Even though the exchange has become the TSX Venture exchange, Vancouver remains the centre for junior mining companies, of the sort where scams are common.
I used to work in Downtown Vancouver and would on occasion get my haircut at a downtown barber frequented by office workers all around, and those barbers were a wealth of knowledge about the latest gossip from shifty junior miners and whatever they were into, which was increasingly not mining, but trendy startups.
Funny thing was when I was working in the area mining was going through a bit of a downturn, so a lot of the junior miners were shifting into other hot things they could fundraise for, like cannabis and crypto. From scam to scam to scam.
I stopped working downtown so stopped getting the gossip but I presume they swiftly pivoted to NFTs and onto whatever flakey thing they could still dubiously attach a .ai domain to.
I just happened to be going through every stock in the TSX from smallest market cap to largest. Many of the stocks at the bottom were mining companies that started with some huge spike then faded into nothing for the next N years until the current state of what seems to be basically dead.
I assume you’re referring to crypto mining, but the mental image of handlebar-mustachioed ore miners gossiping in Vancouver barber shops about how to scam investors with their shaft-digging operations is quite hilarious to think about! Pickaxes must be left at the door after the Incident.
Energy (oil & gas) and Resources (mining) have some serious scams, minor coup d'états, and no shortage of the not so funny.
Common low level scams such as falsifying assay results from ground and bore hole samples are just the beginning.
More questionable scams tap dance about questions of who really owns or controls resources, who can be paid off, and how to bury money spent greasing wheels by various means.
But ultimately the transferable skills are pitch making, selling to investors, pumping and dumping.
That applies not just to some plot of land in some obscure place that has some "enormously promising" signs of valuable minerals, but also some new crytocurrency, NFTs, cannabis, VR and all sorts novel things. AI is the latest thing but it won't be the last.
When mining is hot they'll focus on mining, but when it's not they'll be looking to see how they can use their skills on other places.
(Not to say that any of these things are necessarily scams per se, I personally think there's lots of interesting things going on with AI, but this is the ocean that these guys swim in, and there'll be lots of money attaching some flimsy nothing idea to the latest hot trend)
that's pretty accurate ;) I used to live in Vancouver too and ... some of that culture's like that. Most is good 'ol "people in suits" though.
A long time ago, Vancouver was a center of gold mining scamming too. "Gassy Jack" downtown was one of the major scammers near the founding of the city.
... Visit first. When I left (2018-ish) Vancouver was one of the most expensive cities on the planet. (put it this way : the only places more expensive were in China ...). It's a beautiful city, close (ish) to skiing - especially Whistler (2 hours drive, or various other transportation methods) but there are a lot of closer ski sites too. Warmer and wetter than Seattle (slightly) due to being surrounded by mountains. I have to admit I miss Vancouver badly.
Toronto's a much better "hub" for tech work. (I work remotely out of Winnipeg now, and am liking that too).
Mind, Vancouver does have a lot of tech, and if you want to work more with tech world that speaks other world languages, Vancouver is very good, too. Or music, or film, or really media of any kind. Also better diversity and cheaper food than almost anywhere I've visited.
Just not - unless you really figure out where and how to look, or if you have good connections - a particularly affordable city, at least as far as rent goes. Everything else though is good.
Thanks for a great answer.
I did visit Vancouver last year. Just arriving at the airpoirt with its lush green-blue colour scheme and a small river running through the hallways towards entering the country where the two tall totem poles wish all visitors a warm welcome. It felt like coming home.
In Vancouver we rented a car and visited almost all suburbs. For me the absolute dream would be Vancouver West, Vancouver North followed closely by Kitsilano. North and West seemed like a Twin Peaks dream all surrounded by the woods and mountains. I fell in love.
Downtown was in our view, beautiful but broken by (1) homeless roaming, (2) homeless with psychiatric issues making a scene and (3) opiate drug users aka junkies. It is not somewhere I want my kids to roam. This was terrible, but we are willing to overlook it.
We also went to Toronto. World class city. But we stayed in Vaughn and had to endure 1 hour commute in traffic each direction. Being stuck in traffic is not an appealing lifestyle.
Toronto felt like an awesome world class metropolis city with more opportunities probably than Vancouver. Anecdotally the standup shows were better (actually most hilarious of all) in Toronto than Vancouver too :)
My first thought was ore mining before crypto mining. I think I've recovered from the days of crypto induced mania where every other article on Hackernews was cryptocurrency related.
It's worth mentioning that the 'culture' you describe is also something that significantly aided and abetted various real estate scams and bubble related activity. Vancouver has all sort of shady shit going on in real estate.
Interesting article though it curiously deemphasizes what is likely the most significant reason for the differences in outcomes, which is that housing is more cheap and abundant in Houston/Dallas stemming from being easier and cheaper to build. (Yes this is mentioned, but it doesn't end up in the 5 point conclusion list).
This passage for example. Houston can only achieve permanent placement if it actually has homes to place people in. SF is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic because it has no where to put people and they're in and out of shelters. (Vancouver has the same issue)
> Houston houses people first, then closes encampment sites permanently. San Francisco deploys enforcement first, achieves temporary displacement, and watches areas refill. Houston tracks every person from intake through permanent placement. San Francisco can’t determine if anyone is being permanently housed at all.
Beyond better outcomes around creating new affordable housing if Houston and Dallas are also doing a also better job at keeping rents low and maintaining existing affordable housing that will also prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about eight years and left a few years ago. As someone originally from New York, I’m baffled at this idea that there’s no place left to build in the Bay Area. The East Bay still has large swaths of land with nothing on it. SF has plenty of options for building upward. There’s open land to the south. The political gridlock in Bay Area politics is the problem. I’ve never seen more dysfunctional government in my life.
Ultimately the government is the people. The problem is that the established wealthy single family owning class want to retain the status quo they bought into, and reject any and all political change. Cynical politicians leverage this to get elected and serve those interests by rejecting any change.
> A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
Affordability isn’t simply a function of supply in a market but the wealth distribution of market participants. When wealth is concentrated, housing ownership is concentrated in the hands of rentier capital, which is precisely what determines the amount of financial outflows from the poor to the wealthy in the form of housing prices (rent and mortgages).
Texas cities don't just stumble into better homelessness outcomes because they build more houses—though, yes, their zoning laws are less suffocating than California's bureaucratic strangulations, letting developers churn out homes while keeping rents from spiraling into the stratosphere.
The real engine here isn't just policy, it's the stubborn, unapologetic religious underpinnings of Texas. Those churches you see in Austin, from non-denominational barns to Catholic sanctuaries, are the sinew of a community that doesn't bend to the fickle winds of election cycles. The faithful don't wait for a ballot to act—they feed, clothe, and stabilize the downtrodden with a doggedness that shames the state's tepid, vote-chasing programs. Why? Because they answer to a higher power than city hall, and their time horizon isn't the next electoral race. Contrast this with the secular cathedrals of the blue coasts, where government is God and every solution is a press release, not a commitment. SF's "enforcement-first" shuffle—clear an encampment, watch it refill—betrays a system that worships process over results.
Texas' edge lies in cheap homes plus a culture that scorns the state's monopoly on virtue. The religious don't just build safety nets, they weave them into the social fabric, outlasting the transient schemes of politicians.
So if I'm understanding correctly, your argument is that more homes and lower housing prices wouldn't solve the issue of people not being able to find homes they can afford without people being religious as well? Or is it that only religious people would be willing to build more homes at cheaper prices?
News flash: churches exist even in the left coast.
One of the biggest non profit organizations that helps people in Vancouver's DTES is Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army.
Nonetheless severe poverty has persisted in this city my entire life. The churches hand out food and run some shelters but it's a band aid.
The solution would start with housing, but the government refuses to spend the money to build it. So the status quo persists, with non-profits, many of them religious, step into the void just to keep people alive.
This is the answer. Housing cannot be both an investment and broadly affordable. Our society needs to choose.
Honestly its time to rip the bandaid off here with housing. Build, build, build. Fuck the NIMBYs, use eminent domain and buy them out. Build up, not out, and start driving prices down.
We need to stop making real estate an investment vehicle and an endlessly appreciating asset. "Line must go up" is fine for the stock market and a company's profit, it need not apply to a basic human need.
There are more churches in California than their are in Texas. We just don't brag about it as much because religion isn't a costume in California like it is in red states.
Saying California has churches is like saying a desert has cacti—it's true, but it misses the point.
Texas' religious density, from Austin's sprawling non-denominational hubs to its Catholic and Protestant strongholds, isn’t just a headcount of steeples, it's a cultural force that outmuscles the state’s flimsy, election-timed gestures.
These communities don't just exist—they act, relentlessly, weaving safety nets that endure beyond the next ballot. California's churches, where they stand, are drowned out by a secular dogma that kneels to bureaucracy over human need. If they were enough, San Francisco wouldn't be playing whack-a-mole with encampments while Houston houses people and moves on.
California has more churches - but not more practitioners.
San Francisco has four Orthodox Christian cathedrals. Many big cities only have a single Orthodox Church, much less a cathedral. San Francisco also has a many Catholic Churches - most with an ethnic component, not to mention Buddhist and cultural associations.
Most of these are due to extreme diversity, not religiosity.
Diversity isn’t an absolute good.
Having 200 churches, each with 50 members, does not make you more religious than a city with two megachurches, each with 20,000 members.
Nor does going to a megachurch to hear a rock band play Christian rock while your pastor tells you how great Trump is make you more religious than going to a more pious orthodox smaller church.
Don't act like this is the solution. It's the same as "religious people give more to charity than secular" which rapidly becomes untrue if you remove "their church" as the charity, in which case secular people tend to give more.
But, you say, it's the church that is doing all that charitable work, so why should it get removed from that accounting?
Religious people like to point to charitable giving.
But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).
If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if secular charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (https://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu....) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
There's less here than you think. Video games have already been procedurally generating environment art for quite some time, and film/tv are already leveraging that with giant screens that use Unreal Engine to create the backgrounds.
AI could be helpful here, but it's not clear that it is required or an improvement.
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born
Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society.
Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other.
For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada.
After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.
China needs sugar and is allowed to trade with Cuba. They import about $3B of sugar every year, mostly from Brazil. Most likely Cuba just isn't cost competitive: Communists have never managed to get the basics of agriculture right.
yes sure but that's off topic. The parent wasn't talking about that, they were talking about the quality of the food being poor, electricity infrastructure bad etc. That stuff is impacted by being severely restricted from trade.
Canada is going through a bit of a moment in scaling back relatively unskilled immigration as it became clear a there were heaps of scam colleges bringing in folks to get useless "hotel management" degrees etc, but IMO there will be sustained interest in Canada in continuing to have eased immigration pathways for real engineering talent.
I used to work in Downtown Vancouver and would on occasion get my haircut at a downtown barber frequented by office workers all around, and those barbers were a wealth of knowledge about the latest gossip from shifty junior miners and whatever they were into, which was increasingly not mining, but trendy startups.
Funny thing was when I was working in the area mining was going through a bit of a downturn, so a lot of the junior miners were shifting into other hot things they could fundraise for, like cannabis and crypto. From scam to scam to scam.
I stopped working downtown so stopped getting the gossip but I presume they swiftly pivoted to NFTs and onto whatever flakey thing they could still dubiously attach a .ai domain to.