What a myopic, hateful comment. You are no more entitled to keeping it as whatever idealistic version you have in your head as they are making it into theirs. Also, I'll note that trying to sow discord between groups of people in the US, and very specifically promoting the secession of California, is a known Russian active measures tactic.[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41853131
Please do not take HN threads further into political, ideological, regional, or nationalistic flamewar.
Edit: we've had to ask you this repeatedly before. We eventually ban accounts that keep ignoring such requests. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and fixing this, we'd be grateful.
The traffic in Texas is significantly better than SF and LA. My parents live in a suburb that is 25 miles from the Houston and it takes 45 minutes to get to downtown during commute hours. My girlfriend has an equivalent commute in the Bay which takes around 75-90 minutes during commute hours. The public transit is terrible in Texas so I expect it will be worse than the Bay in a decade or two if they refuse to build u…
Dallas is terribad. At least it was in 1999 when I lived there. I can't believe that there are fewer people on the road and less traffic now than then. Fun trivia tip: the opening scene of "Office Space" with the old person and walker going faster than traffic was filmed in Las Colinas (where I worked at the time).
It has gotten better in 20 years (that's way too long to retain judgement on transportation). Not a ton better, but since most of these companies aren't moving to Dallas proper, it's moot anyways.
Companies move. HQ move all the time. This is a leverage that corporations employ to maximize tax gains all the time. Don't know why it always makes some sort of headline. Schwab and its leadership has been saying how they hate California for a long time. So not surprising. And any HQ move out of CA is often dressed as a political success story of a low tax state. Weirdly, I would never see a story that says "$1 trillion worth of new wealth created in CA, zero in Texas". I mean, this last year alone, with IPOs of Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Slack etc. we probably had $200bn worth of wealth generated. Now taking into account the stock price inflation of Google, Apple, Facebook over the last decade, and not to forget Tesla, Netflix, Nvidia etc. Nobody ever uses those gains to comment on why a high tax state was able to generate this much new business and wealth. Over the last decade, CA companies have generated 50% of all VC capital in the US and Texas companies have generated <5%.
Once upon a time, "Go West, young man" was advice for "growing with the country": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man Now with California's anti-housing, anti-commerce policies & government deeply captured by incumbent interests, better advice may be: "Go East, growing company."
California companies capture >50% of VC investment. So, there are big headline moves, but the underlying truth is California destroys every other state when it comes to growth
Why do people leave CA? Because they don't like what it's becoming. So they move somewhere else. But it's not really what they want, either. What they want is maybe 75% Texas, 25% California. So they try to move Texas, not all the way to California, but in that direction. To the people in Texas, that feels like "trying to turn Texas into California".
People leave every state. CA population is actually growing and added over 2mn in the last decade
There is nothing wrong with moving to a better tax jurisdiction because you want lower taxes. It is perfectly legal, happens all the time, and is not something subject to a 'government review', because firms are expected to optimize their behavior in order to avoid taxes as much as possible, and even legally required to do so if they are to meet their obligations to maximize shareholder value. The whole idea that peo…
> The whole idea that people change their behavior to avoid taxes is the basis of sin taxes - this is how things are supposed to work. What sin taxes are at play here? Edit: Or just downvote I guess, it was just a question.
No sin taxes are at play here. Their reference to sin taxes was to show that tax minimisation is expected behaviour.
But the people in San Francisco have got what they wanted. Maybe in 20 years SF will be able to change but right now the majority of people are actually in favor of the way the city is being run: to stay stuck in time as long as possible
If I had most of my net worth tied to my SF house, I would be a NIMBY as well. Don't blame them though.
I have relatives in Oakland. They own a couple of houses, rent one out and due to home value, are multi-millionaires. They live a lifestyle of multi-millionaires as a result of their belief that they are multi-millionaires. If anything happens to property values there, they are screwed. I can only imagine most of the people who own homes there behave similarly using credit cards and other means to live a fancy lifestyle believing one day they will sell their property and pay everything off.
I don't hate them, but the phrase "California values" has a deeply negative connotation to me. Everything they do screams of hypocrisy.
Yes. I'm building a distributed engineering team now (hiring people both inside and outside the bay area). Everyone underestimates how much talent there is outside the core hubs (Bay Area, Seattle, NY, etc). Yes, talent does cluster in those cities, but they don't have a monopoly. There are lots of smart, driven people outside the talent hubs. Also as a sweeping broad generalization that I frankly can't back up with…
Why do I have the feeling that “entitled” is being defined as “they ask for lower salaries that allow the company to keep more of the money they make.”
Well they do ask for lower salary (their cost of living is lower), and in my case it's less about "keeping more of the money" and more about having a bigger chance at building a successful product with the runway we have (being an early-stage startup and all).
But that's not what I mean by entitled. Entitled is an attitude of thinking one is special and thus deserving of special treatment.
Part of the problem with housing prices in California is that property taxes are too low. Prop 13 means existing homeowners are shielded from higher property taxes, so growing property values are only good for them, no matter how high. Thus, there's no incentive to increase housing supply, which could lower prices.
Whoa! Didn't even know about Prop 13 - that basically means no house can currently have a higher taxable value than basically double what it was worth in 1978. Insane!
It gets even better. Because commercial property taxes are so low, the state is forced to rely more on income and sales taxes. Unfortunately these taxes source are affected much more by recessions. Things go to crap, and the state's coffers empty out.
Welcome to why California has budget problems in recessions!