Sunday, July 08, 2007

Where would you like to go, eh?

Claire graduated from Waterloo, which is a big tech school here in Ontario. A lot of their graduates go on to work for companies like Microsoft or AOL. In fact, a friend of ours, Darren has been living in Seattle for a few years now, working for Microsoft, and going through the long process of getting a green card and citizenship. Of course, this is bad news for the ''dey're takin' ur jobs!'' people because he's been contributing nothing to America, aside from his intelligence, tax money, and a massive amount of cash.

So, good news for everyone! Microsoft is tired of getting jerked around over H1-B visas by a US Congress that wants to please the nation's provincials, and is setting up shop in Vancouver. Now all of the brilliant programmers who can't get admitted to the US can come work in Canada. It's good news for Daren because it's a lot easier. It's good news for those of us in Canada because we're getting some of the world's best and brightest moving here and enriching our culture, economy, and society. And it's good for the US because, hey, dey're not takin' yer jobs!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I fucking knew this would happen -- a brain drain to Canada or some other more hospitable place than our religiously zealous and xenophobic country.

clairev said...

It also been happening in biomedical research- groups that used to fund American researchers are now funding research in Europe or Asia involving stem cells. It's not even clear that they have to since there is actually stem cell research in the states, but they're sick of the federal government pandering to the religious right.

And actually a surprising number of the brainiacs I knew in the states are moving overseas.
-Rufus

Anonymous said...

Interesting about the American brainiacs moving overseas. It seems once a person reaches age 35 or so here in the US they're treated like drooling idiots - I guess they have not choice BUT to move overseas.

Rufus said...

It's interesting- a group of psychologists did a study in the 1940s in which they determined that the average mental age of American adults was about 13.5. What happened was that people panicked and went on a 'self-improvement' kick across the country, signing up for classes, working their way through Shakespeare, and so forth.

Is there any doubt whatsoever that if a similar study was done today, the result would be Bill O'Reilly and every other cable show assuring us that psychologists are assholes?