Elon Musk moves to Texas
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359144&p=2
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I also remember reading stories years ago about CA/SV businesses that had offices up in Colorado as a back-up for when 'The Big One' hits.
And toll roads, etc...
In short, the money has to come from somewhere — if not from income tax then it will be from somewhere else.
The rate may be higher, but the total paid will probably be less.
CA/0.74%/$2839
TX/1.8%/$2275
You'll likely be paying close at best the equivalent of Silicon Valley housing.
https://www.redfin.com/TX/Houston/9730-Arched-Oak-Dr-77095/h...
No one is knocking Texas per se.
If you're saying that anyone who was professionally successful in California has no right to ever leave the state, that seems like a tough sell.
You make it sound like if you ever lived in CA you have to pay CA tax for the rest of your life until you retire lol.
If you move from California to another country, and are subject to US Federal Income tax, and don't qualify for an exemption, the Franchise Tax Board still considers you a resident of the state, and as such, taxes you on your worldwide income; as you did not end your residency by establishing residency in another state.
Income taxes has so many bad consequences. It would be great to ban it and replace it with land value taxes.
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
While this is strictly correct, I think the implications of what you wrote are too strong. If you move from California to another country or U.S. state, the requirements to get an "exemption" from California tax residency are essentially "convince the FTB that you have weaker ties to California than to your new location."
While arbitrary and open to abuse in theory, it appears less so in practice. Quoting from California's Guidelines For Determining [Tax] Resident Status [1], heading "Leaving California" on page 6:
> Example 4 - You and your spouse/RDP are California residents. You accept a contract to work in South America for 16 months. You lease an apartment near the job site. Your contract states that your employer will arrange your return back to California when your contract expires. Your spouse/RDP and your children will remain in California residing in the home you own.
> Determination: You maintain strong ties with California because your spouse/RDP and children remain in your California home during your absence. Your intent is to return to California, and your absence is temporary and transitory. You remain a California resident during your absence. You are taxed on income from all sources, including income earned in South America.
> Example 5 - You receive and accept a permanent job offer in Spain. You and your spouse/RDP sell your home in California, pack all of your possessions and move to Spain on May 5, 2019, with your children. You lease an apartment and enroll your children in school in Spain. You obtain a driver’s license from Spain and make numerous social connections in your new home. You have no intention of returning to California.
> Determination: You are a part-year resident. Through May 4, 2019, you were a California resident. On May 5, 2019, you became a nonresident. All your income while you were a resident is taxable by California. While you are a nonresident, only income from California sources is taxable by California.
> Example 6 - You are a resident of California. You accept a 15-month assignment in Saudi Arabia. You put your personal belongings, including your automobile, in storage in California. You have a California driver’s license and are registered to vote in California. You maintain bank accounts in California. In Saudi Arabia, you stay in a compound provided for you by your employer, and the only ties you establish there are connected to your employment. Upon completion of your assignment, you will return to California.
> Determination: You have maintained greater connections with California than you have established in Saudi Arabia. Your absence is for a temporary or transitory purpose. Therefore, you remain a California resident. As a California resident, your income from all sources is taxable by California, including the income that you earned from your assignment in Saudi Arabia.
Example 5 above is closest to what I think you were talking about by "moving from California to another country." The only way I think FTB could go after you for here is to argue that you could have an "intention" of returning to California eventually, and I do not know whether keeping your American bank accounts at California banks would be enough of a hook for FTB to decide it's worth the effort to try that argument.
For myself, if I did move from California to become an indefinite expat, I wouldn't worry too much about the FTB going after me. Opinions may vary, of course.
[1] CA FTB Publication 1031, 2019 edition: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf
FTB can use 'has a storage unit in California' as a factor; and maybe combined with California banks and California voting, and maybe a California mailing address, if you use friends/family to forward your mail, could be enough to tip the scales for them. It's rather opaque.
I don't think it's a small motivation of Musk to escape the tax rate when he starts to sell his shares. Just because he vested them while in CA - if he's a resident of Texas when he sells I don't think he owes CA a dime.
It depends on what type of shares/options/equity grants, and what's still vesting, and what isn't.
ISOs that are exercised in a qualifying disposition are taxed based on residency on the day of exercise.
RSUs that vest while you're a resident are taxed on vest day, and any capital gains from that are taxed based on residency on the day of the sale, yes.
RSUs that vest while you're not a resident are taxed on vest day, and a portion of the income will be california source if you worked in California during a portion of the vesting period, or if you were a residing during a portion of the vesting period.
https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/misc/1004.html#E-Restricted-Sto...
But, as much as i am a lefty(+capitalist), that seems a fault of the state. States should expect this more imo. You give near negative returns to companies to come to your state and then you're shocked when they leave and you haven't gotten your ROI?
But maybe this will be good. If the migration continues perhaps California will have to stop subsidizing low-tax states and let them fend for themselves more.
Does California invest money/resources to companies? Or is it more of an indirect thing, such as maintaining roads and bridges?
Why are businesses choosing to hop off the California gravy train? Is the gravy not worth the taxes? Is the gravy just hyperbole?
I left California for Nevada many years ago, and I subsequently sold stock I accumulated while in California without paying state income tax.
It is legal and you can do it, but there are a lot of legal hurdles. They're pretty well documented around page 5 of FTB 1031 [1].
In my case, I quit my W2 job in California, entered into a contract to lease a home in NV, got rid of all leased or owned real estate in CA, sold or re-titled all motor vehicles from CA, registered to vote in NV, surrendered my CA driver license for a new NV license, re-titled all my financial accounts at my new address, got a NV phone number, etc.
This was all easy because I was single without children. If my situation was more complicated, like I had a spouse or ex-spouse with children enrolled in CA schools, or decided to retain owned real estate in CA, the situation can quickly fall into a gray zone.
If you have a W2 job in CA while claiming you're in NV, it's very hard to escape the CA FTB.
CA is very aggressive about chasing down its former residents. It's important to check all the boxes to get them from chasing you.
After I left, I filed non-resident CA returns for three years basically saying, "I had income but I am not a resident and it was not from a CA source, therefore I owe no CA tax." This is important because it starts the statute of limitations running. If you don't file, the statute of limitations doesn't start.
And while I'm writing all this: what in the world is up with a 13.3% state tax bracket? Screw California.
[1] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf
And AZ isn't NV. The FTB pays special attention to NV in particular because it has no income tax. Someone who moves to AZ isn't so obviously trying to skirt CA state income tax.
My case was a little special because I sold a lot of stock right after leaving CA, which makes it a little suspicious to the FTB.
But the state remains a very conservative place overall, just like the rest of the USA. There’s a broad swath of the public who distrust the government, are opposed to taxes of any kind, and so on. Even in 2020, 34% of voters picked Trump, even though his rhetoric has included badmouthing CA as a cornerstone. And many CA Democrats are pretty conservative by the standards of most other developed countries, and would most naturally fit in a centrist or center-right party.
You can be right of the Democratic Party and be anywhere from merely slightly-less-center center-right to, well, anywhere to the right of that.
But the US polítical spectrum is basically bimodal, and the peak to the right of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is far-right.
"The far-left managed to create an "amazing" (and terrifying) perspective.
If you're a leftist but not as leftist as them, you're a centrist, maybe even center-right which makes everybody on the right to be automatically far-right."
I suspect you haven't elaborated on it because you recognize that your application of the term is easily disputed.
Far-left is the complete abolition of private property, abolition of police and prisons, in some cases the abolition of monies period.
There are literally zero far-left people in elected or appointed positions within the US government today.
Your worldview is much smaller than reality and the dog-whistles you lean on are obvious. Educate yourself before choosing to expound your limited views.
Oh, come on. You can't really be that condescending and expect people to take you seriously.
Anyway, according to your broad worldview, communists are not far-left. Ok.
So you're wrong again.
Folks seem to be taking me seriously. I don't know if you can say the same.
Attacks on rhetoric and not substance only serve to expose your lack of a basis on which to make your claims.
To reciprocate your condescending comments I could say you should read a little bit before making a fool of yourself.
I'm not wasting my time anymore with you.
Your house and toothbrush and such is personal property.
Some call that... being a snowflake :)
Socialists want to end the private ownership of means of production. Communists go further.
Your attempts to silence me are petty.
such a low level of discourse. I thought these kind of comments weren't allowed on HN?
When center leftists started to embrace free trade and things like that.
So basically anybody not on the left fringe was label a neoliberalist, all the way from Clinton to Milton Friedman.
You can make it really easy if you just throw everybody in the same bucket and label it evil. Its a classic move in politics.
It does have a meaning.
> Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
So disheartening to see this low quality of discourse on HN.
It's a magical place where only those who agree with the person speaking are allowed to have an opinion and shouldn't be censored by big tech co.
Since then the Democratic Party has continued tracking to the right, with Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation's 1994/94 HEART Act being slightly edited and passed as Obamacare.
This isn't a "terrifying perspective", but literally public statements and accepted political science.
They gained power before that (their main original organization, the DLC, was a powerful force in Democratic politics well before its former head became the Democratic nominee in 1992), but they were definitely the unquestionably dominant faction from that point forward, though that has gotten weaker over the past decade or so.
Do you see anything that looks like "socialism" coming from the democratic party in the united states?
Ocasio-Cortez is one congress woman who has been in office for less than two years. She is not in a position of power within the democratic party, in fact they actively oppose her.
So what is your point? AOC does not reflect where the democrats are as a party, and it's dishonest to pretend so.
And student loan relief is not socialism. Free college could arguably be, but what is being discussed is far from free college.
Your logic is astounding.
That's all socialism.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/31/the-repu...
The GOP does not employ "populism" they employ scare tactics.
Edit: the reason I ask the question is that I've noticed a trend among people from very left-leaning areas to define anyone slightly right of center as being "far-right". I've been called "far-right" because of beliefs that were typical of moderate Democrats in the 1990s.
What label that leaves for people like actual Nazis, fascists, neo-Confederates, etc, I'm not sure. Far-far-far right?
Excellent example.
For the record, I support civil rights protections for all humans, including gays on the basis on sexual orientation. I disagreed then with most of Bill Clinton's policies toward gay rights (I also strongly supported making marriage a uniquely civil institution vis-a-vis government recognition available to all citizens, like France).
By the way, you know who else had that exact same views on gay rights as Bill Clinton when he entered office?
Barack Obama.
Was he "far right" in 2008?
It's absolutely untethered how far much of the left has moved in 10-15 years. The right has also moved toward the right, but they're much less homogeneous in their beliefs.
This is reflected in polls over time from Pew and others:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
(click "animate" to see to 2017).
I don't know your exact situation at all and criticism of you may indeed have been unfair. But for fucks sake don't try to make a case that you're not far-right by looking to the behavior of people in the past. That indicates strongly you may indeed have backwards views that are 30's years out of date.
And I think it's still fair for a person to claim tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints while rejecting positions that are bigoted or deemed unacceptable.
For someone who rejects meliorism, what moment in human history is the correct frame for evaluating the world? Many social or religious conservatives positions today often overlook that certain perspectives they hold now were unacceptable a century ago. The use of contraceptives being one example.
Can we live in a world where "if you believe this now you're evil but if you believed this 10 years ago you're cool."? Replace 10 with any number of years.
As a personal anecdote; every time i've been slow to adapt to the new societal norms, when i look back it's been me who was wrong, not society. It's just taken me time to realize it. I've learnt to force myself to accept, based on repeated past experience, that it's probably not society that's wrong when the overton window moves, it's probably me. I'm yet to regret adapting my viewpoint even if at the time it irks me somewhat. If you're over 30 think back to the school yard gay insults and compare your own viewpoints now. It's not wrong you've changed is it? Take that lesson into account with todays changes and you won't regret it.
What i'm trying to say here is that fighting against changes to the overton window will cause you to end up as a sterotypical old person with grossly outdated views. There's no need to be this way.
And before you ask what my morality is, I'll just sum it up as enlightenment Western liberalism, for want of a longer essay to explain it. And today's left (and right!) are starting to leave that outlook behind, to our detriment.
Now remember this thread started because you specifically raised an issue with being called far right. Do you think that maybe you do have views outside the norm. Note that i'm not saying it's right or wrong nor do i even want to know what your views are, i'm just pointing out that you might just fit the description of far right/left if your measuring stick for normal is to compare your views to those of a decade that started over 30years ago.
And yes, I'm right. It's sometimes right to have views outside social norms.
However, my views are not "outside social norms", unless you only count members of the full-on right, and full-on left as "social norms". My views are right in between those two.
Edit: "You can still be outside norms without being at the fringes." Hehe, we used to have a name for this: centrist. I know your kind hates us even worse than Trump supporters. They're beyond your influence, but you know that bullying, shaming, and harassment can "convince" many centrists. Well, not this one.
And boy, I screwed up by saying 1990s moderate Democrats. I should have said a 2008 Obama moderate, which is basically the same thing but few would dare call him "far right". BTW, I voted for him in 2008 (but not 2012).
That's absolutely ridiculous. "outside norms"? Whose norms? Your in-group's norms, which is at best around 20-30% of the country. There's a stronger argument that you all are the ones who are outside our country's norms, at least at present.
Do you think going back to a world where gay people were often attacked and beaten in public is a good idea? Where women were regularly subjected to sexual assault at work? My mum who worked as a teacher in the 80s and 90s told me she was regularly slapped on the ass by male teachers at work. Is this ok? Would you be ok with your daughters getting this treatment?
How do you reconcile the fact that slavery was once widespread and morally acceptable by the majority of society, and defended by the church, with your position that morality does not improve over time?
How about the fact that interracial marriage was once considered sin, and that women allowed to own property or vote was also morally acceptable?
Would you prefer a return to the morality of the 1800s, since in your view morality does not change, where women and dark skinned people returned to their "rightful place"?
Even the Church has undergone massive reformation over the centuries, and what was considered morally acceptable in the 1200s is not acceptable to modern Christians.
Atlantic chattel slavery could be argued to be crueler than ancient/traditional forms of slavery and hence a temporal decline in moral goodness from the middle ages to late 1800s. It may also be noted that in a low-tech society, feudalist and traditional slave economies may have had some advantages over e.g. a laissez faire wage worker economy. (In a famine perhaps? A question for historians). The cruelty of nature itself on human lives in a low tech society interacts with moral judgments about economic systems etc. in ways that complicate these questions - I would say be careful not to credit to improved virtue what is really the due of technological innovation.
A counterexample of moral improvement could be respect and care for elders and parents, broadly speaking. The point being only that the march of progress is not always consistent nor can it be counted on to be so.
And how to describe Nazism except as a moral abberation? That wasn't moral progress after the (already declining) morality of the Weimar republic.
And I'm getting weird dystopian vibes from a significant % of the present left. The moral crusading. The authoritarianism. The absolutism. The shaming. The religious ferver of its movements.
Conservative leaders, at least in the US, seem far more authoritarian and xenophobic than left leaning leaders. I'm curious what you see as authoritarian about the modern left.
Also, it is interesting that you associate shaming with authoritarianism. Shaming is intrinsically a grass roots thing - it's the people, not some autocrat, that shames people. Authoritarian governments don't need to shame people, they simply imprison them or take other direct coercive measures.
Societies shame people because they cannot physically do anything to them. That's a huge distinction.
But as for all the others I insist that they are primarily left-wing phenomena.
And regarding your argument for shaming, what happens when the folks who do the shaming gain power?
I suspect we'll find out in the coming years.
If you say morality was better in the past, which past are you talking about? After all, as you just admitted, morality changed in the past just as much as it did in the present.
Not only was morality not constant in the past, it was not constant geographically, nor even within the same religion (Protestant vs Catholic, Southern Baptist vs Episcopalian). Protestants in the US did not agree with Catholics in Europe, to say nothing of Muslims in the middle east and Buddhists in Asia.
What "eternal constant morality" are you appealing to? Are we talking about Protestantism in 1800? Roman Catholicism in 1400? Buddhism in 800 AD? Theocratic Judaism in 200 BC? Kantian categorical imperatives of the early 20th century?
So, again, if you claim that morality is constant based on some "past", it is incumbent upon you to answer : Which past, and in what country/tribe/kingdom, was the absolute "constant" morality that you claim we should now uphold here in the 21st Century?
And my specific viewpoint in question? That all people should be treated equally, and given equal opportunity, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
I will die with that belief, even if 99% of the population believes otherwise.
In addition alot of the far left is pinning 'nazi' or 'facsict' on any politician or idea that does not meet their ever changing ideas. Even feminists are now getting trampled on if their ideas don't meet up to the week culture temperature checks.
AOC (a leading democratic congresswomen) has called for complete prison abolishment - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/yes-aoc-tweeted-she-want...
A insightful piece from the NYtimes talking about 'abolishing' not defunding the police - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Here's another article about when Jacob Frey (mayor of Minneapolis) is asked by a sea of left wing activists if he will abolish the police, he said no and was greeted by a sea of boos - https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0615-abo...
CA decriminalizing shoplifting, which is fueling a huge boom in theft across the west coast - https://www.city-journal.org/west-coast-shoplifting-boom
What constitutes center right, center, center left in your view?
(I say people because the same thing occurs in reverse when talking about "extremist leftists")
The virtue signaling left has made it to the point that words don't mean what they should anymore because they crank things up to 100 every time they accuse anybody of anything.
I figure Florida makes it up with their tourism industry but Texas decidedly does not have that.
Sales tax and property tax.
> What is the difference between their government and California's?
Houstonian* here — Texas doesn't provide nearly the level of social services.
* I saw a post recently where someone said "I'm from Houston, not from Texas."
As to Hurricane Katrina: We took in about 250K evacuees but only about 40K stayed permanently (which is a bunch, of course). I'd guess most of those were the sort who liked being here better, so they made lemonade out of the lemons that the storm forced upon them. [0]
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40460412/after-hurricane-harvey-...
It's not that it's a Louisiana influence, it's that we're all on the gulf coast and all have a lot in common. (Not with New Orleans so much, but certainly with Lake Charles/etc.)
That somehow gets misnamed as a "Louisiana influence", when really it's just the region we're in.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-school...
On the east coast some of our states have high state income tax AND high property taxes (and property is very expensive) and I’m not sure the services or infrastructure are any better than in states like Texas. At least in California your property tax is locked in, which has its own problems of course.
At least where I live, a good deal of today’s tax revenues go to pensions to people that retired to Florida or Arizona (or some other tax free state) in their 50’s. I think Texas has avoided this trap many states are in today.
Your math is a little off, it was 1978.
- Personal income/wage tax
- Business income tax
- Capital gains taxes, Dividend taxes
- Sales tax
- Proper tax (homes, cars, etc.)
- Reducing services (e.g., worse schools, worse healthcare)
- Borrow (this can be a slippery slope)
- Create shadow liabilities that dont show up on the books (e.g., pension liabilities with poor growth assumptions)
Lots of trade-offs.
P.S. Tourism's economic impact on my city in Texas was over 15b BC(before COVID).
Seems like they're still moving in instead of moving out, for now, though.
Is it driving home prices up?
Or is it robbing the state coffers of a tax revenue that has to be made up elsewhere?
I don't know.
Build X amount of new housing or have your property tax go up 10% per year until at market rate.
Would never pass, but I think it would be interesting.
For single-family, owner-occupied housing, remove Prop 13 provisions for new sales, but grandfather in all current owners until their death or 20 years, whichever is sooner. After which their assessed values are gradually (say over 5 years) allowed to rise to the fair market value.
Force a reassessment upon the property being inherited, and remove Prop 13 protections from it. Right now, there's no reassessment if a child or grandchild inherits the property.
Eventually all grandfathered owners will die off, sell and leave, or start paying taxes based on the fair market value of their property.
People don't move because there's a tax hike proportionate to how long you've lived there, so there's less turnover in housing, meaning less supply, meaning higher prices.
It puts a hard, long term, effectively permanent cap on tax growth, so cities must plan for everything to continually get leaner. Cities make land use and zoning decisions based on uses that are net contributors to revenue, vs net costs. What is a net cost? Housing in general, especially housing that might contain school aged children - that's why 3+ bedroom apartments are so much more rare. What are net contributors? Offices and retail. So the places with demand get to pick, and SF and the Peninsula restrict housing as much as they can and have a huge concentration of offices.
Places on the outskirts (e.g. Dublin, Livermore, Gilbert, Brentwood) are allowing housing to be built because they're trying to turn nothing into something, but any established, and especially built-out city, has a strong financial incentive not to admit a single additional resident to live there, while encouraging everyone they can to shop and work there.
Those who would benefit from its repeal - renters, people who moved out, people who choose not to move to CA in the first place because of cost and governance, children, etc, either don't vote as consistently or can't vote in CA at all.
Proposition 15 (which would have eliminated commercial property tax breaks) failed 48%-52%. I think its biggest political flaw is probably the fact that it would apply July 1, 2022, with no phase-in for small businesses whose lease passes through the property tax. So hopefully in November 2022 another attempt can be made that addresses the political shortcomings.
Proposition 19 (which eliminated tax breaks for inherited investment property in exchange for increased tax portability for the elderly) only barely passed 51%-49%, and that was after it received overwhelming support from the legislature, and a $45 million advertising campaign from the California Association of Realtors that some people criticized for only highlighting the goodies for old people and not the costs for inheritors.
No one is attempting a full repeal of Proposition 13 including residential property.
It could also be attacked judicially; see this episode of the Henry George Program for a discussion of Nordlinger v Hahn and whether different legal arguments could be tried (e.g. does Proposition 13 impinge on the American freedom to migrate under the US Constitution?) http://seethecat.org/ep/2017-07-11.html
I believe it could be revisited on the grounds that Prop 13 primarily benefits white families (makes sense -- they were the only ones buying property 40 years ago).
There is now good data on the racial disparities in our current tax law and with enough money I think another lawsuit has a chance.
https://twitter.com/alfred_twu/status/1327821019931787264?s=...
It probably means prices are a bit higher than they could be, and people have stayed in their current property longer than they might've, but as a dominant factor? It's a lazy explanation since expensive city property is a problem elsewhere in the US and internationally too.
That continued price growth also tells you that "exodus" is a misleading oversimplification, since it means people are still buying. It wouldn't be too expensive for the people leaving if there weren't richer people buying!
(Even in a prop-13-less CA, the additional people selling their current properties to buy new CA properties instead would be adding to both the buyer pool and seller pool, it's not like there'd be an increase in inventory without an increase in buyers. So price effects seem potentially weak?)
Another problem is that many California counties subsidized suburban sprawl by not charging for utility hookups (like sewers). This put them in debt which caused them to encourage sprawl to balance the books, and some day someone will get left holding the bag, as is happening now.
California catered to the wealthy for decades and now they are having to pay the piper, so to speak.
This is what happens when you bend over backward for the super rich. I say good riddance, maybe California's taxation policies will recover to something more equitable without the 0.1%ers fucking it all up.... Like lowering income tax and repealing prop 13.
Interesting point.
It reminded me that in his past he has also left South Africa, and yet South Africa could also be described pretty accurately as "its not perfect. But its pretty diverse, and it seems that folks with opposing viewpoints can still coexist here."
Now I'm fairly certain based on his interviews that the reason he "left South Africa" was more to do with him wanting to move to the US since it increased the odds of success of his entrepreneurial dreams.
So I suspect his move to Texas might be along similar lines?
> I suspect something must be going on for several high profile folks moving out.
Interesting question you raise there.
If that were indeed true, what would you guess might be the cause?
I'd guess it might have to do with freedom of some kind.
Crime is South Africa's biggest pusher-outer-of-citizens.
But those that have been to Cape Town and its surrounds understand why so many still choose to live there.
It's a tough compromise!
If it wasn't for the lack of a high trust society, I would actually look into moving to Cape Town myself.
If you can afford it, perhaps consider purchasing a small beach-front studio apartment along the Atlantic Seaboard of Cape Town.
Then should South Africa evolve into a high trust society you'd feel comfortable living in, go spend a few months in Cape Town during its spring/summer (October to March) and check out the local beaches and mountains.
Clifton Beach and Devil's Peak in particular.
You have massive slums of people with no hope or future less than a 100 miles/kms away from the billion dollar French Riviera esque lifestyles of Camps Bay.
And with so many refugees coming in from the rest of Africa it almost seems like an unsolvable problem.
I guess it comes down to your risk appetite.
In South Africa you the most gorgeous landscapes that are freely accessible public landscapes on everyone's doorstep - irrespective of their financial position in the steadily recovering historically unequal society.
Yeah, there will continue to be crime until balance is had, but there are plenty SaaS opportunities, and the forested cliff-side hiking trails ending in tranquil beaches are an awesome way to experience nature.
Refugees are welcome in South Africa. The media has its paws in everything.
I've never been there.
All I come in contact with, living in middle income suburbs, is panhandlers at intersections.
Not sure what you mean by "panhandlers" - please clarify?
Here in Houston there are $500 per month apartments and $25,000,000 estates within the same city limits, yeah. There are some homeless folks, but not like Sacramento or San Francisco. Some people who work make less than $8 per hour right now. Other people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in just insurance premiums.
I fail to see the devastating difference in Texas when cities in California are adding to their own homeless populations by refusing to allow more housing to be built. Austin is a little more strict than here, but in Houston there are practically no zoning laws.
Population growth without commensurate growth in housing. You can add people, but you gotta let them build houses. If you don't, then prices rise, for reasons that are very easy to understand if you're not financially (or otherwise) motivated to find them confusing.
I'll turn your phrasing around and say show me a city that makes it legal to build as much housing as people desire for 30 years that still has high prices and I'll consider your point of view. But until then, it seems to me that you're going to have to make it legal to build housing if you want more housing.
A cynic would see this as a dog-whistle for "too many Asians/Hispanics/foreigners". (And I have actually heard a white person here in California say that about the schools.)
I suspect though you mean something else.
It's remarkable how "I don't like the Bay Area" translates so easily to "racist dogwhistle".
Quality of life means things like:
- "there are children in my neighborhood"
- "I don't need to keep looking over my shoulder at the playground with my children"
- "I can get a 15-yr mortgage on a house that is 2000 sqft, be financially stable, and safely deal with recurring large medical expenses that we will always have due to pre-existing conditions"
Although in all fairness, I am not aware of the drug situation in other parts of the country.
- Massive seasonal forest fires that have become normalized
- Risk (however small) of a catastrophic earthquake
- Dangerous public transport
- Piles of feces, needles, and general filth on (some) city sidewalks
- Daily bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways from 8AM-11AM and 1PM-6PM
- Extreme regulatory burden and cost of normal things like starting a business, building a home or addition, and owning firearms
Same complaints: cost of living / taxes, quality of life, and kids' education.
The only thing keeping me here is my current job and clear opportunities for future [tech] jobs. If WFH became the norm, I'm out of here in 50 milliseconds. There are probably a lot of people like me.
Granted, $120k-150 for a single earner is plenty to live a good life in Texas, even in the cities (as long as you don't have excessive personal debts). Something to think about that I'm sure you've probably considered.
Anecdotal, but everyone I know who left California recently did so due to the high cost of housing, not because of their tax liabilities or a plastic straw ban. Kinda hard to be upset about having to give 9% of your income to the state when you have to give 50% if your income to the landlord (for an 80 year old, 350 sq ft studio heated by radiator in my case when I lived there).
Sorry for noseing-in, but could you elaborate on the part that affects the kids? What sort of factors are there, or what kind of expectations?
Stopped reading at "urban hellscape like NYC"
This is completely unhinged (and bigoted) fantasy. I have lived in multiple places around the US and liked many of them. California works pretty well, actually. It is not remotely like the USSR circa 1985.
It does overtax and underdeliver. But the federal government does that on a much grander scale.
The Bay Area and LA are overcrowded. There are other places to live in California! Some with much more natural beauty.
That's the sort of insightful, tolerant viewpoint that helps elevate discussions.
I disagree with your assessment that Texas has wide acceptance for opposing viewpoints, at least out in the suburbs where I grew up. If you were not religious and conservative (I have my own anecdotes), you did not fit in. Only when I went to college in a college town did people largely seem to want to live and let live. Sure, inside the larger cities it is more cosmopolitan, for lack of a better word, but lots of people live in the 'burbs and around the smaller areas and do not get the benefit of this peaceful coexistence. For example, to this day I do not recommend being openly gay and living near Tyler.
If someone moved to Texas, they made a choice to accept it and I will not knock people for their individual choices. But my experience is not that the prevailing view is open acceptance of people of all stripes like found in other parts of the country.
Even Tyler has changed. (old article, but still)
https://www.advocate.com/society/activism/2009/09/29/gays-ta...
It's not as though California was always unicorns and rainbows, either.
If Texas voters will finally vote in someone who is more like Ann Richards than Greg Abbott, I will believe the mindset is changing. Statewide votes for Governor, Lite Gov, Comptroller, and so on are not gerrymandered so a vote in San Antonio counts just as much as a vote in Midland.
(To your first question, I have not lived in Texas for over a decade, but I am the only member of my family who does not so I have pretty close connections to this day.)
It’s not that people are choosing to insulate - the metros are where the jobs are. Those metros have been changed by the influx of people, and if there were jobs the suburbs you would see the electorate change there as well.
I'm a white man and I suppose I would be a bit wary if I had a huge Bernie sticker on my car, I otherwise don't feel unsafe in the middle of nowhere TX. I just don't like that they're all rah rah GOP.
My own (black) experience in West Texas (Ft. Bliss), "Careful" meant driving across state to see family in Houston and absolutely not stopping in certain counties, not even to piss or stretch my legs.
After getting stopped, pulled over and ordered out of my vehicle while an officer stood back at his car several times and interrogated about "where are you going" "where are you supposed to be" "who do you know in this town" and "where did you steal the car from" (all separate experiences) while doing nothing but trying to take holiday leave.
So... that kind of careful for some of us.
edit, before anyone even makes the attempt:
- I was not driving erratically
- I had no bumper stickers on my car signaling political viewpoints
- I was not wearing any 'curious' clothing other than a shirt and jeans
- I had functioning turn signals and brake lights
- I was driving a legally purchased, registered and insured vehicle at the speed limit (or +5mph) consistent with how I drive literally every day
I've had ... interesting interactions with police and even some ornery locals as far south as Austin (yes, that "blue dot surrounded by red" as people like to call it) and as far north as Milwaukee, which isn't that far from where I live now, comparatively.
Kinda stopped believing in that whole "social avarice is relegated to certain parts of the country" stuff before I even hit 23.
(but don't get me started about certain parts of Missouri)
I remember my truck breaking down in Menard, TX and my black friend and I walked into a restaurant in the morning... everyone stopped and turned around and stared at us for a moment and went back to their business.
Sometimes I don't think humanity deserves to continue existing. It was a wacky experiment, but it is not working out.
That's astounding. Do you have a source for this?
I think we need to admit that we are all racist. Every ethnic majority thinks they are the greatest, it seems. If we can't even admit it, I don't see how it will change.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, Pensacola, or anywhere in "the sticks" of Texas or Oklahoma or Utah or Alabama before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
Newsflash, you're not going to like upstate New York, either.
All it takes is realizing changing X rule like a deadline will help or hurt your party and then voting based on that rule. Eventually this can fail, which oddly enough tends to flip states so they can quickly go from solidly party A to solidly party B.
Having satisfactorily worked hard to make voting as difficult as possible in Texas, he wants to use the state's limited funds to sue other states that dared to improve their democracy. This is the government of Texas.
Are you stating that as long as public officials are "daring to improve their democracy" that they are free to ignore Constitutional requirements that the legislature has plenary authority to proscribe the manor of selecting electors?
Note: Setting aside the likelihood that any of the alleged unconstitutional actions resulted in a different electoral outcome, isn't it important that election law is established through the Constitutionally proscribed legislative process and not via executive and/or bureaucratic actions independent of the legislature?
Let's not pretend that this absurd lawsuit has any merit -- it's one in a long line of losing lawsuits (what are they up to, 50 out of 51 lost now?) by the current president to overturn an election result he didn't like.
I'm interested in poking holes in that argument not avoiding it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_State_Board...
So, it’s a much more specific question you’re asking. It also had zero impact on this election, but that’s largely irrelevant to the question.
The question in the Texas lawsuit doesn't challenge the actions of the legislature, it challenges the actions of the other officials.
It’s often argued by public officials that exceptions are allowed in extreme situations, though what those are is of course up to the courts. Perhaps best summed up as "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic... Which of course isn’t a blank check to do anything for any reason, but it is considered by the court system in various cases. There are many examples of this argument being considered acceptable, and perhaps more frequent examples of it being rejected.
As such simply saying the legislature was bypassed on it’s own is not considered a sufficient legal argument.
Well, the interesting point of law here is that the Constitution specifically delegates the authority to the legislature. So in this particular case it may indeed be as straightforward as saying that the legislature was bypassed and didn't authorize the changes. At least that is my understanding of the case so far.
It all rolls back to article III section 2 The Judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution
The legislature is often assumed to have a great deal of power, but it was intended to be relatively weak just like the other two branches of government.
No, it would actually be terribly disruptive if the legislature could not subject its regulation of federal elections to the judicial and executive power in the same way as other state laws (and, particularly, laws governing the administration of simultaneously and on-the-same-ballot state elections) are.
The concern here was entirely feigned, hypocritical by the states involved in complaints, and substanceless and purely based on partisan advantage.
It is.
> but you’ve neatly avoided addressing the underlying argument that they are making that the election rules were not changed by the legislature in these states and those actions are unconstitutional.
The reason why that is false is well-argued in some of the briefs for the defendant states in Texas just-failed lawsuit, but, in summary: State legislatures are constitutionally free to, as part of the rules they set for elections of Presidential electors, submit those same rules to the same judicial and executive constraints otherwise applicable to state law including those applicable to state elections, the defendant states (and most other states, including those suing) routinely do so and specifically have done so for the rules applicable in this case, and the rules for the elections were all handled according to state law (including the role that state law affords judicial and executive officers in its application).
It's a relatively clean slate in state vs state case precedent. Clean enough that a majority will easily find a way to justify a desired ruling one way or the other.
In any case you can't dismiss a lawsuit "because no one has presented any evidence". That is part of a lawsuit itself. Perhaps the evidence will be determined to be insufficient but that will be determined within the proceeding itself.
Now if you want to say that the claims presented in this particular motion is unconvincing, that would make logical sense. But any rationale for dismissing the motion has to be based on what is in the motion, not on what is floating around in social media.
No, six attempted to do so (since the suit was never permitted to be filed, no one actually joined it.)
18 states (including the six that shortly after that filed to join the suit as party intervenors) filed a request to file a pro-plaintiff amicus brief, which is different than joining the suit.
And that’s exactly what you would expect from the data. Georgia is one of the few states in the country where Black voter registration rates are equal to registration rates for whites: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/voting-and-voter-r.... (California, by contrast, has a 12 point difference in Black-white registration rates.) In 2018, the Black voter turnout rate was actually 2 points higher than the white voter turnout rate in Georgia. It makes total sense that as you increase turnout, you’re going to see roughly the same demographics.
Same thing in Texas. 87% of votes were cast by mail in ballot. Turn out was up almost 7 points compared to 2016. But Trump earned basically the same percentage of the vote as in 2016, with Biden gaining a few points from winning people who voted third party last time: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/04/texas-voter-turnout-...
Democrats have this idea that voter suppression is preventing more minorities from coming out (and voting Democrat). But what the data seems to suggest in Georgia and Texas is that people who want to vote are already voting. Making it easier to vote or having a high states election will increase turnout, but by dipping into a pool of lower propensity voters who don’t look all that different demographically than the people who were already voting.
As to the extra voting in Texas. 2020 had an additional + 1205300 Republican votes and + 1381258 Democratic votes in a solid red state which just hit 1/2 of voting age population. That’s 46.6% Republican and 53.4% Democrat and means those extra votes very much favored Democrats. Project a 20% increase in turnout with that kind of margin and Texas is in dead even recount territory.
Of course any election where Texas is that close Democrats have already won by such a margin as to make possibility flipping Texas largely irrelevant. Further, looking at these numbers it’s clear why targeted voter suppression becomes so significant.
You can’t conclude that because it overlooks third parties (who performed very well in 2016) and people who changed their votes from 2016 to 2020. That happened in suburbs all over the country. My traditionally red county (where voting was always super easy) went for Clinton by less than a point, but for Biden by 14 points. Voter turnout was up only 4 points, so Biden’s gain came mainly from flipping votes.
In Texas, Trump won basically the same share of the much larger turnout compared to 2016 (dropping just 0.1 points). Biden’s gain came almost entirely at the expense of third party candidates.
Indeed, nationwide, turnout went up 11 points. But Trump’s vote share also went up, from 46.1% to 46.8%. Again, Biden’s increased margin came entirely at the expense of third parties.
Donations to the Green Party for example are a clever and accepted means of reducing Democrats’s turnout. Libertarians draw surprisingly evenly from both sides, but Republicans have had their own spoilers.
Biden increasing his vote share at the expense of third parties doesn’t indicate any structural benefit to Democrats from higher turnout. It seems quite specific to Trump/Biden as candidates versus Trump/Clinton. Clinton and Trump had very high disapproval ratings, which pushed people to a surprisingly strong third party vote. Biden had much lower disapproval ratings than Clinton, which led those third party voters to vote for him in 2020. That doesn’t show a structure benefit to Democrats from higher turnout.
I’ve done a little numeric modeling, and it produces some surprising implications about who new 2020 voters selected. Pre-election polling showed that 9% of Trump 2016 voters planned to vote for Biden, while only half as many Clinton 2016 voters planned to vote for Trump. Moreover, they showed people who voted third party in 2016 strongly favoring Biden.
Trump won about 11 million more votes than in 2016, and Biden won about 15 million more votes than Clinton. But there was an over 3 million vote drop in the third party vote. If you assume that Biden pulled in a significant number of Trump 2016 votes, say 6-8%, while losing only 3-4% of Clinton 2016 voters, and won the majority of people who voted third party in 2016 but not in 2020, then its quite likely Trump actually won a majority of the 22 million new votes in 2020.
Your nationwide numbers are also off for several reasons. For example many people voting in 2016 skipped the 2020 elections for various reasons like death. Further pooling including exit polls doesn’t match up with actual voting very well suggesting a significant portion of Trump voters are unwilling to say they voted or plan to vote for Trump. That or a truly massive pro Republican voter fraud which seems unlikely.
Anyway looking at hard data. In 2016 Clinton got 65,853,514 votes Trump got 62,984,828 votes. A Democratic margin of 2,868,686 million votes. In 2020 Biden got 81,282,896 votes vs Trumps 74,222,484 a Democratic margin of 7,060,412.
Using the middle of your range 62,984,828 * 0.075 - 65,853,514 * 0.035 that’s a net gain of 2,418,989 votes which far less than the actual net gain of (7,060,412 - 2,868,686) = 4,191,726 votes that Biden over Trump.
To gain the (4,191,726 - 2,418,989) = 1,772,737 votes from a 3 million 3rd party voter drop would have taken a truly extreme margin of ~80% even assuming your other assumptions where correct. That might be reasonable if they where mostly green voters, but it’s largely from the Libertarian party.
California may seem like it's 100% different, but that's mostly because people only know San Francisco, LA, and the other coastal cities. CA has its other parts, too.
I think the problem with this is that it rests on a fundamental assumption that someone's primary motivation for voting Republican is bigotry. Polls by the Pew Foundation do not bear this out. Non-college educated Democrats and Republicans have equally wrong knowledge about what people on the other side of the spectrum believe. College educated Republicans match their numbers. The outliers are college educated Democrats. They, by far, have the most distorted view of what right wing people ACTUALLY believe. It goes both ways of course, with conservatives dramatically underestimating the patriotism of liberals, etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/democr...
When I lived in Arkansas, the voters simultaneously voted for a Republican governor and state house, AND a ballot initiative to significantly raise the state minimum wage, as well as a ballot initiative for medical marijuana.
The GOP politicians were all against these measures, but the voters approved them by large majorities.
The point I'm making is that the politicians on both sides aren't in step with the electorate, even if they are chosen by the electorate. People are voting for the lesser of two evils a lot more than we give them credit for.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
The "dysfunction" is more likely a function of population density as it is a unique California thing. Watching local Austin news - definitely some familiar problems - gentrification, what to do about the homeless/crime, pollution, desires to raise taxes, traffic.
> If someone moved to Texas, they made a choice to accept it and I will not knock people for their individual choices.
Sucks if you're gay and are born near Tyler. In case others will knock you for something that wasn't even a choice to begin with.
Austin is trying to turn in a smaller scale version of San Francisco, complete with needles and shit on the streets.
Nothing about that is "great". I'll take Fort Worth over that any day.
Compared to 2020 Anywhere, 2000 Anywhere was a very bigoted place.
This really is not true, in many big cities it was another common facet of life that people were by and large apathetic about at that point.
Compare that to the dirty looks I got walking around SF in a Buck-ees hat that happened to be red. It bordered upon comedy.
Man sent to jail for attack on man wearing MAGA hat: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/man-who-attacked-maga-hat-wearin...
And an article about other incidents around the country: https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/attacks-trump-supporters...
49ers hats are not bright red, and tend to be fairly distinctive.
Anecdote time - my buddy sometimes wears a red hat with the California bear on it, and he regularly (as in without fail) gets dirty looks because of it. I personally stopped wearing my red Nike running hat in public last year because of the reactions I'd get. For context, we live in a relatively conservative East Bay suburb of Northern California.
2) Politically motivated violence is rare in the US and right-wing violence obviously exists as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Portland_train_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2018_United_States_mai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Implying that people who enjoy wearing red hats should avoid SF is like telling liberals to not open their mail. It's absurd.
3) They definitely make 49er hats in bright red:
https://www.rallyhouse.com/assets/images/products/59001909-1...
https://m.hatland.com/prodimg/m1/49ers-super-bowl-xxiii-gold...
https://www.neweracap.com/medias/sys_master/root/h75/h28/891...
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/1f6093f0-cbdc-42ac-a096-c65...
For those who doubt you, I ask them to ponder the following:
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
There are plenty of conservative places that would be upset to see Harris / Biden attire. Look no further than the classic Top Gear episode with the Gay Pride car and the Clinton car driving through the south.
Are Fort Worth and Pensacola also filled with "overly polite Mormons"? Are they also "cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales"? (Congratulations, by the way, on making polite Mormons and conservatives sound like bad things.)
Conversely, are San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Cambridge "cartoonish examples of crazy extreme leftists", or are they (unfortunately) typical of places where such congregate?
Mormons are excellent people. I sincerely appreciate how absurdly polite they are. They are cartoonishly polite. It’s just true. My newly married 20 year old next door neighbors moved in and immediately brought me, a plate of fresh baked cookies on day 1.
Fort Worth is a place with plenty of parts of town where I can pretty well guarantee that you’d catch some flack. That said, most big Texas cities are as liberal as they are conservative, if not more, so it’s a bad example of an absurdly conservative place. It’s nowhere near as conservative as SF and Cambridge are liberal. No major city in Texas is. Texas is more diverse than anyone gives it credit for.
I don’t know anything about Pensacola, so I can’t comment on that.
I think a difference might be that these are super rural and uneducated communities as opposed to global capitals of business and technology
Any society will try to grind your unique edges off to more smoothly fit into their culture. Perhaps you were more inclined to explore liberalism or intellectualism (more prone to be the culture around colleges) or had had enough of conservative religiousness. I had that same kind of inclination from ~18-30 years old.
I have seen plenty of discrimination and judgment coming from 'the right' in my upbringing (usually directed toward others). But now that I'm much more center road and no longer extremist leftist, I am experiencing increasing hostility from my still left leaning friends/groups.
I hope that the internet can somehow transform into a vehicle of understanding rather than a vehicle of argument. Maybe video comments would be more helpful in this regard.
The Texas you grew up in is not the same as Texas today. Places change. People change. Look at a county-by-county map of the election results.
That doesn't sound very specific of Texas, that's the case pretty much everywhere
What did he extract from California? Was he on welfare?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
The whole system has been optimized to milk as much money as possible from newcomers. The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted. Now that the system has finally become unsustainable, we get these ridiculous takes about how somebody "extracted wealth" from California.
This is patently false. Property taxes can and do raise 2%/year.
California does need to build new housing.
This had been especially obvious because historically low interest rates have enabled a lot of asset appreciation, with real estate being one example. High real estate prices lead to high property taxes, which makes the difference in taxes paid much more obvious.
NIMBYism also plays a part, but I think people routinely overlook that developers often don't improve local facilities in line with local housing projects, which can lead to all kinds of awfulness. That new 1000 unit apartment complex also needs 1000+ parking spaces, along with other improvements in local infrastructure in proportion to the increase in population, but a developer won't care about that unless someone forces them to care.
I guess they could be $15k/year, but I've never seen an example that high. My mom lives in Yucca Valley and has two or three Mello Roos items (water district, local community college, and something else), and I think maybe pays about $600 total for them.
https://playavistaexperts.com/buying-selling-resources/mello...
It's a ton off money either way, although I guess not surprising in Playa del Rey.
2. Why should it be the developers jobs to build out new infrastructure that isn't directly needed by their building. It's their job to build housing which brings people, those people bring taxes and those taxes pay for upgrades to infrastructure.
In terms of who should improve infrastructure, it doesn't really matter who does it, but I think either local government or the developer should be required to do it and not be allowed to let things slide. I focus on the developer because they're the first in the process, but it doesn't matter if instead the city requires the developer to build in the infrastructure improvement costs and does it themselves. The only position I have is that it should get done.
Btw what infrastructure are you talking about? Water, electrics, roads or sewage I'm guessing.
This tweet highlights some of the insaneness: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192
Someone pays $806 per year, living next to someone who pays $27,732 per year.
https://twitter.com/alfred_twu/status/1327821019931787264?s=...
Palo Alto. Someone pays $1081 per year living adjacent to someone who pays $24K per year.
You can see a detailed study of it here: https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing
Translation: The people who live there won't vote for a thing they don't want.
Because of it's size and market influence, California laws can effect the rest of the country, should the rest of the country vote in California elections?
The people who _choose_ to sit in the traffic are getting what they signed up for. I could be that person and I choose not to be in no small part to that situation.
The words "luxury housing" are designed to make you think that it is taking up space that could be used by non luxury housing. Like the only reason a new apartment is so expensive is because it has a gold-plated toilet or something, and if only the developer had built an apartment without a gold plated toilet you could afford it. But in Minneapolis, for example, a 2 bedroom apartment in the nicest building in the city, with a built in pool, car wash, and cigar lounge, is $2000 per month. That barely gets you a spot in someone's living room in SF.
This proves that it is not luxuries that make "luxury apartments" expensive in SF. The only luxury is having a roof over your head.
I liken it to the California of the Midwest. Its nots the cheapest, its more middle of the road (though, I think in absolute terms there are places around Chicago that outpace the cost of the highest cost parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro last time I looked, granted that was a few years ago).
Its culturally though, very liberal (from my own experience, tends to also be very much a democrat state). One thing I will say is Minnesota's public school system is great, and the collegiate system is both affordable and high quality, on average.
It's still cheaper than California, New York, Seattle, Portland etc. paying 2000 a month for a place to live in Minnesota is still very much not the norm, even in nice parts of the Twin Cities.
If you're willing to live up North a bit, Duluth is amazing, its mostly a college town now, and you can surf in the summers!
The downside is always the snow, though if you live in the Twin Cities there are upscale parts of downtown that have miles of indoor walkable paths that take you all over the city.
I really love the state. I've contemplated moving back several times. I just don't think my tech industry connections would carry over as well, so it would limit some of my job opportunities, even with this big push to work from home by a lot of companies. That will have to shake out for me personally first before I would consider moving back.
Though, they've done a decent job netting progressive employers and have in large part been able to avoid the economic collapse that hit much of the Midwest (the rust belt, in places like Ohio). I know a lot of people out there employed in highly trained manufacturing jobs (highly skilled CNC work, maintain automated manufacturing facilities etc.) and those jobs are the only ones in that sector that aren't leaving the USA in droves yet, plus there are a lot of medical technology companies there. Also, a lot of enterprise software companies have HQ or large presence in the cities as well.
It's not a startup scene like SF, but its changing. When I was a kid the state had these huge policy pushes to try and get people entering college to focus on technical degrees (be it 2-year technical school at a community college doing CNC machining and the like or 4-year degrees in engineering/cs). It's also one of the most educated populations in the country [0][1]
Now I just feel like I'm selling it. Though I want to mention one quirk about the population that stands up to everyone I know who has visited. Minnesota Nice [2] is alive and well still. People tend to just be more friendly there than anywhere else I've lived or travelled, and I've been through more than a dozen states from coast to coast. It's just a general demeanor thing. Thats not to say that everyone is nice all the time though, of course. I'd say on average you're less likely to have small confrontations though, than anywhere else I've been.
[0]: https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/outreach/back-to-s...
[1]: http://www.ohe.state.mn.us/fc/2108/pg.cfm
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_nice#:~:text=Minneso....
In practice, "pushes down the prices" is an overstatement, and what actually happens is that once demand pressure reaches a certain point new luxury supply only opens up higher pricing tiers. It potentially stabilizes older construction, which is not bad, but doesn't seem to provide downward pressure. The only thing that seems to do that is non-marginal demand dropping out of the market.
And if you follow it through that's how the incentives seem to be aligned. Capital examining opportunity in construction will want to chase the highest return it can and if you have capital the marginal cost on luxury construction over non-luxury at the same unit scale is usually less than the return. On top of that, at certain scales of operation vacancy is apparently less of a drag on nominal property values involved in the accounting and financing, which means prices tend to float down when the fall rather than plummet. Though of course, any potential developer doing the math is going to look at vacancy rate and will make their decision about whether/what to build targeting points short of outright surplus.
There are some types markets where I think you can drive down pricing market-wide by coming in from the top (consumer tech sure seems to work that way) and that's my guess why so many seem think the same must apply to housing. Perhaps housing could indeed work the same way if the actual manufacturing techniques and costs were being iterated with the same speed and scale.
But that's why there are specific drives for affordable housing: building at the top slows/stops price increases but only lets people on the verge of being priced out tread water.
Personally I think there needs to be vacancy taxes proportional to the market segment being operated (probably also correlated to tightness of supply) so that prices clear on the falling side more easily, but who knows how that would change people's construction calculations.
If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion.
It's definitely not any individual townships moral or civic responsibility to change their community to accommodate either state/national strategic planning, especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between. If the FAANGs having trouble with salaries and bringing in people want, they can be part of this strategy.
I bet there are thousands of G staffers who'd live to live somewhere south of Morgan Hill, away from the city.
Suppose a person buys a house to retire in, on a peaceful quiet little street with plenty of room to park. The neighbors then build: an 80-story apartment tower, a supervised injection place for IV drug users, an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant.
Maybe we overdo it, but yes, we're going to curtail private property rights.
If this is financially viable, that land must be worth a ton. Retiree should sell the property and stop monopolizing such valuable land. They'll have plenty of funds to use to move elsewhere
> a supervised injection place for IV drug users
Very few people want one of these built near them, which itself causes huge societal problems. We'd be better off in aggregate if more services for the poor could be built.
>an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant
Unlikely to be built on expensive residential land, but if they were it would help fight climate change by reducing commute times, since employees can now live nearby. The existence of actual property rights allows ample housing to be built in this high-demand area
The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
The failure in the 'property rights' argument is that what's built on one property affects the other - there are externalizations.
What is built on one plot, affects the materiality (and value) of the others.
These arguments exist only on HN and other boards, thankfully.
Calling Houston uncivil is a subjective judgement I can’t objectively falsify, and so is calling its residents “nobody”, but the latter act strikes me as ironically uncivil, and IMO not in line with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
But there are good reasons we ought to have governments, and fewer reasons we ought to have a State. I would sum those up as keeping the four horsemen at bay, adjudicating disputes and delivering justice. A few decent reasons too, such as accelerating R&D with their justifiable actions, but pretty much everything else is an abuse of power and tax authority.
Also your examples are ridiculous. There are few places in the world where you can just throw up an 80 story apartment building, and even fewer people who can afford to to spite their neighbors. A world where police powers are not abused to the extreme that they are is also not one without a quiet place to retire without an organometallic peroxide plant nearby, nor one without remedies if a neighbor chooses to break ground on such a project.
Zoning is an important and foundational aspect of civil governance, and works well for the most part.
If SF residents in any clear majority wanted to have zoning laws changed, they probably could, there's a fair component of democratic impetus here.
Most importantly - it's essential to recognize that points of property are not fundamentally discrete from one another.
The value of one piece of property depends a lot on what's around it. Large buildings vs small ones, noise vs quiet, density vs. green, sun vs shade, - there are major externalizations to every property, and zoning helps establish parameters for those things.
Go ahead and put a 50 ft flag pole on our front lawn with a flag on it and see how your neighbours react.
There are innumerable situations wherein tall towers would go up beside homes - they exist in droves in literally every city. Go to any North American city, go to where there are tall buildings - and find homes nearby. Those homes are likely there due to zoning.
There are even more instances wherein homes would be knocked down to put up all sorts of other things - office buildings, industrial facilities, retail outlets, clinics - whatever.
There is in general, no interest in that. Not even the folks wanting to build 80-story towers want it really, lets the autoplant be built across the street and destroy their own property value.
Where we disagree is whether it is an abuse, not the mechanism by which it is justified by the State.
We don’t disagree that what is around is a factor in our purchase and selling decisions, but to be frank, when the developer of your hypothetical skyscraper bought the land to build the skyscraper, he didn’t buy the lot across the street with it that would one day become this hypothetical autoplant, nor the use rights for the lot across the street. In fact, the developer probably didn’t buy across an empty lot because someone that is building an 80 story apartment building wants to attract tenants, and tenants want neighborhood amenities if they’re living in an apartment building.
You could still build across from an empty lot that might be an auto plant in the future, but you don’t build that big without a business case. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we’re agreed on that, and I’m not even 100% against zoning, just maybe 99% of how it is used.
When you buy property, you buy property, not the rights to limit the development and use of all the other properties around you. That “right” comes from a simple tyranny of the majority using the State as their vehicle of power.
It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure.
If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
Also, I'll be even a hyper fast public transport system that connected the Bay Area with surrounding regions: imagine the Bart/Caltrain being 'one thing' running in a really fast loop around the bay, with quick buses LTRs as spokes - and then fast communter trains connecting them out to Sac, Modesta, Santa Rosa, that might work.
Especially if they build smartly around slight more dense centres instead of just pure suburban homes.
Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. They de-diversify and oppress.
> If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost: $3000 for a bachelor. Do anything other than work for FAANG? Sorry, you don’t get to live here. Please bus an hour so you can serve me coffee.
> Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
Bulldozing exclusive communities and replacing them with inclusive ones, which create more local business opportunities and reduce dependence on transportation. Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd.
> There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies. And leads to class segregation (which is a proxy for racial segregation in the US.)
This is a ridiculously false statement.
Everyone wants zoning laws, you can't put up a gas station or an industrial facility right in the middle of xyz residential neighbourhood, nobody wants that.
"Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost"
So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
Are you arguing for rights or not? Which is it?
SF residents wanting to keep zoning laws intact are making their own choices, and that's fine.
"Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd."
Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
"This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies"
Total rubbish. Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization ... which is exactly why those types of people move there. They are downright boring in their concientiousness.
That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
That’s not reality. It doesn’t make economic sense for a an industrial business to set up shop in a supposedly “residential area” - there will still be commercial clusters because that makes sense economically. And you can still define environmental regulations and build infrastructure where you want industrial commerce to happen. Zoning laws are mostly abused.
> So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
The people who are making the choice are the ones who can afford to make the choice. Everyone else is forced out. So what you end up with is a bunch of entitled rich people who forced everyone else out of the market, bleeding the city of its charm and diversity.
> Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
You don’t reach the density of Hong Kong without need. For HK that need is to be included in the region of (former) autonomy. Naturally things aren’t going to get that dense. You can double the density of SF and it still won’t look anything near like HK. And once again, the people who are adamantly against densifying the city are not the ones who have to commute an hour by transit to work in it. They are the stakeholders because they forced their way in. What about people who used to work in SF but got forced out by rising rent, but who still work in the city. They don’t deserve a say?
> Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization
This is so painfully ignorant it’s hard to unpack. Do you understand the toll it takes on small business owners to not be able to buy commercial land where people live? Do you recognize the damage that daily mass commuting into and out of the city has on both the global and local environment? Do you understand that the “peace” is actually just economic segregation? Take a drive outside the gated communities and go on down to the economically segregated “suburbs” of the less fortunate. I believe they call those “ghettos” in the US. Not sure you’ll find much peace or safety there.
> That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
Man you are a piece of work.
The above sentence could be said about building codes.
I sort of jest but also shudder to think: How soon will progressive SFBA thought leaders call out building and health and safety codes as pushing up costs and excluding homeowners (and potential homeowners) that cannot comply with them ?
Because they absolutely do that. God help us if we act on that knowledge ...
Dezoning is not an argument for deregulation, it’s about creating new economic opportunity in a very direct way. You don’t have to sacrifice building safety as a next step. Sure, you could. And you might be right that it is economically positive to do so. But that’s a sort of deregulation extremism.
It’s the places that everyone want to live in that are crowded, and there are good reasons apartment blocks aren’t going up in farmland (this isn’t China where people are told to live outside the fifth or sixth ring road just because).
So if SF goes 'Hong Kong' style i.e. tears down all those homes and puts full on sky-scrapers everywhere, will the 'current' residents be happy, and will future residents want to be there as much?
'Everyone wants to live there' - which is why it's so expensive - this is an inevitability of a good culture whereupon the physicality is usually critical.
If SF went Hong Kong it simply wouldn't be SF.
Pay the price or live elsewhere - California is vast and beautiful.
Also - if some areas on the peninsula put their minds to it, they could be as cool and fun as SF.
Nobody is arguing it’s not their discretion. I’m just saying it makes you a bad actor in the larger community of people who would like to benefit from the opportunity of living in a city that they otherwise might not get if they weren’t living in the city.
> especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
They don’t live there because they’re being systematically and economically excluded from living there by people of means who are unaffected by the damage they’re doing to their own local economy.
> There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between.
So... not in your back yard?
People who want change are free to leave. Only when there are no other places to leave to will there be change.
CA is as expensive as it is in large part because of NIMBYs and tax schemes that were absolutely the product of right-wing ballot initiatives for the most part. OTOH, a large part of the appeal of TX is that it doesn't have a state income tax, but the state is absolutely on the dole. IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, the narrative about people moving from CA to TX often makes it sound like a narrative about left-wing economic policies vs. right-wing economic policies, but the reality is that CA is expensive in large part because of right-wing economic policies and TX is cheap in large part because it's basically on welfare from the Federal government. Which is fine, the system should allow economically healthier states to help the less successful states get by (looking at you KY), but it's so counter to the narrative that usually surrounds these stories that people tend to sweep it under the rug. And also TX is hardly an economically unhealthy, depressed state in need of assistance from the rest of the country. It should step up and stop being being a bum, because AFAICT it's not a bum but rather a state with well above-average prospects.
This isn't true. According to the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report dated Jan 8, 2019 (which used the data from the Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2019) the fifty states all had differing Federal expenditures vs Federal receipts but Texas and California were close. See page 15 at [1].
On a per capita basis, here are the federal expenditures per dollar of receipts for a few states:
Connecticut 0.74 50th
New Jersey 0.82 49th
Massachusetts 0.83 48th
New York 0.86 47th
North Dakota 0.94 46th
Illinois 0.97 45th
New Hampshire 0.98 44th
Washington 0.98 43rd
Nebraska 0.98 42nd
Colorado 0.99 41st
California 1.00 40th <=== CA
Texas 1.03 39th <=== TX
Utah 1.04 38th
Wisconsin 1.06 37th
Wyoming 1.06 36th
Minnesota 1.09 35th
Iowa 1.13 34th
Nevada 1.14 33rd
South Dakota 1.15 32nd
Kansas 1.23 31st
Florida 1.24 30th
...
Virginia 1.97 6th
Alabama 1.99 5th
West Virginia 2.17 4th
Mississippi 2.19 3rd
New Mexico 2.34 2nd
Kentucky 2.35 1st
Or is VA's proximity to DC and ownership of a lot of the Federal apparatus helping them to get a disproportionate cut?
The former -- lack of growth in the rest of the state -- may also be driving the state Blue.
"Other states are high or low for various reasons: the outliers Maryland and Virginia, for example, both have dramatically higher Federal spending per capita than the average state, as they are near the physical headquarters for most of the Federal government and have significantly disproportionate Federal spending for procurement and Federal wages."
So, while Virginia is a relatively high-income state and contributes a lot of Federal income tax, they also have a lot of Federal employees, grants, contracts, etc.
(I was surprised at first too)
I feel like the average HN poster sits in a pretty air-tight STEM bubble and doesn't realise how bad life for most people in the Bay Area who are not in STEM. To them, tech workers can leave and the industry can tank and it would be a welcome change. The tax revenue the cities have made during this "boom" have not affected them at all. Building more houses just means more traffic, more crowded hiking trails and beaches, more crowded and trashed natural parks, and for what?
They think it has not affected them, but if they stop, the house of cards that is underfunded ultra-generous defined benefit state/municipal pensions tumbles like a house of cards. When the munis start going bankrupt, only then will people notice...
Who benefits from these exactly?
Tax revenue is up ten fold from where it was at in 2008 and yet the quality of life for most of my connections not working in tech in the bay area is much worse. Everything is more expensive, taxes are much higher, traffic is 10x as bad, homelessness is more severe... Who's this "house of cards" supporting?
The minimum wage is up, that's the only thing, but it doesn't matter. Since a couple making minimum wage could actually have an apartment in 2008, which is not the case now.
Notice he's "fleeing" after he made his billions.
I've never heard anyone in Tyler scream at random strangers calling them "f*t". But that does seem to be a pretty much daily occurrence from the illustrious cast of characters that hang out around the Powell Street BART station.
You might not have heard it because they've already hammered down all the nails around you that stick out.
A couple years ago I was at a bar in Marfa, Texas - a small art-centric town that gets a lot of tourism for things like it's fake Prada store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa) - and overheard a few guys celebrating a birthday. They were all clearly gay, which isn't unusual in Marfa. I started talking with them and it turned out that one of them, who was black, had just bought a ranch a half hour north of Marfa outside the town of Fort Davis. Fort Davis also has a bit of a touristy feel with its exaggerated "old western town" look and because it's right outside Fort Davis State Park, but culturally it's no Marfa.
The fact that an openly gay black man felt comfortable buying farmland in a small Texas town was pretty awesome. I have a hard time believing that would've happened even 10 years ago. In fact, he might be the first.
I hope he still likes it there.
Well, live and let live sounds pretty ideal, given that in several places across California conservative opinions are not tolerated.
Maybe we agree that a college town in Texas it's a place where opposing viewpoints can still coexist?
It's odd because I grew up in a major metro, and going to college I found people in college to be very strict and severe about enforcing their morals on people. You had to use specific language, be nice and more forgiving and understanding to the right groups of people, and you were not supposed to disagree on specific subjects of discussion or you'd be a pariah.
The idea that this is "live and let live" is silly. It seems that way to you because your morals align very closely with the morals of people in a college setting. If they didn't, you'd notice the similarities to an orthodox religious community immediately.
I think that people underestimate just how common this very same thing is here in California.
> but lots of people live in the 'burbs and around the smaller areas and do not get the benefit of this peaceful coexistence
Again, very similar to California.
I grew up in California and moved to Texas for 13 years, and have recently (begrudgingly too) moved back to California. Things have not changed a whole lot here. Once you get out of the cities and into more rural areas, it's about the same as you'd experience anywhere else.
Houston is literally the most diverse city in America, statistically speaking.
And you have to look hard to find religiously conservative people in any Texas metro that are also exclusionary. I say that as someone neither white nor Christian.
If anything, the only place you may find a lack of diversity is Austin, which is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly intolerant of non-leftist opinions.
I hear this claim from time to time but I’d like to know what it means concretely. Do you mean things like churches being closed due to COVID, or some sort of anti-white racism existing in Austin on the one hand while on the other hand racism isn’t prevalent outside of Austin?
Lol. A couple weeks ago, there was footage of a bunch of Trump supporters in trucks boxing in a Biden campaign box on I-35 and trying to run it off the road.
This isn't a state where people with differing political opinions can coexist harmoniously.
The problem is that most people on HN, and elsewhere on the internet, got everything they know about Texas from watching cartoons on TV. (Same for their knowledge of religion.)
They enjoy repeating half-century-old stereotypes while turning a blind eye to their own region's failings. It's geographic fanboyism.
/Lived in Texas for five years. Also lived in 13 other states. Would return to Texas if the opportunity arose.
So it's not just Elon. It's those who have the opportunity to do so where it does not impact their lifestyle significantly.
Every area has its unique challenges and benefits. For example, there are many jobs in California in a variety of areas including tech.
He's not a perfect person by any stretch but he's been a net benefit and gain for CA, the US, and maybe the world?
The guy constantly gets called out for his twitter shitposting and people think he's some evil overlord... these same folks don't seem to care at all when their elected reps sell them out w.r.t housing, development, healthcare.
Unless you are referring to specifically the covid moves, which are high cost of living minus geography mattering. It's anyone's guess whether it'll continue or reverse or what after covid.
Unfortunately many of those leaving don't realize the policies they voted for are the main cause of this mess and might repeat the same thing in the new areas.
Mostly because it got more crowded. As a CA resident, if you don't like CA, please DO move out. It will help traffic, for one.
If ALL you care about is a big house and taxes, then CA is probably not for you. As soon as you walk outside your TX McMansion, you may realize why CA is so crowded.
So what? That means more people and tax revenue to solve problems. There are plenty of very dense areas around the world run just fine. This is a failure of policy not population. If people are such a problem then maybe tax-paying law-abiding citizens should be prioritized over illegal immigration.
> "If ALL you care about is a big house and taxes, then CA is probably not for you... you may realize why CA is so crowded."
Who said that? Your dismissive and defensive attitude along with blaming completely irrelevant details like population is the reason why CA and its voting populace is in the state that it's in.
Please list what has gotten better in CA over the last 10 years or I'll assume you have no argument.
I'm not the state government though, I'm an individual with a life outside of my house. When the majority of the time for any activity outside of my house is sitting in traffic or waiting in lines, it's difficult to enjoy the area you live in. For this reason, I find myself heading further and further out of town to find areas or activities that aren't completely congested. Tax revenue won't make the lines shorter or traffic less. To do either would require bulldozing all of the housing and building up, at least where I am. Unfortunately, whenever this is done, luxury condos or apartments are the result, with rent that's higher than a mortgage, even for around here.
I've been very grateful to have non-extreme weather throughout the year. I am looking outside at a sunny sky right now and I will go walking on a path shortly to clear my mind. For someone with high allergies, I found that I am not allergic to trees, pollen, and grass in LA. I've had several nasal surgeries in the past to fix issues from allergies. I didn't want to risk it in Austin with different plant landscape.
Still, why can't there be a beautiful place with lower taxes? If taxes are enough to drive people away from a breathtaking place, maybe they're too high.
If you don't spend your weekends fly-fishing Big Pine Creek, 4x4ing the Mojave Road, climbing at Joshua Tree, grabbing burritos and craft beer at Grand Central Market, and swimming out to the mile-buoys at La Jolla Cove, why stay? If your eyes don't light up when you hear 'Clifton's Cafeteria,' or 'Pappy and Harriet's,' or 'half-day boat' what on earth are you doing here?
This state is one of the most unique and incredible places in the country. I can drive from the lowest point in the continental United States (Badwater) to the foot of the highest point (Whitney) in a couple of hours. That's absolutely magical. I love this state with a deep passion, and I know many of its nooks and crannies (still exploring and learning). That's why I will never leave.
If you don't do any of that stuff and you just sit in a bubble writing code all day why on earth would you stay? Just takes parking away from the people that actually enjoy California for the magical place that it is.
I'm happy to pay higher taxes. It helps keep this state humming along as the 5th largest economy on the planet.
Tens of thousands per year in state income tax. The nation's highest sales tax on top of that and we barely even afford school buses for my kids.
Why? Because all that tax revenue is going into my landlords already fat pockets. Prop 13 is over $30B per year -- that's 4x the size of the NSF and $7B larger than NASA. That stupid law ruined the state and I don't fault anyone for leaving. I'm trying to figure a way out to.
Prop 13 is pretty controversial, and considering it bullshit it not something I would consider unreasonable.
I wish you the best wherever life takes you.
It's not perfect by any means but you could easily draw up a similar list for any state. A state is a big area and it's probably more useful to talk about most of these kinds of things at a local level.
CA provides sanctuary status for illegal immigrants, along with driver licenses, free healthcare and other benefits paid for by tax-paying citizens. Traffic is terrible because of a lack of any other alternatives that are routinely defunded, destroyed and dismissed from high-speed rail to bus lines to ridesharing.
CA is now worse than before. It's also worse than many other places. Just because 1 facet is better than somewhere else doesn't impact the objective collective decline. Again, please name 10 things that have gotten better in CA over the last decade if you can.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-prop-47-shoplifting-th...
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-cal...
Why are you suspicious? When you stop arresting people for crimes and allow criminal behavior then you get more crime. This is so correlated as to be mathematical fact. This is no different to NY removing bail and then being surprised that criminals walk right out of the courthouse and back to their operations the same day while being further emboldened by these policies.
Many think there isn't much crime because they're usually sheltered from it by distance and police activity. It only takes a small gap to notice how bad conditions can get, and how quickly they deteriorate.
I've been a California resident for over 20 years. Feel free to come down to LA and I'll walk you through the actual streets from downtown to Inglewood. We can even visit a few prisons where I can introduce you to people on both sides of the law, visit the various homeless areas, and talk to the gang task force and DEA agents. Maybe we can also go down to the border and see how things are.
Or perhaps are you too used to a single media perspective and have little experience with the reality on the ground?
I'm also from a multi-racial family with rich African American roots and spent many summers and trips with my family who mostly live in Lynwood/Compton (no these aren't scary names to me, just places with fond memories of summers spent with cousins).
> Or perhaps are you too used to a single media perspective
I don't get my perspective from media. I get it from living.
There is such a high degree of historical segregation in the state, that sheltered white folks definitely do have a big shock when they, say, hop onto the Purple Line to visit Watts Towers. It's just so different, and I think people don't know how to process it since they have no frame of reference.
It's a shame, because historically African American parts of Los Angeles have a wonderfully rich history that is much more than just 'Crips and Bloods.'
Glad to hear your perspective.
But since you have such a long history, what part of my previous comments are you disagreeing with? Care to tell us what in CA has improved over this last decade?
Cross at San Ysidro, grab lunch at Tacos El Franc and some craft beers at Border X Brewing in Tijuana. Visit CECUT, navigate the traffic circle around Las Tijeras for a real Latin American driving experience, and pick up a torta and some chapulines at Mercado Hidalgo, and then head over to Tecate for a relaxing stroll around the zocalo and a visit to the brewery. Or even south to wine country, and beautiful Ensenada where I've spend many weekends wandering around on-foot exploring by myself.
The beaches in Ensenada are gorgeous and don't get the crowds of the So Cal beaches. I recommend the Ultramarino bar for craft beer and live local music (mostly rock), and if you can find them (it's a very walkable city), the fish taco stand across the street from the birria stand (you'll know it when you find it) is where my family and I head straight-for when we enter the city limits. If you're just looking to hang out and get some work done with your laptop there are several good hipster coffee shops with wifi.
If you're really, really fancy, Verde y Crema in Tijuana is pretty cool (I've only eaten there once, it's a little pricey for me). Tijuana also has a bunch of hipster bars, that are what I imagine SF looking like back when Lenny Bruce was doing shows (Try a big 'ol caguama of Indio beer at El Tigre - It's walkable from the San Ysidro pedestrian crossing).
We could even do the biannual Rosarito to Ensenada bike ride when things open up again after COVID. Hundreds of people turn out, they let you cycle along the toll road, and it's very family-friendly. That Tijuana-to-Ensenada toll road drive is my favorite coastal drive, only second to California 1.
Aw hell, maybe we could even go to a Xolos game.
A visit to the border sounds just wonderful right now, and I can't wait until we get the vaccine out so I can start heading down every weekend again.
Maybe you should visit scenes like these to get an understanding of the topic discussed: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-24/cartel-c...
The drugs coming this way I couldn't give less of a shit about. I'm pro-decriminalization anyway.
I hope that doesn't stop anyone from spending time in Baja, California. It is truly one of the hidden gems of the area. The people are wonderful, and the region has a lot to offer. Your least pleasant experience will be dealing with US Customs and Border protection on the way back in. Those people have a real stick up their ass.
To add on to the understanding thing above, I did a master's in International Affairs with a focus on Latin American Politics and a special interest in the Drug War in Mexico at UCSD's school of Global Policy and Strategy. I took a class from David Shirk. My final GIS project was tracing narcotics trafficking routes up through Mexico. I know more about it than I want to. And yet, despite all that, I will talk anyone's ear off about the absolute wonders of Baja, California to anyone who will listen because it really is a special place.
As for the rest, yes the situation complicated, although I'm not sure what the people of Baja and its tourism have to do with the state of California and its conditions. Were you using this to refute any of my previous comments or something else?
This state has massive problems that do come with its massive population and economy. But it is also a truly special place with a totally unique geography, a rich, diverse culture, a robust economy, and one of the best public university systems on the planet.
I hate it when people start on the 'California is falling apart' train, because it's not. The state has massive problems. Yes, I've walked alone south of Los Angeles street recently. I've seen the used needles scattered on the Gold Line tracks. But that is just one tiny part of what is a truly magical place. For all of that, there's Joshua Tree, and Grand Central Market, and Lake Sabrina, and the quiet postwar bungalows of San Diego, and the Sutro Tower poking out of the fog, and Coronado island, and the Griffith Park Observatory, and the Broad, and Big Bear Lake, and Kelso Dunes, and Telescope Peak, and the French Laundry, and Pappy and Harriet's.
California is falling apart in some places and booming in others. It's a big 'ol nuanced tapestry. That's how it goes when you have 40 million neighbors. But, I wandered around downtown Palm Springs this morning, and lemme tell ya San Jacinto has never looked more gorgeous. I was in Oklahoma two weeks ago, and man the first thing I did when my plane landed back in California was remind myself how fortunate I am to live here.
Of course positives exist, but they are few and decreasing. Unsurprisingly, nobody has yet to answer my repeated question to name 10 things that have gotten better over the last 10 years.
2. Craft beer has continued to get better and better in San Diego.
3. The Black Mountain bouldering area has been more highly developed.
4. Shoshone got internet.
5. Grand Central Market got refurbished.
6. Angel's Flight is open again.
7. Modern Times got Black House on nitro (ok, so this belongs in 2, but it's just so good it deserves its own point.)
8. They re-did the 10 between Redlands and Cabazon.
9. The San Diego light rail got extended out to UCSD.
10. Pho came to 29 Palms (although the loss of Palm Kebab is deeply mourned).
11. Here's an extra one just for fun, Mira Mesa got an 85 Degrees. Hello sea salt coffee.
12. Oh, here's another one. They fixed the toll road between Rosarito and Ensenada where it got wiped out by a landslide, so it took like 40 minutes off the drive.
13. Wait, here's another one. They opened the CBX cross-border express in Otay, so you can fly cheap and direct from San Diego to Mexico City by just walking directly across the border into the Tijuana airport.
14. Oh, and the Sand to Snow National Monument got established.
15. California got three brand new medical schools as well.
16. Oh, and now you can fly in a P51 Mustang at the Palm Springs air museum (They have a C47 as well that is so cool. The sound of radial aircraft engines makes my knees weak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbc5OCU0s00 ...Just do it. Why haven't you done it yet? Hurry up and do it. My god...just listen to those engines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlpmHBgHBCg)
17. Marijuana also got recreationally legalized in the state.
18. Bodie remains the same, which in the grand scheme of things I consider a net positive.
19. The Broad opened in Downtown Los Angeles.
20. Oh gosh, I guess I'll round it out. The cops stopped hassling people over doing the Carrizo Canyon hike (to the largest wooden railroad trestle in the world) in Anza Borrego from Carrizo Gorge Road (the coolest route) along the railroad tracks. (If you do it, do yourself a favor and round the day off with a visit to the Arroyo Tapiado mud caves)
Cool California stuff from a Californian who spends their time doing cool California stuff instead of sitting around getting bummed out about statistics. Elon can have fun in Texas, no hard feelings.
I'm up in Silicon Valley, and... would say some things have gotten better in 10 years. The craft beer explosion has definitely hit here, too, and even more so around Sacramento.
A terrific new tiki bar opened in Oakland (The Kon-Tiki) and multiple terrific new tiki bars opened in San Francisco (Pagan Idol, Last Rites, Zombie Village; Smuggler's Cove opened in 2009, so not technically within 10 years, but they're considered one of the best bars -- not just tiki bars -- in the world).
As much as San Franciscans like to dump on San Jose, I think downtown San Jose has actually gotten pretty cool in a lot of respects, and that's entirely in the last decade.
There's a fair number of other smaller towns scattered around the Bay Area which are seeing some silver linings of gentrification.
I could probably come up with a more detailed list, but despite some very real downsides, particularly economic -- real estate prices really are out of control (and there is no One Single Cause to point to, despite a lot of folks trying); homelessness has become a genuine epidemic -- it's still a great place to be, and it's hard for me to think of another place in America where I'd genuinely rather be. (This is distinct from "another place I'd still like.")
I hadn't heard that tiki bars were a thing! That's pretty cool. Talk about a blast from the past.
With regards to real estate prices, that is one thing where I can really, really understand people's complaints. Even down in So-Cal you can see desert cabins on the market for $300k. I figured a bubble would burst at some point, but it hasn't so far. Maybe with more WFH folks who don't really want to be here can go somewhere that they can get more bang for their buck in terms of property, and the die-hard California folks can catch a break on real estate prices.
Cheers though! Good to hear from someone who isn't so down on California. It really is a cool place, and it's easy to take it for granted until you've spent some time in the Midwest.
I expected real estate prices to start going down, well, any year now, and they're definitely a drag on things. I'm likely to have to leave California in a year or so for family obligations; moving back a few years after that will prove difficult, I suspect, unless I find one of those "merely" $300K desert cabins!
/s
And let's be real here: the policies that have driven California's economic woes date back to the 1970s (tax policy, rent control) or far, far longer (water and fire management), and many of those old policies were pushed into place because California has long been a place people genuinely want to be. If you think we're being obstinate in pushing back against you, it's perhaps because we think you're coming across like "California is NOTHING BUT A PIT OF STEAMING DESPAIR." No, sorry, it isn't. Even now, heading into 2021, it just isn't. The highs aren't going to balance out the lows for everybody, and yes, it would be disingenuous to pretend the lows aren't there -- but it's just as disingenuous to pretend the highs aren't, either.
The lack of people being able to answer yet type multiple paragraphs in response is extremely telling. If you can't even explain how quality-of-life has improved for yourself then what argument is there?
I see these easily debunked anti-immigration talking points regularly elsewhere on the web in right-wing circles, but I'm surprised to see it on HN.
I encourage anyone interested in the reality of immigration(including the common myths like the above) to either read Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, or watch a short talk on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6wGLhEW_uc
Feel free to actually respond to the specific policies that are affecting the state of California instead. Here's just 1 example to get you started: Illegal immigrants have free healthcare until the age of 26 in California, however tax-paying law-abiding citizens are fined if they don't have health insurance.
Indeed, I didn't attempt to debunk anything you said, other than point out they are easily debunked. You understand that these are two separate things, right?
If something is so easy to debunk, then please do so instead of just claiming it is and posting a non-sequitur.
To put it in briefly: Concerns over immigration's impact on labor markets and cultural assimilation are not only wildly sensationalized by not supported by any evidence in data or studies on the subject. They are a thin veneer over xenophobia.
The less immigration controls, the better off everyone(worldwide) is.
(I swear, the lump-of-labor fallacy is responsible for like 75% of this kind of populist tripe)
Also, it's really...strange...to place the blame for the fires or the weather at the foot of the state.
Why is your only defense picking single skewed metrics and comparing it to separate places? Are you going to compare CA as a whole against TX or would that reveal your bias?
You still haven't answered what has gotten better in CA over the last 10 years so I'm going to end this here.
EDIT for your newly added last line: I thought about this and figured that HN readers would understand that "weather isn't great either" was in addition to the other issues and even specifically wrote "main cause" in the hopes that nobody would conflate the issues but here we are. But yes fires are mostly due to poor planning and infrastructure. Wildfires are the most preventable disaster but California has gotten to the point where insurance companies are proactively cancelling policies because of the fire damage.
You twice pointed out illegal immigrants with emphasis on their contrast to "tax-paying" citizens but failed to connect it to any deeper meaning. So what if they've given them driver's licenses or paid for children & young adult healthcare? At least they've made attempts to integrate them, ostensibly recognizing their hardships and to prevent them from engaging in crime or becoming homeless.
Wildfires are easily preventable if you draw the line at individuals not lighting shit on fire in arid areas or private companies better maintaining their infrastructure.
Instead of costing citizens, working with federal agencies to remove illegal immigrants would be the better outcome. That would do a much better job of actually eliminating crime instead of enabling it with driving privileges.
But... you still haven't answered what has gotten better in CA over the last 10 years. So let's call it done now.
Would it? How do you know?
It's not that nothing has gotten better, but it's obviously relative. Everything has two sides.
- Marijuana was legalized and the convictions of thousands of inmates and priors adjusted accordingly, bettering the lives of thousands.
- Better protections and benefits for those here illegally.
- LGBT protections and rights under the law have greatly expanded.
- Worker protections from discrimination and predatory employers has expanded.
- Most types of crimes have decreased (and if you think things have been wrongly decriminalized, I'd be interested to hear what they are).
- Home values have probably doubled in that time without property tax increase.
- The tech industry continued to grow and employ more workers.
One could go on.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QgrfJvfa8XaVm0MEfU4j...
This isn't true at all. Since prop 47, property crime has exploded across the state. Even violent crime rates are significantly higher in LA than they were in 2010.[2][3] In particular gang-on-gang violence may be moving the homicide rate lower, but predator-on-prey violence has shot up. Rapes have more than doubled in the past decade.
> From Seattle to Los Angeles, a “shoplifting boom” is hitting major retailers, which deal with thousands of thefts, drug overdoses, and assaults each year. Since 2010, thefts increased by 22 percent in Portland, 50 percent in San Francisco, and 61 percent in Los Angeles
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/west-coast-shoplifting-boom [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr02.php [3] https://abc7.com/murder-los-angeles-crime-covid/7185695/
Property arrests and crimes are actually down, while violent crime has increased.
Interestingly, just as a comparison, Texas has as many rapes despite having somewhere around 10M less people.[1]
Do you have any source that states that this increase is actually due to more crimes taking place, rather than more victims reporting rapes due to shifting attitudes and/or less fear of societal rebuke? It could very well have been under-reported in the past due to stigma and other reasons.
These kind of societal factors can often affect the number of reported rapes more than the actual crime rate does. And we absolutely know that the attitude toward sexual violence and misconduct has changed a lot in the last decade. So it is reasonable to believe that this had had some effect on the increase of reported sexual violence, especially since most other violent crime has had sharp declines.
Summary of the provided source for people scrolling past:
Since 2010, homicide had a 21% decrease, robbery a 14% decrease, aggravated assault a 25% increase, and rape a 94% increase.
The contrast is even more sharp when looking 20 years back:
Since 2000, homicide had a 52% decrease, robbery a 35% decrease, aggravated assault a 47% decrease, and rape a 41% increase.
Also, police departments and mayors have every incentive to keep reported crime lower. The LAPD, for instance, has a history of underclassifying crimes to maintain appearances that their city was safe: https://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-lapd-reclass-20141...
Also, the OP specifically pointed to 10-year statistics, not 20. Isn't it at all concerning that we're erasing all the progress we've made over the course of decades?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QgrfJvfa8XaVm0MEfU4j...
The fact is Musk extracted all his value from California then “fled” to Texas.
He’s a parasite.
I don't see many "opposing viewpoints" in Palo Alto either.
Also, more people move to California than any other state.
California is just huge
No. There's a trend of rich people commissioning articles about them leaving california. Articles which provide literally zero evidence of a trend.
The media likes to build up hype brands and then do exposes to deflate them. It's different parts of the media doing different hyping/deflating.
Indeed and people leaving LA or SF because of the homelessness problem are going to have a serious wakeup call when they get to Austin. It's certainly not as bad as it is in CA but there are tent cities under countless overpasses and downtown has a large amount of homeless.
I think you're talking about Dallas/Houston/Austin vs everything else. I actually wouldn't necessarily call that diverse, it's in fact polarizing, but that's okay.
At the end of the day, no one in Texas really cares because the economy is strong and people's assets are going up. Until that stops (and it will eventually, like California) then thats where the divisiveness is going to be a problem.
> But its pretty diverse, and it seems that folks with opposing viewpoints can still coexist here. I like that...
You hear this a lot lately from tech bros. It's hilarious considering how many things are illegal in Texas. Ya you can buy an assault rifle, but its illegal to buy hard liquor on Sunday. Have you ever looked at their gerrymandering? Did you know during the 2016 election they didn't allow mail in ballots?
Hispanics are set to become the largest racial demographic soon. ~13% of the population is black.
Houston is one of the, if not the depending on the report, racially diverse cities in the country. It's a bit self segregated geographically, but is pretty impressive and there is a lot of culture to be found. Large Asian community with substantial communities from countries that don't really exist elsewhere in the state.
The state is also more or less purple outside the voting booth. Major metro areas have higher concentrations of liberals. Etc etc.
Pretty much a microcosm of the USA.
Yes the like most urban areas they trend left and more ethnically diverse. Thus Texas is also trending left. I'm not sure what your point is.
Is your point that change is coming for Texas? I totally agree with that, but I think it's going to be a longer and harder fight than most think. From my experience a lot of the white population there are some of the worse bigots I've ever met.
My point was it's not a very free state, lol there are just certain specific things allowed. And it has low taxes so it's great if you're already rich and successful.
It likely posed an appreciable risk to his business ventures that CA at some point will try to tax unrecognized capital gains, which would require him to liquidate shares to pay the tax. Basically akin to a hostile government takeover.
If CA were to aggressively pursue such a policy, they would likely go after anyone they perceived as fleeing just ahead of it.
In a situation like that, best to cut ties from the state as much as possible as soon as possible. This is why he had to sell all his CA assets.
Replace paintings with ownership of a company (equity) and you should get the idea.
There is no guarantee that the current market-clearing price for a given object is equivalent to that at which a larger inventory can be sold.
Taxing capital gains at the time of sale makes sense -- there is actual revenue available for taxation. Taxing unrealized gains can be a path to really-negative outcomes. This is particularly so if the government doesn't give matching credits for unrealized capital losses.
I'm no expert, but I would guess that, if shares are foreclosed upon, the bank's basis is zero (and their taxation short-term)?
(Edit: the downside here is that the government doesn't see any revenue from this approach, which it might otherwise. The shareholder must pay interest, though, which might not be to their advantage.)
This keeps people's capital invested longer term, which is part of the purpose of capital gains tax incentives.
In other words, it's not a loophole. It's working as intended.
If you receive Stock options, you pay taxes over the gains, i.e. the money you would have made if you exercised on that date. Even if you have not exercised. So the options were free, but suddenly you have to find a lot of money to keep them. Or you exercise a part of them.
And imagine paying "asset" taxes on that $250,000 home even though you still live there.
You have stock in amzn, say you buy at 3200 a share. A year from now it's 4k a share. 800$ capital gains...you get taxed on that.
It is a terrible tax law bc it is unrealized. What happens when you get taxes on that 800$, then the share drops down to 3300, you sell at 3300, making a REAL profit of 100$?
Do you feel fairly taxes at 800$ profit despit having only 100$ profit?
Basically $180 million to make this commercial and a couple scrapped demo stations:
Nobody likes taxes and if you can either avoid them or recoup them through subsidies it makes you "smart."
For the factories, maybe.
What about the rebate to car purchasers for many years, making California Tesla's biggest market? That is substantial.
Now that he's not there other willing people will have the chance to apply to those subsidies aware of the new regulations and the change in direction the state is taking.
People like Musk leverage their paper wealth into real (risky) loans and the like to support their business ventures (and personal lives)--part of the "socialize risk, privatize profits" model of pseudo-capitalism they practice.
A thoughtless approach to taxing unrecognized gains is not a good idea, but I certainly understand why it might be considered, at least for some minimum threshold. There's already something like this in the way some stock options are handled: individuals are taxed at exercise on the difference between the FMV and the strike price, whether they sell or not. I don't see why a similar principal couldn't be made to work with actual equities, at least for some high-value accounts/holdings.
I would argue that the opposite is true. California wants a larger cut of profits from business activity within their borders without any risk on their part, or even having to provide better services than competing states.
For sure Elon Musk is a very smart guy and he works really hard and he knows how to deliver amazing products and his PR skills are amazing... That said, we can't deny that he got a lot of support from the US government. Without US government help (e.g. subsidies, grants, carbon credits), he probably would have failed flat on his face like all other geniuses. His ability to secure government support had more to do with luck (history and social connections) than skill.
So as great as Elon Musk is, he did socialize a lot of his risk.
And again, don't ignore the part where he used his entire PayPal fortune to build a company that he thought had a high probability of failure. That's key to this conversation about risk.
The government chose to take on the risk of providing subsidies in order to get the benefits it enjoys today due to Musk's efforts, which is a growing electric vehicle industry. That wasn't Musk's choice to socialize risk, it was elected officials'. And that choice has paid off well for everyone.
Government officials didn't risk anything, they risked other people's money (tax payers). That's literally the meaning of "socializing the risk."
It was certainly his choice to apply for government aid and to use his exposure in the media to give himself leverage over politicians.
It's fine to think well of Musk but to suggest that it's all perfect and fair game is extremely misleading.
Him and the rest of the Paypal mafia have been hoarding attention in the media for decades... Hoarding opportunities.
Government has its own accounts, therefore it has its own money to spend. It doesn't matter that they get that money from taxpayers, it belongs to the government by law.
> leverage over politicians
What leverage over politicians was used and what objectives did it achieve? Please give specific examples. AFAIK, the EV credits were designed to get more EVs on the road to reduce pollution and were successful at doing that. They are also not limited to Tesla.
> hoarding attention
What does that mean? You're complaining that people write articles about Musk?
The same has been happening in New Jersey with its insane taxes that don't really go to pay for services anymore and have diverted from transportation & infrastructure projects for decades now to bail out their severely underfunded pension funds...where the pensioners have almost entirely moved out of New Jersey to avoid the same taxes.
There's a point where what you get out is not worth what you put in. I don't blame Musk at all for doing what's best for himself, his company and (probably) his employees.
It's been all over the news, including very left-wing sources like NY Times and Politico.
The state _projected_ a surplus and was off by an entire order of magnitude into the red.
The state has been campaigning to Congress all year for about $14B in bailout money.
As recently as 2017, the state miscalculated the costs of Medi-Cal and had a 1.6B deficit for the year.
The argument that I'm framing is that the state has to continuously dig further into its citizens pockets in order to fund its appetite for spending. It's entirely true.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/debt-by-sta...
This is all good, until we put another element into the equation. How about stability of the system? It turns out it's predicated on your current- and future- (especially future) citizens' productiveness and willingness to cope with ever growing appetites of the state government. It's been accumulating debt since 1990s, and all the growth that you attribute with a "success" tag is predicated on the expectation that the future generations will figure the solution to the ever growing debt problem. What happens in fact is that the government is stealing the future from the generations to come - it's they who will have to pay for the debt of the current government. And they may just rightfully refuse to do it by moving elsewhere.
We aren't getting out of this pandemic financial mess through cutting spending. Literally no republican or democrat is pitching that solution - do you have your own economic crystal ball to read the future? Go look to how that worked out for the austerity measure put in play in the EU or during the great depression.
As well right now debt is ultra cheap so any borrowed money to cover downtime when people can't work to protect their health is likely going to have upside in generation of jobs, general well being and future revenue.
If you want to go take that generational wealth tax fight argument probably better to start with the federal government instead of wagging your finger at California.
And in terms of stability of the system that is a much larger macro economic question. There is a great amount of debate in the academic community on how much debt countries can sustainably support especially with Modern Monetary Theory getting traction. I don't think MMT is grounded in its origins but it has pointed to a greater sustainability of deficit on our countries balance sheet as well as us getting to a higher level of employment in our population than we had previously though.
This is Stockholm syndrome.
Are citizens being protected? Because last I checked, the "smart" people have largely outlawed working, destroyed any semblance of normal life, the average person is $5k behind on rent, and all the old people died.
The federal government has all but given up pretending money is a finite resource. Likewise states are much the same. There really is no such thing as fiscal discipline nowadays.
You can't stimulate an economy if no one is allowed to work besides the already well-off that can work from home.
It's just class war under the guise of public health.
All of these state budgets depend on projected tax revenue which isn't coming.
People aren't working. People aren't having kids. People aren't staying in the state.
The cuts MUST be massive.
This is all supposition that says nothing about the horrific costs.
You could be right, but this won’t be apparent for a while and it’d be nice if people at least had the humility to admit they’re making a bet and forcing a plan on people that will destroy their livelihoods.
What makes this particularly offensive is that the authorities have little accountability and skin in the game. The “libertarian” approach at least respects the dignity of people to assess risks they’re willing to take and assume the responsibility for the costs of the measures they take.
Is it a well educated bet based on science? Yes. No one is saying it is proven to be successful, no one has had a pandemic or a virus this dangerous replicate itself globally in an incredibly short period of time. This isn't a panacea it's survival mode. We've been in a pretty unknown unprecedented state since February with some pretty bad information coming from the Feds to sow doubt into the equation.
What is your solution given the benefit of hindsight? Go the Texas approach? If you look at death per capita in CA it's highest in the red counties that didn't do any lockdowns and have the lowest population density. Meanwhile the second most dense city in North America (SF) has an incredibly low rate of mortality and infection with some pretty tough measures in place.
Was it well educated when the surgeon general said don't wear masks?
The takeaway is that practically no one should be feeling sure-footed right now about their understanding of something as complex as the net-effect of a pandemic and counter-measures.
The hubris I see in practically everyone nowadays suggests to me people are more politically devoted to their opinions and defending them.
It is totally possible that lockdown measures will be shown to be marginally effective or net-negative in terms of life-years lost in several years time, factoring in the disruption to everyone's lives, children in particular.
If you are implying that the surgeon general said don't wear masks then yes I would say it was an uneducated statement or alternatively that he was under political duress to appease the president's administration. After all the Surgeon General is a political appointee serving at the whim of the president.
Are there better ways to implement shutdowns? Probably yes. Are those difficult decisions to make? Absolutely. Are they made with imperfect information? Yes.
I'm not politically devoted to my position - what part of my comments have been political?
I'd like to see that scientific research that proved that it's definitely permissible to continue filmmaking in LA County, while dining outside a small restaurant is an intolerable risk.
You are using one locations shutdown rules to make a broad unfounded statement against the broader scientifically proven base of research.
> You are using one locations shutdown rules to make a broad unfounded statement against the broader scientifically proven base of research.
Does it mean that in the context of this particular location and this particular ruling, you condemn Newsom and Garcetti and are willing to inform your elected government representatives about it?
I will wade in here. Lock down measure do restrict the spread of covid - that I won't refute - and that is scientific in nature and if you are of scientific worth you can't deny that. It's merely physics - if people don't see each other there is no ability to transmit the illness. The debate that you are referring to is whether the severity of the lockdown measures are worth the cost. Thats a political calculation. I haven't waded into that in any of my comments and don't intend now.
> Thats a political calculation. I haven't waded into that in any of my comments and don't intend now.
you literally began this thread by posting under the comment that questions the degree of "responsibility for the costs of the measures they [authorities] take", and you proceeded with defending authorities' actions and stating that they have their skin in the game and that they follow the science. Your comment was about politicians making political decisions and enacting certain rulings regarding the lockdown.
> Lock down measure do restrict the spread of covid - that I won't refute - and that is scientific in nature and if you are of scientific worth you can't deny that.
What lockdown measures are you talking about? Generic lockdown measures or particular measures like enforcing "face coverings"?
> It's merely physics - if people don't see each other there is no ability to transmit the illness.
If people don't see each other, there's still a physical world they interact with. They can still pass stuff around and to each other, like food and clothing, right? Or do you live in a vacuum world of abstractions where no one sees nobody and lies still like a rock?
Yes the restrictions work at reducing spread. Literally all of them do reduce the spread of the virus. The question is the efficacy vs the cost not whether they reduce the spread of the virus.
The virus is much less danger than the risk of lockdown.
Yes, i much much prefer to live in place where there are no covid related restriction or lockdown whatsoever.
Lockdown is never needed in the first place.
If the majority of the people dying are at the end of their lives (or at least at the end of their working lives), doesn't that mean we're shutting down society with no return in the future?
Healthy immune systems seem to be able to handle the coronavirus fine. That's the science.
You can't get revenues (or future health/growth) from the dead.
I don't mean this in a heartless way, but if we're going to say we all believe in science, you can't claim future benefits where there are none.
The thought that we could let our older and at risk population get decimated because we didn't think they had economic value is a crass oversimplification and belies a lack of understanding of how our systems work.
No I was explaining the contradiction that you're saying there's some large future benefits from locking everyone inside and essentially halting public life to protect people who are defined by their very much bounded future.
And we've essentially failed to protect the elderly even with lockdowns.
This is California - there will be no cuts, just massive tax increases.
California won't accept that it's destroying its tax base and so will fail.
California is a geographically large state, but the bulk of the population lives in dense coastal areas. Given that, you'd expect California to have a very high death rate from Covid. But it's actually ranked 38th on a per capita basis (where higher is better), right behind West Virginia.
California has about half the deaths per capita as Florida does, another warm climate, fairly dense large state. It has a quarter of the deaths per capita as New Jersey, the densest state.
San Francisco has one of the lowest rates of any city in the country, despite being the nation's second most dense city.
All of it much more manageable and probably many fewer businesses would have had to have been closed, jobs lost, people dying if we just adopted some straightforward measures at the beginning. Super depressing.
That's not a fair comparison!
Florida's age demographic skews elderly because it's an extremely popular retirement destination for folks living along the eastern seaboard.
This census website is a little out of date [1], but it has good proportional data:
* California 62 years and over = 4,253,854 (12.6% total population)
* California 65 years and over = 3,595,658 (10.6%)
* Florida 62 years and over = 3,245,806 (20.3% total population)
* Florida 65 years and over = 2,807,597 (17.6%)
Florida is a retirement home. The reason it has double the deaths is because it has double the old people. That counts for a lot when age is the largest risk factor.
[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...
California's 2020 budget shortfall is projected at $54 billion.[1] Florida's 2020 budget shortfall is projected at $2.7 billion[2]. In other words, on a per-capita basis, California has ten times the shortfall as Florida.
[1] https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/06/29/governor-newsom-signs-2020... [2] https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/state/2020...
California had the nation's healthiest budget prior to the pandemic, with the highest per-capita surplus, largest rainy day fund.
It's true that California relies heavily on income taxes, which include capital gains, both of which are much more strongly impacted by the business cycle than states primarily funded by property taxes. You can make an argument about that, but California's budget was extremely healthy prior to the pandemic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...
Where do you expect California to get the money for $1T in unfunded pension liabilities? California's budget is "healthy" only for as long as they ignore their long-term liabilities.
California's "healthy" finances was a lie that the state told you in order to have a hope of meeting future obligations. The legislation they keep trying to pass where they're going to chase after money of people leaving the state shows you the true picture. They wouldn't have a need for such games otherwise.
I don't want to sugar coat the unfunded pension liabilities, but they are much smaller than you suggest. The official figure for the unfunded liability for CalPERS is about $140 billion and about $100 billion for CalSTRS.
Importantly, this is over a 30 year horizon. And the more we pay now, the less we pay later. Newsom's 2019 budget included $11 billion in pension liability payments. Even if you assume CalPERS and CalSTRS investments return worse than the 7% (or 6.1%) that they calculate, that's still in the ballpark of what is needed to pay the liability.
While this is a big deal, the funding levels in the 2019 budget are sufficient to pay the entire liability.
The numbers are only small on an actuarial basis which assumes positive things about the future like: the number of years employees are likely to keep working, the rate at which salaries are expected to increase, the rate of return on plan assets, the discount rate on future benefits.
When conditions are bad, you have to switch to the market basis.
https://www.pensiontracker.org/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/09/24/californias-pension-de... https://calmatters.org/commentary/dan-walters/2020/08/califo...
And yes, sorry, technically I did lump in other unfunded liabilities (like bonds) in my calculation, but the number does indeed top $1T and California does its best to ignore these liabilities in their budgeting.
To put this in perspective, even if you assume zero investment returns, that works out to $35 billion/year over 30 years. The California 2019 budget was $215 billion.
Pension liabilities are a BFD, but I don't think it's fair to say the state is ignoring it. The state is actively pre-paying its obligations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/305287/california-state-...
You see a lot of people talk about the unfunded pension liabilities in apocalyptic terms. And when you hear figures in the hundreds of billions, or trillions of dollars, it sounds insurmountable. It sounds like a bomb waiting to go off that no one is dealing with.
But it isn't. The State is currently over-paying its required contributions. The State is not ignoring the problem. This thread spawned out of the assertion that California's budget is a mess. It started with a discussion of the 2020 budget deficit, and then spiraled into whether the pre-pandemic budget was a fiction which ignores public pensions. My assertion is that the budget was not ignoring the problem, the 2019 budget was funding pension liabilities at a level sufficient to dig out from the hole we are in over the next three decades.
It's also important to point out that the State of California is not the only entity required to fund the shortfall in CalPERS and CalSTRS. The State's liability in CalPERS is about $60 billion. The remaining $70 billion is owed by localities and other special districts.
None of this is meant to claim that the problem is not real. California is going to have to pay an awful lot of money for the next several decades. But that is an awfully long time horizon, with room for an awful lot of economic growth, and if we continue to prudently make payments towards the liabilities each year, it's not apocalyptic at all.
Importantly, the liabilities are owed over a long time horizon, and they don't scale with economic growth, or population growth. They are static. Meanwhile, in the past 30 years, California's real GDP has increased by a bit over 100%. Thirty years from now, it's entirely possible we'll have 2x the 2020 dollars available to pay the liability.
Then again with Jim McGreevey (Democrat) from the right.
It's a very bipartisan issue and both parties have fucked it all to hell.
Not disagreeing with your overall claim that CA does in fact have budget problems, but citing the NYT and Politico as "very left-wing" is a pretty hilarious example of just how far right "center" American thinking has gone.
NYT is a classic example of a centrist/liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.
edit: If you think "liberals" are the same as the "left" you are about as confused as someone who thinks that JavaScript is the same as Java.
They are not a worker co-op, they are not a mutual aid-organization, they are not seeking to overthrow the capital class, they are not socialist, maoist, communist, anarchist, etc. therefore they are not left.
The 54B seems to be a projection from May?
I saw stuff like https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-29/californ... and https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler... which seems like there will be a surplus this year but people aren't sure they're out of the woods just yet, which seems reasonable.
Those are not very left-wing sources.
Edit: to the downvoters, this is objectively true. In actual leftist media NYT is considered conservative. The reality is that they are mostly mainstream.
"Actual leftist"? Nice No true Scotsman you got there.
These are center-right sources by any reasonable standard
If you're a leftist but not as leftist as them, you're a centrist, maybe even center-right which makes everybody on the right to be automatically far-right.
They beat the drums of war for Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as every other imperialist act of war that the US dreams up, breathlessly reports the opinions of the NSA, CIA, and FBI as fact, and generally shills for the corporate-backed opinions of both political parties.
Poll after poll after poll shows these positions to be out of touch with the average American.
The fact that the NYTimes sides more with rich, hypercorporate big-govt Dems more than rich, hypercorporate big-govt Republicans is all part of the charade of choice between the two sides.
I said very left-wing (as in firmly left-wing), not far-left.
You mean the budget that included tax abatement and subsidies for his factories and the people who buy his cars?
Without Tesla & CA's policies, auto electrification would be at least a decade behind what it is today... Being at the forefront of environmental policy has real costs.
And California directly benefitted from the money they spent. That benefit is electric vehicles in the hands of its population, which improves the state's pollution levels long-term.
Most governments e.g EU, UK, China all looking to curtail/ban ICE cars within the next few decades. And of course this has resulted in car manufacturers rapidly pushing EV cars.
Tesla has helped but be would have EVs today even if the company had never existed.
EU regulations had approximately zero impact on Tesla's formative years -- and Tesla was the first auto manufacturer to meaningfully commit long-term (and not lip service) to EVs. VW and others are still today talking about how they're playing catch-up.
Electric cars & clean tech generally have made leaps and bounds because consumers want it. Climate agreements help somewhat, but they're a lagging indicator of the trend.
This sounds a bit like abusive spouse behavior.
"I'm leaving"
"You can't do that - what about all those nice things I gave you?"
(Income) Tax free Texas sounds good right about now!
Someone making 100k/year, and making 1M/year, both living in 400k houses (not uncommon in the Austin area), will be paying the dollar-amount in tax.
Ie, a high property tax and low income tax is very regressive.
Joking aside, it wouldn't surprise me if $400k was close to the median price for homes within the city limits.
Originally I wrote 500k, but changed it to avoid "no one should be complaining if they life in a half a million dollar home, that can buy so much in Ohio!!" type comments.
But I don’t mind if people don’t know this, this state is great as is :)
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/03/895377375/california-has-lost...
[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
[2] https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2020/4297/fiscal-outlook-111820.p...
They certainly waste money but... they also make a lot of it... why is the budget failing? This is a common refrain I hear but I've never really understood it.
It might just be that income tax isn't the best/fairest tax.
Could you reference the law please? This sounds like the wealth tax which was raised but didn't pass committee. Is there a new proposition?
Or, you know, taxes to pay for the government subsidies that have funded all of Musk's current business operations.
I can't think of another state in this country where Tesla would have thrived nearly as well as California. Do you think Tesla would have done well in Texas back in 2003? All those oil guzzlers would have laughed Elon Musk out of the state.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-price-california...
> All those oil guzzlers would have laughed Elon Musk out of the state.
We are talking about global production not sure how that matters if people in Texas didn't like them.
Where is the evidence for this?
Effectively, Elon has avoided future California capital gains taxes by moving. Those are the facts of his move.
Personally, I would rather pay a few points extra on capital gains and income taxes to avoid Texas.
Just look at what the Texas AG is doing right now:
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2020/12/08/texas-ag...
By my calculation its 13.3% more living in California in state income tax savings alone. That is a huge amount of money for Elon, but is also a huge amount of money for people working on a SV salary. It could be more than a mortgage payment. There are probably additional savings with less regulation etc
California is not a state anyone should want to do business in in 2020.
Most Californians don't get to keep their SV salary when they move to Texas.
[0] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#6NtLs...
"If your household income is > 1MM and you live in California, it is not surprising that you would want to leave"
It's pretty despicable that he is willing to throw the country under the bus for his own personal benefit.
It's sickening how a coup attempt is being normalized by our media.
The grievance rhetoric has gone too far (and had awhile ago) when it's used by billionaires.
There is also strong reactionary political rhetoric here, the premise that taxes on wealthy people are nearly criminal theft, and nobody would want to live someplace where they democratically invest in their community (i.e., pay taxes). There's also the economic assumption that taxes, whatever their current level, are always too high; AFAIK, taxes on wealthy people are at historic lows.
If I was in Elon's seat, I personally wouldn't mind paying 20 or 30% of my income in taxes. But vesting shares should not qualify as income. What should qualify as income is me selling those shares. In other words, If I am awarded 1B$ in shares that I have no plan on selling short term, I still have to liquidate 20-30% of those shares just to pay taxes, which may have a pretty high negative impact in term of voting rights.
Why could the taxation not occur when I am selling instead?
I believe that the logic here is the same reason AMT was introduced in the past.
I vest $1M in shares. I get a loan against those shares for 500k. I now have 500k in cash, that I have paid no taxes on. Someone will definitely give me that loan because _worst case_ I have to sell the underlying shares, pay tax, and still pay back the loan. When that loan is due? Refinance against the same shares that I still haven't sold.
If you have a lot of assets, you can always get a loan against those assets. You can kick the can down the road long enough to, effectively, never pay taxes. Or you just kick it long enough for some sort of "tax holiday".
Real estate lets you do this with refinances and 1031 exchanges all the way until you die (at which point the cost basis resets, and your heirs will most likely pay no tax).
That's probably owing to the fact that California's economy is just that large. We're the 5th largest economy in the world.. there's bound to be a higher number of billionaires here.
> The grievance rhetoric has gone too far
I live here, and I disagree. The civil situation in California has done nothing but slowly get worse for the past 3 years, and it has obviously started accelerating in the last 9 months.
> the premise that taxes on wealthy people are nearly criminal theft
That may be the argument.. it may be that for our high taxes in CA, we've been seeing less of it's impact in this state recently. I also have even been wondering if it's still "worth it" to live in CA over the past few months.
> AFAIK, taxes on wealthy people are at historic lows.
Federal personal and business income taxes are. State taxes are not. California in particular is not. Sales taxes are the highest in the nation, and personal income taxes are as well. The state spent the last 8 years going from running a few million in deficit to having several billion in surplus.
Unfortunately, due to corona, that surplus is entirely wiped out and now we're facing several billion in deficit again.
There's not a lot of optimism in CA right now.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/09/08/golden-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
I don't think anybody has a problem with investing in their community, but when there's no return on an investment you cut your losses and move on.
Tent cities, rolling blackouts, no healthcare, no public transportation. What are you getting for the taxes?
I moved to Hong Kong this year. Public health care, amazing public transportation, no tent cities[1], and the top tax rate is 17%. It's not perfect, but this idea that the solution to every societal problem is just to pay more and more taxes is nonsense.
California has the highest taxes in the country. If the quality of life there is worse than in states with lower taxes, then it's time to start questioning how that tax money is spent, not shovel more of it into a black hole that isn't doing anything.
[1] I won't say there's no homeless, because I don't know that for sure, but there are hardly any panhandlers. I know there is subsidized housing available, but I hear the wait list is long. Whatever they're doing, there's hardly any homeless on the streets.
Sure makes me want to run a business and be successful in CA.
Elon is a talented man - I absolutely respect what he's done. However - let's call this what it is - he doesn't want to pay a large tax bill for the success that he has had (hence selling all property in CA). I get it - it sucks and you can also be much more anti-union in Texas.
Too bad he had to go along with the narrative “I think we’ll see some reduction in the influence of Silicon Valley” -- feels like a slap in the face to the market that lifted Tesla off the ground.
I think he might not want to be in the NEW California and Silicon Valley.
I could spend a lot of time doing research and trying to figure out why... but things have changed somehow.
I think the mass exodus of people from California kind of supports his decision.
I think California has a negative growth rate last time I checked.
I would say the cost of living has escalated significantly, the companies that can afford to thrive in the bay area are not hardware startups as VC money has a difficult time support most of their higher capital costs, longer growth cycles and lower multiples on return. The pressure to succeed and level of talent is incredibly competitive. Therefore a lot of the software companies have taken over which is a different demo of people.
Don't believe the narrative on mass exodus - thats a signal that is being amplified in the press. Exodus? Yes, will it come back when we are not in pandemic? I would wager yes.
Is it time for some people to move out of state especially those who don't or never liked it? Yes, take the pressure off our public systems.
Ignoring the Covid exodus, California had a .1% growth rate, which is in the lower half of all 50 states growth rate.
Texas has the number one growth rate in the country.
""It’s hard to find a total dollar amount of California’s subsidies for Tesla, but the subsidies have been thick and fast. Until this year, the state government covered $7,500 of every Tesla bought in the state. The Tesla factory applied for and qualified for plenty of tax breaks.
Early on, it got $612 million in tax breaks from California, according to Green Car Reports.
The federal government also subsidized the factory in question. Musk was a major donor to and fundraiser for Barack Obama. Obama’s administration issued a $465 million loan to help Musk’s company, Tesla, build the Fremont factory that would build components for all-electric cars. (Tesla has since repaid the loan, according to the Energy Department.)"".
This was a general subsidy for every car maker, regardless of location.
> Obama’s administration...
Was also not California specific.
Tesla was (and remains) a financial basket-case, that in Musk's own words brushed with bankruptcy a few times, and yet the billions of dollars the California government threw at Tesla over a decade didn't help them?
It would be great if he recognized this when deciding where to establish future production/design centers. But as an individual, I don't think he owes any state or government an allegiance. If you had found career success in New York State, would you feel any obligation to NYS if you had family or a new opportunity in California? I should think not. Nor should Musk.
It is interesting that Tesla is expanding with a new factory in Texas and that could be a big factor in his move. Regardless, it's up to him where he wants to live.
> he doesn't want to pay a large tax bill for the success that he has had (hence selling all property in CA).
I like to think I'm pretty progressive and the wealthy should definitely have a significant tax obligation. But if he has been taxed on his wealth up until now, why would he continue to owe California? If he wanted to leave California on terms that you would find more legitimate, how long would he have to stay or how much would he owe to leave?
It's odd to me to be so aligned with the State to claim it is responsible for one's success, without accounting for the jobs he created, and the related industries he energized. California benefits from people like Musk. As more companies and thought leaders leave (as they should given the direction of CA's policies), the state will suffer.
> Highly talented employees
The vast majority of Tesla's "talented" employees came from out of state. Regardless of that, I don't understand the perspective that employment is an act of "taking from the state". Tesla pays above-market salaries. Isn't it, then, more accurate to view employment as Tesla giving back/helping to the community?
> Progressive policies that CA built for clean technology
I assume the policies you're referencing are the tax credits for solar installation and EV purchases. Aren't these credits independent of where the company is located? If so, Tesla would have been able to take advantage regardless of their location.
> Let's call this what it is - he doesn't want to pay a large tax bill for the success that he has had (hence selling all property in CA)
It seems reasonable to assume that his tax bill and California policies were both factors in his decision to move. What makes you so confident that the tax bill is the primary factor? Do you have some inside knowledge? If I were in his shoes, I'd be optimizing for Tesla's success, not my personal taxes. He's already wildly rich, and it's pretty clear to me that he's not doing this for the money.
Can you link me to a source that explains the additional benefits that in-state EV manufacturers accrue? Thanks!
In-state incentive explanation: https://energycenter.org/sites/default/files/docs/nav/buildi...
SGIP program budget here: https://www.selfgenca.com/budget_public/program_level_summar...
In total, SGIP has issued $841M of incentives. SolarCity's market share is ~20%. The in-state incentive grants an additional 20%. $841M * .2 *.66 = 111M
Edit: not the best source but has some of the govt programs www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html%3f_amp=true
I find it tough to imagine Tesla pulling off its trajectory in any other state from the early days. He’s had some good tailwinds from the state until this spring.
Genuine question, not trying to be snarky.
I grew up in Australia, which educated, housed and fed me very well, and turned me into a successful Engineer. I decided I wanted to live in the snowy mountains of Canada, so I moved here.
At what point is a person like myself (or Musk) free to move wherever they want? How long to I owe an obligation to Australia for what they helped me with?
Clearly what myself and Elon are doing is perfectly legal, so it sounds like you have a moral objection to what we're doing. Do you think morally everyone should stay in the same district they were born, paying off their "debt" from being raised?
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
Also, Elon has been paying taxes there for how many decades? Is he forever indebted to stay there now? Ridiculous.
"NEW: L.A. County DA George Gascon has issued a directive to prosecutors that the following misdemeanors will be declined for prosecution, with exemptions.
-Trespassing
-Disturbing the peace
-Driving without license
-Prostitution
-Resisting arrest"
This is an abbreviated tweet, and each of these has some explanation and color, for example, resisting arrest will still be prosecuted if the suspect physically assaults the officer. But they can break loose from restraint and flee and not be prosecuted for resisting.
Prostitution was more specifically 'loitering to commit prostitution'.
My issue is the message this sends to those committing criminal behavior. They'd be attracted to municipalities that they know will not prosecute them. In many cases, it's likely that this petty crime is largely in support of drug addiction or influenced by mental illness. It would be more effective (and lauded by me) if this approach was paired with an effective treatment system. None is put forth(?), and we'll just see more and more mayhem, as we have seen already in San Francisco.
The part of me that likes freedom over safety likes this idea because it gives the government less ability to enforce its own bullshit.
It should be legal to drive without a physical license. We're all stored inside the computer now.
I'm not sure if driving without a license can ever be escalated to a felony, but I'm sure they can do things like impound the car, etc. That would never involve the DA unless it was challenged in court
https://twitter.com/BillFOXLA/status/1336119868182077445/pho...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllTDoW9cMI - Bar owner in Los Angeles CA is livid to see that mayor Garcetti has approved an outdoor dining area
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvvRme0h2oY - Message from Sheriff Bianco 12-04-20
Most of those have the exception clauses like "repeat offenses" or "imminent danger" (except prostitution) which sounds much more reasonable than how it's been described.
The message this sends to "those committing criminal behavior" hasn't really changed. If they have been committing criminal behavior, they will be charged, because repeat offenses are an exception.
More likely, this sends the message "doing a mistake once won't ruin your life forever" and "sex work isn't a crime".
Sounds like you have a really solid understanding of the sociological nature of crime! /s
Was there an influx of criminals from outside San Francisco? Or did law-abiding citizens turn to crime? Or did the crimes per criminal go up?
In any case, it was a disaster. Los Angeles deserves what it gets for voting him in.
I think our justice system desperately needs reform, but it needs to be done in a competent way. Could it be that your own prejudices are preventing you from Gascon's half-baked efforts with an objective, critical eye?
The fact that even questioning the effectiveness of an individual's policies gets you labeled as "prejudiced" sums up so much that's wrong with modern progressivism.
LOL, this makes as much sense as suggestions that members of $GROUP move to $STATE to achieve some political goal.
Do you have any idea how vanishingly small the number of people who can actually just up and move somewhere is?
I can speak from personal experience here. Our local town had one of the toughest-on-vagrancy laws in the country. Then it go eviscerated in court, and the laws struck down. Without taking a position whether that was a good or bad thing, it's undeniable that the change was near instantaneous. Downtown became swarmed with aggressive panhandlers and park benches filled up with addicts on the nod.
It's not like the homeless in other cities were closely following the local court decisions, then strategically relocated. But by definition transient populations bounce around a lot. In previous times they might pass through before getting hassled, then thinking this place really harshes my mellow, then hightail it out of town. Now they show up, enjoy the good weather, panhandle off the tourists, don't get hassled by the cops, and what used to be a week-long residency turns into a year or two.
It's very easy if you have incentive, or if you have nothing keeping where you are. Career criminals have every incentive in the world to move to a city where they'll be treated lightly, and often nothing holding them back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes#T...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-cybertruck-sales-direct-sale...
They are major contributors to state legislative and congressional races, support local charities, etc and employ lots of well-paid local staff.
As electric becomes more common, that will tip as manufacturers buyout dealerships. But that will take awhile and bigger dealers are gobbling up little dealers in the meantime. IMO, the dealers will be less of a big deal as they consolidate into regional players. Dealers were a barrier to Tesla selling cars at all -- they have traction now. Plus, the Uber-consolidated dealerships will continue to consolidate operations and shed overhead costs in the process) Even Coca Cola still has 60-70 independent bottler franchises.
I sold my car in 2018 and have been living car-free in Los Angeles since then. For the times they are a-changin'...
Restrictions on mail in voting are only a good thing if you want to restrict the participation rate.
> Texas residents can still easily buy a car from Tesla
Yeah, the regulation seems silly, but presumably it's a trite inconvenience compared to California shutting down various Tesla operations. Certainly we can't conclude from this one example that Texas and California are comparable with respect to "excessive" regulation.
Tesla is not your regular dealership. Car purchases are made online anyways.
Carvana has a similar model for used vehicles, and they are very successful with the demo they cater to (buy online or in app, with a test drive period after purchase if you want to return the vehicle). People hate the traditional dealer sales experience apparently (half tongue in cheek, it's terrible, it really is).
It blew my mind when I went to a dealership that had radio ads about their great lease deals on a Chevy Volt. I walked in, told them I'd like to lease a Chevy Volt and that I was very excited about the deal.
They spent an hour trying to talk me into other cars and the sales people didn't know the first thing about what made the Volt so special. GM apparently didn't either since they discontinued it.
Contrast this with my first car buying experience where the 'finance guy' told me to 'get the fuck out of his office' when I explained him how he was manipulating the loan date payment, and price to charge me more. The deal still got done, but it was with the sales guy running between me and the finance guy basically relaying me saying no.
And, frankly, this is how most new car purchases work. Every one I've purchased or been a part of; they don't end with you driving off the lot in a new car, they end with you waiting a week or two for the car to be delivered. I imagine some dealers have a limited stock of new cars in common configurations, and you could drive off in one of those, but that's the minority of purchases in my experience.
Around 15% are factory-ordered - typically luxury brands. An additional 20-25% are sourced from other dealer inventory, or an upcoming shipment that is already specced and on the way. The rest are on the lot and ready to go with the buyer. Dealer lots are huge in most of the country. Endless seas of near identical cars with minor variations in options and colors.
This seems like he's renting a place in Texas and making a big deal out of 'moving there' to make a point about California's regulatory environment.
It's possible this move might help Musk become a "nonresident" and pay less CA taxes, but I kinda doubt it. The classification of type of resident is based on more than just "official address of your house". It also includes things like where your work is, what banks you use, what doctors you go to, and even what social activities you take part in.
This is pretty common in many states, btw. One time I had to file a tax return to a small city in Michigan because I had a 4-hour work meeting there and they taxed it.
https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/personal/residency-status/part-y...
But, he's keeping his house in CA (for "weekends and vacations"), and he's building his studio in Vegas to be an exact replica of the old one.
So, yeah, charitably, "moving" for the highly wealthy does not really look anything like "moving" for anybody else.
Less charitably, it seems like a scam. In GS' case, nobody can tell where he's doing his work from, so "oh we spent too long at the beach on this 'vacation day,'" better stay here and film tomorrow's episode from CA, nobody will ever know." In EM's case, I suspect he spends more time business-traveling than at home anyway, so it would be pretty difficult to prove which of his houses he "lives" in.
And if anybody balks, there's a huge amount of PR content proving that they "moved."
This wouldn't bug me so much if it weren't for the arrogant, selfish, hubristic political comments they always make on the way out.
Of course, the Castro government seized his assets in Cuba come the revolution, so I don't think it worked out for him in the long run, financially speaking.
I'm not sure about that. I think in these high profile cases tax authorities are more inclined to look into it given how much money there is in the balance. And it's somewhat easier to track people like EM precisely because of their lifestyles: flights would be paid by his companies which would keep receipts for a few years, they would interact with other people from the company in certain location and have a shared calendar, including meeting locations.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-ceos-manage-time
"About half (47%) of a CEO’s work was done at company headquarters. The rest was conducted while visiting other company locations, meeting external constituencies, commuting, traveling, and at home."
Shockingly I didn't see anything about time spent on Hacker News. There's probably a lesson there, or something. :)
What's the definition of "reside"? In the US, it's generally not just a matter of where you sleep at night or where you keep stuff; the legal definition of "residence" is a matter of intent, where you intend your permanent place of residence to be. Of course there needs to be objective evidence of your intent: you can't just say "I live in Texas" if you own a home in California which you aren't renting to anyone else, but don't own any real estate in Texas. But it looks like Musk is selling all his California property. Even if he doesn't buy a home in Texas, if he has a permanent rental of one there, but only rents places in California temporarily when he travels there for business, legally his residence would indeed be in Texas.
Elon has built incredible companies doing incredible things. He's also made some stupid comments re: covid.
SV political hostility towards technology companies and employees is frustrating. I wish the government was more aligned with helping these companies grow and things weren't treated as if they were so zero-sum (when they're not). I also wish the taxes weren't so extreme (including state capital gains tax).
I wish there was more housing supply so cost of living wasn't so high and the focus was on increasing supply rather than band-aids that provide short-term relief, but make things worse long-term (rent control, price controlled units).
The "Fuck Elon Musk" tweet from a politician is dumb and makes this kind of thing worse, why can't people in government behave better than this?
If we could coordinate better we could do so much more. It's just frustrating to me.
I hope you see theres an issue with statements like this. Its hard for someone to be so competent in terms of founding multiple billion+ companies, and then be completely wrong on covid.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/13/health/james-watson-honors-st...
It’s not that hard - people are wildly inconsistent in views and accuracy.
Someone can be contrarian and correct in one area and contrarian and wrong in another.
In fact I’d bet if you are more independently minded then you’re more likely to be very wrong in some categories since you’ve succeeded mostly by ignoring convention and thinking independently.
Most of the time this works, but sometimes you’re wrong and the consensus is right.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960
I'd suspect he'd admit as much at this point. It was a bad prediction. There have been an enormous amount of cases since then and many have died.
I'm an Elon Musk fan, but on this issue he was wrong.
That said, Elon Musk is an active participant and influencer of "F*ck X" culture on Twitter, so he hardly gets a pass when others use that same rhetoric on him.
> why can't people in government behave better than this?
Likewise, why can't Elon Musk behave better? The answer: Acting the way he does publicly is part of his marketing tactic.
I do think people in government should be held to a higher standard. If only for the public’s benefit.
We are witnessing super-wealthy individuals, I think the word is oligarch, use their out-sized wealth to advance causes outside of the domain that made them wealthy. Obvious examples include Bill Gates advancing world health, Mark Zuckerberg funding Freedom of Expression initiatives, and Soros' Open Society Foundations.
These initiatives can be impactful simply based on the resources supporting them. For example, LinkedIn reports 1,100 people currently working for Open Society Foundations. That number would require an annual budget in the realm of $200,000,000. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shows 2,500 people working. Both Soros and Gates could easily fund those workforces out of their passive income.
Certainly, we've had relatively super-wealthy persons in the past. What's new is the reach that these current oligarchs can leverage. Their wealth is drawn from a global revenue, their workforces can easily travel globally, and they can promote their message globally using the Internet and Web, which have supplanted both the print and radio media that earlier oligarchs were confined to.
Whether or not you see this as a threat, my take is that I did not vote for Gates as world health oligarch or Soros as societal transformation oligarch, but they have taken those mantles on themselves. Whether for better or worse, I didn't have a say, but they can impose their initiatives on me. That bothers me.
Did you check how well those companies actually grew, dominated markets and made their employees millionaires?
Sure, not everything is perfect and aligned to their liking, but calling a place that still actively creating biggest tech companies in the world a hostile place for them is a stretch at best.
The political rhetoric of the area is hostile to technology companies and employees though. A lot of blame is put on the tech industry for whatever problem is being discussed.
For example employees and tech companies are blamed for high housing costs because new jobs lead to more people living here (rather than blaming policy that restricts supply).
AB5 is hostile to ride sharing companies and was written mostly to target them.
This kind of blame comes up for pretty much everything.
It’s hard to find anywhere else in the world, where sum of all things is so friendly towards tech. Of course, a lot of that isn’t because of government (or even, despite their actions) but complaining how horrible it’s for tech companies in SV is so detached from reality like billionaires complaining that they need to pay extra few % in taxes.
It’s possible you read my initial comment as more extreme than I intended.
I just think there’s more opportunity for collaboration - the stance I often see/hear/read about is combative. Tech companies vs. local politics. Local politicians vs. tech companies, etc. It’d be nice if there was less of this and more working towards shared goals.
Rest is blah blah, this right there is the real reason for such a move. Can't blame the man either, I'll do the same in his shoes.
Being worth $120B Vs $150B isn't a material difference. At that level, I would say "California was good to me, I leveraged the ecosystem there and the state's generous tax subsidies for my product. I'm ok paying them what I owe."
And honestly, once you have hundreds of billions of dollars across multiple companies, do you really need to hedge?
While Musk’s move may be an indicator of a kind it reflects on largely different factors than those weighed by most people. Most people don’t strain against state bureaucracies to develop innovative products and services.
Regulatory burden does reach Main Street, though. Ask anyone who’s ever run a restaurant in San Francisco or needed to get a state-issued license for, e.g., working in a nail salon if they think the government made it easier or harder for them to do business. Does this make the regulations wrong? No. Could they be easier to follow? Definitely.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bi...
Analogous examples can be found for remodeling/construction, etc.
Quality of life is high and cost of living is low. We had a huge variety of housing choices at many price points. Groceries, gas, and utilities are much cheaper. People are friendly.
The culture is different. More people here are religious [0]. Alcohol is strictly controlled [1] and the driving BAC limit is .05, lower than the typical .08. Cannabis is not legal. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon Church, and its adherents are a big part of the culture here, especially their orientation towards family and service.
We’ve liked it.
[0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/state/uta...
But .. are you mormon? Otherwise, how are you finding the social isolation? SLC itself is now 50% mormon, but the surrounding areas are still mormon-dominated. I like mormons, but they are definitely tribal.
[0] https://www.deseret.com/faith/2020/8/12/21353766/latter-day-...
Housing there is surprisingly expensive if you want to own, another concern for me. I really like SLC though.
We’re unsure if we’ll stay long term and buy or not. We want kids and a religious community for them to grow up in. That would’ve been kind of tough even in the Bay Area, though.
CA is the most negative State in net domestic migration and TX is second to FL only at the other end of the scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
CA is just terrible value for most people currently. I'm not American and neither is Musk, it's not like he's going to make such decision for ideological allegiances. He just gets better value for his money elsewhere. Currently CA seems pretty broken between rural, poor and underinvested areas; and super-expensive, badly mismanaged urban areas. I don't think he's going to move to the desert, he'll probably move to urban TX and it's rather liberal there.
Sure, but mostly that's actually good for the state economically since while there is net domestic outmigration, its more than made up for by international immigration, and the gross domestic outmigration is lower on the economic scale than the gross domestic inmigration.
international migration is shown in that like as well, in the bottom table
in any case it doesn't bode well for them economically as these immigrants are usually net welfare recipients
I suspect that once they have the Giga Texas built and delivering vehicles that TX lawmakers will quickly change their tune since TX is the biggest market in the US for trucks.
Musk surely has some good accountants to figure all this out, but it's not as clear cut as your first sentence makes it sound.
His businesses in California would have to move to Texas to realize the benefits.
It's simply not accurate to make the general statement that state personal income taxes are based on your domicile.
They're not paying California income tax because they're not working in California.
In my mind, this is exactly what Elon would be doing from Texas. Zoom calls with people in other states and countries. So how are the two things different and why would he be paying CA taxes on his personal income?
I'd imagine the commenter that said he'd still have to pay income tax in California assumed that Musk would still need to be in California, to manage his companies there, and would have to pay California tax on a corresponding proportion of his income.
Not in CA. The determination of your residency status for CA tax purposes is based on much more than just your legal home address. And even if you are classed as a nonresident, you still pay CA taxes on any income earned due to work in CA.
Texas and CA do not have any reciprocal tax agreements.
Source: live in Texas, travel for work a lot all over the country, including many months spent in CA, have had to file many income tax returns and determine residency status with the state of CA for exactly this purpose.
I do exactly this. I earn income from a CA company, but live elsewhere. But I wouldn't characterize it as "paying".
Paychex withholds my CA taxes, which then get (nearly) fully refunded a week after filing. It's not exactly "paying" - rather, you're giving a zero-interest loan to the State of California with an average maturity of 6-7 months.
For example, let's say I live in Texas and work for a Texas based company at a salary of $100k/yr. I spend most of my time in Texas, but I travel a lot for work and for 12 weeks of the year, I spend Monday through Friday in California.
Since I am a resident of Texas, I pay taxes on all of that $100k to Texas (but since TX has no income tax, it's moot).
However, I spent 12 weeks of that work in California, making me a nonresident worker in California. I owe CA income tax on $100k * (12 weeks spent in CA / 52 total weeks in a year) = ~$23k. If I have enough deductions in CA to offset that, I might end up owing nothing and any paid taxes might all get refunded to me. But if I don't have enough deductions, I might owe CA some tax money.
What self-respecting F-150 owner is going to buy a Tesla pick-up "Design in California".
And since he's a renter, rarely sleeps and has minimal possessions, how hard is it to "move"?
As much as I have admired and enjoyed many of those places, I always knew I would come back to Austin. The quality of life you get here, all things considered, simply cannot be beat.
After I graduated from school in the Bay Area (circa 2005), I recommended to many friends in high-tech to move to Austin. Most said no, for many reasons. Fast forward to today, and many of those individuals have made the move or are thinking to do so at this point. It is for the same reasons: cost of living, raising a family, space to build, etc. I welcome their arrival and hope they take the time to learn about the city and what makes it special.
https://www.kvue.com/article/weather/austin-tied-for-the-thi...
"As of Thursday, Austin has officially had its 19th day of triple-digit temperatures. This means we have tied the third-longest stretch of 100-plus degree days recorded at Camp Mabry. Not to mention, every single day this month has been above average. Our average temperature at this time of the year should be 97 degrees."
On the flip side, winters are great! The best time of year is Mar/Apr and Oct/Nov. Absolutely gorgeous. There's a reason why SXSW and ACL are scheduled at those times...
Elon moving has little to do with California vs Texas. This is totally expected from Elon, who likes to oversee new operations personally and whip everyone into shape.
His "dislike" of California has little to do with it, but he's definitely going to milk it for all it's worth. I thought at least HNers would see through this easily.
So why is he not moving from Shanghai to Austin? And from Austin to Berlin?
I think people should really look into where Elon actually spends his time. Tesla is his clearly on the back burner as far as his personal attention is concerned. He checks in, but he's very successfully sold the "I sleep under my desk" narrative, while only dropping by every few weeks. It was like when Fremont ignored the lockdown orders and said "I'll be there, if anyone is arrested let it be me" and he was actually in a completely other state when they re-opened.
His primary concern based on physical presence is Space-X at this time.
Or do you have any real data on that?
If you are starting a business California is still a place competition exists.
Non-competes are the most anti-business, anti-worker, anti-innovation and anti-American thing you can think of.
Non-competes are like fixed authoritarian markets that appear open but are actually nearly mafia state controlled by the existing players.
Sure once you get big you might want to lock down the gains, but while growing and disrupting the lack of non-compete recognition is a huge things for both workers and businesses.
The ban on non-competes should be nationwide and California has always had that pro-worker, pro-business, pro-market policy in place [1]. When the AG of a state is calling for that to be nationwide, you know you are in a place that values value creation without limitation or blocking competition.
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bece...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_flight
or, for apologists:
https://twitter.com/LorenaSGonzalez/status/12592878791775313...
Killing the messenger nowadays is all the rage. "Rage" here to be taken literally.
1. https://electrek.co/2020/07/14/tesla-spike-covid-19-cases-da...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259638112688304129
Contrast that with leaders who are welcoming to tech and would be happy to be the next Silicon Valley:
Does that follow? Wouldn't it seem more likely that California latinos statistically disregard health officials advice if they're being most impacted by a disease which doesn't care about ethnicity?
"Wouldn't it seem more likely that California latinos statistically disregard health officials advice" - No. For example: a lot of communities have intergenerational families living in close proximity due to lack of affordable housing, jobs, redlining, etc. Having many people living closer together explains being "most impacted" as well as (obviously better than but hey I'm being magnanimous) your thesis that people are choosing to "disregard advice". Just... no.
I could say "Alaskans are disproportionately affected by testicular cancer", because their per capita rate of it is higher than any other state. But it has nothing to do with being Alaskan - they have a totally normal rate of testicular cancer - it is just because a higher percentage of men live there than anywhere else in the US.
And, her next tweet in that thread is her celebrating keeping playgrounds open. Yes, children need to play - but maybe they can spread covid there?
Having many kids is part of it too.
Elon Musk's success and several others began as the result of PayPal.
To my knowledge none of Elon's companies since have produced a group like the PayPal mafia. The PayPal folks are smart people, but the bay area is full to the gills of smart visionaries lacking capital to take on ambitious visions. Many have worked at Elon's companies. To really see little trees grow people like Elon would need to change their equity structures to let the next group of innovators thrive.
Cities have been the great engines of modern culture and economies for awhile now. Nothing has changed. Coronavirus is a brief interruption. Remove work doesn't change it - Covid didn't teach SV about remote work (many SV companies tried large-scale remote work several years ago, then brought many back to the office). There's a reason businesses try to create great office environments - dynamic, exciting, fun, social - it's highly creative and productive. Now you think people will be just as creative and productive sitting by themselves at their desk at home?
Taxes are a major part of that - taxes are how we invest in our communities. To treat them only as an expense is ignorant, sometimes willfully so. California and the Bay Area have been taxing and investing for generations, and look what it turned out. The infrastructure of the Bay Area, U CA Berkley, and Stanford (which at least receives research money and massive tax benefits in tax breaks, I assume) are just three examples. The Golden Gate Bridge is another. Next time you are in a city, look around at all the things that the people got together, democratically, and built, funded, and operate. I believe in democracy, a fundamentally American belief.
In the end, it's a reactionary political statement. The reactionaries have been targeting cities for many years because they are powerbases for Democrats, progressives, are populated by many non-white people, and they are cultural threats (merely by the fact of their existence and success: their diversity and integration, their cultural leadership, and in business and economics: what great, innovative industry comes from reactionary parts of the country?). You'll note who made the big statements about leaving - Thiel and Musk, possibly the leading reactionaries in SV.
Reactionary politics is fundamentally corrupt - a lie about the world, in every aspect, to protect and accumulate their own power and assets. They're right - they don't fit well in SV. Reactionary is anti-progress, anti-optimism, it's anti-. SV is doing well if the reactionaries don't stay and stagnate, but leave and create more space and opportunity for the newcomers, the next generation. I believe in those newcomers much more than in Thiel and Musk.
After all, I am a humble HN user from half the world away and I still spend time on live streams from Boca Chica. If I were Musk, I would move there.
And make make no mistake, if there's a large outflow of the moderately well off and up out of Califonia in recent years, it's probably because our last Congress capped the state tax deductions they could take.[1] Effectively making Bluer states pay for the most recent nationwide tax break.
Kind of a moonshot, but it's nice to imagine states leaving income taxes to the federal government because of this and just switching to land value taxes.
Some kind of fairer sales tax like a VATS are another alternative, but I hear too much about the trouble people have with them (added bureaucracy, carousel fraud) to actually like the idea.
Honestly my tax arguments with MD were furious and frustrating. It's difficult, once you start paying MD, to escape their claims on you. Even while working out of country for multiple years running, MD will claim you owe them taxes, unless you have changed domicile in the manner they demand.
> Texas is the best state for business. Texas has no state income tax, while California’s is the highest in the country. It just got better because Texas made an income tax unconstitutional.
Can you explain what he means by that last sentence?
I'm not asking for a political exegesis, unless there's no way to explain it without. I'm just curious for a technical explanation of what he's referring to. I suppose part of what I don't understand (as a non-American who knows little) is how a state can rule anything unconstitutional in the first place - isn't the constitution a federal affair?
This is the Texas one: https://tlc.texas.gov/docs/legref/TxConst.pdf
Texans pay hefty property taxes.
A good way to think about the US is as a more federalized EU, after several centuries and a civil war to figure out how power devolves between the Federal and State governments. The individual states were originally sovereign entities, bound together through a very weak system called the Articles of Confederation. After this was shown to not work very well, a group of legislators committed treason against the government outlined in the Articles, and convened to write the US Constitution, which the sovereign states decide to adopt after furious debate.
I mean, Musk is opening up a Gigafactory in Germany near Berlin, a place that culturally and regulatory, out-California's California in terms of politics.
People really really want to turn this into an anti-California story and sell conservative politics. I'm sure Musk will enjoy lower taxes, but if you listen to the same interview, he rakes MBAs and bean counters over the coals.
I don't think Musk cares about profits or money as much are libertarians fetishize, he cares about what he can accomplish. He's more concerned with his goals and how much stands in his way, not whether or not he can get a tax cut.
If anything, environmental and labor regulations that slow down his rate of building are more important to him.
How can people listen to the audio of this WSJ interview, where he claims corporate boards, and power points, and financial meetings, are all bullshit and a waste of time. This is a guy who doesn't want to take investor Q&A during earnings calls. He routine tells people not to buy Tesla stock! He tells people people to sell Tesla stock if they don't like his answers to Q&A. He literally gives two fucks about the kind of stuff hyper-libertarians on Seeking Alpha care about. He's also tired of the games, the constant bullshitting and trying to short the stock.
He doesn't care about the money as much as he cares about making cool shit and getting yo' ass to Mars.
Much is made of a tiny percentage of people leaving. The vast majority won’t and will be forced to see another job if he were to close the CA offices which will be massively disruptive.
I’m betting he won’t, that the CA offices won’t move, and the people who are writing the code that lands his rockets will remain.
It’s too much of a risk to replace those people and break up teams.
I am sure that there are many people, already living in Texas, who would want to work for Tesla.
"With a net worth of $134.7B, Musk recently surpassed Bill Gates as the second-richest person in the world, and he's on track to earn more than $50 billion in stock options. If he remained in California, he’d be facing income taxes on the profits when he exercises them. In Texas, there is no income tax."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52627744
The modern day robber barons will never care about the working class. It is up to us to look out for ourselves.
He's playing a positive sum game - his ventures are growing the pie and moving us toward a better future (e.g., sustainable energy).
Focus on the rent seekers, not the pie growers.
I was just musing about how strange it is that people love him despite his sketchy business practices. The OP was about him forcing a plant open and having a bad record on workers rights. That's what I objected to, not all the money he's making.
I do understand my comment didn't really explain that, so I understand the downvotes. I guess I thought it was clear from the context, why I had a problem with him.
Pull the lever and destroy the economy, put the government in debt, destroy businesses, send millions into poverty, hurt individuals futures, increase infant mortality, increase drug use/overdoses, hurt artists and destroy museums, increase suicides, and more.
Don't pull the lever and kill a .01 percent of people above the age of 55 who won't stay quarantined.
I think he thinks pulling the lever is the wrong decision, and he's moving to a place with like minded thinkers.
But these two options seems to be the choices that are being discussed by the media and government.
You're either pro Covid restrictions or you're a granny killer.
I personally think we should quarantine the age 55+ crowd and let the people under 55 go about their business.
The under age 55 group is like 80% of the population who have only 20,000 covid fatalities which is less than car accident fatalities so why are they being locked up?
[Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...]
Most people don't spend money on things/do stuff when they are afraid of dying while doing so. Hundreds of thousands of deaths due to uncontrolled population spread, randomly (nearly) amongst the population is going to cause the economy to crater - and even the possibility of it already did before any lockdowns happened.
The lockdowns just stopped the 25% (guess) of the population that is going to YOLO anyway from causing even more damage. The businesses were still going to get a huge hit regardless.
The s and p 500 is actually breaking records now WITH Covid.
Pretty much everything you just said seems to be inaccurate and no citations are provided.
The corporations are doing great.
The small businesses and individuals are being crushed.
We give the people the information and let them make up their own minds.
People can choose to leave quarantine or not.
We don't use government force.
Just like cigarettes.
We give them the information and let them think for themselves.
Giving people the freedom to think for themselves is a beautiful thing.
It's the basis of John Lockes natural rights which the founding fathers used as as a principle when writing the constitution.
The decision whether to ban or approve the vaccines as they were developed was another example. The status quo is to ban vaccines until they meet criteria.
Ban a vaccine for those over 65, avoid the possibility of a side effect 100x than ever experienced (there has never been a vaccine entering phase 1 trials with over 1 in 100,000 expected risk of death).
Allow high risk people to voluntarily take the vaccine, most will work (about 85% of vaccines tested for efficacy succeed).
Society chose to ban the vaccine, killing hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been prevented. This pandemic is effectively solely a problem caused by this decision.
"Society chose to ban the vaccine, killing hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been prevented. This pandemic is effectively solely a problem caused by this decision."
you say this of literally the fastest development of a vaccine in the history of our planet. vaccines only work if people take them. people only take them if its safe. (and even when they are safe, anti-vax crowd actively works against uptake).
so your proposal is to give an untested vaccine to the entire planet, because the harms of doing that would be fewer in number in the short term while completely destroying the ability for society to deliver any vaccine in the future.
scenario plan for this: the next pandemic is 10x worse than this one and you blew all of society's goodwill on an untested vaccine this time around. nobody takes vaccine. everyone dies.
We don't need daddy government'to keep us safe' or do things 'in our best interest'.
Every restriction of freedom is always couched as improving safety.
Who cares if Musk leaves. Business people hate paying taxes, and they will always where go taxes are lower. They've done this for the last century, and will continue playing the victim despite getting massive bailouts.
Things like this shouldn't new news and/or posted here. It has no relevance.
I don't see what's all this fuss about, it's just simple tax "planning" as exercised by the wealthy. I guess the extra billions will make him happier, but it's weird we get attached to such things as money when you have already amassed it so much it doesn't really make a difference.
But he doesn’t seem to realize there are other externalities to price in: worker health, education, etc
One of the reasons CA developed as a hot bed of activity was the college system here which provided a ready supply of educated skilled workforce. That’s been supplemented in recent years with people moving here but the genesis started with the great colleges.
Once you admit there are negative externalities that the government has to force companies to “price in” to meet human goals (eg slowing climate change) you can’t just turn around and be a hyper libertarian on every other issue.
Musk is smart enough to extend his reasoning from the environment to other factors.
Indeed environmental regulations are slowing down Gigaberlin, if he were to whine about government required environmental impact reports, he’d be a hypocrite for example.
The CA FTB hunts people down for this kind of thing all the time.
This is important, because for electric trucks to succeed, they have to be appealing to people who are willing to modify their truck engines to burn more gas, for no reason other than to “own the libs.”
By culturally ingratiating himself with conservatives, he’s helping create a bigger market for electric cars than would otherwise exist. I find it obnoxious, but it’s not worth caring about in the context of the dire need to electrify America’s vehicle fleet in a hurry.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2020/04/09/the-s...
To answer some other questions why people like Elon but not other billionaires. He thinks about things more engineer like, doesn't accept things on face value, has a libertarian bent, doesn't seem to value traditional things that the wealthy are attributed to (read: expansive homes [anymore], yachts, fancy collectibles) and is an unbelievable producer.
It seems any capital he does accumulate he deploys directly into his next venture - which creates jobs, products and tax benefits for states.
The end.
You have to weigh a population's death risk vs increasing the net worth of Elon Musk.
I am certainly not a person who believes that because people depend on economic activity, that we should make a cold hard decision and keep production levels up to normal during the crisis.
COVID-19 infection and death rates are up all over the US, so I don't have a good answer for you.
I would be pretty angry if my SO or family worked in a Tesla factory and were forced to work somewhere they are in high danger of being infected, but I guess that's Capitalism.
To quote a Fish Called Wanda: "Good."
sadly for those liberals who moved to Texas they can wait for one second to make Texas more like CA, the socialism ideology is a life long brain damage with no cure.
Please don't california my texas!
People respond to incentives. This is axiomatic.
Those who would enforce socialistic policies, ignore this basic fact.
We need more capital countrols or more state and local currencies. Pick your poison, libertarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group_of_America
Just looking at the VW sales, not Audi
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/30/20891314/elon-musk-...
While I admire Elon's vision, I'm not a huge fan of how he's going about it. Kind of seems like he views other human beings as tools to be used and discarded when they've outlived their usefulness. You can see it when he makes comments about things like the US being "entitled" - yes Elon, US workers expect to be treated like humans... we shouldn't be striving to recreate the slave labor conditions of the industrial revolution...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-china-ro...
I posit that both are true: 1) US workers have shitty protections 2) Americans are ungrateful, lack perspective and are entitled. They don't understand when a pack of immigrants from wherever smuggle themselves in a container or coyote or what-have-you, and live for years together 10 people to an apartment to save up a little money to send home.
He's saying they don't realize what they have, they are not thankful for anything and they keep dramatizing over everything.
Certainly _implies_ that they shouldn't be, in his opinion.
Tantrums are OK when you're a kid, once you grow up you're expected to do better.
Telling a minimum wage worker who likely can't afford rent and are probably below the poverty line, they should be grateful because there's "starving children in africa" sounds patronizing, entitled, lacking empathy, and does no help anyone. It does not help the minimum wage worker or people in the other countries.
In America, the top one percent holds over $25 trillion in wealth, exceeding the wealth of the bottom 80 percent. That other people have it worse than the bottom of the 80 percent is only to distract from that bigger issue.
They just don't expect the non-US workers that make their iPhones to be treated the same..
No, you're not. When was TPP going to involve China, or the UAA? In fact, TPP could just as well be used to avoid other types of punitive tariff. foei also opposed TPP [0], does that mean they are oppose labour-law improvements too?
And why are you so confident TPP would help with labour laws anyway? What said, and what's done across international borders often differs a lot. Blaming Trump as if something was lost is pretending there where ever guarantees of success.
Claiming some complex legislation would "have helped with" poor foreign labour laws while actively benefitting them anyway is pretty weak.
[0] https://www.foei.org/features/tpp-bad-deal-for-people-and-pl...