"State Democratic leaders ignore the obvious. Liberal-leaning think tanks have produced studies alleging that few businesses actually leave the state. That is true on its surface, although Fox News reported that more than 2,500 employers, accounting for 109,000 jobs, have left California in the past four years."
In other words, research bodies are too liberal-leaning to be of value, let's rely on foxnews. Not really HN worthy.
Clearly a lot of major CA employers choose to put factories or large operations in other states for cost reasons; some of this may be regulatory, some may be taxes, some may be availability of labor, some may be availability of other resources (cheap power in OR/WA, old industrial facilities to repurpose, ...).
I don't think a lot of companies move their HQs from California to elsewhere, but you could easily have a much bigger effect from California-HQ companies putting their major new facilities out of the state.
I personally would like to put my business in Washington, Nevada, Hong Kong, maybe Texas, or potentially Colorado or Montana, for a mix of tax, regulatory, and cost reasons. Unfortunately, with the possible exception of Seattle, there's really no way to reliably locally hire enough computer security people, or to have proximity to customers, to overcome the advantage of the Bay Area. The alternative is some kind of distributed company, or recruiting and relocating lots of people, but that makes the difficult problem of a startup even harder.
You are missing the point it is not about software company or manufacturing company sooner or later we all will get affected. It is about the path of self destruction Democrats are taking us on with their ideological thinking and and selfish behavior to remain in power.
There are a lot of things WA politicians are doing which seem reasonable, especially compared to other states. There are a lot of factors besides government; Seattle happens to be a great tech place for computer security, and UW is really good. WA people and weather are nice, and it is a good place to live.
If it is just about minimum regulation, startups would all be in NV and WY. Very few are.
Big industrial companies selling overseas get much more assistance from the federal government than any small computer company hacker news people would be familiar with. The US does this a lot less than most countries, too, but it definitely exists.
Boeing has far closer ties to the government than a tech startup would.
Actually I'd say it is good that it came to HN at least the intellectual community here could know and may be do something about it. There is always next election!