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Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

So, you think businesses should move away from the largest single-point concentrations of customers and workers? Something like 20% of all the humans in USA are represented by those two little acronyms NY and CA.

'easy to do business' isn't just about regulations. It's often about fishing where fish are.

Tangentially related to differences in regulation between states, but interestingly Oklahoma has a nearly ironclad ban on noncompete agreements for workers. Has some fascinating effects for attracting skilled labor there. I know welders, mechanics, electricians, etc based in OK that are at the top of their game nationally and earn mind blowing salaries hopping from contract to contract, like sports players. Usually unionized as well, so reasonable work-life balance to boot.

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> So, you think businesses should move away from the largest single-point concentrations of customers and workers? Something like 20% of all the humans in USA are represented by those two little acronyms NY and CA.

You are correct in that you need to fish where fish are. Conversely, this sounds too close to staying with the abusive partner because they're hot. At some point, the abusive partner needs that prompt to change their behavior, and that does mean leaving them, even if they are hot.

Yes. At a certain point, it's just not worth it. Atlas Shrugged makes the case that competent people are not slaves and they can just stop.

The GDP and other economic statistics of NY and CA (also about 20% of whole country) suggests to me we have not reached that point yet. They are operating on the world stage economically which suggests it continues to make sense to do business there.

But, if all the people objecting to the regulations that make life better in those states want to go away, all the better for the remainers in my eyes I think. We'll see which US megaregions are still economically and culturally dominant in 50 years, and I suspect it's going to still largely be CA and NY, complaints of libertarians aside.

Granted, I think the northeast megalopolis will eventually extend downwards to Atlanta and even Florida via high speed passenger rail eventually and knit together the whole east coast as a megabloc, which raises interesting questions about how that entity will federate given the differing cultural ideas at present.

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