Funny enough in 2014 I almost moved to Austin. I had an offer from a local startup. Thankfully I picked up some bad vibes in the interviews and said no. A couple of months later it turned out that the company had been fraudulently winning contracts from the state with shady connections. I would have been unemployed 3 months after moving there.

My wife and I have talked about moving to Texas but we wouldn't be very close to Austin. We would probably get a big piece of land in a decidedly less hip part of the state.

I love the Hill Country, and if you haven't had a chance you should go check out San Antonio. The Riverwalk is a tourist trap that's fun for kids, but the restaurants in other parts of San Antonio phenomenal. Tejano culture/food is amazing. I really like New Braunfels too.

Colorado as a state is a pretty great place. Our governor has been very good in the pandemic and in my opinion has probably been one of the best Democratic governors. He has a pretty strong background in business and from the very beginning of the pandemic was engaging routinely with business leaders including executives at the company I was working at then. He has that perfect mix of classic liberal values with a dash of libertarianism.

Unfortunately the county we live in has gone a little off the rails when it comes to public health. Although I am an atheist, my wife works at a Christian school and my kids get a big tuition discount, so I enrolled both of them in that school. The academics at the school are top-notch and it's pretty cool that my son's calculus and computer science teacher graduated from MIT a few years ago. The public high school doesn't compare. The fact that it was barely open last year is a whole separate issue. One of the first things I noticed is that the county health department has routinely harassed this school. They never have set foot on the public schools that my kids were at previously. I know some of the principals and confirmed that they have never had a single inspection from the county health department.

I have a strong suspicion but obviously can't prove, that the current county health director doesn't like Christians. I suspect that she has a lot of emotional scars since she is a lesbian and likely spent decades wanting to get married and having people who claim to represent Christianity preventing her from doing so. I don't fault her for that, but I do fault her for allowing her emotional feelings to clearly create a bias that influences her very much targeted and selective enforcement. Another aspect of her that I really dislike is the fact that she is a PhD in sports injuries, but acts as if this education is remotely related to viral epidemiology. She really doesn't appear to know what she's talking about and has aggressively complained in some leaked emails about the governor not "being strict enough because of his libertarian streak". She requires that student athletes wear masks while playing sports. This is insanity to me. The idea that cloth masks are effective pretty much became out of date once Delta hit. With omicron it's just absurd. We are talking about measles level transmissibility and it's been known for decades that cloth masks aren't effective for that kind of virus. The county requires that all of the athletes be vaccinated as well, so the mask requirement on top of that is a bit hard to swallow.

None of this foolishness is going to age well. My subjective opinion after reading the leaked emails is that she has definitely allowed the power to go to her head. The language she uses is very aggressive and indicates a big us versus them mentality when it comes to religious schools.

These kinds of local government officials have increasingly made Texas look good to us.

Have you traveled recently? It's a bit of a shock to go from a place where people are relatively unpanicked and show up on the west coast and realize that people are grossly overestimating their risk and acting out from that. They don't seem to be aware of how normal life is in most of the country. They have this picture of Florida as being a place where body bags are being piled up outside of hospitals. It must be painful for the minority of those folks who stop and look at the data and realize that most of the sacrifices they have made in their lives have been for nothing. Florida is spiking in new cases like many states, but the number per 100,000 is less than New York's is. That really must bother people in NY.