Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Also odd since their state government leaders are highly politically motivated and want to make political waves even if their actions are irrational (like on power production, blaming wind turbines instead of recognizing their failure to winterize wind and coal power systems).

View on HN

I think it's a favorable tax environment. Just remember that these companies claim to be progressive, but if they can save $20 on their taxes, that all goes out the window.

that's a fair criticism a lot of the time, but I don't think Samsung ever makes any real claims of being progressive. not too many woke companiese have a division that builds tanks.

How are you defining woke as you use it here?

I think the tax environment for companies is favorable, also fewer environmental regulations (and making chips uses some nasty chemicals)

Just wanted to say that taxes in Texas are less favorable than eg California when it comes to middle class citizens - no income tax, but very high property taxes.

I've driven through Texas, and there is this 300 mile+ stretch, in the North, that is hell on earth. Pure putrid smog, the skies darkened, the air thick, dank, cloying from refineries or something.

So yeah, great place to build something, and save cash on tech to cleanup your waste. Yay Texas!

I swear people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch.

> people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch

No Texas county breaks the top 10 for counties with the shortest life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._counties_with_sho...

10 years less than the national average would get you to 69, and be #5 on the list. For comparison, #50 is only 6y below the national average.

There are worse places just in Texas - there's a chemical refinery locus to the east side of Houston near the port and bigger one near the border with Louisiana with so many flares at night it reminds one of Mad Max a bit, though there are various plants scattered along the gulf coast as well, were a half dozen that I knew of in the mostly rural county I grew up in to the south of Houston.

Bit of a tangent but I've often wondered why refineries don't generate electricity from their unwanted gas instead of flaring it off.

Flare gas recovery systems do burn the excess gas to power the refineries. I’d guess the generated heat is used directly without conversion to electricity.

That’s absolutely appalling, whether or not it shaves a full ten years off people. Reminds me of the one time I visited Ghengzao in China. The pollution was so bad it was cloying.

> very high property taxes

CA property taxes are highly regressive. Old boomers get to pay sub 0.1% tax rates because of Prop 13 while new, young, and poorer buyers get to pay tax on inflated property valuations.

When it comes to increasing class mobility high property tax >>> high income tax.

I don't live in CA, but forcing low or fixed income people out their homes just because their property increased in value which is often outside their control is not good.

From my understanding part of the problem also is even landlords and businesses benefit from prop 13 and same with people that own multiple properties. Honestly, I think something like Idaho's Homeowners Exemption is better. The owner has to live in it to qualify. https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1051.cfm

Also states like Nevda have done some other interesting things like letting family farms get a Limited Allodial Title for a period in time before stopping. I just think prop 13 was not planned out very well and applies to too many entities, but the idea of not wanting to force people out their homes is certainly a problem other states worry about.

They can take a line of credit on their home and pay for the taxes, then when they die their home is not passed on to their children for free (and inheriting the low property taxes!). At CA property tax rates, people would not be forced out of their home in their lifetime.

Unproductive assets like real estate should not be enablers of generational wealth.

That's kinda how the Idaho Property tax deferral program works. Prop 13 from my understanding applies to businesses, landlords running apartments, people with multiple properties ect... A tax reduction that only applies if the owner is living it seems fine in my opinion. Most other states property tax relief programs require that property to be the owners primary residence.

Property taxes are weird as they are basically one of the few taxes that continue to happen even without any transactions. Almost all other taxes happen when there is a transaction. For example sales tax, when you buy something; Income tax when you get paid; Tariffs when something is imported ect... Property taxes can also can increase without you doing anything so if your income is fixed or does not increase fast enough you could lose your house due to a tax lien.

If your worried about generational wealth that's why we have inheritance and estate taxes. The federal estate tax can get as high as 40%. However, a home is a productive asset if people are living in it. It may not be as productive as some other uses of property like running a business from it, farming the land ect...

> Property taxes can also can increase without you doing anything so if your income is fixed or does not increase fast enough you could lose your house due to a tax lien

Like I said, you won't lose your house within your lifetime at current property tax rates. I see no reason why we should guarantee owners' houses for any longer than that instead of freeing up those houses on the market for new owners.

Tax deferral is a great idea, tax relief not so much.

There is plenty of politics in Texas, for sure, but it wasn't coal power systems that failed in the winter, it was wind, natgas, and one nuclear power plant.

Iirc wind performed more or less as forecast (admittedly not great, but as expected) during Feb 2021 and nearly all of the shortfall came down to natural gas plants and infra failing.

I'm all in favor of wind power in Texas, and want more of it, but it did do worse than expected in Feb 2021. It's just a problem to be fixed, not a reason to drop wind power (west Texas has a lot of wind), but it did actually happen.

It's not about who is or isn't in favor of it. The narrative has been misleading here.

Check figures 2.c on page 18 and 2.o on page 34 in UT's report on this (https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%28...) for a sense of the scope of how unexpected capacity outages break down.

Yes--a lot of wind was offline. But all of the expected wind capacity could have been met and the grid would have still needed to shed quite a bit of load. In fact, all of the expected wind, solar, coal, and nuclear could have been online and the grid would have still had to shed a meaningful amount.

The scale of the natural gas outages was larger than the entire load-shed, afaict.

My understanding is that this is incorrect, and it was coal power plants that weren’t properly winterized that failed. Of course you had a lot of people claiming the opposite, without evidence.

EDIT: Okay there was some loss in capacity in wind power, but the greatest loss in capacity was natural gas plants, which lost 15GW of capacity. I confused natural gas with coal as I don’t consider either to be climate friendly. Wind lost about 3GW of capacity.

See at 7:50 here: https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM

Natural Gas may not be climate friendly, but there is lots of it in Texas, and it's more environmentally friendly than coal.

The Natural Gas distribution system just fell apart two years ago.

Excellent video channel, I follow it as well.

By the way, natgas is actually much friendlier (well, less hostile) to the environment than coal, if you're looking at carbon/kWh or all of the other things released into the atmosphere when you burn coal.

However, you can much more easily make a giant mound of coal next to your power plant, than store up enough natgas (LNG is much more expensive to store). So, the power plants required natgas to show up in the pipeline, and when the temperature dropped and everybody cranked up the heat, not only in Texas, the natgas pressure in the pipelines dropped. Oil (liquid) and coal (solid) are just fundamentally easier to stockpile than natgas or wind (gas) or solar (light).

A big freakin' battery would help with this, but that isn't a cost-effective option (yet?).

Natural gas is 100 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 though when unburned and it leaks when being collected and transported.

Actually some coal plants did fail in the freeze as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com