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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

Contrast this article with the techcrunch one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190942). It's just like Seattle really. It almost makes me want to move there from Seattle :-) How hot is it there in the summer, really bad, right? Seattle is where people come to die, don't move here either.

Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay? I want to believe it's not true, but it seems like we are heading that way.

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The hot summer isn't bad because of the ubiquity of air conditioning in Texas. A lot of folks bring jackets to work in the summer because office temperatures are so low!

Everybody adapts to their environment, and in Texas, that means swimming when it's hot. As long as we get rain, the swimming holes are just absolutely fantastic. One summer, I went 3 or 4 times a week. Pack a bag with a few beers, bike to a trail, hike down to the water. The hotter, the better. You get super sweaty on the trek down, but getting in the water is so. damn. refreshing.

However, if you like hiking, Austin really sucks compared to Seattle. Washington has soooo many great hikes in close proximity to Seattle (less than 2hr). The best hikes around Austin feel like nerf trekking. Your best option is to drive 6 hours to Big Bend. Some folks recommend Pedernales or Enchanted Rock, but both are very popular and not at all challenging.

I love Austin, but dammit, we don't have mountains.

Which is why my bet is that Denver is the new Austin.

Denver is a farm more livable place than Austin. Other than live music, not much goes on here. It is a terrible place if you like the outdoors.

Yes, by all means, don't move to Austin ;)

> Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay?

This would work better if your cities hadn't stopped moving in the 70s. (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html)

Could you flesh your idea a bit more? I don't relish digging through that meandering blog post from a random author.

Basically American cities stopped growing at a rate sufficient to handle the boom in people in the mid-late 20th century. Now there is huge demand on cities to house people affordably but the entrenched powers that be in these areas prevent the necessary development through tools like zoning or bureaucracy.

The whole system is basically fucked. Sigh.

I was actually looking for this http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t... and we had an interesting discussion going at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10798352

Both might still be a bit too rumbling. If you want the least rambling, the Economist is almost always the way to go:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...

Instead of linking, could you just say what you intend to say?

Land Value Tax good. NIMBYs bad.

Native Texan here: the "average" is in the high 90s but July and August regularly hit--and stay at--100-and-above afternoon temperatures. The hot weather starts around late May and doesn't really wrap up until September. Temperature swings can also be brutal, 101 at 2pm, 50 at 10pm.

Yes, there's air conditioning but you will pay handsomely and but you have to be inside to "enjoy" it. My two-month bill from Seattle City Light last August was 1/3rd what my last one-month August bill was in Texas.

One of the big reasons I left Texas for Seattle was the weather.

I don't know about Austin, but 90 in LA is more like 80 somewhere else, due to our lack of humidity, so there's that to consider.

The humidity in Austin is absolutely ridiculous. It's not Houston by any means, but it's not okay.

I used to think San Diego got a bit humid around May gray, I was fucking wrong.

I'm not sure that's worse than living in Seattle and for 8 months a year going two week stretches without seeing any blue sky.

I'm sure. :) I detest hot weather and after 30+ years of living with it I was ready for a change. "Hot" in Seattle is a handful of days above 90. "Hot" where I'm from is the local news declaring that this is the 10th-consecutive day of highs over 100. Besides, the two-weeks-no-sun thing seems to be more local myth than actual reality in Seattle. Even in the dead of winter there are still sunny days. The days are really short in November and December, but the sun exists.

I can work around cloudy days--which I genuinely love--by sitting in front of a Happy Light for an hour or so. That's an acceptable tradeoff, for me, to escape not being able to be outside for more than a few minutes without being drenched in sweat.

Note the swinging needle of urbanization, sub-urbanization, back to urbanization...

That's not an answer to your question, as the city-states end up including their suburbs, but I think whatever causes that swing could inform - or perhaps be used - to combat that effect.

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