The backlash will be enormous. In the near future, there will be less competent coders and a tsunami of bad code to fix. If 2020 was annoying to hiring managers they have no idea how bad it will become.
Of course this will be the case, but probably not for the reasons you are concerned about. It is because a lot of people have been enabled by these tools to realize they are able to do things they thought were beyond them.
The opaque wall that separates the solution from the problem in technology often comes from the very steep initial learning curve. The reason most people who are developers now learned to code is because they had free time when they were young, had access to the technology, and were motivated to do it.
But as an adult, very few people are able to get past the first obstacles which keep them from eventually becoming proficient, but now they have a cheat code. So you will see a lot more capable programmers in the future who will be able to help you fix this backlog of bad code -- we just have to wait for them to gain the experience and knowledge needed before that happens and deal with the mistakes along the way.
This is no different from any other enabling technology. The people who feel like they had to struggle through it and pay their dues when it 'wasn't easy' are going to be resentful and try and gatekeep; it is only human nature.
> This is no different from any other enabling technology.
Coding is unique. One can't replace considered, forward-thinking data flow design reasoning with fancy guesswork and triage.
Should anyone build a complex brick wall by just iterating over the possible solutions? Hell no. That's what expertise is for, and that is only attained via hard graft, and predicting the next word is not going to be a viable substitute.
It's all a circle jerk of people hoping for a magic box.
When did you learn to code? What access did you have to technology when you started? How much free time did you have? What kind of education did you have?
Are you really unique because you are one of only a few special people who can code because of some innate ability? Or is it that you have above average intelligence, have a rather uncommon but certainly not rare ability to think a certain way, and had an opportunity and interest which honed those talents to do something most people can't?
How would you feel if you never had access to a computer with a dev environment until you were an adult, and then someone told you not to bother learning how to code because you aren't special like they are?
The 'magic box' is a way to get past the wall that requires people to spend 3 hours trying to figure out what python environments are before they can even write a program that does anything useful.
I read a lot of books. While I had some fundamental in high school, I really started in college and the tricks was to read books for the theorical parts, read articles for advices and specific walkthroughs, read code for examples of implementation, and then solve problems to intenalize all of that reading.
But it all compounds. Going from reading to doing takes little time and I’m able to use much denser information repositories.
If you have to spend three hours reading about python environments, that’s just a signal that your foundation is lacking (you don’t know how your tools work). Using LLM is flying blind and hoping you will land instead of crashing.
One quibble, however, is that python environments are a mess (as is any 3rd party software use in any environment, in my limited experience), and I refuse to use any such thing, when at all possible. If I couldn't directly integrate that code into my codebase, I won't waste my time, because every dependency is another point of failure, either the author's or (more likely) that I might muck up my use of it. Then, there are issues such as versioning, security, and even the entire 3rd party management software itself. It does not look like it will actually save me any time, and might end up being a huge drag on my progression.
That said, using an LLM for ANYTHING is super risky IMO. Like you said, a person should read about what the think they want to utilize, and then incrementally build up the needed skills and experience by using it.
There are many paths in life that have ZERO shortcuts, but there are also many folks who refuse to acknowledge that difficult work is sometimes absolutely unavoidable.
You must have replied to the wrong post, because I never said anything about myself being "unique" or otherwise differently talented than others, though that is possible. I don't measure myself against others; if they have a better insight into something I will gladly learn from them, without ego.
I'm talking about the fact that programming is a unique human endeavor, and a damned difficult one at that.
> How would you feel if you never had access to a computer with a dev environment until you were an adult, and then someone told you not to bother learning how to code because you aren't special like they are?
I would never say some stupid shit like that, to anyone, ever. If they want to do it, I would encourage them and give them basic advice to help them on their way. And I IN NO WAY believe that I am more talented at programming than ANYONE else on Earth. The experience I have earned from raw, hard graft across various programming environments and projects is my only advantage in a conversion about software development. But I firmly believe that a basic linux install and python, C, and bash will be enough to allow anyone to reach a level of basic professional proficiency.
You are WAY out of pocket here, my friend, or perhaps you just don't understand English very well.
> When did you learn to code? What access did you have to technology when you started? How much free time did you have? What kind of education did you have?
Getting to learn BASIC on an Apple (2e?) in 6th grade was fantastic for me; it was love at first goto. But having a C64 in 9th Grade was pivotal to the development of my fundamental skills and mindset, and I was very lucky to be in a nice house with the time to write programs for fun, and an 11th grade AP CS course with a very good teacher and TRS80s. But we were very much lower middle class, which factored into my choice of college and how well I did there. But, absolutely, I am a very, very lucky human being, yet tenacity via passion is the key to my success, and is not beyond ANYONE else.
> The 'magic box' is a way to get past the wall that requires people to spend 3 hours trying to figure out what python environments are before they can even write a program that does anything useful.
If you say so, but no one should be learning to program in a specific python env or doing anything "useful" except for personal exploration or rudimentary classwork.
Educating ourselves about how to logically program -- types, vars, fcts, files -- is our first "useful" programming any of us will be able to do for some years, which is no different than how an auto mechanic will ramp up to professional levels of proficiency, from changing oil to beyond.
With the internet in 2025, however, I'm sure people can learn more quickly, but if and only if they have the drive to do so.
> The backlash will be enormous. In the near future, there will be less competent coders and a tsunami of bad code to fix
These code AIs are just going to get better and better. Fixing this "tsunami of bad code" will consist of just passing it through the better AIs that will easily just fix most of the problems. I can't help but feel like this will be mostly a non-problem in the end.
> Fixing this "tsunami of bad code" will consist of just passing it through the better AIs that will easily just fix most of the problems.
At this point in time there's no obvious path to that reality, it's just unfounded optimism and I don't think it's particularly healthy. What happens 5, 10, or 20 years down the line when this magical solution doesn't arrive?
I don't know where you're getting your data that there's no obvious path, or that it's unfounded optimism. When the chatbots first came out they were unusable for code, now they're borderline good for many tasks and excellent at others, and it's only been a couple of years. Every tool has its limitations at any given time, and I think your pessimism is entirely speculative.
What we have now are LLMs that some consider to be good at tasks that are incremental, limited in scope, and require constant human oversight with many iterations.
What you want is an LLM that is exceptionally good at completely rewriting a poorly written codebase spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, which works reliably with minimal oversight and without introducing hundreds of critical and hard to diagnose bugs.
Not realizing that these tasks are many orders of magnitudes apart in complexity is where the "unfounded optimism" comment comes from.
It's more than the past couple of years, steady improvements in machine learning stretch back decades at this point. There is no indication this is stopping or slowing down, quite the contrary. We also already know that better is possible because the human brain is still better in many ways, and it exists.
You can claim that continued progression is speculative, and some aspects are, but it's hardly "an article of faith", unlike "we've suddenly hit a surprising wall we can't surmount".
> steady improvements in machine learning stretch back decades at this point
Except that's not how it's actually gone. It's more like, improvements happen in erratic jumps as new methods are discovered, then improvements slow or stall out when the limits of those methods are reached.
And really, there was a version of what I'm talking about in the shorter timespan with LLMs - OpenAI's GPT models existed for several years before someone got the idea to put it behind a chat interface and the popularity / apparent capability exploded a few years ago.
> OpenAI's GPT models existed for several years before someone got the idea to put it behind a chat interface and the popularity / apparent capability exploded a few years ago.
That's exactly what I said in the post you responded to: there weren't erratic jumps, there was steady progress over decades.
You keep switching back and forth between short and long time periods, as if the rapid steady growth of the past couple years is how it's gone for decades. This is not the case - we're currently in a short* period of rapid growth after a decade or so of stagnation. That's what "erratic" means, it has not been steady - over the past several decades there have been several times where we've seen rapid growth for a short period, then it hits a wall and we see very little or no growth until the next breakthrough.
* Granted we don't know for sure it'll be short this time, but hints are that we're starting to hit that wall with improvements slowing down.
We need to trigger external effects (eg on a USB-attached embedded device) and sometimes do stuff like forget a BLE device in system settings. We‘ve been looking into making a fake mouse that can achieve the latter. If you can support both use cases, you‘ve won.
That's what I'm doing with my new project, Valet. It's a Raspberry Pi configured to be a fake mouse, keyboard, and an Android (touch stylus). Works well on iOS and Android.
I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.
The workspaces feature in Aerospace is phenomenal and so much better than native macOS workspaces. I highly recommend it. Also the accordion layout of aerospace is better than Yabai’s stacks, and the way that resizing windows works is also better
I tried it, it's nice. There's an issue where high CPU usage makes it unusable though, last time I checked it was still open. Will probably try again in future.
I agree, aerospace is great! I'm surprised I don't hear of it more often. I'm recent convert to MacOS and was surprised at how bad the window management was by default, but aerospace fixed that right up.
Why don't devs use React Native like tech stack that allows development across platforms at the same time, especially for simple apps like this when they probably don't have to use all native capabilities different platforms provide.
Texas is meaningfully less free than many other states. No legal cannabis, can’t watch adult content without it being attached to your identity, can’t get proper care when experiencing a miscarriage, etc…
For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.
Texas was literally founded to be a slave state. I know this, because my ancestors were there doing that. No surprise that it's still oppressing big chunks of its population.
One thing I will say, it's hard to put all the folks in Texas in a bucket.
Several classes of folks live there- most of my friends there are just trying to, like, keep the fresh tortillas in stock at the HEB or serve beers while keeping a functioning automobile. Regardless of the goodness or badness of their ideas (or even fantasies of sovereignty), they are still materially beholden to a powerful and oppressive state.
People who get joy out of watching things happen to poor folks in Texas really don't understand gerrymandering, cultural hegemony, or any of the other mechanics of how oppressive governments operate.
I can guarantee you that those same folks, in Texas, would be the conservative folks writing oppressive laws to empower their good ol' boy buddies to do horrible stuff to the population.
Because at it's base, the inability to see oneself in oppressed people is the same everywhere we go.
The view that the idiot lumpen serfs deserve to be oppressed (or, if you prefer, "deserve the government they 'elected'") is the same aesthetic position that leads the folks who own Texas to conclude they can do whatever they feel like to the people there.
Don't forget about the slave handle of Oklahoma. They gave away over 5000 square miles so they could keep slaves. And the reason they were forced to do this is that they wanted the US government's protection against Mexico and statehood prohibited slavery above the 36th parallel (Missouri Compromise. Quite ironic.
(Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
> (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
From the outside, it looks worse than that. It seems more like the US has developed a weird active aversion to empathy, to the point where even enlightened self-interest gets rejected because it looks suspiciously like empathy.
Yup. It's odd what they do and don't teach in Texas History.
People tell me about how bad propaganda is in other places. Good thing they don't have it here, or those folks would probably be very mad at the systems who raise them- then they might have to examine their highly conflicted relationships to the abusive powers that be.
Personally, though, I do see empathy here and there.
In some places (especially among folks who think they are more likely to have been a plantation owner than a peasant anytime someone talks about 'land reform') it's notably attenuated.
Empathy is not a lost cause- lots of good folks, and lots of folks who want to be good but don't know how. But it's gonna take some work to get make it louder.
> For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.
A distinction that historian Timothy Snyder[1] wrote about in his recent book On Freedom, freedom to versus freedom from (positive versus negative):
> To the Ukrainians, freedom does not simply mean the absence of Russian soldiers, but also the reconstruction of society — of schools, hospitals, and roads — and making sure everything functions even better than it did before the war began.
> The Ukrainian definition of freedom is very different from how it’s commonly defined in the United States, where overuse has divested the term from its true meaning. When contemporary Americans talk about freedom, they’re usually referring to what the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom: freedom from something, like a dictator invading your land, or the government taking away your right to bear arms. By contrast, Ukrainians tend to talk about positive freedom: the freedom to do something, like building robust social institutions.
The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever they wish appear as a positive or negative freedom. If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want?
It's not some neutral objective "natural" definition. When you separate freedoms into positive and negative, you get to choose how to do it to suit your agenda.
The point that's missing is where rights and freedoms "originate", so to speak.
The US view, called out specifically in the Constitution, is that all freedoms and rights are inherent in being, and not granted by the government. As such, the government cannot give or guarantee rights, it is only capable of taking them away.
The role of the Constitution and the amendments (in particular, the first ten known as the bill of rights) do NOT specify what rights people have, they specify those rights that the government may NOT curtail.
Hence, the discussion of negative versus positive rights is entirely not about what rights exist, but what authority the government may or may not exercise over them.
Of course, any brief look at America's history shows the government failing to abide by its own restrictions. The government we have now is significantly different from what the original authors had intended, as they were more concerned with finding a way for the disparate states to coordinate at all after the failure of the previous Articles of confederation.
Now, we have an overarching federal government that renders individual states to be little more important that municipal organizations, much more in line with other countries.
So when the rights of two individuals conflict, I guess you'd say the correct way to deal with it is not with a criminal charge, but for me to sue the other person? Do you think the American system would rule in favor of people who caught Covid if they sue people who went out in public without taking precautions? Do you think that's a realistic way of having one's rights made whole? How do I sue a class of individuals?
Furthermore, do you really think this is a plausible way of managing disease outbreaks, which affect large populations in aggregate and not just single individuals? Systems like private insurance don't work if all the individual risks are correlated.
Even murder, except for certain circumstances, is not a crime at the federal level.
Under the original framing, anything not specifically mentioned by the Constitution was delegated to the individual states to decide. It wasn't until after the civil war that the amendments to the Constitution itself applied to the individual states.
I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way.
For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction.
It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.
But I agree that some things are obstacles, and others are creative acts. But so what, I'm not going to let you or somebody called Snyder tell me that one of these is virtuous and the other is mean-spirited, because that's bullshit, and the two sides of it go together, and he's only trying to prise them apart because he's more comfortable in a world where people declare their intentions in advance so that they can be vetted for constructiveness by some overbearing authority.
And you can definitely virtuously overcome obstacles, or be creatively evil.
One clarification to make - While I haven't read On Freedom, Tim Snyder is a scholar of Ukrainian (and slavic) history who is a major opponent of the far right's agenda. One of his big ideas is the different approach to time promoted by authoritarian vs liberal regimes, to try to inoculate people against the talking points of the authoritarian view.
I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it.
It's about our attitudes towards time, and the stories we tell about our relationship to it. For example, authoritarian regimes tend to eliminate the future from discourse - the future is not possible because we are beset by enemies and danger surrounds us. All we can do is aspire to restore some mythical past. By contrast, the one idea that ties together disparate definitions of Progressivism across history is the belief that a better future is possible.
Snyder has a framework for discussing how ideologies relate to time in these sorts of ways.
Well yes, kind of, and in conclusion no. Certainly the mythical golden past is a component of populism, and can be seen in Mussolini wanting continuity with Romans, and Putin weaving his own myths about Russian history - I forget the details, but it entails more territory for Russia because historicist destiny - and "Little Englanders" (the look-backward, xenophobic kind, not the original ones who were just isolationists).
On the other hand, Musk kind of likes looking toward the future. So this thing about a mythologized past is at most a tendancy, and a way of stirring up a sense of injustice, while your non-authoritarians don't have the monopoly on looking to the future. In fact I don't see that these are even polar opposites, I think authoritarian progressives would make sense as a concept, and we may be seeing a bunch of them rise to power.
It doesn't have to work in every case, and it doesn't have to be simple, but nevertheless there remains significant disagreement and ambiguity that gets to be decided by the person in power. In the end, it's a false dichotomy.
Consider the freedom from being infected by disease. Does your positive freedom to use a public space trump my negative freedom from you interfering with me by bringing a contagious disease to it?
> If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want?
From some book reviews:
> “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.”
> In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.”
> He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
> So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable.
> Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines.
> Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future.
> What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality.
I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).
OK, that's really fatuous. He's a statist, he doesn't like Musk, he likes regulations, he like communities pulling together and public services, fair enough. But then he's fabricated this thing about "positive freedoms" like it's the big philosophical insight that distinguishes his allies from his enemies. That's some post hoc justification, he isn't really informed by that philosophy at all, he's just a fan the string bag of assorted values I previously mentioned. People invariably want both kinds: "I don't want to be coerced, because I want to do [whatever]". And this stuff about gravity, where he gets into justifying state control like it's a law of nature and helps us walk around, good grief.
I find it interesting that discussions of freedom in the context of states like Texas tend to be more about freedom for businesses instead of personal freedom.
The 1980's when Reagan turned this country upside down and showed the GOP that cutting taxes wins them elections, even if it makes the debt go out of control and you can no longer pay for anything the government buys.
The personal freedom thing has always been rules for thee and not for me, particularly in the religious South. Lawrence v. Texas led to legalizing consensual homosexual activity.
The personal freedom thing might gain traction again because people are realizing that explicitly endorsing Christianity as core to the identity of the country often goes hand in hand with picking a favorite version of it and demonizing others, which is why the separation was historically included.
> Like Heather, she spent her time in Dallas lying to people about products to stay ahead of vice officers.
> “This was my first experience as a white girl from Wisconsin at fearing the police,” she says. “My heart was in my throat. I had to say with a straight face, ‘no, this three-pound dildo is a cake topper.’ I would have to talk around any reference to the body parts these were supposed to be used on. Even with regulars who I knew were okay, I never changed the words in case I got used to telling the truth and slipped up when a cop was around.”
(f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.
I'm not sure a word like "freedom" has an objective measure.
If you click on the "personal" tab it ranks Texas as dead last - I suspect the person you are replying to is using a definition closer to that: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal
As someone who's lived in both states (which both hold a special place in my heart), here's my 2¢.
While ∆9-Tetrahydrocannabinol remains illegal in Texas, almost all other cannabinoids have functionally been recreationally legal in Texas since Trump's 2018 federal Farm Bill, operationally legal (able to purchase and transport from stores without fear of prosecution) since early COVID in most of the major metro areas (e.g. Austin, Houston, DFW). Now to your credit, a handful of police departments are being pains in the rear about this, but even more departments have simply stopped enforcing laws against minor cannabis possession. Being unregulated, it doesn't come without risks, but it does come at a price about 1 order of magnitude lower than what you'd pay in Colorado, gram for gram.
You can have a gender identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender norms, hell, you can even have a gender identity that doesn't conform to a common notion that gender is a binary value, rather than a spectrum. You can have a sexual and romantic attraction to whoever you want. Just don't go around shoving it in everyone's faces, unable to even discuss anything else without bringing it up. That's annoying in the same way a car guy who never shuts up about cars is annoying. I say this as someone with an identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender stereotypes, with a partner of the same biological sex, so trust me when I say that I also understand how unforgiving Texas can be when you do go around doing PDAs in a relationship like mine, especially out in the more rural areas. Thankfully, that's what firearms are for - protecting yourself and your loved ones from crazy bad guys who aren't acting rationally and might pose a danger to the life of myself or my loved ones.
But hey, you can also watch whatever you want. There shouldn't be anyone on all of HN that believes the state government of Texas is actually logistically capable of blocking all adult video entertainment from the entire internet from ever being streamed into their state without photo ID verification. I can (but won't) name a half dozen such sites that haven't appeared to perform any amount of effort to comply with the Texas law whatsoever, probably hosted in jurisdictions that Texas can't even do anything about.
I say this after having returned from Colorado's front range last year - a magical place full of whimsy and charm, my favorite kind of climate, and the most breathtaking natural scenery I've ever seen in my life.
It was also full of a bunch of condescending, unkind, prejudiced, close-minded people who seemed almost incapable of engaging in an honest, good-faith dialogue on the lived experiences and perspectives of people from outside of their cultural "tribe", and as a relatively decent income earner, I felt that the price I was paying to live there (a state income tax bill over $2000/month, more than my rent), was too much for a place that felt very culturally intolerant of me based on dehumanizing stereotypes that serve little purpose other than to vilify and otherize, and which I felt unfairly compacted the nuances of some of my lived experiences into trite anecdotes to be mocked, so I respected their wishes and I left.
Colorado talks a good game about their empathy, kindness, diversity, and tolerance, but I sure feel a whole lot more empathy, kindness, and tolerance from the middle aged southern waitress in Texas that calls me "hun" and actually listens to me when I'm talking to her, than the tatted up cute bartender chicks in Colorado that would roll their eyes at me in smug condescension and start using words with fewer syllables after I respond "Texas" to her question of where I'd moved from. Those two couldn't be any better representations of my lived experiences in TX vs CO.
I assume from your response that you are a man since you didn’t mention the most important freedom of all that I mentioned, the right to have reproductive healthcare.
I generally like Texans but your government is wack. Also the property taxes are pretty insane so I wouldn’t exactly say you have no tax burden there.
You aren’t wrong about prejudice towards southerners in blue states though. Sorry you had to deal with that.
No disagreement about the wack government. I'm not big on the conservative christian bits, but I respect those people's beliefs and their right to hold those beliefs, no matter how much I may personally disagree on some fundamental aspects of those beliefs. I find that most people, even most of those people, are willing to be kind, respectful, and accepting of others who treat them with the same kindness, respect, and acceptance... even if you don't personally accept every idea they believe. To your point, though, I wouldn't object to a little bit less of the conservative Christian stuff in my state government, all else equal.
I'm a renter, property taxes are baked into my rent. I live in an exceedingly safe and quiet area, a high income, low crime primarily suburban zip code. This isn't a discrimination thing, this is part of how I've learned to cope with feelings that I struggled with after being the victim of a traumatic, violent, and unprovoked attack I experienced a few years ago in a less safe environment. I have an attached fully enclosed garage in a townhouse-style apartment where I have nobody above or below me, and I pay less in rent for that than I paid for a condo-style apartment in a rough part of town in the cheaper southern side of the front range.
My (rent + state income taxes) in CO were about $2400/mo more expensive than my (rent + property taxes) here in TX, and that was living in a place with 6x as much violent crime per capita. To get somewhere as safe in CO as I am here in TX would've been even more expensive.
For as many downsides as you point out, there is still a lot to be said about the power of the market efficiencies made possible through the lax regulatory and pro-business environment that Texas has produced for itself.
As for your assumption, I absolutely understand the frustration with the changes to medical care laws down here, but that doesn't affect my partner or I, as neither of us are engaging in any kind of activity that could ever get either of us pregnant, so the question of medical care in the event one of us ever did get pregnant is functionally moot for us.
I think that having the richest guy in the world throw up 3 nazi salutes at the inauguration and basically be the puppet master of the new administration certainly isn’t helping Americans want to sign up to help the military industrial complex.
