I grew up in MI, and moved to Kalifornia to take a job with Chevron just outside of Oakland.
This was the early 1990s.

first, I had never seen so many foreign cars. In fact, I was the ONLY employee in the training class who drove an American car to work. My brother owned and loved his Toyota pickup, so it wasn't like "never". I drive a foreign car today.

But, I only lasted about 93 days. The state quickly introduced me to:
- State Income Tax
- County Income Tax
- City Income Tax
- And a pretty heavy IMPACT Tax on my car
- Plus generally EXORBITANT Prices!

the weather was "To die for". That is the reason you go there. It NEVER rained once while I was there. I had to use NEITHER the heat or the A/C the entire time, despite it being summer.

Housing Prices and Property Prices were insane. Half the state is like a desert, the term Golden State is because the grass is always golden brown.

This article is a great summary. While I was there, I was watching companies move to Colorado, Arizona and Texas.
It was not this super Chic and flashy Silicon Valley back then, but it was starting.

I left for Florida, and have never looked back (except during the summer where the A/C is the ONLY thing that makes Florida liveable!)...

Then, in December, I get a letter from CA.

Dear ,
While you worked here only 91 days, and your total income was JACK. And while you PAID your state taxes...
This is a reminder that you MUST file a tax return, AND you must Pro-rate your earnings to annual to determine your proper tax bracket. You must use the GREATER number (Pro-Rated or Total Gross Income) for the year to get this number.
Then send us the remaining money to this address.

Of course this put me in one of the higher state tax brackets, and required that I send them YET ANOTHER check.

About that time, I realized that Income Tax was SLAVERY. I have been saying it ever since.

And Kalifornia is crazy.

For the record, one of the companies that was moving to Arizona, found a much larger piece of property, and between like 3 sets of housing (Cheap/Trailers, Middle Class, and Mansions)... The only stories I heard were how people sold their houses, and bought so much more for so much less, and paid off their debts... I wish I could have followed up to see where they are now...

I have a small group of friends who did not exit. They are not conservatives any longer, but even they are shaking their heads. They just can't BELIEVE it is the socialist policies causing the problems. AMAZING.

To add to the story. A decade ago, Richard Myers was the director of the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he enjoyed the fruits of a rich endowment and his pick of faculty members and graduate students. So he left behind some befuddled scientists when, in 2008, he left Palo Alto, Calif., for Huntsville, Ala., to launch an independent research lab, the HudsonAlpha Institute.

“‘My God, you’re leaving Stanford for Alabama?’” Myers recalls colleagues asking. “‘What’s wrong with you?’”

Huntsville may not seem like an obvious place to base a center for genomics, a branch of biology concerned with DNA sequences that requires expensive hardware and even greater investment in human capital. Alabama ranks in the bottom 10 U.S. states for educational attainment and median income.

Yet Huntsville, nestled in a hilly region in the northern part of the state, turns out to be a great place to recruit high-tech workers. As of May 2014, 16.7 percent of workers in the metropolitan area held a job in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics—STEM, for short—making it the third most technical workforce in the country after San Jose, Calif., and Framingham, Mass., a Bloomberg analysis of Labor Department statistics shows.

"Why Can't We Be More Like Alabama?"

Answer: because you choose to embrace policies which are diametrically opposed to success! It really is that simple.

I just sold my SF based business, and nearly done with my SF real estate. Sadly, tho, Austin TX is becoming more Californianized by the month.

The article either forgot or neglected to mention the miles of tent cities growing with homeless people congregating along the streets in Orange County. I would image other counties too are starting to jump on that bandwagon. Thank you Jerry Brown, I'm so glad you chased me out of your state the first time you became governor.

Perhaps I'm confused, back in the mid 60's I took a tour to Vietnam so I wouldn't have to relocate from California to Mississippi with Rocketdyne, but that was before Jerry Brown the first time. California actually used to be a wonderful place to live.

It's interesting how the ever-growing bubble encapsulates the best and the brightest of the tech industry, its rarified air pushing everyone else out. By that industry's logic, they must be located where the talent is and can collaborate with other talent. And so costs and prices within the bubble go ever higher, and higher.
To me, it's just a ticking time-bomb attached to a giant needle.

On a related note. Here in my office in California my colleague this morning said he's seeing homeless walking the freeways in the mornings now. Yeay!

Those were commuters who were fed up with sitting in traffic and concluded that it would be faster to simply walk.

I enjoyed a trip to B'ham about a year ago where friends were doing some technical testing of their high tech- low pollution process for power plants. Good food. Didn't find a jazz club- but only had 2 days and nights.