Man who moved from CA to Texas pens scathing op-ed complaining about Austin | Hacker News Reader

Man who moved from CA to Texas pens scathing op-ed complaining about Austin

dailymail.co.uk

12 pointsrmason20 comments

San Diego is a beautiful city. Austin is... well it's nice for Texas, I mean if you like living in the middle of a huge expanse of flat dusty land. How can you move to Texas and not know about the importance of football? Musk moved there because he wants to sell cyber trucks, not for its beauty.

Lived in Texas my whole life and like it. But the natural beauty in Texas in my opinion doesn't really compare to a lot of California and the Northwest.

But from a financial standpoint it's great. I have friends who make 50k a year in California and live like they're in college where as when I made that much in Texas I felt very comfortable. Things like buying a house in a nice walkable neighborhood 5 minutes from downtown for 200k in a major city isn't really an option in California.

On paper, Brett sounds intelligent, but what sort of person moves self and family to somewhere new without doing any research first?! PS .. I live in UK, not Texas.

Agree. And another thing: Brett talks too much.

I get some things are hard to understand about a place until you've really lived there. But temperature is definitely not one of those things.

Does this article have anything new to say? It is basically rewriting the main article and laughing about how dumb he is. I was hoping they would actually address his points. I've never lived in Austin or SV so I have nothing to go by but what the original article wrote.

So, does Austin have an issue of lack of public parks? Do roofs have to get replaced frequently due to hail?

I mean, it is the Daily Mail. That’s kind of their whole thing, really. Agreed about the overarching tone of the article too, but again, that’s pretty standard for this publication. It’s why I avoid it (along with similar ones).

SoCal and Bay Area Californians don’t appreciate how kind our weather is on roofs. I didn’t even know hail damage was a thing until working in home insurance. Okay I was vaguely aware that golf ball sized hail existed and did consider that I didn’t want to be outside in it but I pretty much never considered it.

The roof thing is true. I can't find statistics on how often they have to be replaced, but my guess is every 10 to 15 years. This is usually structured so that homeowner's insurance covers all or nearly all of the cost, but of course that makes insurance more expensive.

Google tells me Austin has about 20,000 acres of parks for 950,000 people, and San Diego has about 40,000 acres for 1.4 million. If he really lived in Bee Cave he was pretty close to Zilker Park, which is hard to complain about.

Some of the other complaints feel legit and some seem strange. We were not calling teachers "sir" or "ma'am" in school when I was in elementary school in a more conservative Texas the 1980s, for example, much less in Austin now. Scorpions pop up occasionally, especially in West Texas, but I've lived in various places in Texas in between living other places for decades and I've never seen a scorpion outside of a herpetarium at the zoo. He'll definitely encounter more of those if he moves to Reno.

I know the trend to relocate there has been going on for a while now, but I scratched Austin off my list after a 2016 visit due to (1) a very small airport with limited international flights and (2) really bad traffic (but that’s almost all cities, right?).

I’m not sure why this is newsworthy but yes Texas is hard right, Austin is just one of the most left leaning areas of the hard right. Overall it is still one of those places you will want to stay on the interstate and stick to the major cities if your not Caucasian. Nonsense increases the closer to the southern border you get. Cops have no checks in the areas with no cell phone service, if you are driving while anything you’ll get pulled over in those areas.

Texas was one of the 10 closest states in the previous election. If it's a "hard right" state than 80% of the states in the U.S. are "hard left" or "hard right". Which is a completely nonsensical definition.

If I had to guess, The poster was a bit loose on their language. I think what they are getting at is there’s a non insignificant chunk that’s the type that would like to enforce sundown towns even today.

And that a liberal from Ca is different than a liberal from Texas. Like our “left” (according to the average American) is democrats but compared to Europe they are pretty center, center right on some things. Or like joe manchin is nowhere near as left as a Cory booker but each works for their area.

Houston is the most diverse city in the United States. Literally every citywide elected official in Dallas is a person of color.

I suppose it's arguable that you may want to stay out of some suburbs if you're not Caucasian, but an American major city is an American major city on that score.

  Houston is the most diverse city in the United States. Literally every citywide elected official in Dallas is a person of color.

Having zero whites (or Asians?) is an odd definition of "diverse".

Houston doesn't have zero whites or Asians. Dallas's executive leadership (not Dallas itself or even the city council) does, but I didn't claim it was diverse; those are two separate sentences, both responses to the parent's claim that there were major cities in Texas that are uniquely unsafe for minorities.

Not sure how relevant to Hacker News this post is, but this guy definitely portrays the mentality of a lot of people I met from California / Bay Area / SF: hard aggressive stance on anything Right-wing, screaming about social justice, complaining about everything, demanding to have everything they want their way etc. This is a bad attitude to have when relocating and traveling. I would be surprised if he did not lose his job.

Texas and California should be separate countries with immigration restrictions in-between. It would have spared this guy a lot of trouble!

Call it Santa Ana's revenge.

So I guess Montezuma gets left with diarrhea or smallpox?

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