If you've never tried gai lan or bok choy before you really don't know what you're missing. I grew up being a very picky vegetable eater, but these two vegetables are some of my favourite foods. Find a good Chinese restaurant in Chinatown downtown or up in Scarborough/Markham/Richmond Hill and order some as a side dish. Then learn to cook them at home for low-cost, extremely savoury, and nutritious vegetable options in your staple diet. I was on a low-carb diet years ago and I practically lived on these two and they never got old. They're quite filling for a vegetable too.
The tech industry has been under the spell of cargo cult cheap investment money for the better part of two decades. The most cynical but simple and probable reason they have 2000 employees is because almost every other tech company has about 10x-20x the number of employees they actually need to be sustainable and profitable companies.
TLDR: they're throwing shit at the wall until something sticks
So they're just doing what everyone else is doing. It would look very suspicious to investors if leadership said "You know what, we actually can run this thing with a team of 100 people and make a few tens of millions in profit a year!". That's not what investors want to hear. They want to hear "If we have a 100 person company making a few tens of millions in profit a year, imagine how much revenue we could make if we were ten times bigger. We can easily scale operations!".
Investors want the kind of financial growth that would make cancerous tumour cells envious. And most tech leaders have figured out with cheap money that the best strategy for obtaining this growth is by having smart people throw shit at the wall until something sticks. The more smart people you have throwing shit at the wall, the better your chances at stumbling on a product or service that levels up your company.
If a tech leader were just content with running a sustainable and profitable business at the end of its growth curve, they wouldn't need as many employees. They just need the ones who can keep the core business going because there's nobody working on new venture pet projects.
But investors aren't interested in that because that's like putting their money into a savings account at a bank except with a lot more risk of losing it all. Right now, Reddit's investors are starting to realize that their risky investment with a chance at winning it big is looking a lot more like a dud that will pay out more meagre returns or worse, may not pay out at all. They desperately need an IPO to win it big. It's their last hope.
The investors won't throw any more money at Reddit and are at the stage where they're pressuring the leadership to start cracking the whip. The leadership has now removed any illusion of wanting to make Reddit users happy because we aren't their customers or investors. They need their customers and their investors happy. They don't need Reddit users to be happy. They just need to keep them hooked.
With so much headline negativity about the city, what are some nice changes that you’re seeing?
There are so many negative headlines about the city at the moment and this isn’t meant to be dismissive. The housing crisis and spiralling cost of living will have future consequences for this city in terms of people’s ability to have and raise families here, businesses’ ability to find and retain talent, and local art & culture.
In many ways, the good bits of Toronto weren’t planned. One small example of this is already long gone now. But the entertainment district that Gen X grew up to enjoy could only happen once industry had fled the city taking jobs with it. Those buildings and warehouses that sat empty with no hope for a new industrial tenant could all be cheaply converted to places for people to enjoy as clubs. Through the mid 2000s the entertainment district was a massive party on weekends, before Adam Vaughan had his way with zoning laws and teamed up with condo developers to end it.
Many cultural events and phenomenon in the city, from Pride to Caribana have been successes in spite of lack of political and corporate support early on in their history, or in many cases downright hostility from that corner.
So my question is, what are some things happening in the city right now that are positive, or trend setting, or creating culture that we might be overlooking that are happening in spite of political or corporate hostility?
There are so many condos with empty commercial ground floor leases; there are empty offices and the PATH has been gutted; we’ve all seen small business shops shutter as A&Ws, Popeye’s Chickens, Rexalls, and Loblaws move into our neighbourhoods to replace them. If nothing seems to be brewing now because of the high cost of real estate, does anyone secretly hope that commercial real estate continues to do poorly so cool artists and innovators can move in and actually make productive use of these spaces? Or is all this culture just moved online now?