Sam Stone believes Trump's tweets

The BBQ Pit
1164

What Sam really doesn’t get is how I keep getting associated with things I didn’t say.

Upon reflection, I think I get it. I think people here treat me as an avatar for their idea of conservatism, which is largely made of up nut-picking the worst examples of conservatives that make the rounds of liberal twitter and here, and arguing with me as if I hold those opinions, rather than anything I actually said. Thus I get labelled ‘extreme’, even though my own positions are notably centrist in an American context.

For the record, I think people are leaving California primarily because of the high cost of living and high taxes. I never said a word about how this affects other states, so I don’t know how you concluded that I don’t ‘get it’.

I’ll leave you with this:

Another issue these blue states have is not just that people are leaving, but who is leaving. Tax too much, and the wealthy leave and take the revenue with them. If you lose your tax base and replace it with low paid or unemployed immigrants, you will start to decline.

Silicon Valley is ripe for disruption. I predict that it will be the next Detroit - once the powerhouse of the American economy, it succumbed to corruption, machine politics, and overly-powerful unions that drove the cost of doing business through the roof, and eventually led to the decline of the city and an exodus of car manufacturers to cheaper states.

Silicon Valley is a lot easier to relocate than an auto industry. Especially with work-at-home, California could see its tax base plummet as the engineers and technologists realize they can live in a state with no income tax in a much nicer home and still do their job.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-11/richest-1-in-new-york-earning-133-billion-will-devastate-city-if-they-leave

Funny that on the one hand the left believes that the rich pay almost nothing in tax, but panic when the rich threaten to leave, because they need their taxes.

Also, highly progressive taxes are risky, because the tax base becomes very thin. According to the article, New York City gets 42.5% of all its tax revenue from a group of 38,700 people. And if the Pareto curve applies, I’d guess that about 30% of the revenue comes from maybe 7500 people, and 25% from the top 1500 or so. And at the very top, I think there are a few billionaires that, if they moved out of state, would demonstrably damage the budget. That’s not a good position to be in.

Relying on revenue from the very rich is also volatile because if the market crashes their wealth crashes with it, so you can take a nasty revenue hit in a recession when you most need the money. Diversity is a good thing, including diversity of tax revenue…

1165

I very often get personal realtor letters/phone calls asking me to sell my townhouse in an expensive area of SoCal. We bought 37 years ago for $158.9K; our neighbor in a comparable townhouse (3 “doors” down from us) just sold for $825k.

If you’re in a desirable area people still want to buy.

1166

Whereas we just complain about the Californians…

1167

I don’t know where you get this idea that Silicon Valley is some bastion of progressive ideology. Don’t confuse its faux “wokeness” for progressivism. Anyone who’s ever lived in Silicon Valley knows it for what it is: the epitome of go-for-the-jugular cut-throat American capitalism.

1168

When I see stories like yours and JT’s, it’s clear that the invisible hand has lost its mind. After 1933, it wasn’t until around 1987 that we had anything remotely resembling a financial crisis with the S&L scandal – a good 54-year run. But it took only 20 years to have the next one after that. Our regulatory system isn’t keeping up with our appetite for financial “innovation”.

How long before the next financial crisis? 5 years? 10? 2?

1169

I’d have to agree. We’ve got resources pooled here, so we’ve got companies. The businesses are almost universally shitty to work for, and usually poorly run to boot.

A few other data points on people leaving California

From the next article:

“To date, the pandemic has not so much propelled people out of California as it has shifted them around within it,”

I was hoping that the mass exodus would tip some of these purple states blue, but alas it turns out that not all that many people left.

1170

And bastions of anti-unionism. A good friend of mine who held various VP-level positions left the Silicon Valley tech company grind because she just got tired of the cluelessly casual misogyny she encountered everywhere. Even in companies where she liked her boss and team in other respects. Like being the only female executive in a meeting and constantly being completely ignored even when the discussion bore directly on her area of expertise or even immediate responsibility.

Silicon Valley is very progressive in certain respects, but can be weirdly regressive in others.

1171

Your friend’s experience is eerily familiar. Most companies are just flat out toxic.

1172

Nothing very weird about it. US “progressivism” is a weird mash-up of basic human rights (LGBTA, etc.) and left economic beliefs (strong unions, etc.). They’re completely unrelated concepts, so it shouldn’t be surprising to find people that support one and not the other. Especially in an area dominated by STEM professionals, who have little need for unions or general workers rights protection.

1173

To some extent. But the ‘basic human rights’ stuff is kinda at odds with the rampant misogyny. Which anecdotally at least is really widespread. It can perhaps be attributed to a historic techie boy’s club attitude. But it has been a real problem.

1174

But that doesn’t seem to be happening. From @Sunny_Daze cite:

You say later:

Except wealth isn’t taxed. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

1175

I don’t deny that there is plenty of misogyny, though in my limited experience I haven’t seen it (just reports of it). I’m mostly just disputing that this has anything to do with unions. Silicon Valley does better with LGBTA rights than women’s. Some can be attributed to a boy’s club attitude, some to the fact that men are simply overrepresented in these jobs, and some due to plain toxicity. We could and should do a better job with that, but overall I’d say SV does well in a human rights sense.

1176

Sam, where are you getting those stats? Because the place I found listing similar data is based on the 2020 National Movers Study from United Van Lines:

Right away, Sam, I notice that this data is obviously very distorted by virtue of excluding all the moves that don’t involve hiring United Van Lines movers.

People who rent a U-Haul or hire another moving company are simply not represented in this data.

So Sam, I think you need to be careful about the conclusions you’re attempting to draw from this survey. Not only are you trying to deduce overall “red state” versus “blue state” trends from a very flawed sample space composed exclusively of a commercial moving company’s customers, you’re speculating about motives for relocation while ignoring the survey information about them.

1177

I forgot about this earlier, but want to address it.

First, you assume that I got the data from a trucking line, then without verifying that you went on to criticize me for my ‘source’.

Unfortunately, you were wrong. I based my data on the U.S. Census.

If you don’t want to slog through a bunch of Excel tables, here’s a nice summary at Wikipedia:

Maybe next time check your criticism until you find out if your assumptions are correct. Especially when criticising someone for drawing conclusions with bad data.

1178

Thanks for the clarification, and the cite. If you could manage to get into the habit of citing your sources at the time when you actually make a claim about some complex social phenomenon, instead of just proclaiming an unsupported assertion and then letting the argument drag on for weeks before you bother to dig up a cite, there might be fewer such misunderstandings.

I notice that what you referred to in your post that I replied to as “the last few years” is, according to the census data you cited, the entire decade from 2010-2019. Which kind of opens up the phenomenon of interstate migration to a lot more potential demographic and social influences than just the last “few years”.

1179

Here’s a chart of net migration per capita versus Republican lean in 2020 (share of two party presidential vote minus 0.5).

Google Photos

This is the trend Sam is crowing about. While here is an ever so slight trend in the direction he desires, the model explains less than 5% of the variation in net migration.

1180

Is your chart net migration, or net internal migration? California lost 203,000 people in 2019, but gained a bunch from other countries so their actual population loss was a lot smaller. But if you are trying to figure out whether people like living in a state or not, external immigration is a confounding factor you need to control.

Also, ‘R Lean’ is not the metric I used. I compared the ‘bluest’ states to the ‘reddest’ states. Comparing a state that is slightly Republican to one which is slightly Democrat doesn’t really show much, and I would expect partisan differences to be swamped by other factors.

1181

I used “Net domestic migration rate per 1,000 inhabitants” from the Wikipedia page you linked earlier.

You didn’t use any metric at all as far as I can tell. Just a bit of cherry picking.

1182

Actually, your graph does show what I said. Look at the most Democratic quadrant and conpare it to the most Republican quadrant.

I would consider the middle section to be noise, since there are either no partisan differences or very small ones.

Your graph shows that all of the ‘most partisan Democrat’ states have net outwards internal migration, while the majority of ‘most Republican’ states have net internal migration. And the ones that have net outwards migrtion have smaller amounts than almost all of the ‘most Democrtic’ states. Which is all I was claiming in my post.

1183

Go take a statistics course please.