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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

It’s a no brainer, my company offered to let me move out of CA a few years ago.

My utilities are 50% cheaper and more reliable, crime is lower, the air quality is better, and I bought a new construction with 10G Fiber Internet (You will never get this in California due to failing infrastructure). I miss is the arts, culture, and nightlife, but that was wiped out by government-enacted COVID restrictions so there are few redeeming reasons to stay. Tesla should be a good lesson that when you put political idealism above the basic needs of your residents (Safety, infrastructure, housing), people leave.

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I don’t know where in CA you were… But here in Oakland I have the option for 10G fiber (albeit the landlord only wired my actual apartment for 1G ethernet, but the fiber is like 50 feet from my door). Utilities are extremely low… Far lower than I had to deal with winter and summers in the US South. And at least so far, this year air quality hasn’t yet entered in to the toxic level.

In Austin, you’re lucky to get 1G anywhere. If Google Fiber has already laid down cable news provided service, then you will not be surprised to find that Spectrum and AT&T both are surprisingly competitive it’s each other.

Otherwise, you get what little you can get and you just have to be happy with DSL because it’s still better than what you can effectively get with Spectrum, since you’re sharing that with all your 500 closest neighbors and you still have to put up with outages and throttling and being treated like trash from the “cable guy” installers who wouldn’t understand concepts like bend radius if you broke their arm at the right distances and showed them how the glass fiber also breaks when it is bent too tightly.

Yes, this is an old pet peeve.

>>>In Austin, you’re lucky to get 1G anywhere.

That's depressing, especially for a US "tech hub". I'm in an irrelevant-but-dense urban area of Japan and have 1G fiber @ <$40 / month.

In the entire US, you are lucky to get fiber at all. Almost all people have a choice of only garbage asymmetric over subscribed coaxial cable with no other choice. A significant portion do not even have that. So few have fiber, that I disqualified 90%+ of the houses that came up in my searches when I was searching for a home.

People may be leaving but I don’t think it will start to change anything about CA anytime soon. It could lose 25% of its population and still have more than the next most populated state (TX). That’s ten million people—nearly the entirety of the LA metro area.

> I miss is the arts, culture, and nightlife, but that was wiped out by government-enacted COVID restrictions so there are few redeeming reasons to stay.

Isn't that the case pretty much everywhere, though? These things will come back in CA just as they will everywhere else, barring catastrophic economic collapse.

Its not even true, last weekend I went to a watercolor painting show featuring international artists. Been going out for dinner (not much of a drinker), the late night "downtown" area in my town is fully open. Tourists were back during summer. Activities are all back to normal. Concerts are going on, I went to one a couple weeks ago. There is one I really want to go to in the bay area too :( but no time.

Just clueless people on the internet that don't know what they're talking about. Probably because there is nothing else to do in texas besides be mad about things lol.

Every time I hear someone rail against California, I think of that scene in Mad Men when Don Draper tells Michael Ginsberg: "I don't think about you at all"

You fantasize about a scene where you have a cool comeback when you overhear someone railing against a state you live in?

Then you think about it again and comment on a public forum about it. Yeah that's totally not caring at all.

This is a good example of what I am talking about ^

> new construction with 10G Fiber Internet (You will never get this in California due to failing infrastructure)

I've had 10g fiber in three places in San Francisco and almost moved to a house in Cupertino that had 10g fiber. Not sure about the rest of California honestly.

NIMBY housing cartels aren’t political idealism, and they are the main reason people are leaving.

Also I’m not sure the utilities are better in Texas. Cheaper, sure, but is that gas infrastructure winterized yet?

Nope. ERCOT a got told what they have to do, but then they got told what they had to do last time, too.

Nothing happened then, and I don’t expect anything to happen this time.

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