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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary

The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.

I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.

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> San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.

Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...

(We can't, and we don't.)

I don't actually want to ignore San Francisco's problems. [0] I would just say that its existence makes national conversations more difficult.

[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.

If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.

10% of America lives in California. Can't really call it an outlier.

You're right. Outlier is a poor word choice. I just mean to say that increasingly we need separate discussions for the 10% of people who live in CA and the 90% who don't, because the experiences are really quite different.

I think you're right in that discussions need to be different for different parts of the country, but I think the split is urban and not-urban. A lot of California is urban, but so is a lot of New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, etc etc. as far as where the population lives. And all have similar problems when it comes to education.

When it comes to education pensions, CA is not an outlier. The precise terms vary, but I think most public educators have access to similar pension programs.

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