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Comment by crowf | Hacker News Reader

Does this article have anything new to say? It is basically rewriting the main article and laughing about how dumb he is. I was hoping they would actually address his points. I've never lived in Austin or SV so I have nothing to go by but what the original article wrote.

So, does Austin have an issue of lack of public parks? Do roofs have to get replaced frequently due to hail?

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The roof thing is true. I can't find statistics on how often they have to be replaced, but my guess is every 10 to 15 years. This is usually structured so that homeowner's insurance covers all or nearly all of the cost, but of course that makes insurance more expensive.

Google tells me Austin has about 20,000 acres of parks for 950,000 people, and San Diego has about 40,000 acres for 1.4 million. If he really lived in Bee Cave he was pretty close to Zilker Park, which is hard to complain about.

Some of the other complaints feel legit and some seem strange. We were not calling teachers "sir" or "ma'am" in school when I was in elementary school in a more conservative Texas the 1980s, for example, much less in Austin now. Scorpions pop up occasionally, especially in West Texas, but I've lived in various places in Texas in between living other places for decades and I've never seen a scorpion outside of a herpetarium at the zoo. He'll definitely encounter more of those if he moves to Reno.

SoCal and Bay Area Californians don’t appreciate how kind our weather is on roofs. I didn’t even know hail damage was a thing until working in home insurance. Okay I was vaguely aware that golf ball sized hail existed and did consider that I didn’t want to be outside in it but I pretty much never considered it.

I mean, it is the Daily Mail. That’s kind of their whole thing, really. Agreed about the overarching tone of the article too, but again, that’s pretty standard for this publication. It’s why I avoid it (along with similar ones).

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