California has exploded to the world's 5th largest economy. Surpassing even the UK.

Zero growth isn't the right baseline. The fact that the population hasn't boomed means something is definitely wrong.

> But assuming it isn't, there aren't many better places to go.

Washington state is a good alternative. It has all of California’s grievance politics and collectivism but with none of the tax burden.

What about Puerto Rico? I moved here 6mo to take advantage of the lowest taxes an American can get and it's pretty livable. Of course English is spoken as a second language, but all in all it's pretty livable

There are better places to go, hypothetically. Realistically: People are going to Texas. Obviously they are; ranked by GDP per state, California is #1, Texas is #2. The only people who give a shit about the Christian zealots are people hundreds of miles away outside the state; people like Elon Musk don't care, and still move there, and move their companies with them.

> The only people who give a shit about the Christian zealots are people hundreds of miles away outside the state

That seems untrue, given Texas' shift toward purple. Certainly wealthy people in Texas (regardless of their politics) aren't affected too much by who sits in the state house, but there are plenty of Democrats in Texas who aren't wealthy.

And just as a random example, I bet women who are looking to terminate unwanted pregnancies in Texas right now are probably sick of the Christian zealots.

There are many millions of people in the country that don't share your politics. Some of them are even engineers with families.

I don't know which people like sitting in traffic. Wide roads is a sign of sitting in traffic.

Family wise though, moving to Texas is bad for half the members of your family. Half the people in your family, aren't going to agree with the Texas government's views, whether you want to force them to or not.

> Half the people in your family, aren't going to agree with the Texas government's views

You do realize that there are plenty of women in Texas (and elsewhere) who support curtailing access to (or even outright banning) abortion, right?

Edit: I didn't expect this number to be so high, but apparently 43% of women in the US identify as pro-life (https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018...).

gender is not very predictive of people’s opinion on abortion, it’s a common confusion and i’m not sure where it comes from

Recently moved to north of Dallas. Many wide roads, very populated area. Rarely see traffic that slows trip time more than 10%. Much better than my experience driving in Seattle and what I've seen in SF/LA.

The speed limit on the freeways and tollways is 70 mph, so distant places that would take over hour to get to in Seattle are 15 min drives here.

If you think the abortion debate is as simple matter of "men vs women", you obviously haven't looked up the facts, otherwise you would know that men and women in the US oppose abortion in roughly equal numbers.

I feel like this should be obvious but wide roads don't imply sitting in traffic. If traffic is 1.5x but road width is 2x then you're less likely to be sitting in traffic.

That's a big "if". Building wider highways seems to just attract more people to drive on them.

>Not to mention the a worthless human being of a governor. Backwards politics and ideals. It's a joke of a state, everything wrong with America hyper-concentrated on steroids.

There are millions of people who think this exact same thing about California.

You need to spend less time on the internet. You’ve worked yourself into a frothy rage and I suspect the only think you know about the state is what you’ve read online.

Go outside sometime, you may be surprised.

These laws and politics have real effects on people's lives. Just because you personally are comfortably removed from them doesn't mean that they aren't problems.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that point, but if you're expecting to have productive discussion here, and not be downvoted and flagged into oblivion, I would suggest you frame things in less inflammatory and absolutist terms.

It's stuff like this (from another post of yours) that shows your ignorance of people's views:

> If someone can't agree that (a) the current state of climate change is bad, and (b) women deserve bodily autonomy, their opinion simply doesn't matter to me. IMO they also shouldn't be around women.

I agree that women deserve bodily autonomy, and I'm fine with abortion if it's a choice made freely, but there are tens of millions of women -- 43% of women in the US[0] -- who believe abortion is wrong. Not sure how many of them also want to impose that view on other women who don't share their views, but I expect that number still ranks in the millions. Should those women not be around... themselves?

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018...

Life is terrible for poor people. Software professionals are living high on the hog in Austin. If you turn off the news and live locally things are far better for the cohort that reads Hackers News.