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Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

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Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation: [error data not found] There's a cost of moving. California's taxes and regulations are bad, bad enough to force many out, but not all. If things continue on their present course, even Google and Amazon, who personally like the political climate there, will have to start looking elsewhere.

> Amazon Headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Not California.

Funny to point this out. Bezos literally packed up his car and drove from NYC to Seattle in order to avoid Internet commerce taxes.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#362
post #275
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that the people moving are responsible for the bad policies? Something tells me the NIMBYs that bought their homes decades ago and pay $3.50 in annual property taxes aren't going anywhere.

Well looking at voting records of Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Colorado, I’d say say yes. Those moving into those states are bringing their politics with them.

And once they're thoroughly shitted up, there'll be some other place to move.

I like what Matthew McConaughey said about people moving from California to Austin - "Remember why you moved here, and understand you're going to have to vote a certain way if don't want to move again in the future."

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#363
post #322

> the cost of housing is one-third of Bay Area prices and the absence of a state personal income tax amounts to a 13.3% raise for top earners. This point always makes me laugh because anyone who lives in affluent TX neighborhoods knows your property tax is _enormous_ and usually makes up for a majority of state income tax you save. They still need to pay for roads and schools, right?

Which is great. A high property tax keeps the price of housing down (what people will pay for a house is cost per month, basically mortgage plus property tax), makes people want to have new housing built so that housing prices don't go up, and promotes a general attitude of anti-NIMBYism. Just the opposite of California with its low property tax and very aristocratic prop 13 problem.

I totally agree and I think property taxes are way more fair and equitable for a society than income taxes. Usually we tax behaviors we want to curb. Income taxes disincentivize people from earning more, whereas property taxes are a consumption tax. In my mind this makes way more sense, and there's good data to suggest property taxes are the best/most efficient way to gain needed revenue for a city but do the least "damage" to economic prosperity

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#364

This general topic seems to come back into focus on a regular basis on HN (last time, 1 week ago). People have been leaving SV in numbers for the 30 years I've been here, always citing traffic & cost of housing as the primary reasons. Though this time, you could add decriminalization of petty crime. Nonetheless, the population growth remains net positive. The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust agains…

I just came across a NYT article from 1997 talking about the emergence of Texas as a high tech haven, and migration of tech companies from California.

Prominent local superstars included Dell, Nortel and Enron (As well as numerous companies who fared better, admittedly)...

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/30/business/a-new-breed-of-w...

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#365

The real state I wonder about is Illinois. Who the hell wants to live in Illinois? Both the state income tax and property tax is absurd and you can easily cross state lines to somewhere cheaper with pretty much the same scenery.

Have you never been to Chicago? Pretty nice town.

Nice to visit, wouldn't want to live there.

Did I mention it's the murder capital of the United States?

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#366
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.

Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. The impact will be noticed. They hire people who later move to the "sexy" companies a few years into their career.

But moving to Texas frees up real estate in the Bay Area for more productive businesses. And given the transient nature of techies, many of those techies would have moved to California will now move to Texas, putting some relief into the housing market and maybe clearing up traffic a bit. I wouldn’t see these two moving as a negative, they’ve long had reputations as bad places to work.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#367
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 is one of the few reasons many could consider staying in California, vs having to pay property taxes on the bubble prices here. Property taxes do go up at what amounts to reasonable inflation numbers.

What do you think happens in most other states with normal property taxes? Do you think people just continuously get pushed out of their homes because of local taxes? It's pretty rare even in extremely high property tax counties like Cook and DuPage here in Illinois.

I have known it to happen to friend’s parents that live in New Jersey, as their pension didn’t keep up with the property tax increases. But New Jersey is notorious for their property tax.

I mean, Prop 13 passed specifically because seniors were losing their homes. But in this case the cure was worse than the disease.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe only Musk is moving to Texas, not Telsa. Thought at this point they are basically one in the same.

He's opening new Tesla facilities in Texas, but currently he hasn't formally announced he's completely pulling operations out of Texas, although he's threatened to in the past.

He made some very suggestive comments last week about Tesla being the last manufacturer of cars in CA.

I might add, the size of the Austin gigafactory is larger than the size of all Tesla factories in the world combined [1].

I will leave you to do the math if Tesla leaving CA isn't a possibility.

[1] https://electrek.co/2020/07/30/tesla-gigafactory-texas-crazy...

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a strange analogy. Walmart provides immense value to millions of people. They've developed an infrastructure that delivers cheap products to areas that otherwise would have few other options. Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products. One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all thei…

Walmart has contributed to the decline of small businesses in rural areas[0] and they compensate their employees so little that they officially encourage their employees to take advantage of the social safety net[1] despite ever increasing annual net income[2] captured largely by the non-productive latter-generation Waltons. [0] https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cla…

Not to go too off the rails, but they only “contributed to the decline” by being a better option for customers that switched from small businesses in rural areas to Walmart.

A lot of small businesses are bad. Bad hours, bad selection of products, bad customer service, bad prices.

They’re often held up in some idyllic form, but it’s clear from the behavior of their own customers that Walmart provides these customers more value.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities help I think. Stanford, Berkeley &c. Many great public universities and many great universities!

The east coast has entire Ivy League and yet no Silicon Valley. Also, how do you explain Seattle?

Many of the brightest on the East Coast get sucked into finance.
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