Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely bearish on the future of CA, so much so that this is my last week in the state(moving out for good). The state has really shot itself in the foot by driving out stable tradional businesses in the past few years with insane policies that really only favor hollywood and tech. With tech in full meltdown and as long as interest rates keep increasing(and tech stocks falling) the state will face a reckoning unlike any its ever seen.

As social/govt. services dry up, professionals will leave in droves as who wants to pay 10-13% state taxes when alot of other states offer way better tax rates with better quality of life. Think the homeless situation is bad now with tent cities everywhere, wait until the yearly $15B that CA spends on homeless disappears.

I predict a hyper exodus as the state suffers an economic collapse that will take most likely a decade or two to recover from. Lets also not forget that the 20th century was the wettest in the past 2000 years in CA and the 21st century will be very dry(which is normal for this state), so CA's agro economy will rapidly shrink, and water loss will force population out.

Oh and by the way I am a 4th gen. CA resident so its tough for me to acknowledge these facts.

>With tech in full meltdown

The stock market does not reflect the reality - in fact, you might say the market is coming back to reality. There’s been small layouts but to call it a “meltdown” is a bit much.

Look at the prices of paypal, square, netlix, roblox, affirm, coinbase, etc they are all down at least 70% from 6 months ago with some down 90%, if that is not a full meltdown I don't know what is :)

A full meltdown would involve actually losing money and eventually running out of it and shutting down, rather than just fluctuations in stock prices.

Do you think Roblox, Affirm, Coinbase or even Netflix is in immediate danger of bankruptcy?

per the nasdaq's site my statement is verbatim what they also say:

> Refers to events like steep fall in stock markets, decline in asset values, corporate losses etc. that hurt the economy and lead to losses for investors.

https://www.nasdaq.com/glossary/f/financial-meltdown

Had you said the Nasdaq was entering a meltdown, I'd have thought it a bit hyperbolic but wouldn't have disagreed.

Your claim was that tech is in "full meltdown" and you were talking about falling state revenues for California would drop so dramatically that "the state will face a reckoning unlike any its ever seen".

In my opinion, large tech company stock declines won't have much impact on California revenues. Only their relocations would. There's no "full meltdown" or anything like it happening to "tech". On the contrary, I'd bet that each of the MANGA companies with the possible exception of Netflix grow their revenue in the coming year and that their employees will pay more in taxes to California in 2022 than they did in 2021.

Let's check back in a year and see how our predictions fared :)

The problem is the timing. While workers are resisting return-to-office and startups offer equal comp for remote within the US, tech is taking a big enough downturn that if you started your job exactly a year ago you'll be making less this year than last in real dollars before taking into account inflation. A great time to be a startup that just closed Series A with remote positions though, which is why being bearish on California is not the same as being bearish on tech.

I really think a lot of businesses have been propped up by the bull market the last 12-14 years. We are at a point where we are scraping the bottom of the barrel of ideas because all the fertile ideas for "how to use the internet" have been consumed. The internet is interesting in that it democratized creating businesses in probably a way never seen before, a kid with no life experience could teach themselves programming and invent a billion dollar company, how wild is that.

I'm also incredibly bearish on CA and left for good last year. The quality of life per dollar is just so incredibly skewed, and the monoparty culture perpetuates terrible policies that will continue to strangle the state.

I left the city for the mountains (tahoe) in 2020, and it felt much more reasonable, but with the forest fires getting worse every year living in nature there feels even more hopeless.

I'm back in the midwest, and my plan is to buy a huge plot of land and build a house that is off grid w/ it's own water supply. The system is in a slow state of collapse, and every year people just paper over what's right in front of us. I think CA right now is a leading indicator.

Shit is gonna get weird over the next decade.

Even though the one-party (it does not matter which party, by the way. The key is one party) California wreak havoc in the state, the Bay Area is still the best place for meaningful tech jobs. The Bay Area still has the highest concentration of the companies who are willing to invest in solving hard problems that in turn demand solid tech solutions. For me, that's distributed systems (especially distributed stateful systems), machine learning, and statistics. Throw in handsome pay and the Mediterranean climate, there's really not much incentive to leave, despite the disgusting lies in politics and wokeisms in every level.

This very common Internet take seems self-fulfilling, to a degree. And like many Internet takes, I've read it a million times without seeing any data.

> driving out stable tradional businesses

What is that based on? It's hard to believe all demand for local services doesn't have anyone supplying food, entertainment, construction, etc.

> wait until the yearly $15B that CA spends on homeless disappears.

Wouldn't this alleviate the situation? I hear homeless people come to CA for the benefits.

But also being outdoors in CA is better than say MA.

Not during wildfire season when the weather forecast is "smoke"

Smoke is much better than snowstorm or 10F or lower.

The ones i saw when i visited SF clearly didn’t come there to benefit from anything. They were zombies walking the street with saliva dripping from their mouth.

I can’t imagine that this is with 15B spendings. It also makes me wonder what it’s going to be without..

Most of the money for homeless outreach is pork. We refuse to force people into mental care facilities and drug rehab when they are in desperate need. Instead its just a stack of bandaids one on top of the next. It’s just a million here, a million there, and nobody has the political capital to kill projects that yield no results.

California used to do that. It was apparently really bad in those facilities. So much so that putting them on the street was better.

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