Which policies specifically? Certainly not the income tax on million+ income, seems pretty modest. We moved from TX. Property tax rate is low, no income tax sub million in income, schools are great (and almost all new), roads are fine and transit seeing massive investment. They definitely need to fix budget, but there's _ample_ wealth here to deal with it. I think they'll figure it out.
_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.
You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive. The cost of doing business has become unreasonably high and is so badly structured that it creates perverse incentives for how you organize business.
And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.
Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.
Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.
>You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive.
None of this matters. We have been hearing how California is doing the same shit for years and people are moving out in droves, but turns out California house prices are still high because people are staying there and its still a very good place to live and work on the average, despite way higher cost of living.
Oregon has some decent things going for it. Multnomah county is rolling out Preschool for All and it's wildly popular. I know lots of people who were going to move, but stayed in Oregon just because they got into the early lottery for it.
There’s no way preschool for all is broadly popular.
It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.
And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.
So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.
Even Kotek was ragging on it.
2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.
This is all a temporary problem. PFA will roll out to everyone, income thresholds can be (and are) renegotiated, and as someone who has a large PFA tax burden, I'm happy to pay for it even if my kids will age out before I get the benefit. I have never met anyone outside of ranting internet commenters who is actually mad about this situation.
Establishing free universal child care as the norm that everyone agrees we have to find a way to provide is the real virtue here. Detractors like you are missing the forest for the trees.
It's easy to gloss over this assessment but ultimately this needs to be a key decision point for where you choose to work. No matter how well you manage complexity as an IC or a lower tier leader, if your upper tier of leaders don't value it, it won't last. Simplicity IME is not a "tail that wags the dog" concept. It's too easy to stomp out if nobody in power cares.
I think that is exactly backwards. Many of the companies integrating with KYC/AML providers (such as my company) definitely don't want to be dealing in ids, just like most companies don't want to be dealing in storing credit card numbers (and the compliance that goes along with it). Its why Stripe exists, and its why ID verification companies exist.
I'd like to agree, but I don't. If companies didn't want to be involved, they would aggressively be pushing governments to provide ways to confirm age w/o transmitting any other data. Primarily because you can't leak data you never had in the first place. I don't see that happening.
I bought an LG Ultrafine 5k at the time and felt kind of stupid for being spending on it. But nearly 10 years later... its still my daily driver. Best ROI of any tech equipment I've bought. It changed my mind about how to think about it, not just the monitor, but having speaker / camera / mac built in, and all over one cable, its been such a joy when I bounce around the house to be able to plugin / unplug so easily; or when I swap from work to personal laptop. Its such a simple setup. Im definitely considering the Apple one, basically regardless of what it costs, once its time. Its simply been too convenient to have a one-plug solution for the laptop that has everything I need, never breaks (my LG may be exception here lol), and that has somehow taken forever to be super ceded by something better.
Only thing that holds back that thought lately is, I'm suddenly spending more and more time in multi-pane terminals, and my screen real estate needs have dropped. The only two things I greatly miss now on my laptop is keyboard quality and general comfort (monitor height, etc).
Try building review skills based on how you review. I built one recently based on how I review some of the concurrent backend stuff one of our tools does. I have it auto-run on every PR. It's great, it catches tons of stuff, and ranks the issues by severity. Over 10 reviews, only 1 false positive (hallucination) and several critical catches. I wish I'd set it up sooner.
Can also after those sessions where they get stuff wrong, ask for an analysis of what it got wrong that session, and produce a ranked list. I just started that and wow, it comes up with pretty solid lists. I'm not sure if its sustainable to simply consolidate and prune it, but maybe it is?
Uncharitably, I think this is a strategy to gorge further especially if they select for higher quality open source. They are embracing the best to train off iteration patterns of the best, and have a semi self correcting slop mechanism.
Charitably this will be great for open source software so... so long as they never moat up and lockdown.
But if you live near Lamar its pretty great. I use to alternate bus and light rail despite owning a car because it was very convenient, despite always being the slower option.
But that does also reinforce the point. Even at max convenience, with two good options (rail, rapid bus line), it was still about 15% slower than driving. Add a single connection or your situation and you're losing an hour a day round trip.
I'm sure you can't share details but would be cool to hear more about it generally speaking, what worked and not etc. Especially if it involved HN.
Our company is being attacked rn in tech media and at least some of it, gut feeling wise, seems obviously sponsored / promoted by competitors. I know that's not surprising, but never watched it happen from this side before.
The key was to present what looked like a lively debate. The dirty trick was to have the "bad side" over state the position horribly. For example, to make Republicans look bad we'd start having their fake personas use subtle racism.
_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.
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