6 ms·
Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity
- thinkindie 4mo agohttps://archive.is/2g0QI https://archive.is/2g0QI
- J_Shelby_J 4mo agoTexas is where companies go to die.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoCan you put some substance behind that statement, or is it just snark?
- darth_avocado 4mo agoSounds like a whole lot of “companies can do whatever they want to without anyone else having a say in it”. Sounds amazing in the short term but a nightmare in the long term if you live there.
- gpm 4mo agoHonestly it sounds like a nightmare even in the short term, companies are well known for literally poisoning everyone around them when no one else has a say in it... The low regulation and trend of news articles from Texas... it doesn't inspire confidence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747 / https://reclaimthenet.org/texas-woman-arrested-for-facebook-post-about-town-water-quality https://reclaimthenet.org/texas-woman-arrested-for-facebook-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198551 / https://www.autonocion.com/us/tesla-lithium-refinery-texas/ https://www.autonocion.com/us/tesla-lithium-refinery-texas/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121178 / https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/28/texas-fracking-water-reuse-legislative-protections/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/28/texas-fracking-water...
- almost_usual 4mo agoLife is short. If folks want to spend their time in Texas more power to them.
- trial3 4mo agolol statistically life is longer in 23 other states
- dexwiz 4mo agoSo that puts them in the middle? For such a massive state, regression to the median sounds likely.
- NewJazz 4mo agoNew York, California, and Florida have higher life expectancies. That's a quarter of the US population better off, after only taking into account 3 states.
- tzs 4mo agoAre we talking about life expectancy at birth, or life expectancy of the current population? If the later I'd expect Florida to get a big boost because so many people retire there.
- NewJazz 4mo agoI was looking at birth numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy#/media/File%3ALife_expectancy_by_U.S._state.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- water-data-dude 4mo agoAs a gay dude I will never take a job in Texas. Companies may enjoy the lax regulatory environment and favorable tax laws, but there are many bright people who - for one of a NUMBER of reasons - will never move there. It is repressive and frightening. Who knows if that will be enough to move the needle on any of this, but companies aren't just buildings and incorporation paperwork, they're also the people.
- testing22321 4mo agoSame thoughts as the father of a young girl. I don’t want her to have less rights.
- jleyank 4mo agoSome folks find Howdy Arabia to be a pleasant, rewarding place to live. To me, I think roughly half of the US working population would dispute this, as they would dispute a discussion of any other place. It's just that the disputants change based on where you're talking about. It's warm. It's dry, and there's some evidence the power system isn't up to the task. Their call.
- gigatexal 4mo ago"Howdy Arabia" is gold. I legit laughed out loud. I'd much rather companies that incorporated in Delaware than the Wild West that is Texas: I want to have peace of mind knowing the company is not trying to get away with shady stuff like Elon is with his companies.
- jleyank 4mo ago[dead]
- testing22321 4mo ago> It's just that the disputants change based on where you're talking about. It would be good if everyone agreed that taking away basic human rights from women is a bad thing, but I guess were way past that.
- dyauspitr 4mo agoThis is only going to help with turning that state blue.
- arppacket 4mo agoRepublicans and the Supreme Court have learned their lessons from Georgia, and will never let this happen. They will find new ways to disenfranchise all the people who'd vote blue. Plus their war on education ensures that people who grow up there will remain uninformed and hateful and thus red.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- junofan 4mo ago> State officials are eager to supplant Delaware as America’s corporate-law hub. In 2024 they established the Texas Business Court, presided over by expert judges capable of handling even the most complex disputes. Last year the state also introduced a measure to allow firms to prevent shareholders with a stake of less than 3% from suing them, and another to let only large shareholders put forward proxy proposals. Interesting, hadn’t heard. I can’t wait to see where this goes. Working with regulators is a terrible experience. I hope they can fix this as well.
- kmeisthax 4mo agoTexas saw "one share one vote" and thought "that isn't exclusionary enough, we should disenfranchise retail shareholders altogether".
- baggy_trough 4mo ago[flagged]
- kmeisthax 4mo ago...turning a bunch of Boomer homeowners into members of a landed gentry is progressive?
- NewJazz 4mo agoDemocrat = Liberal = Progressive in these folks minds. I think that already starts the discussion off on a challenging foot.
- functionmouse 4mo agoYeah, they got rid of the smog. Just terrible.
- stouset 4mo agoAnd have increased their standing to the world’s fourth largest economy. Absolutely terrible.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoYou have to understand that to a conservative, living in CA feels like dying. It's a feeling of constant intense psychic pain.
- QuercusMax 4mo agoBut why? Because they can't oppress people as much as they want, and it drives them nuts?
- jleyank 4mo agoTell them to move to Orange County. Unless there's been total demographic changes since the 1990's, they'll feel fine.
- alephnerd 4mo agoAdditionally, Apollo (the world's second largest PE firm after Blackstone) has just selected Austin as it's second HQ [0] as it is looking to shift the bulk of it's hiring and headcount outside of NYC [1]. This is a huge deal, just like how Wachovia-Wells Fargo merger helped build NC's PE industry and Citadel's new HQ in Miami helps put Florida on the map for high finance. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/036a838f-8209-4df7-8cbc-bb069e4e703a?shareType=nongift https://www.ft.com/content/036a838f-8209-4df7-8cbc-bb069e4e7... [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/efeca6be-c9b5-4912-b66b-15716cc914b7?shareType=nongift https://www.ft.com/content/efeca6be-c9b5-4912-b66b-15716cc91...
- woodruffw 4mo agoI’m skeptical about this, at least for finance. Your second link points out that these firms are between a rock and a hard place: senior employees and leadership are already established in NYC, and junior employees/new hires want to move there (both for the experience, but also because it exposes them to competitors/alternative employers). Perhaps it’s different this time, but the underlying message in the past has been more about negotiation with the city and state rather than an earnest intent to relocate to an entirely new state (and regulatory environment, etc).
- alephnerd 4mo agoI don't expect it to displace NYC but it's a good shift and it's good to have additional clusters arise. For example, if you were always specialized in Energy, Houston/Dallas would have always been comparable to NYC, or if you were specialized in TMT then LA and SF were similar. Reading between the lines, I'm assuming Austin was chosen not just for QoL but also to solidify an Energy and probably AI and Data Center thesis as well. Also, I'd assume most backoffice roles like Accounting, Compliance, IT, etc would be shifted to Austin similar to what JPMC did in Dallas.
- m-hodges 4mo agoAnticipating all the Texas hate comments, just gonna plant a flag and say I love living in Austin. This city rules.
- alephnerd 4mo agoYep. It's a great city though I wouldn't live there due to the summers. Honestly, the reflexive hate both Texas and California get on HN is ridiculous and a great way to filter out accounts to ignore. There are valid criticisms to make for both, but if someone only criticizes and cannot point out or conceed positive attributes as well, it's best to just treat that account as a lost cause.
- m-hodges 4mo agoI have a mirror feeling about Chicago: very good city, but I wouldn’t want to live there due to the winters. Geographic negative polarization has become far too entrenched in online discourse.
- alephnerd 4mo agoYep. And it's absolutely being exacerbated to further entrench divisions. Honestly, I wish the HN/YC moderation team could be explicit in showing how it has taken down certain bot rings as a trust building exercise, because there absolutely are nation state bot rings on HN as well.
- queenkjuul 4mo agoThey're not that bad :) (Or I'm just built for Siberia and fit right in idk)
- jimbob45 4mo agoRural Washington, Oregon, and California actually are what these leftists think Texas is. Let’s not forget which state Cliven and Ammon Bundy staged their standoff in.
- ChrisArchitect 4mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418721
- nostrademons 4mo agoSomething I've wondered: for all its claims of business-friendliness, why does Texas insist on attracting the lowest-margin industries? All of the high-margin innovation-based industries continue to get started in California. There was a huge Bitcoin push in Texas about 5ish years back. But the way they went about it was that they passed a bunch of tax breaks for Bitcoin miners - the most commodified, energy-intensive part of the value chain. Coinbase and Kraken and Ripple and Solana and Binance's U.S. operations are all based out of California. The article mentions Exxon's reincorporation in Texas, and Chevron also recently moved their headquarters from California to Houston. But oil is a dying, commodified industry. The replacement is electrification, in terms of solar, batteries, EVs, inverters, and other parts of the value chain. Enphase is in California, SunPower was until its recent bankruptcy, Tesla R&D is still in Palo Alto, and other major companies like Rivian and Lucid also put all their R&D in the Bay Area. The other major industry Texas is known for is construction, and cheap houses. But construction, if you read any of the construction-physics.com articles that frequently pop up here, is another famously low-margin industry. We know how to do it, and millions of people do. My theory is that low-margin industries get located in Texas because they make it easy. By being business-friendly, low-regulation, and low-expenses, they become the only place that low-margin commodity businesses can survive. Thus, everyone who has no pricing power and struggles to cut costs moves to Texas, because they offer the lowest costs of everyone. California is the opposite: by making business onerous, creating huge amounts of regulation, taxing the hell out of both people and businesses, and enshrining a pyramid scheme in their state constitution via Prop 13, they make sure that only the richest can survive there. And thus only the richest do survive. The state is filled with wealthy companies and wealthy individuals because everybody else got priced out and moved elsewhere. Selection effects dominate efficiency effects.
- enraged_camel 4mo ago>> Something I've wondered: for all its claims of business-friendliness, why does Texas insist on attracting the lowest-margin industries? Tech is one of the highest margin industries.
- NewJazz 4mo ago
- schmookeeg 4mo agoI find it amusing that these two stories hit the front page one right after the other. > Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity > What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work?
- dylan604 4mo ago> What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work? Same thing that happens when it's too cold to work? Wait for another season?
- queenkjuul 4mo agoI love how on an article about Texas, half the comments are about California. As a Midwesterner, i always forget that those are the only two places
- OutOfHere 4mo agoTexans, I hope you like PFAS in your water and soil because Texas being unregulated would have loads of it.
- arppacket 4mo agoGiven the state's war on education, how do companies think they'll have a pipeline of well educated workers? We know it's only going to become more biblical as long as the current Supreme Court exists.