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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

In the case of Texas, where idiocy rules to the level that the state is bonding billions to reimburse power companies for the failures and chaos caused by very predictable cold weather, that won’t work.

Unfortunately, whomever runs the Texas public utility commission doesn’t work for the people of Texas.

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Texas is one of the fasting growing states in the union, so the idiots running things must be doing something right.

Low taxes and flat planes of land that you can keep building new housing on, cheap, that makes it easy to keep growing out. Good for them I guess. But providing infrastructure for that expansion does cost something eventually, thus the struggles with increasing electricity in a state with less oversight. I find your comment pretty generic that could be applied to almost anything. California must be doing something right, because their tax surpluses are incredible. Same for lots of other states. So what, just because California has huge budget surpluses doesn't clarify if the state is serving its citizen's needs.

I moved out of Texas long ago precisely because the geography sucks and it's too hot.

Ah right, must be the topology. Brilliant insight. Wake me up once people start voting for California with their feet again.

This reads like you only read the first half-sentence of that comment and stopped there.

Your reductive reasoning is palpable. People will move to Texas in the near term for the promise of low COL, but I wonder how many massive power grid failures it will take for the rich to begin fleeing for greener pastures.

The same things were said of California!

When my dads family grew up in the 1950s, the allure of buying a cheap bungalow in a lemon farm outside LA felt like paradise…

Pablo Escobar's business grew fast, too.

It had (ahem) some externalities, and wound up collapsing. Fast growth isn't inherently a sign of something being done right, or we'd be talking about Zynga a lot more.

Unfortunately, plenty of horrid people DID talk about Zynga a lot.

Yes; the point is that "this is popular now" is not necessarily an indicator of quality or long-term sustainability.

A tragedy of the commons is preceded by a gold rush before the predictable tragedy strikes.

Yes, making money for their patrons. Texas is blessed with many things.

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