Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity • Hacker News Board

Re: Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

#41

Post by solumunus » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:45 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #27

bmitc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost none are from out of state. 90% were living in California when they became homeless, and 65% were born in California. It doesn't even make sense as to why a homeless person would voluntarily move to California where literally everything, including food, is more expensive and housing is impossible. Plus, homeless people lack the means to easily move around. California's housing situation is the worst in the cou…

Not disputing any of the statistics cited, but there is one advantage of being homeless in California compared to other places: favorable weather, especially along the coast. Snow is a once-in-a-generation event outside high-elevation areas, and while it does freeze on some winter nights, it’s rarely below 30 F. There are many parts of the country where temperatures sometimes get low enough to be life-threatening for…

This. It’s simply much easier to be homeless in California, one of the easiest places imaginable. Do people think if the state was red that suddenly all those homeless people would become homed? A ridiculous notion.

Re: Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

#42

Post by Eggpants » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:31 AM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #22

jnakano89 wrote: post #3

About half of America’s off-grid energy projects are in Texas. The OpenAI/Oracle data center in Shackelford County is running on its own gas plant. That’s the real Texas advantage. It’s not just taxes or cheap power. It’s that you can put the power plant and the inference cluster in the same operating loop to avoid waiting years in an interconnection queue.

Those companies building AI datacenters in Texas are still mostly hiring for higher-paid office positions (like SWE) in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, etc because that's where the leadership still is. Before this, it was the same, California had almost 0 datacenters while the rest were in like SC, OR, TX, NV, IA. You could argue CA should've been more receptive to datacenters because they bring decent jobs, but I don't…

The construction of data centers brings jobs, most of the running of data centers is done remotely. There are more security guards than on site tech workers. Just look at the size of the parking lots. In Ashburn Va, a single tech will be assigned to multiple data centers further reducing the number of “decent jobs”.

Re: Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

#43

Post by bmitc » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

solumunus wrote: post #41

linguae wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disputing any of the statistics cited, but there is one advantage of being homeless in California compared to other places: favorable weather, especially along the coast. Snow is a once-in-a-generation event outside high-elevation areas, and while it does freeze on some winter nights, it’s rarely below 30 F. There are many parts of the country where temperatures sometimes get low enough to be life-threatening for…

This. It’s simply much easier to be homeless in California, one of the easiest places imaginable. Do people think if the state was red that suddenly all those homeless people would become homed? A ridiculous notion.

It's immaterial when the data says they were in California to begin with.

Re: Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

#44

Post by bmitc » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #29

bmitc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is high tax in Texas, much less insanely high? There is no income tax. Property taxes are okay-ish. It has a standard sales tax. > Of course California also has a much larger safety net than Texas. California alone accounts for a third of the homeless population in the U.S.

Texas has high property taxes. This causes people to need to move. It also spurs construction causing prices of homes to stay flat. For the typical homeowner, the total combined appreciation of your home in CA combined with the savings from the no moving property tax once you've been there a while more than covers the California tax burden. My colleagues and direct reports in Texas constantly have to move as their pr…

Lots of states have high property taxes. Texas does not have "insane" tax that's more than California. Everything is cheaper, like gas, food, real estate, etc., in Texas than it is in California, and so California has that additional tax.

> This alone results in excess cost that is essentially a tax on not being rich.

That's everywhere in the U.S. right now. Texas is not an outlier.

Re: Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

#45

Post by MAustriaGA » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

Recurecur wrote: post #39

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they move to the complete opposite end of the spectrum where not three years ago Texas was human trafficking migrants to other states? Quite the change of hearts.

I believe the correct term is “illegal aliens”, not “migrants”. They weren’t “trafficked”, they were “relocated”.

More specifically, relocated to the places that REALLY wanted to have them. Texas was doing a favor here to both the illegal alien and to the locations they were relocated to.