life is an adventure much to short to keep ones self forever in one place. Go for it! I love San Fran (aside from the abundance of homeless). It's got a great flavour and character to it. If I could at this moment I'd up my tail and move there myself.

You should do that---but please, only if you stop calling it "San Fran". It rivals "Frisco" in terms of grating on the ear and soul.

[Sarkhaan]

As one who's chasing a skirt all the way to Japan and then, eventually to San Fran myself (if all goes well and the gods shine mercifully upon me) I can only say that life is an adventure much to short to keep ones self forever in one place. Go for it! I love San Fran (aside from the abundance of homeless). It's got a great flavour and character to it. If I could at this moment I'd up my tail and move there myself.

You should do that---but please, only if you stop calling it "San Fran". It rivals "Frisco" in terms of grating on the ear and soul.

At least you don't have to deal with "Beantown". Seriously, people. No one calls it that except people who fully intend on running home to make a facebook photo album entitled ~*~BOSTONNNNNNN~*~, people who refer to the Patriots not as the pats, but the patsies, and other such social untouchables.

[Barzan]

What's EI? And 11% income tax? That's... how can you be socialist and pay less income tax than us?? Is the 11% just federal tax? Do you have provincial taxes?

Sure we do. It's all lumped together. (All taxation is administered on behalf of both the federal and provincial governments except for Quebec, I believe.) Now remember, the 11% is my *effective* tax rate, not my marginal tax rate. I believe that the average marginal rate in the States, at the Federal level that is, is 28% or so, right? Now if you divide your total tax by your total income -- not your taxable income, but your total income -- I'm sure you'd be paying a lot less than 28%. I have an ass load of student loan interest and tuition fees I carry over each year -- that has to be taken into account. And I get paid a shit wage because I'm a contract employee instead of a permanent one. But remember, we don't get our mortgages and home equity loans subsidised by the government the way you guys do, so that has to be taken into account when comparing taxes as well. Taxation is not always a simple one-step arithmetic operation.

EI is employment insurance. Here we pay half the EI premiums whereas in the States the employer pays it all. (Technically you could say that the employee pays it all indirectly in the form of reduced wages I suppose, as wages would be higher if the employer didn't have to pay any sort of commitments in addition to cash wages.)

As for Canada being "socialist", it's no more or less socialist than the US. Like I said above, we don't subsidise home equity loans and mortgages and we don't subsidise employer-provided extended care benefits. The US subsidises extravagant employer-paid health care plans through tax exemption, meaning the uninsured end-up subsidising the insured. Our governmental health care spending is less than half of what it is in the US, except that everyone has a basic level of care, whereas in the US only old people get anything. And they tend to get extremely lavish and unnecessary services for nothing more than a nominal fee. We have to pay insurance premiums to the government, which are subsidies up to 100% for lower-income families, and those premiums easily cost us around 700$ per year while old people in the US only pay about 70$-150$ for Medicare.

I know you aren't knocking us using the "socialist" tag, but I just wanted to clear everything up -- that word has been misused so much by uneducated sycophants that I fear few Americans actually know what the word means -- or even notice that they, too, live a life of entitlement. I hate it when someone from the States knocks "socialist medicine" yet thinks that Medicare should pay a million dollars to keep a terminally-ill 80+ year-old alive another week instead of just allowing them to rest in comfort in the privacy of their homes with family and the supervision of a nurse.