Native of Austin here, moving to SF. I can only speak to the trends I'm personally seeing, but the flood of tech money into Austin is sweeping my favorite parts of the city away. The places that filled the nooks and crannies in the city are getting replaced by fonts. Put up a steel and glass building with a cafe in the bottom, slap on an "indie-western-hipster" font and boom, we're still "keeping Austin weird". My parents moved to Austin after law school to avoid the money-culture in Dallas and the humidity in Houston. But you can't outrun the money culture forever; it's relentless at finding pockets of cool to sell.
The tech wealth moving to Austin is a certain type of wealth. It's largely the wealth that is socially liberal, but sure as heck likes the low taxes. For them, Austin is having your cake and eating it too. You get loudly decry everything the state government does while silently enjoying the tax and business environment. It's uniquely Austin seeing how people take comfort knowing if the Austin mayoralty swings too far left that the Capital will crack the whip. It's a win-win all around.
People forget that South Congress was grungy for awhile. People forget that Liz Lambert took a big risk when she bought the motel there, that ACL was only one weekend, and that Whole Foods started here. Before all this, Austin was anchored by the Capital and UT, but now we're getting a SoHo House down the street from the Equinox. And Oracle has a new skyscraper, cool. If I had to bet, it's only a matter of time before we start putting up skyscrapers up North near the Domain where the Amazon's and Apple's are setting up.
And when y'all move here anyways, try to leave Austin weirder than you found it. This is a great city.
I feel like people discount how much the “weird” contributed to the success of SV. You had The Grateful Dead in Palo Alto, Clifford Stoll types in Berkeley, etc. [1]
I would argue the opposite: SV is a monoculture of nerds obsessed with computers, science, and grand ideas of changing the world through tiny companies. Everyone around the world knows it. So all of these kinds of people flock to the Bay in droves, and drive all of the locals mad in the process, but eventually unicorns and impossible fortunes start oozing out of the cracks.
And how can we be sure SV is a monoculture? Because in San Francisco, and now Austin, residents are complaining loudly about the blight of uniform techies with nothing to offer the community at large but glass skyscrapers and hunched backs. Case closed!
The thing about this is that there are mops and geeks. The geeks just do the thing that they think is cool. The mops are there because the geeks are there. Since the geeks just do cool things, they have no trouble finding each other and doing cool things.
It's the mops who have trouble. They're always like "X place used to be cool. There were all these people who did Y here". Well, those people are elsewhere and you don't know it because you were never one of them. You were a groupie. So the mops always get annoyed at some point not because some lower class of mop arrived but because there is only so many of them that can exist without ruining their thing.
So, usually it's earlier groupies complaining about later groupies.
"Man, Oakland used to be full of artists"
"Oh yeah? What kind of art did you make?"
"Oh not me. I studied chemical engineering. But there were all these artists back then."
I'd argue that there's culture and there's vultures. In any place, a community of people create a unique culture.
Geeks create most of the artifacts & traditions of that culture, but the entire community (either passively or actively) contributes, supports, and adds to it.
When that culture blows up, the vultures move there because they find value to exploit in that culture, while simultaneously supplanting/destroying/building over that culture.
In your example, maybe the local ("earlier groupie") who studied chemical engineering knows the artists, supports their shows, smokes with them, shares his or her life with them, and has the culture ingrained in them even if that person isn't directly an artist or geek.
Continuing the example, contrast this with a "later groupie" who would move to said location. This person might move into a new highrise development that used to be the warehouse where aforementioned artist & chemical engineer would kick it on weekends. The vulture will also support noise ordinance laws that would kill the informal events/performances of the culture that said chemical engineer used to attend, and where said artist would perform his or her art when that person was still 'underground'.
See essay "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution":
> The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.
> Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.
> If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.
> If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.
- what you describe about SV isn’t as much a culture, as it is psychographic homogeneity that is in its own way unifying [1]
- but about how “weird” as a culture can be good and important, I see that as the existence and acceptance of various sub and counter cultures, leading to an air of vibrancy, excitement, and “cool“.
San Francisco certainly wasn't always this way. Seems like GP is expressing concern that the corporate culture will wash away the weird/counter culture in Austin as well.
Lol I enjoyed your rant. I think this is true for most new stuff in any city. From Stockholm to Milan, from Melbourne to Tokyo. It’s the general money culture you’re addressing, not necessarily from SV.
I wish we would have uniqueness to the city. It’s becoming all a monoculture of Eames fake bar stools and Edison bulbs illuminating your exceptionally well crafted macchiato. This started in late 2000s actually. I was just in Kyoto before the pandemic and a lot of traditional old cafes are being replaced by the most hipster japanese shit I've ever. You know the old cafes that served 10cm thick toast, I specifically remember one by the Tajima (sic?) market when I used to travel there back in early 2000s.
Honestly, I want to preserve culture, but that's "too conservative" and you get attacked for saying these things.
>For them, Austin is having your cake and eating it too. You get loudly decry everything the state government does while silently enjoying the tax and business environment.
Give them a decade and they'll forget they actually enjoy the environment and light the cake on fire by putting their money where their mouth is, act like nobody could have foreseen the resulting tragedy and move on to do it again somewhere else.
It's not so much the wealth that is a negative, IMO, but certain elements of the SV culture that feel like they are corrosive. In particular, the attitudes of "I earn high comp and know stuff in my industry so surely I must be smart on all topics" and "I must inject my lefty politics into everything always" are antithetical to Austin's (and Texas's) culture.
You’re describing the people who came here for the money, found SV boring, and colonized SF instead. Those parasitical shits are the ones assailing you like two-legged tree roaches (yes I lived in Austin...in the early 80s)
This is true of a lot of cities of course. You have 42nd Street in NYC, the Combat Zone in Boston... Through really, people complaining that it's not like the old days either didn't live there then or they're looking back through very rose colored glasses.
Case in point, the old adult theatre the parent is talking about was flush with pimps, prostitutes, and drugs along with the rest of south Congress street.
It was not somewhere you would walk during the day, much less at night. Yet people are remembering it fondly.
Oh, let me be clear, I was a teenager when that thing was around. I'm not remembering it fondly...I just remember it and thought it was funny that it was being renovated into an office at the time.
If I'm going to remember something fondly it will be the smaller music venues like Liberty Lunch and old Emo's.
Honestly...most of the changes are good. More smart people is always good. More VC attention is (mostly) good. Some of the new buildings are good.
What I don't appreciate:
People that can't stop talking about how awesome SF or NYC is.
Cookie cutter condos.
People that don't appreciate what they're moving to and trying to get the best parts shut down -- i.e. Don't move to a condo next to a well known live music venue and try to get it shut down or at least quiet after 9 pm. Not cool.
Cheap places to live are disappearing for people who don't make a lot of cash.
Straining already struggling infrastructure (traffic and water, in particular).
Lame cookie-cutter architecture in general being thrown up as quickly as possible.
And, generally, bringing bad attitudes into what has been a very chill, very accepting culture.
But those are small things, all things considered. Most of the people moving here are smart, cool people that acclimate quickly. To them, I say Welcome! To the others I say...maybe Dallas or Houston would be a better fit.
I am a tech “bro” myself, but my move to SF predates the recent tech boom. I was also annoyed at the local government for not fixing quality of life issues. But off late, I am increasingly disillusioned by the tech industry and the loudmouth tech execs and VCs on Twitter. They complaint all day about SF. They are constantly looking for validation and affirmation of their self importance from local leaders. They probably believe that everyone owes them something. And I started to realize that people forget why they moved to SF to begin with. It was because it wasn’t a wasteland of mono culture of office parks and white collar workers. And now every day they decry what they moved into.
You can use taxes as a sword, but Texas has no personal income tax. A higher minimum wage would also help, but that has to go through the same people who don't want a personal income tax.
As more and more people move to Austin they will grow in political influence until they can vote out those people, institute a personal income tax, etc.
Texas amended the state constitution in 2019 to prohibit a personal income tax.
Also, the legislature of TX isn't structured in such a way that a large increase in Austin's population would enable sufficient political power to alter the constitution.
Finally, why would you want to move from California to Texas and then try to transform Texas into California? Just stay in California if that's what you want.
> As more and more people move to Austin they will grow in political influence until they can vote out those people, institute a personal income tax, etc.
Houstonian and UT grad here. We libtards have been saying that for as long as I can remember, and it never seems to come to pass. It's much like the old saying, [X] is five years in the future, and has been for the last 50 years.
Owned a home in Galveston only to have the property tax triple, but when I finally challenged it using a local realtor family friend's help it turned in to "okay how much do you want to pay". Its a game with rules that aren't exactly clear.
Sounds like a repeat of what happened to SF. Be ready for the tech money and tech sis/bros to descend like a swarm of locusts, displace all the locals, extinguish everything cool, and then start complaining about how nobody appreciates them.
Imo, these are the worst type of people. I look forward to the day they all leave the Bay Area and go somewhere else.
Nobody would have been displaced if SF home building wasn’t at an all-time low. The propensity for the left in this city to stick up for homeowners and their intentional housing crisis is incredible.
I think it has more to do with preserving the character and vibe of the city -- the things that make it uniquely San Francisco. A lot of animosity toward the new arrivals stems from the lack of respect and appreciation for these. The valley itself (i.e. the peninsula and Fremont down to San Jose) has always been a cultural wasteland. I miss the days when the techie scum used to confine itself to those environs.
Not necessarily. The people who were there for money / work are leaving in droves. I can only hope that a crash similar to the tech bust in the late 90s / early 00s accelerates the process. Those who are staying tend to genuinely like and appreciate the area, and they tend to be better citizens who contribute to a sense of community.
It's a nice rant but you clearly don't care about most of the things you complain about.
You're moving to SF.
Everything you complain about is worse in SF and there are even more problems like (still) insane real estate prices, out of control homelessness, city government against everything new (e.g. it took SF months to approve bird etc. scooters).
Your actions speak louder than your words.
There are, of course, plenty of good reasons to move to SF from Austin (weather, ocean, mountains, more tech jobs) but those are not what you claim are your reasons.
Or put another way, the talent need not follow the money types to Texas. There are plenty of cheap places in California where you still aren't compelled to sell your soul to your employer - and salaries suggest that talent in tech already had plenty of leverage before remote working even entered the equation.
I see a sad pattern where government officials often conflate free markets with sound markets. They certainly overlap in many areas but non-competes are a classic market failure.
I concur. I grew up in Sacramento and I'm contemplating buying a place there (I'm currently in Santa Cruz County; I'd love to stay here forever, but it is too expensive for me to buy unless I live in the mountains) and working remotely from there, though prices have risen considerably this year due to its popularity with Bay Area mega-commuters and remote workers. Sacramento has a lot going for it; it's a diverse metro area with a lot to do, and there are many nice, safe neighborhoods. I also like Sacramento's walkable central areas, though these areas are a bit pricey (they're an absolute bargain compared to the Bay Area, but they're more expensive than Sacramento's suburbs). Sacramento has a California State University campus (Sacramento State University), and University of California, Davis is only 15 minutes west of Downtown Sacramento.
An alternative that I'm considering is Merced, which is roughly two hours from Silicon Valley. Merced is much smaller than Sacramento, so it lacks Sacramento's amenities and variety of neighborhoods. However, Merced is home to University of California, Merced, which opened in 2005. UC Merced has been expanding and is becoming more popular with students. While Merced does not yet have a college-town atmosphere (at least to me), Merced has the potential to develop this feel. Merced has the cheapest housing of all cities that host a UC campus (though Riverside comes close). A mortgage on a brand-new three-bedroom house in Merced is cheaper than the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area.
Finally, I'm also considering some of Southern California's desert cities that are part of the greater Los Angeles metro area, such as Palmdale and Lancaster in the Antelope Valley as well as the Inland Empire area. These areas have relatively affordable housing yet are very close to Los Angeles and all of its amenities.
> ... Palmdale and Lancaster in the Antelope Valley as well as the Inland Empire area. These areas ... are very close to Los Angeles and all of its amenities.
Have you lived in SoCal before? Because this reads as kind of naive about the traffic patterns down here. I'm not trying to discourage you or anything but there's a certain reality you have to be capable of accepting about driving distance to driving time in SoCal, otherwise you will be absolutely miserable living here.
I spent a summer in Palmdale to do an internship with an aerospace company, and pre-COVID I used to go to SoCal a few times per year to visit friends and attend concerts. I wouldn’t want to commute from the Antelope Valley to Los Angeles every day due to the legendary traffic there. However, if I work remotely, then the commute to Los Angeles becomes less of a problem. There’s also the Metrolink train, which I took whenever I wanted to explore the LA area (I didn’t have a car at the time of my internship).
As an ex Texan, I understand the pride behind this statement. But I think what seems to be the underlying premise — we don’t need to change to attract outsiders - captures an essential historic difference between California and Texas culture. It’s dangerous to speak too broadly — california has had its reactionary periods - but on balance I find it historically much more eager to change and evolve, especially socially, in response to outside and unconventional ideas and people. The Bay Area in particular (a tech center) is famous for this. Yes Texas is demographically changing rapidly but the culture of a place changes relatively slowly.
I'm not trying to make this political, but with all the migration to Texas it will be interesting to see if it remains a strongly Republican state in the future.
I live in Georgia and I can see the demographics changing quite a lot.
IMO the idea of red states and blue states doesn't make a lot of sense. Remove the state boundaries and the real defining characteristic for red/blue is urban/rural. It need not be any more complicated than that.
I live in this district. Supposedly, I have more in common with folks 50 miles away in Kingwood than I do with the folks two streets over. It's BS and leads to Crenshaw getting elected (who I didn't like but at least respected at the beginning of his term, but really kinda do hate now).
There is a bit more than just the usual gerrymandering at play here, though. Notice where the southern tip of the district is. The med center is deliberately split between (almost) every congressional district in Houston. That means that it gets multiple representatives in congress from multiple parties and remains well-funded. That's actually not a bad strategy, but it unfortunately gives the Republican state legislature a justification to hide behind for their blatant gerrymandering.
It's also why the current configuration isn't likely to change dramatically. Both parties want to ensure that the TX Medical Center has lots of representation in congress. As a result, Houston's core will always be divided among multiple districts. Republicans control the state legislature, so they make the districts have big "blobs" from outside the city, but if it were drawn by the democrats, it would still have this weird tendency to have narrow "arms" reaching towards the med center.
You nailed it. The difference between cultures in rural, suburban, and urban is mainly due to environmental stimulus. When your only opportunity for food at ~9pm in a rural/suburban environment is fast food — that changes the way you view your day, becoming a defacto framework that permeates everything.
They think in terms of independence and consequence (sound red?) - work late and still want decent sleep? Well you have to eat McDonalds or make a turkey sandwhich, there is no luxury, no option of a small family restaurant sharing their homeland cuisine.
This makes for a peculiar set of people - people that are mad good at creativity within limitations, but are constantly defined by their lack of exposure to experiences and post-modern cultural poverty.
>When your only opportunity for food at ~9pm in a rural/suburban environment is fast food — that changes the way you view your day, becoming a defacto framework that permeates everything.
I pretty strongly disagree with this. Most people make meals at home which aren't necessarily "just a turkey sandwich." I don't even live in a particularly rural area (about 40 miles west of Boston) and I don't really have great meal options at 5pm much less 9pm. There are a few good pizza places, a Five Guys, some chain steak places, etc. but other than the odd pizza takeout I don't really eat out.
If I lived in a city? I'd probably go out or get takeout more regularly but I'd still cook most days.
I debated fully fleshing out this topic and decided to stick to a high level until someone replied - so thank you for the critique.
The turkey sandwhich was meant to be a place holder for the general idea. Roughly, if you want to work long and hard to get ahead, usually food prep time is the easiest thing to cut to get a return on time invested in long term value. There are still super humans that have mastered meal prep (this may be you) but for the people I know, it’s hard to do all of these things well with limited options - which forces this consequence mindset.
Nothing particularly super about me. I haven't regularly commuted for a long time and almost certainly never will again. But even when I went into an office regularly, I mostly left at 5-6pm. Never felt it was useful to put in more hours than that. (Travel, well, not these days, but you know what I mean is a different matter.)
That said, when I was commuting, I did have a lot of meals I could throw together quickly (or had made ahead)--probably faster than going out for takeout to be honest.
Each state is unique and changing in time. Look at CO for example. Focus on the Family, the USAF Academy and many military bases are all in CO. 20 years ago, it was a solid Rep. base. But over time, things have shifted so that weed first became legal there.
That's ignoring the major issue that all western states have: water rights. All the pish-posh of politics today has nothing on the fights over water in western states. In CO that pits the mountains against the ranchers, in CA that pits north against south; there is no red/blue when it comes to the real (and sometimes deadly) fight over water.
Indeed, and I'd read many articles over the past few years pointing that out. Being a bit of a nerd, though, it was brought home to me most vividly by an NYT article in September, which uses aerial image analysis - roughly speaking grey v green, but with the most interesting bits in between:
In TX it is more complicated. The cities and farms were blue until all those folks from out-of-state moved into new suburbs and retired to exurbs. The suburbs have controlled TX for about 30 years.
What's left of real rural folk doesn't matter except in the local statehouse.
I mean at the voter level. How it gets expressed in power is certainly an artifact of our political system. For better or worse, our system is tilted towards rural power.
It’s a shocking almost perfect correlation, and it’s intensifying. The suburbs are starting to turn blue, especially around large cities, leaving the Republican Party an almost pure rural party.
Texas was strongly democratic until a lot of folks from the Bible Belt watched too much Dallas on TV and moved in.
The demos have to change a lot in a lot of districts to overcome Gerrymandering for state and federal House representatives. Power isn't in the Governorship, the Lt. Governor controls the state Senate, budget and sits on the redistricting commission. They are elected from the state Senate members.
So TX could have a Democratic Governor and Senators but the local stuff will be red for a long time.
Fort Worth (or Tarrant county maybe, I forget) majority voted for a democratic president for the first time in a long time. Demographics are slowly shifting there (and for those looking for that old Austin feel, it has a lot of it these days).
What makes you think it's red or blue that's leaving? California is still 40% republican after all.
Granted there are lots of reasons both would move like the needles and shit in the street. I feel on the political side it would be more likely for the reds to leave.
People living in strongly red or blue states are going to be more used to the dominant party's stupidity. It's not about the specific party policy points as it is about being blind to everything your party does wrong.
A "red" Californian transplant in some other state is more likely to vote for some insane leftist who wants to turn the economy inside out because they like their policy on police reform and they are blind to all of the things that should be red flags because those things are within the realm of normal back home.
And the same goes for a blue transplant from the reddest parts of the bible belt. They're more likely to vote for some insane moralizing right winger because they support legal weed despite having beliefs about homosexuals that are straight out of the 1980s (or whatever, I'm just making up somewhat realistic examples).
IMO the worst part is that both groups don't realize that the rampant ineffectiveness, corruption, back room dealing and bad treatment of the populace that governments in both red and blue states indulge in when they don't have to fear being voted out isn't something that's normal or something that should be tolerated.
If you live in a single party dump of a state you're eventually gonna stop smelling the dump.
Define "level." Is there the same caliber of talent? Absolutely. Are there an equal number? Not even close. Is the ratio of tech to non tech in the ATX area the same as the bay area? Probably not but it's growing. More and more of the people I've met here are in tech. This has continued to go up as more subdivisions are completed. The new tax laws that screwed over CA residents have definitely increased the number of CA migrants, as has the the increase in remote work from COVID. We have fast internet, no state tax and cheaper property. (What you get for half million here vs CA is amazing and it's nowhere near as nice as it was just five years ago).
Added bonus and what nobody here will tell you (and TX natives don't see) is that the Hill Country is absolutely beautiful. I was shocked when I moves here. I didn't know it but it's a huge wedding destination because it's so pretty. (Being in CA leaves an ignorant taste in your mouth about TX).
So no, it's not the bay area and we don't have parity right noq. As a bay area native, I would never go back. (Full disclosure: TX will get better than it is now but not that I'm a parent of a toddler, we're probably leaving and headed to New England. That's a discussion for a different topic though.)
I don't know what criteria is being used to claim Texas is American's most diverse city but simple checking the census data shows that is provably false.
ALSO, WTF is up with the whole mixing in Hispanic in such a strange way in the census? Seems super fishy like someone wanted to paint a certain kind of picture but if they just plainly list ethnicities they don't get to make the story they want to tell.
It’s handled that way because many Hispanic people don’t consider “Hispanic” to be a race. That is to say, Afro-Latinos and White Hispanic people often don’t consider ourselves multiracial; my racial heritage is independent of the fact that my ancestors happened to be located in Mexico at one point.
What's a racial heritage though? Appalachians don't have the same racial heritage as more recent family immigrants from Russia or Ireland, but all are Caucasian, and Black descendants of slaves don't have the same racial heritage as Somali or Kenyan immigrants.
"Obviously" in what way? Houston's population is 25% foreign born, with an almost even 4-way split between Black, Asian, Hispanic, and White residents.
We're also more socioeconomically balanced and diverse.
I grew up in the VA suburbs of DC, and one of the obvious ways that you can tell the diversity was in the schools. The schools had signs telling all visitors to report to the main office, and (owing to the numbers of immigrants for whom English proficiency wasn't strong) repeated this message not only in English but Spanish... and Arabic (or Farsi, I can't distinguish the two), Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.
Yes, California is a very big state and I could imagine for example the Central Valley reaping many more benefits from any persistent remote work or company relocation trend than other states. Hadn’t considered this possibility but it makes a lot of sense.
Having just left the Central Valley of California, living there for 7 years working remotely the whole time, I don’t think it’ll work out this way. If you want to see overtaxed areas where you absolutely cannot see the benefits of your tax dollars, you’ll be right at home.
Moving out of California is like getting an immediate 25% raise.
I thought the same until I spent more time in Reno. The cost of living increased too much and the WIND is the worst thing about the area. Constant 40+ mph gusts.
I don't know much about Vegas, perhaps it's better.
Also means that some simple reform in Texas could remove one of the few downsides. Meanwhile California cannot build anything. Everything is either blocked by NIMBYs or like the high speed rail fails due to corruption and incompetence.
I felt like the failure of the rail project from LA to SF was kind of a milestone showing just how dysfunctional the state is. California spent more money not building rail than it costs in many countries to complete a rail line.
I feel like your comment is spot on for the usual Texas vs California dialog:
High speed rail in Texas: 0 miles built, zero miles under construction, projects stuck in regulation waiting to begin work[1]
High speed rail in California: Active construction, most ambitious real HSR project in the country, project delay by regulatory hurdles… mostly because conservatives tried to sue it to death and failed.
Texans on their progress vs California: California is a failure.
This whole meme is because a couple struggling Silicon Valley companies who stopped being able to make it in SV decided to relocate to Texas to go out to pasture along with a couple rich people. Y’all think that being a launch site for SpaceX, which remains a company with a California headquarters, and a majority California positioned engineering team is hot stuff. Y’all celebrate how many tech jobs come to Texas when California companies open branch offices for support and secondary roles in your state and crow about how you one upped the Californians as you landed those amazing customer support roles by selling corporations pieces of Texans and the time of your citizens for cheaper. Then y’all lecture us about how you just got HP’s enterprise spinoff, when we have the actual HP… y’all need to stop claiming to be doing better at areas you’re doing worse on if you want to figure out how to actually do better.
The California HSR project is dead, in case you didn't know. It ran over budget nearly 3 times the initial projected cost estimates, and ultimately is going between Merced and Bakersfield instead of the original SF to LA (less than 200 miles of track) - two cities practically no person commutes between.
Overall, the project was a massive failure, and a political party that's in the minority isn't the reason.
It's a failure in the sense it was supposed to cost $30 Billion but is estimated to be nearly $100 Billion, and was supposed to go between SF and LA with extensions to Sacramento and San Diego, but instead is only covering less than 200 miles of track between two cities nobody commutes between and have small populations which will not be able to sustain the operating costs of this railway.
It doesn't achieve any of the goals it set out to do, is way way over budget, and has been axed by the governor. That's a failure in my book...
More progress on building a high speed rail network than any other state. If this is what failure looks like other states should try some success, I guess. We’ll just have to settle for keeping up with failure as we construct our new rail line, piece by piece by piece.
A railway that will be bankrupt in days, and will have to forever live off tax payer funding, running a route between two cities nobody wants is not a success.
That is, unless your definition of success is any mile of track laid, regardless of how it's used? That's a weird definition of success, if I may say so.
As-is, people will need to drive 2.5 hours from SF to Merced, wait for a train, take a 1.5 hour train ride to Bakersfield, then rent a car and drive another 1.5 hours from Bakersfield to LA.
All that saves about 1 hour of travel time (at the most!)... but requires renting a car, gas, etc.
Basically, this thing is completely useless. Finally the government realized this and cancelled the entire project.
Yet, the California Tax Payers that voted for the $30 Billion Bond Measure will continue to pay the extra taxes for decades to come...
I'd love to have a HSR in California - but it has to be built for a reasonable budget, and support itself with ticket fares, and go to destinations people actually want. Otherwise, it's just a waste.
If you think places like Orange County, Ventura, the Inland Empire, Sacramento, etc are expensive; you’re going to be sorely disappointed when you leave to any similarly sized metro elsewhere.
It's entirely valid for people to want a middle ground.
You can think California is too regulated and that Texas isn't regulated enough -- but it's much, much harder to repeal regulations than to create new ones.
So it's entirely reasonable to see Texas as a location where you can implement the right regulations from scratch without going overboard.
I got my current job when I got a good offer to relocate. When I eventually leave, I will either return home or move to the bay area. One of the reasons I would move out to the bay area would be the better noncompete and IP assignment legalities. I would like to code my own stuff at night or on weekends without worrying as much about all of this.
Non competes are a different thing than IP assignment.
Non competes prevent an employer to forbid you to work for competitor after you leave (or they fire you). Non competes are non enforceable in CA.
IP assignments (i.e. "what you do belong to us") is very much enforceable and very common.
How it's enforced depends on the company, but by default the employer can claim ownership if you do your work on their time or using their resources (e.g. on a company's laptop).
And they can drag you through courts even if it's all your time and your resources.
If you work for Apple, you better not do any non-Apple work. At Google you can do open source work but you have to get a permission.
So as far as IP assignment, CA is no different than TX.
That "relate" clause can be a pretty major deal breaker. Companies like Apple have their fingers in a lot of pies, and a lot of their projects are secret even to employees
If you just start working on a side project without running it past your employer, you could be in violation and not even know it
I thought California had better IP assignment laws than states like Texas ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208819 ), but it is not something I know about in full detail.
I know California can can claim ownership if you do work on their time or using their resources. In other states the scope seems even wider. I should probably look into it more.
As long as they don't use the employer's equipment nor work that they do for the employer or compete with the employer, they can own their own work. This is one of the key legal reasons CA spawns so many startups.
CA's restrictions on what IP assignment agreements can claim is a _huge_ win for employees. I _really_ wish we had similar legislation here in TX. I think that's a much more important issue than non-competes, personally.
It's more of the "money types" have the money to pick up and move half-way across the nation at the drop of a hat, and not worry about trying to find a new job or housing, etc.
A luxury the rest of us cannot afford.
They are fleeing red tape, overregulation and general dysfunction, yes... along with things like a hypocritical governor[1] that crushes businesses seemingly at random[2], ludicrously high state income tax rates, property tax rates and sales tax rates[3], and half the state burning to the ground every year due to what our government tells us is Global Warming's fault, instead of decades of awfully misguided forestry management policy[4], a massive homeless problem that gets worse every year[5] and is consuming coveted public areas like Venice Beach[6], people defecating in the streets right in front of families[7], an electric grid that is turned off for millions of people when the wind blows too much[8] and also when the wind blows too little[9]... plus more.
And then when our government officials are questioned about the "Exodus" they laugh and say, where are you going to go? The entire country has all these same problems you're complaining about!"[10] Which is absurdly false.
There definitely are greener pastures in this massive country... perhaps Austin and/or Texas isn't it... but California isn't as good as it gets, at least certainly not any more.
Anyone whose been in Dallas in August when it's been 110 degrees with humidity at 80 percent 3 days in a row knows why Texas cannot become ... anything but Texas.
Silicon Valley was not an intentional construct. It was a happy, chance collection of attributes that were combined geographically and then allowed to evolve for, now, 100 years. The Valley's seeds were planted in the 1920s when the Stanford-graduated, radio-enthusiast, electrical engineer sons of John Osborne Varian[0] patented the vibrating magnetometer. You you might consider John Osborne Varian the 'father' of Silicon Valley. His sons, Russell and Sigurd Varian, were compatriots of Philo Farnsworth and later invented the Klystron and founded Varian Associates.
Radio technology, a key player in WWII, guided military dollars to Silicon Valley. And then, Shockley established the semiconductor industry. Happenstance again due to Shockley being an alum of Bell Labs, and born in Palo Alto.
The point is, it was chance that the Varians and the Shockleys were from a region that included Stanford University. And to some extent the weather may have played a part in their decisions to locate their companies there. The seeds were planted as a matter of chance and then allowed to grow, mature and evolve for now 100 years. Moreover, I'd contend that the rate of growth in influence (how would you measure it?) of Silicon Valley is greater than anywhere on the planet, meaning, there is no region that is closing the gap.
Texas is a great state. It has awesome people, a large space industry including NASA, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, the real Texas Barbecue, a great University system, and a significant high-tech industry. But it cannot be, and should not strive to be Silicon Valley. It should strive to be the place that it has the most natural advantage give it's history, resources, and strengths.
To put it succinctly, Texas should not strive to become Silicon Valley any more than Silicon Valley should strive to become Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Paris, Milan, ...
You're listing a ton of achievements in tech which took place in the Valley while completely ignoring the role Texas has also played in technology. You mention Shockley's inventions driving the semiconductor industry there, but make no mention on Kilby making the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. You ignore the PC giants who called Texas home (Dell, Compaq, AST, Tandy) or at least had massive operations in Texas such as Apple. You ignore many telecommunications giants who call Texas home (AT&T, Ericsson, NTT Data, Softlayer, Fujitsu Network Communications, and historically many others) and ignore its positioning as a pretty good central hub for lots of transnational telecom. Lots of big software companies also call Texas home, such as Hotels.com, indeed, match.com, id software, travelocity, and way too many others to bother listing them all here. All the while also ignoring that many big tech companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, IBM, Accenture, Xerox, many others) that don't technically HQ in Texas have pretty large offices around here as well.
Historically many tech firms have called Texas home. If Texas cannot become anything but Texas, well then I'd say Texas will continue to be a pretty good place for technology.
> Anyone whose been in Dallas in August when it's been 110 degrees with humidity at 80 percent 3 days in a row knows why Texas cannot become ... anything but Texas.
I am a native Texan and spent most of my life in different cities throughout the state. However, this alone is the primary reason I may never move back. It’s too damn hot and only going to get hotter. I now live somewhere that has 4 seasons and where I can turn off the air conditioning for weeks or months at a time. It turns out pleasant weather is a pretty important factor for me and, I imagine, many other people as well.
I'm a native Michigander who moved to Austin from Seattle 4 years ago - the summers are absolutely brutal here, and like you say, only getting worse with climate change.
Have my first kid due in April, wife and I started earnestly looking into buying, and with a 6 figure salary I don't feel like I can afford to live within Austin city limits. The schools all suck where we could theoretically afford a total rebuild project home, at the very top of our price range.
Went to Buda to see what suburban life would be like, and it was my own personal hell. 6k sq ft lots for miles on end, everyone crammed in on each other snagging their tiny slice of the American dream. No tree coverage - summers there would be absolutely awful.
With 0 signs of climate change slowing buying a house in Texas feels like a gamble on a 20 year timescale. Austin is a lovely city in many ways, but when I think in 20 year increments I don't see this growth being sustained, I think there will be an exodus out of Texas and other southern states for cooler climates within my lifetime.
Taking my family back to where I grew up - Grand Rapids Michigan area. Winters aren't exactly fun, but it's a simple thing to get warmer - you just bundle up. Summer heat there is no escaping without air conditioning, there's weeks on end where you really can't go outside.
I feel the same way about heat and cold. I actually lived in New Orleans for 3 years and, when I was in the city, it was pretty much a matter of going from AC to AC for multiple months a year. I didn't really do outdoor activities.
The one time I was in Austin over a weekend relatively recently--I had events on either side--I did go up to Fredericksburg one day but mostly I just hung out until evening when the bats came out.
The only thing that really bugs me about snow is commuting/traveling. Fortunately I don't have to commute any longer and, as you say, you can always add a layer or two.
Never was. Was a good job out of engineering grad school. Actually spent a fair bit of time on offshore rigs and in shipyards. Fairly fun place to spend a few years but very little real culture--some jazz aside--as the wealthy were too busy planning their Mardi Gras balls. And to a local, Mardi Gras was mostly a zoo. Left after a few years to get another grad degree, which was pretty much my plan from the start.
I am working on an homestead design plan for someone near Buda/Kyle. Still gathering research material about climate/water etc but won’t start working on it before June 2021.
Out of curiosity, would it be possible to build an underground home(earth sheltered) in the Buda area? Should be cooler..and tree cover above.
I'm not sure - I'm sure it is possible. I do know that basements are not common in central Texas.
Near the hills there's a ton of limestone, and farther east I think there's a lot of clay. Both make digging (or sealing) a basement more expensive then in other parts of the country.
Without knowing anything about how the cost compares, it might make sense to look into building a home out of some thick dense walls of cement or something for natural insulation.
And you can look into some of the passive temperature regulation of traditional architectures from parts of the world with similar climates or newer green architectures that accomplish similar.
There are probably architecture firms in Central Texas that could help you with the last one.
I have found someone in Colorado who specializes in underground/earth sheltered homes. But local Texan expertise is even better as they’d know what has and hasn’t worked for local conditions.
I was working at Microsoft in Seattle, met my wife to be there, when we met her family already had plans of moving down to San Antonio, so we followed to Austin.
I work fully remote for NTT now.
PNW is an option, and that area has a lot going for it, but affordability isn't one of them and we no longer have any family up there, whereas I have family in Michigan. I had initially moved from Michigan to the PNW, wanting to get away from the snow, but in many ways the constant drizzle in Portland and Seattle made the winter even worse.
I do love the PNW though, in the summers it is so majestic with the mountains, rivers and ocean.
This is unrelated to the topic at hand, but your point about the Texas heat led me to another train of thought. It seems that when it comes to temperature extremes, heat is the first to get criticism. But I very rarely hear any complaints about the frigid temperatures in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, or Boston. I'm trying to wrap my head around it. Are humans better situated to deal with colder temperatures than hotter temperatures? Or is it just the simple fact that it is easier to layer up than it is to layer down?
>Or is it just the simple fact that it is easier to layer up than it is to layer down?
Pretty much. A good coat, scarf, gloves, hat, and long-johns will keep you comfortable outside down to single digits (f).
Plus, when you're outside doing stuff, it can feel pretty warm, even in 20 degree (f) temperatures. One of the best feelings in the world is unzipping my coat on a brisk day while working outside and feeling that cold air hit my hot, sweaty torso.
Also, people adapt to cold pretty quickly. Never-pants people are a thing, even in Russia.
People do complain about the cold though. I bet if you polled people who moved to Texas for Florida, one of their reasons for moving from the north was the weather.
You can't be serious. There is an entire culture of seasonal migration (snowbirds) to places like Arizona, that exists simply to escape the weather in the midwest/northeast. There is no one migrating from Texas to Ohio to enjoy the winters there.
I bet there are people who come up during the summer though. Probably not nearly as many yet, but I'm willing to bet that the population who moves north during the summer is going to increase significantly over the next 20+ years.
For those who are well enough off, you can even do it with your kids while they are on summer break, which you can't get away with in the winter.
And a lot of folks already "migrate" .. to the beach, to lake houses, etc. Part of it is recreation, but part of it is escaping the heat of landlocked areas.
> There is no one migrating from Texas to Ohio to enjoy the winters there.
(N=1:) Friends here in Houston do that to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan every summer.
A few years back, relatives were visiting from the Northeast in July. When planning the visit, they said we should make sure to find some things for them to do that Houstonians do in the summer. I said no problem, we'll take you to Colorado for a month ....
Lived in Texas my entire life. It's a lot easier to get warm than it is to get cold.
If you're cold? Grab a coat or blanket. Obviously, if you're stuck outdoors exposed to the wind and snow, that's a different thing altogether.
But if you're hot... you have to try and find some shade, drink some water, and hope you don't get heat exhaustion or stroke.
Much easier to bring your body temp up than it is down. That's not even accounting for the psychological effect being hot and miserable does to tempers.
> But I very rarely hear any complaints about the frigid temperatures in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, or Boston.
Eh? This is the principle complaint when someone tries to say Minneapolis or Chicago could become the next tech hub. I've lived in both cities.
It's also the chief complaint in Minneapolis for both new transplants and those leaving for greener (pun intended) pastures. In Chicago it's also the first complaint transplants have, but I suppose leavers tend to cite taxes first, weather second.
I have no evidence, but I posit that this is Northeast population center/media market bias at play.
Personally, I see far more people saying things like "how can you live there" about cold places, than about hot places (in the US).
However, the majority of the population in the US lives in areas that are less habitable due to cold than they are due to heat. That is to say, a New Yorker or Bostonian readily identifies with needing heat to survive, where they don't as readily identify with needing air conditioning to survive. So, extreme heat is more "foreign", more "other".
Also, in the US, air conditioning is more of a comfort factor than a life-sustaining factor. I mean, sure, there are places in the desert that are only habitable due to A/C, but there are just as many places across the south that are miserable in the summers, but people lived there 100 years ago, all the same.
Are humans better adapted to cold? Well, modern humans are descended from the few that survived the ice age, so I think there may be something to that.
But as a former Minnesotan.... I can say there is plenty to complain about with respect to cold weather. Joke 1: Minnesota has four seasons, they are called: almost-winter, winter, still-winter, and road-construction. Factoid 1: During grad school at U of M, I had a sticker for a commuter student parking lot only 6 blocks from the EE building. That winter I learned that in a -45F wind chill it takes 4 blocks for your beard to fill with ice, but in a -55F wind chill it only takes 3 blocks. Proverb 1: "There is no such thing as cold weather, only cold clothes." That comes in handy in Minnesota. Related factoid 2: I had a parka that I called my "snow blowing parka" because that is what I wore early in the (still pitch dark) morning to clear out the driveway so that I could get in to work on time. If it was as warm as 0F I never wore it, though, because I would overheat in it if I was working. Got a surprising amount of use out of it. 6 months after moving to California, I found it in my closet and thought to myself: "What the HELL were you thinking, bringing this thing out here?"
So yeah, cold weather in Minnesota is generally somewhere on the not-fun to dangerous end of the spectrum, and layering up is the way to go, with a good dose of thinking ahead. But on the list of reasons I would never move back, cold weather is actually number 3. Number 2 is ridiculous taxes for what you get, number 1 is those infernal deer flies -- think pesky like mosquitoes (the Minnesota state bird) except that every bite takes a chunk of flesh.
You can't layer down to less than nothing. Even if you are naked, most people will find being in 100 degrees of heat with 80% humidity extremely unpleasant. And it is the high humidity that is a major factor. 110 and 15% humidity is much more tolerable.
This is anecdotal but I have certainly heard my fair share of criticism of the cold as well. It likely depends on where you live, but while living in Texas I met many people who had moved there from Midwest/Northeast states who said their favorite thing about Texas was that it never snowed. They are the opposite of me in that what drew them to Texas was the heat!
I've lived in Beijing (sub-zero winters) and currently live in Singapore (30 degrees/80%+ humidity year-round).
I would much prefer to face a cold winter than hot and humid year-round. The weather is the main reason I'll eventually leave Singapore, there's simply nothing you can do to escape the heat/humidity. I work from home and literally run the A/C 24/7, and even then I still never feel "comfortable" (because it's too cold when it's too low, and when it's too high it doesn't evaporate enough sweat).
The South has been growing along with the West but the South still has the largest population at ~121 million. It sounds like I a lot of people, including myself, can stand the heat.
My parents actually moved to Arizona from Chicago because they go sick of the cold weather. Apparently the cold gets harder on you the older you are; in my parents case the cold made their arthritis worse.
Also while the summers in Arizona are hot, at least they are not humid. Its a much more easy to tolerate dry heat
>IIRC, there are cooler places in Arizona as well (mountains?).
Yes. You get snow in the winter in places like Flagstaff.
As someone who really doesn't like humid heat, I still find the low southwestern deserts relatively tolerable (not that you're going to go for a mid-day hike in the summer). That said, if I were to live in that area of the country, I would probably want to be someplace up higher.
My wife is very fair. Heat impacts her hard. She doesn't love cold but it seems to get to her less. I can handle either extreme but prefer high heat to low cold. I've also been told I radiate a surprising amount heat (by multiple people), so that could be part of it. My core temperature is normal but my surface temperature runs hot. When I'm cold though, I'm cold to the core and can't warm up.
Cold climates and obesity are complementary, USA has an "obesity epidemic", so you see less complaining about the cold than hot.
As an obese colleague once told me "you can't get more naked than naked, but I can put on as much clothes as needed", in a climatic conversation comparing his midwest origins vs. "hot" SV in California.
Well, the heat AND the humidity! People joke about this saying but having moved from Texas to SoCal it really makes a difference. (Which is good for California because it’s only getting hotter there...)
Doesn't half of Texas have seasons? I only drove through Amarillo but there was snow when I did. I always assumed the western half was drier and cooler, low humidity, etc.
> The Valley's seeds were planted in the 1920s when the Stanford-graduated, radio-enthusiast, electrical engineer sons of John Osborne Varian[0] patented the vibrating magnetometer.
SV was built by Fred Terman using post-WW2 Cold War money:
There’s so much salt about this Cal-exit phenomenon.
Tech industry diversifying location-wise is a good thing for everybody from a governance/regulation perspective.
It’s also a sign of the industry maturing further.
By all means, make non-competes largely unenforceable like they are in California (where they aren't actually "banned"). But be aware that even in states that do or did allow for enforcement of non-competes (like Massachusetts that finally significantly weakened them), there has always been a lot of job mobility and even competitors started by people leaving a prior employer. Non-competes/not-non-competes are not some binary thing that either lets you make off with all of a company's IP or that leaves you chained to a desk for the rest of your career. There are certainly stories of serious non-compete abuse (in my view) and I even know of a couple second hand, but people do routinely move among competitors in states other than California.
I don't live in California and I've only once had to sign a non-compete and it was narrowly scoped and mostly irrelevant.
> By all means, make non-competes largely unenforceable like they are in California (where they aren't actually "banned").
Largely? Aren’t they completely unenforceable? I seem to recall some big case where a C suite executive left and that was unenforceable. All that’s left is board members with a fiduciary duty, if that.
California’s stance on non-competes is so broad and uncompromising that you could show up and represent yourself, drunk, versus the finest legal team money could buy and you’ll win.
I am not an employment lawyer but very few things about employment contracts are so simple that you can just show up in court drunk and be fine. (Yes, I know you're being hyperbolic.) In part, because if you have a non-compete, you may well also have NDAs, non-solicitation clauses, etc. which are enforceable in CA. If a company wants to make your life difficult you're probably going to be out thousands of dollars in legal fees, lack of non-compete enforceability in CA notwithstanding.
The reason for "largely" is that in come sases, non-competes are enforceable. For example, if you buy a company, you can enforce a reasonable non-compete clause for the prior owners.
I live in California, and when I got my first non-compete 25 years ago (out of state company, it was their standard hiring package), I asked my dads friend (a corporate council - aka an attorney who knows about this stuff) about signing it. His advice was to redline everything, sign it, and return it with the package. If the employer had balked he’d have written a letter in response, but that didn’t happen.
So that’s been my routine ever since - non-competes and any non-compete language get a red pen through them, signed, and returned.
I’ve never had a single company even mention it, let alone push back.
I left Texas several years ago, and I don't plan on returning. I didn't realize just how much the weather there was reducing my quality of life until I moved. Almost overnight, I dropped 50 lbs and started spending a lot of time outside. Outdoor recreation is just not an option for most of the year in Texas. I can't see a thriving startup culture materializing in Texas if young people don't want to live there.
Great way to get clicks on an article. Sprinkle some Texas California rivalry, overblown cal exit and the perennial favorite “the next Silicon Valley” and boom recipe for some good ad revenue. I expect more from you Bloomberg, especially as a sub.
I don't think there will be many left. There are some very powerful forces driving the blandification of all modern medium to high population cities. I would even argue that cities can be "cool" and "unique" only when the super-majority of the population doesn't want to live in them.
I think there's a lot of truth to that. Cool, unique, edgy, hip, etc. US cities in the 70s/80s were also relatively gritty and dangerous. It was partly because most of the jobs (and essentially all the tech jobs) were out in the suburbs anyway but I don't think anyone from my 1986 grad school class who got jobs in the Boston area moved to the city proper.
I would have thought most of the jobs outside of Boston proper were in Cambridge or Somerville (essentially cities in their own rights). Unless you were alluding computer manufacturers like DEC or Wang, or defense contractors like Raytheon and MITRE.
They're not essentially cities; they are cities :-)
There was relatively little tech in any of those three cities by around that time, though there were still a few companies like Polaroid. (And some small firms like Infocom.) When Teradyne moved out of Boston in the 90s, it was basically the last real tech company there. (Arthur D. Little in Fresh Pond also survived until dot-bomb.) Kendall Square was Draper Labs/Tech Square with a bunch of old brick manufacturing buildings/warehouses to the east. The modern Kendall Square is a relatively recent phenomenon.
(And even my classmates who went into finance, working at Fidelity or Harvard, still lived in points at least somewhat west.)
Pretty much all the tech companies in the Boston area were ones like you mention: DEC, Wang, DG (where I worked), Prime, Apollo, MITRE, Raytheon, etc. And they were pretty much all well west or sometimes north of the city.
I guess back in the day, the Silicon Prairie was a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Prairie). I finished watching the show Halt and Catch Fire a while back and was surprised how the entire first two seasons started out in Texas.
At the time, I think Compaq was the fastest-growing startup in history. And, of course, Dell also came out of Texas--albeit the Dallas area rather than Houston. TI is also a Texas company. Etc.
Cities too expensive to live in, evaporating local cultures, and companies who either capture the governments, or pack up and leave. Why would Texas want to become the next Silicon Valley?
I could see why a short-sighted local government would want to attract new tax dollars, but I can't see why the majority of actual people in those places would look at the Bay Area, or Seattle, and say "yes, let's duplicate what happened to people like me in those cities".
> I can't see why the majority of actual people in those places would look at the Bay Area, or Seattle, and say "yes, let's duplicate what happened to people like me in those cities".
Well, wealth gets spread around so most people will become richer (though they may not feel richer due to comparison). Additionally, home values will appreciate (along with rent) which is a positive for the 50% who own their home. I feel like the culture gripe is ultimately caused by differing value systems. The good thing about personal values is you can change them.
If they build skyscrapers providing housing for the influx of people, it doesn't look anything like the bay area. Instead it's more of a NYC trajectory.
To which SF Bay area residents would largely respond with "Good riddance, better there than here."
As a native Texan, I’m cautiously optimistic. All of these articles are about established unicorn tech firms moving. It’d be far more of an interesting trend if Austin had a surge in brand new early stage startups that became unicorn companies, and that were built in Austin from day 1.
But, I guess the new startups will follow after more big firms relocate, as some devs will eventually leave to work on their own projects.
One think to look at which may be more closely related to newer startups is that several VC firms have started to move to Texas. It could definitely drive the growth of more small startups WITHIN Texas.
I don't see anything useful about non competes when NDAs and IP laws exist, other than to restrict the talent pool.
I've been bounded by non competes before and I can tell you it really restricts your job mobility, especially if you're specialized, since only direct competitors can benefit from your skill. Even harder if you're on a work visa which is linked to your specialization. This is the primary method to keep salaries down in competitive markets.
Not a lawyer but sometimes I wonder if they are even constitutionally valid, considering you are restricting someone's freedom to do something in the future.
I just had coffee, so please double-check the workings of my brain. Doesn't the author mean "consistent?"
> Banning noncompetes would be inconsistent with Texas’ principles and reputation as a defender of free markets. Noncompete agreements are restrictions on the free movement of labor; they gum up markets.
Regulating non-competes is not consistent with a free market where individual actors are expected to negotiate on their own behalf. “Inconsistent” is correct usage here.
I should've included this sentence that follows. Essentially the market freedom is more important than individual companies, but noncompete agreements put companies above the market.
> Ultimately, the market is more important than the prerogatives of any particular company.
I do not like non-competes, but I don’t think they put companies who use them above the market.
In a multi-turn game, company A which uses non-competes would have to offer something else in exchange to be preferred (or equal) to company B which does not. Employees who then accept whatever that was are indeed bound by it when they want to consider moving to companies B, C, or D, but I see all of those as market actions.
If some employees take jobs without thinking about their future position, I’m not convinced that’s a widespread market failure. I’ve asked about and read IP and non-compete clauses at every role I’ve ever taken before accepting the position. Only once has it affected my choice; several times I had to negotiate redlines in the documents (which went smoothly as both sides were being reasonable).
This got me to thinking about the possible shift to a much more remote work force triggered by the pandemic. Obviously information workers are largely remote right now, but we still don't know how many companies will insist on going back to physical offices when they can.
The reason I'm thinking about this is because unless another comment above, I've seen non-competes pretty often. And I also had to negotiate redlines. I didn't think about this early in my career, but then I changed employers... and ended up sued. The new employer paid for a lawyer and it was largely non-issue, though at my age, I found it a very harrowing experience (and an education.) Many hopefully won't get that same experience, but they may also lack the education or wisdom to negotiate around non-competes. In the physical world, some non-competes would essentially require you to pack up and move if you want to remain in the same line of work. That's great for a company, and terrible for talent. Remote work would eliminate that particular effect - assuming non-competes were still worded around physical geography. But a well-worded non-compete that applies universally could very well tie someones hands - either leave your line of work, or stay with the employer that now owns you.
All "free market" theories emphasize individual choice, and they all rely on individuals having the ability and information to make those choices. But non-compete (basically the exact phrase meaning to eliminate competition and therefore choice) agreements tend to be giving companies the power to remove choice from individual employees. So while theoretically a "perfect" market would result in all employees mindfully rejecting non-compete and choosing incentives wisely, this would seem to fall into a similar category as other "big business, big lawyer team" situations, where the advantage lies clearly with those in power, not individuals trying to have and make choices.
Laws against monopolies, and attempts to prevent propaganda and misinformation that take choice away from individuals exist as a check against power imbalances that remove freedom from markets.
I agree. There's probably a free market argument (though I wouldn't make it) that banning non-competes prevents two parties from willingly coming to a mutual agreement. But there are obviously limitations to the agreements we allow parties to make. And there are significant power asymmetries with respect to employment agreements.
Allowing non-competes or forbidding them is zero-sum when it comes to how free the market is because of them. People have taken a mechanism for pricing goods in an economy and perverted it into some aspirational metric for economic correctness. So people on both sides try of an argument try to claim their idea is more "free market."
Non-compete enforcement is largely pro- or anti-labor, but even that is a little disingenuous because non-competes also prevent companies from hiring labor with specific expertise. Whether they are enforced or not, the labor market will gradually shift to accommodate either position. If the market can adjust prices in response to some event, then it is a free market.
To the extent that Texas has such a reputation, it's entirely unearned. The state loves sticking its nose into pretty much every area where it doesn't belong; they want to tell you on what days and from whom you can buy groceries; in many fields you're not allowed to start a business without permission from competitors; their gun laws are about as restrictive as they come while still being shall-issue; marijuana and gambling (except for the state-run numbers racket) are still illegal. The city governments of any political leaning aren't any better; Austin still hasn't legalized building housing other than detached single-family in the overwhelming majority of residential-zoned land.
It may have low taxes, but Texas is the furthest thing imaginable from a small-government state.
Texas needs to do a better job of keeping costs under control as people continue to pour in. That is a big reason why people are moving out of the Bay in the first place. The good news (for Texas that is) is that the high cost of living in Silicon Valley is attributable to factors beyond just the explosion of wealth that occurred there. Regulation, poor governance, etc.
The difference in cost of living between Austin and San Francisco is insane at the moment: https://www.thriftythoughts.io/silicon-hills/. Obviously there is more to where you live then just cost, but it appears that cost is the one of the largest drivers in this migration.
I've lived and worked in many places, from shortest to longest duration:
London area, Stockholm, and Munich
Marin County in the SF Bay area (my family lives in Sonoma)
Dallas, Texas
Boston, Massachusetts
Des Moines, Iowa
Detroit, Michigan
Austin, Texas
I'm retired and I could live wherever I choose; I liked all but one of these cities--Austin is where I decided to remain. I like the weather more than most of the places I've lived, there is a top-ten CS grad school, and my friends are fun and very interesting (some from California). My California friends hope that Austin won't go the way of San Francisco.
For those interested, "The 8-bit guy" did a video series about tech companies in Texas which was insightful and had a couple of surprising things, so the capability is there in some form already.
UT is great but there is no equivalent to Berkeley and Stanford, let alone UCSF, UCSC, and the state schools within a 50 mile radius of anywhere in Texas.
Without that reliable feedstock you aren’t going to become the next silicon valley.
Now, if Boston’s weather improves due to global warming...
I think you are underestimating University of Texas at Austin as a research powerhouse, particularly in engineering. It's not quite Berkeley or Stanford, but I absolutely would put it on a part with anything just outside that very top tier (certainly equivalent to UCSD or USC, which are very influential research universities).
That said, I do agree with the general thrust of your argument - California has a silly number of top research universities overall and in engineering (Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, UCSD, USC, UCLA, Cal Tech... and many of the universities in CA I haven't mentioned would be considered a tremendous asset to any region trying to build a tech center).
As a New Yorker would I be happier in Austin due to the vibe (let's not talk about politics because I separate politics and culture) or Houston due to the international cuisine and options?
I haven't driven in a decade but myself and many other people I know are ready to escape NY.
And this is coming from someone who has lived in Houston for 20 years.
Cuisine is often touted as one of the best things about Houston, and it is good, no doubt. We have quality and variety. It's also very cheap to live here compared to other places.
And that's pretty much it as far as pluses as far as I'm concerned.
The job market tends to be good overall, but I would say the jobs are not as good, at least as far as technology. This is mostly "Line of Business" land, and while there's nothing wrong with that, you'll often find technology companies here who are still stuck in the old ways of making and delivering software.
Oil and gas rules here and everything tends to be centered around that. The list of companies here doing what most of us would consider to be interesting work is rare. Also, you're going to be hard pressed to find anything that isn't centered around Java and/or .NET, so be aware of that.
And while real estate is cheap, it really depends on where you live. You MUST have a car to live in Houston. You also may find yourself commuting 45+ minutes each way if you aren't careful and don't have a remote job.
Oh, and the weather here SUCKS.
With that being said, I'm sure there's worse places to live.
Austin’s vibe is probably dead due to the reliance on live music. Houston still has tons of museums and food. If you can handle humidity, that’s a good option.
Having said that, Austin will still have cheap housing way south, which means it will still have good weird stuff happening. It will just take a few years for it all to come back.
Neither would be high on my list but probably Austin. Haven't been to Houston for a while but it's quite the sprawl and I never liked it much even when I spent a lot of time there--admittedly many years ago.
It's so weird to hear people talking about Austin like the "next big thing"; I first visited in 2010 and thought anyone who wasn't already there had missed the proverbial boat.
Of course, I also interviewed at Google in 2007 but wasn't particularly interested (not that I got an offer, mind you) because I thought, "it's already past its growth phase, how much bigger can it get?"
(FWIW, I live in the valley, and I love it, though I do have a desire to live internationally, and in a city next time... not in yet another US suburb)
> It's so weird to hear people talking about Austin like the "next big thing"; I first visited in 2010 and thought anyone who wasn't already there had missed the proverbial boat.
For vibe, quite true.
My barometer was the local Austin guitar stores.
When the local guitar stores disappeared and/or quit catering to the working musicians, I knew that the Austin vibe was dead.
People have the mythos about Stevie Ray Vaughn and his cohort. The reality of the time is that they regarded those folks as the "undesirables." Those musicians tended to live in the really slummy areas because they were so poor ...
When we walked on 6th Street on New Year's a couple years ago, it was DJ after DJ after DJ ... all nice and clean and corporate. No scummy bars selling to minors here.
If you want vibe, you're probably talking cities like Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc.
I will caution you a bit about Pittsburgh, it seems to be gentrifying fast in a lot of areas. I know that practically all of the excellent little family bars and restaurants that I used to go to are all gone. The O disappearing simply reinforces that. :(
Easy, just move Stanford and Berkeley, as well as any SF Bay Area operations of Apple, Google, etc., to Austin.
The combination of UT Austin, Tesla, SpaceX, Oracle and all of the above would definitely rival Silicon Valley, and tech talent would almost certainly follow.
the article sidesteps an entire cultural element of "Silicon valleys" in favour of attacking...noncompete clauses? the author seems to forget that it didnt work in California (non competes just evolved to no-poach agreements.)
> non competes just evolved to no-poach agreements
There is a huge difference between noncompetes and no-poach agreements between companies. Right now, I work at a tech company and I can go to another tech company using the skills I picked up at my current employer if I wish. With noncompetes, I can't do that at all. With no-poach agreements between companies, I won't be recruited from one specific company to another specific company but if the other company puts up the help wanted sign, I could go over to the other company on my own accord. Even with no-poach agreements, I can freely move between companies.
Yes, no-poaching agreements are terrible but they are nothing like noncompete clauses.
Edit: looks like we've had to ask you this many times. Continuing to do this kind of thing will eventually get you banned on HN. I don't want to ban you, so please take the intended spirit of the site to heart and curtail this.
As a Texan whose family lived in the Austin area when it was named Waterloo, and were citizens of the Republic of Texas--people like you are what give Texas its reputation as a haven for cowboys and idiocy; and make me think twice about identifying as a Texan.
Just because space karen is having a temper tantrum, it's a little early to predict the next silicon valley. Does anyone actually think HP and Oracle tagging along achieves anything other than freeing up some real estate in the bay area?
Texas, you'll recall, has creationism in science textbooks. Techs affair with Texas will be short lived as i don't think tech people are going to want their kids taught Texas science.
Depends on the school district. Rural East or West Texas: perhaps, with a good chance the biology teacher’s main job is assistant football coach. Super-competitive suburban schools serving the kids of these well-educated transplants? Beyond tolerating “we learned in this course that A, but the Bible says B” exam answers, no - those kids are being prepped to pass the AP Biology and Chemistry exams.
> Texas, you'll recall, has creationism in science textbooks. Techs affair with Texas will be short lived as i don't think tech people are going to want their kids taught Texas science.
As someone helping a 14 year old with their 8th grade science homework, I can assure you that this isn't the case at least in one city school district.
I think a /lot/ of people don't understand how schools are structured in Texas, which is very different even from the Midwest where I grew up. In Texas, school districts are "ISDs"[0], which means that they make budgetary and curriculum decisions independent of the city they resides in and multiple ISDs can coexist in the same city. In San Antonio metro area, where I reside, there are nineteen (19) different ISDs in the same metro area. There is sometimes cooperation between them, but in general they operate completely independently from one another and from the city itself.
This contrasts with most other states where the state DoEd sets state-wide curriculum, and cities operate school boards (which may or may not be elected positions), which run the school system for the city. In Texas, the state DoEd sets minimum standards which are mostly enforced/set by setting minimum standards for acceptance to state universities. So in Texas, yes, /some/ public schools /may/ teach creationism in their science textbooks. But I do not believe this to be commonplace, and I've yet to observe it happening in any of the materials I've been exposed to in any Texas city. The science textbook used in the district my girlfriend's daughter attends is a newer edition of the same textbook I had in a city in the Midwest, for instance.
Because Texas has this ISD system, it is true that /some/ schools in the state may use materials which teach this, but it's important to note that the state's DoEd, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has a policy of neutrality on the subject of intelligent design but has multiple times soundly rejected approval of materials which contain anti-evolution rhetoric, including in 2011 which was the last time that these materials were up for review. Given that, while it's possible /some/ schools may be using these types of materials, it would be against the recommendations of the TEA, and these materials would likely not qualify as meeting the necessary science requirements to attend a state university in Texas.
The fact people constantly bring up "creationism is taught in Texas" is to me a coastal "elite" trope that is intended to dig into Texas stereotypes and make fun of people in Texas as backwards hicks, when in fact Texas has been at the forefront of science and technology in the United States for over a century, including today. The AMD Zen (now Zen 3) microarchitecture that just slapped Intel up the side of the head was designed here in Texas [1], SpaceX is at the forefront of reusable rocketry and is doing that work here in Texas, NASA has had and continues to have a huge footprint in Texas, additive metal 3D printing (SLS) was invented in Texas at UT[2] and continues to be advanced there and several companies producing 3D printing systems are based in the area, last year the first woman to ever receive the Abel Prize was Professor Emeritus Karen Uhlenbeck at UT Austin [3].
In every single aspect of science, technology, engineering, and math, there are people in Texas pushing the envelope of human knowledge and achievement, and it is exceedingly disrespectful to them to publicly shit on "Texas science", thank you very much.
There are plenty of smart people in Texas, of course. However, it may be difficult to attract scientific-minded employees to a location where their kids will be taught on a curriculum that rejects science in some regards.
That also hints at the larger culture clash that may result from the "liberal elites" moving to the area. If this migration does happen it'll be interesting to see how the culture in Texas changes.
Last I checked, there are _tons_ of "liberal elites" here (speaking as one of those, I suppose).
Let me check the public schools in my immediate neighborhood (I walk my dog past all of these)... We have two dual-language immersion schools (Spanish/English and Arabic/English), a Montessori school, and one school that doesn't fall into any particular bucket but is highly ranked. Those are the _public_ schools for this neighborhood. If you live here, you're going to one of those three or paying for one of the private (mostly Catholic) schools nearby. Hell, we're not even in one of the "good" school districts... Those are out in the suburbs.
You do realize that Houston _is_ the global R&D center for multiple domains, right? Medicine, Geoscience, several different engineering disciplines.
The migration you're talking about started in the 70's and has been going strong for many decades. As someone who moved here for work after getting a PhD, I can assure you, it's not that hard to "attract scientific-minded employees" here. My previous employer had thousands of positions that required a PhD. The overwhelming majority of those were filled by people who moved here for the job.
Yes, the TX state educational board is fucked up. That doesn't translate to what's taught in most schools in urban areas. It unfortunately _does_ mean that schools have the leeway to teach bizarre stuff, but most in the areas being discussed by this article don't.
The reason folks don't want to move here has more to do with the weather and traffic than anything else. (The weather really does suck half the year, but we get 4-5 really nice months of weather in the winter.)
There are definitely some sprawly areas that I'd recommend avoiding (Houston has more in common with LA than with SF), but by and large, Houston's a great place to live. I walk more or less everywhere I go, have a 110 year old house with a great backyard, and live within walking distance many of the best-rated restaurants and bars as well as downtown. This is the expensive area, and you can still easily buy a house for under $500k.
Where does this happen in Texas public schools? Have you ever been to a populated city like Dallas or Houston? What culture change are you expecting? Texas is already full of liberal elites living in two of the largest cities in America.
Your post reminds me of when I studied abroad and some European exchange students asked me if I rode a horse to school and if the Indians were still around when they found out I was from Texas.
I don’t think SpaceX is a great example of “Texas science” given the vast majority of their major science and engineering work is located in their California offices.
I think that was the point. For all the stereotypes of Texas (I'm originally from Norway - we use Texas as a general synonym for "crazy" [1]), there are significant areas that are a lot more progressive, so to assume moving to Texas means moving to some creationist hellhole is excessive.
Given the specific Texans I know that have had expat assignments in Stavanger, I can't imagine that helped erase the stereotype... We seem to send some crazy folks over there... Not to mention drillers... Drilling engineers are nuts.
To be fair, the origin of the term probably has more to do with 50's and 60's Westerns than with any idea of present-day Texas. You'll also find references to "wild west" / "vill vest" used in pretty much the same contexts as "texas".
Though we also have the harsher term "Amerikanske tilstander" ("American conditions") that especially in the 80's was often used in politics by the left to evoke an image of a failing state.
Fellow Norwegian here, can confirm this is an old term related to the "cowboys & indians / wild west" stuff that was so prevalent in American cultural exports at the time. I actually grew up in Texas among a tiny colony of Norwegians in the Houston area (obviously centered around the oil industry).
It's given me an interesting window into all the weird obviously false stereotypes that Americans have about Scandinavians and that Scandinavians have about Americans (and Texans in particular).
Like pretty much everywhere in the US, big Texas cities lean (or, in Austin’s case, are quite) left, suburbs are increasingly very swing, and the rural areas are really right wing but have been emptying out. Texas has a somewhat higher proportion of rural to urban/suburban population than New York State which makes Texas overall a “red” state and New York “blue”, but a current Silicon Valley resident is probably going to feel far more at home in Austin, Houston or one of their closer suburbs than they would in rural western or upstate New York.
The tech wealth moving to Austin is a certain type of wealth. It's largely the wealth that is socially liberal, but sure as heck likes the low taxes. For them, Austin is having your cake and eating it too. You get loudly decry everything the state government does while silently enjoying the tax and business environment. It's uniquely Austin seeing how people take comfort knowing if the Austin mayoralty swings too far left that the Capital will crack the whip. It's a win-win all around.
People forget that South Congress was grungy for awhile. People forget that Liz Lambert took a big risk when she bought the motel there, that ACL was only one weekend, and that Whole Foods started here. Before all this, Austin was anchored by the Capital and UT, but now we're getting a SoHo House down the street from the Equinox. And Oracle has a new skyscraper, cool. If I had to bet, it's only a matter of time before we start putting up skyscrapers up North near the Domain where the Amazon's and Apple's are setting up.
And when y'all move here anyways, try to leave Austin weirder than you found it. This is a great city.