California is certainly at the end of the road here. There's no way around a reform at this point. I think in the next few years it will be interesting to see if we chose well when asking for deep cuts in spending.
Texas is not any better, for the simple reason that Austin is the only place any sane person wants to live, and most of the money is in Houston or Dallas. Austin is full of brainy people distracted by culture and working service jobs just to stay; Houston and Dallas are full of people with an appetite for money and nothing holding them back, not sophistication and not vision either (except visions of themselves driving expensive cars and screwing hot blondes.) Austin will continue to produce a modest amount of innovation, and Houston and Dallas will continue to produce an immodest number of millionaires. It's like having a beautiful pig and an elephant with a great personality and hoping they'll have perfect offspring -- the cities are hundreds of miles apart, the people don't like each other, and the DNA definitely doesn't splice.
I live in the Fort Worth Area, and I've seen things a lot different than you make them out to be...in fact I've lived in Texas my entire life, from the south tip, to where I am now and some in-between, I've been to the major cities and driven all over south-central Texas, and I have to say, I think you're letting personal feelings skew your viewpoint a little.
There is a cultural rivalry between cities maybe, but never has anyone ever shown me disrespect from not being raised or living in their city.
And it's rather offending that you would say Austin is the only place a sane person would want to live, that tells me that your viewpoint of Texas and it's culture is already skewed and bias, it's also a little elitist to suggest that there are not plenty of smart people outside of the Austin clique, does Baylor, or Texas A&M, or Texas Tech, Rice, not count? Is UT the only school that attracts smart people?
The article and the whole thread are based on massive overgeneralizations. The author only makes a couple of concrete observations of California's decline; most of the article is based on the author's conviction that the state's culture and politics won't work in the long run. I'm just getting in on it by comparing Texas cities in the same spirit :-) I certainly know Houston has a leg up on Austin in a few areas, and I have some Aggie friends and colleagues. Nobody looks down on a Rice degree -- quite the opposite. (I went to college out of state, but when I'm in College Station, I'm immediately pegged as a tea-sipper. Meh, I could do worse.)
Dallas, on the other hand, (which is where you live -- who uses the archaic name "Fort Worth" anymore?) is an unholy Sodom of beehive hairdos. Did you know you can get fined for not washing your BMW, or for doing your own yard work? It's true!
Oh yeah, but you don't HAVE to live in an HOA. I understand what you were getting at now though, I think I just failed to realize your point.
I don't know about Fort Worth being archaic, it's actually a city that is not part of Dallas, complicated zoning up here, I can't put "Dallas" as my address, since I wouldn't get my mail then.
I will have to concede to your point about the beehive hairdos, but I've seen plenty of that in Austin as well, it all depends on neighborhood....plus downtown DFW is a mecha of status symbols, not sure about the culture in downtown Dallas, I try to avoid it as it's a little too congested for me.
Distracted by whatever they consider as culture. Live music, community agriculture, hipster bars, lifestyle emissions reduction, New Age hippiedom, Christianity, drugs, you name it. There's quite a spectrum, but Austin is a place where people are concerned with living well, helping others live well, and generally working to figure out what "living well" means. That kind of exploration is where most of Austin's restless spirit takes it. Startups are pretty diametrically in opposition to "living well" unless you consider it a spiritual exercise like a monk living in the desert and whipping himself ;-) (Mostly kidding.)
Sometimes I think all these intelligent questers are going to raise a generation of really smart hippie-raised kids who roll their eyes at their idealistic parents and decide to take over the world. Is that what happened in California? Is Austin just one generation behind?
Maybe they are just consumers of culture. Wearing art as tattoos, t-shirts that say 'Keep Austin Weird', painting their houses unconventional colors. None of that seems very creative to me. Its too easy to buy stuff to be act creative than make it.
The problem that has to be solved is instead of everyone in Austin priding themselves at how laid back they are they need to realize they are actually just being lazy. People in California seem more driven.
huge college town though, might have a lot to do with the attitudes and the hippie shops who make money selling to them...now that I think about hippies owning stores, it reminds me of Thundercloud Subs...man I miss that place.
