Also everyone who handled a physical US dollar said it felt fake, which made me wonder how easy it would be to pass off counterfeit bills. Regardless, your money is so much prettier
I have mixed feelings on Toronto. On the one hand, it does feel like an overall pretty pleasant for a large city, especially considering how hellish & aggressive many US cities can be.
On the other hand, it's falling hard into some of capitalism's consequences-- the cost of living has blown out of proportion, and there's tent cities cropping up just like in the states (positive note: I def feel like the homeless are treated with more dignity here, have access to services, etc). Vancouver is even worse, where there's effectively no middle class. It almost feels sometimes like covid became a catalyst for introducing privatization to undermine social services and fall more in line with the diminishing returns of western capitalism. It's just worrisome that it seems like Canada used to be a step above the States in terms of quality of life. And now it's almost trying to make up for lost time (sorry about the doomerism).
That being said, if you ever get the chance, check out French Canada. Montreal & Quebec City. Super progressive, friendly, fun, and liberated from a lot of that lingering Christian stigmatization that often permeates in the States. Also, the Euro in them makes them way better at protesting, upholding their rights, & questioning authority. Just my two sense. Toronto still a very cool place.
See one of the things I immediately noticed in Ontario was how racially diverse it was, even in the more rural areas I passed through, at least compared to the practically segregated area I’m from
Quebec might be more European but that comes with the Euro style racism too. Don't be brown or Asian outside Montreal or you're gonna have an awkward time.
It almost feels sometimes like covid became a catalyst for introducing privatization to undermine social services and fall more in line with the diminishing returns of western capitalism. It’s just worrisome that it seems like Canada used to be a step above the States in terms of quality of life. And now it’s almost trying to make up for lost time
As a Canadian, that's how I'd describe it. I expect there to be a ton of reliance on private health care by 2030 :sadness: modern Canadians are complacent bastards who will not protest/riot/strike to get our social services back.
It is extremely easy to make counterfeit $100 in the style of the old ones that don't have a magnetic strip. No I will not be elaborating because this post has already alerted the Secret Service.
$100’s seem ballsy. Either way I only crossed with like $30 in cash because I read you can use cards most places
Yeah I also quickly discovered that places accepted US cards way more readily than US cash
Ive been feeling and doing quite a bit better since I left US myself, but I'm in South America.
I love it here to be honest, I'm starting to de-stress somewhat from stress that built up over the last several years in US.
used to go to Toronto all the time when I lived in Upstate New York. Canada felt like an extension of New York whenever I went, at least southern Toronto did.
That's why its used as a NYC set in all the movies lol
I’ve heard they are indeed similar, including sharing a lot of the same issues. I haven’t spent enough time in NYC to comment
One-way GO Transit fare from Square One in Mississauga to Union Station in Toronto is currently $7.55 CAD, but will be a bit cheaper if you use a Presto card. I believe GO also has weekend passes for $10 or something stupid.
Don't forget also that you can take a bike on any GO bus or train as long as there's still space on the front of the bus or in the bike section of the train. It really helps open up the region a bit if you're comfortable cycling in a few places (downtown Toronto can be nasty).
Just from having driven a car in Toronto and having to share the road with cyclists and see all the bullshit they put up with I’m not sure I could handle cycling there. I’m used to cycling on roads where the cars are all going 55mph but they’re sparse enough that they’ll go into the next lane to give a cyclist some room. So having to stop because someone just rushed out of an intersection or driveway isn’t a thing for. I would for sure ram straight into someone’s door
Fuuuuck that would have made way too much sense. I’m not used to that being an option
After a lifetime of syphilis I’ll take cholera. Or maybe I just need to travel more
Counterfeit USD is really common, most of the people getting burned by having it passed to them (in the US) are sex workers and massage places that double as sex work.
There's lots of folks who print them, some decent ones sell bills on Tor but if you want the good stuff you need to do some digging.
I've never made it myself but I've handled it and I don't really know how people would catch it, other than the ones that repeat the same sequence of serial numbers and shit.
Even countries with crazy security in their bills get counterfeited successfully, Australia comes to mind and while it's really rare I've seen counterfeiters make some generations of their bills.
Ultimately, it's not a terrible idea for states to move to centrally-issued digital currencies that reuse blockchain technology. It doesn't have to be as bottlenecked as the fully decentralized ones and they can obviously reverse transactions in this scenario, and the mining isn't trustless so there's no ridiculous energy waste.
In theory it would also enable a socialist state to crack down immediately on any financial impropriety. Citizens could even be afforded some reasonable amount of privacy by reusing elements of ring signature schemes, but eg only allow a certain $ value per person per time period to be submitted with private spend outputs. Some moving dollar amount could almost certainly be calculated that mimicks what people usually spent privately (eg with cash) today, so it doesn't freak the libertarians out too much. Anything you're paying with a bank or pay card or app today is already fair game for the state to vacuum up and analyze, so I don't think shifting to a digital currency needs to be that scary for people. USians will shit blood if it resembles the Digital Yuan though, I stand by the privacy provisions.
From what I understand, if you make it able to roll back transactions, less distributed, and not public, it’s fundamentally not a blockchain and therefore not cryptocurrency. Just… currency. Although if you wanna talk about a global federation of states operating a mutual currency I suppose there might be something to that
I cannot stress enough: You can do absolutely anything without a blockchain. The blockchain does not provide any benefit whatsoever. It does not provide any feature whatsoever. Just use a regular database.
In theory it would also enable a socialist state to crack down immediately on any financial impropriety.
Why even use money?
I left the US for the first time a few months ago and was very surprised that the money wasn't gross and beat up
I like to think that every US dollar has been manually dirtied up by a money launderer at least once
just being in czechia feels free even though we're a client state of the EU
:yea:
I’ve known for over a decade that the US was not the greatest country in the world. Applying that to actual living conditions has remained entirely abstract until now. Fuck
When I was in Toronto it was weird, like Candaians are all about being super independent and nobody's bitch, and yet everywhere was The Queen's This and The Royal That. Really unexpected. Ordered some nachos in a bar just to see what came out of the kitchen. $11 and we got nine individual chips dressed with chili from a can, melted cheese and a single jalapeno.
People took US money no problem, it's worth more. Of course your change was in Canadian money. They said they saved it for their trips across the border to visit Costco. Apparently they don't like paying high taxes, I thought that was part of the pride they took in living there (that's what they tell Americans anyway).
If you get out to the smaller cities outside Toronto they're very nice and green. We took the tour boat in one place and the recorded voice wouldn't shut up about how proud they were that the defenses they built kept the Americans out. Because they didn't try to invade.
Toronto has some really cool museums, one was in a house that had some of the first telephones ever installed in a residence. Toronto also has a neat city flag.
