public transportation? I live in Vancouver and recently flew in to SFO. Being from Vancouver I thought I know I'll save time and money and just take the subway in. BART is fucking disgusting and I couldn't sit down on the train for fear of picking up god knows what. In Vancouver if you start a startup and hire someone under 30 with a degree the gov't will pay you the first $15/hour of their salary, the rest you can avoid paying all taxes on if you make a SRED claim. All that AND we have public transportation you can sit down on, and even inside the tunnels you still have 3G connections. All that AND 'free' health care, and there is no f'ing way the city would ever levy a 1.5% payroll tax, let alone on stock options. In Vancouver we live in the best city on earth and pay less tax to the city than in SF.
If you include the portion of your federal & provincial taxes that are then granted/budgeted to the city, I bet the tax you're paying "to the city" is a lot higher than you think it is, and per-capita are probably on par with SF.
Also, unrelated question: How much harder is it for a 31-year-old to find work?
That question largely depends on your skill set and who you know. If you know lots of people in SF then it's going to be more difficult in Vancouver if you don't know anyone.
I'm not sure what age has to do with the question though? Either you have have marketable skills or you don't.
edit: After reading jackowood now I realize what the issue was, most places are up front about it and they look like really shitty places to work that are more concerned about saving $15/hour than figuring out how to make an extra $15/hour. They take a total labour mentality to programming instead of the view of code as a capital good with near-zero cost of reproduction. (aka, their idiots). I've never had a problem finding work in Vancouver and I'm 29 with no degree.
I think his point was that if that subsidy exists for hiring people <30, once that subsidy stops applying, you'd expect companies to be less willing to hire you. The idea being that they could hire someone with basically the same experience and also get the subsidy.
The problem with Bart is 1) cloth seats, and 2) a large homeless population. Not a great combination. There's been some talk of replacing the cloth seats with plastic seats, which will be less comfortable but much easier to clean. I'm not as creeped out by bart as you are, but it is kind of gross.
Vancouver is a great city, no question about it. I think San Francisco is bigger, more disgusting, more thrilling, and in my opinion uglier and more beautiful than Vancouver depending on where you're looking. Keep in mind that part of the reason for our homeless problem is that we're a magnet for the cast-offs of an entire nation with less of a support system than you have in Canada - it's not like San Francisco manufactures homeless people in some factory south of market and dumps them out on market street every morning. We're not purely innocent victims in all this, San Francisco has done plenty to earn that magnet status. Every now and then a mayors of some other city starts a kerfuffle by offering homeless people $50 and a one way bus ticket to SF (though SF actually used to bus its own over to Oakland).
I think a very well implemented national health care program can be a competitive advantage. The other things you mentioned seem less important to me, valuable at the margins, but not game changers in any way. It comes down to UBC vs (Stanford + UCSF + UC Berkeley). UBC is a wonderful university, don't get me wrong, but as long as the Bay Area has those three, it will be a huge player in high tech.
The (biggest) problem is that BART has cloth seats, which are absorbant and more difficult to clean than plastic seats.
btw, the cloth BART seats pictured in that article are some of the cleanest I've seen. I ride BART every day. Most seats are collapsing, ripped, and filthy.
