Dear California Dum Fuqs moving to Austin

A year ago, you tech neoliberal types spiked the cost of a new house there to more than $600K. Perhaps not as bad as the Bay Area, but I venture worse than Sacramento. And, in your lust for a state with no state income tax, you ignored that in a metropolitan area, you can pay $2.50 or so per $100 valuation in city, county, school board, hospital district and other special tax district property taxes.

Well, beyond that, feast your eyes on this:

Yeah, you may say, you've been to Sacramento, so you know what a 100-plus day is.

Know what? There's this thing in Texas, from the Hill Country eastward, and especially from I-35 eastward, called "humidity." Go visit Weather Underground's Austin page, where I got that screenshot from. You'll see that, even at a 102-degree high, the relative humidity is still near 30 percent.

And, in California, besides the truly dry heat of Palm Springs and Death Valley, I've been to Redding when it was 110 or so. But, you know what? The humidity there was below 20 percent, even though not in a desert. (That's part of why you have all those summer wildfires.)

So, per a heat index chart, lets do, say 102 at 33 percent versus 112 at 16 percent. The Austin heat index is 108 and Redding's is 112. So, pretty close.

But, those aren't the only factors. AccuWeather's "real feel" takes into account other things, like wind speed and sun angle. Sun angle is not just time of day, but latitude. Austin is a full 10 degrees of latitude further south than Redding. Eight degrees further south than the Bay Area. The sun is close to overhead from late morning through mid-afternoon.

And, this applies to you Southland folks moving to Tex-ass, too. Sure, the Inland Empire area also gets hot at times, but not like the actual desert, and, it also has no humidity in the summer. And, LA is four degrees of latitude further north than Austin.

Also, notice that it doesn't cool down a lot at night and the humidity goes way back up.

"Congrats" for coming here and burning through electricity on a Texas-exceptionalist electric grid not connected to the rest of the nation that's barely winterized and really not at all summerized.

(Update, July 2: Outside energy experts warned again about grid and supply concerns a couple of days ago, even as ERCOT again said, "move along, nothing to look at.")

But wait, that's not all. Due to the geography of the Hill Country, freeway type highways running straight in any direction once you're west of the Mopac don't exist. The Mopac, at least on some of my years-ago visits to Austin, at times could be worse than 35. (It was usually the other way around, though.) Sounds almost like the Bay Area you left, doesn't it? It's not quite that bad, but it can be as bad as Dallas or Houston, and all you folks moving there are just making it worse.

Fredericksburg is the new Aspen? No, Texas Monthly; it's being Californicated or New-Texified

Fredericksburg is the new Aspen. No, really. That's the skinny from Texas Monthly in a new series on small towns. I Tweeted to TM is this wasn't some new version of pay-to-play like that which got Tim Taliaferro kicked upstairs and sideways out of the editor in chief office a couple of years ago. After all, the series IS "Small Towns, Big Money." Battling for the soul of Marfa? That's realistic. Fredericksburg the new Aspen? Thanks for the laugh.

Just because property prices are skyrocketing doesn't mean it's the new Aspen. There's no skiing, and while the wineries might be nice, they ain't Californian.

Speaking of, THAT is the issue.

You got a bunch of Texans getting butt-hurt over one of their picturesque small towns being Californicated, is what it is, at least in part.

Plenty of us who grew up in the actual West know all about that.

Taos, more picturesque, smaller and poorer than Fredericksbug, sheds no tears for it.

That said, the idea that this might be a political tipping point, as Derek Thompson claims? Tosh or at least semi-tosh. The majority of California migration here is from places like the OC, the Inland Empire, San Diego exurbs to the south of that, and portions of the Central Valley. Red, or at least red-dish. Now, these folks may not be as conservative as the likes of Former Fetus Forever Fuckwad Jonathan Stickland or Gohmert Pyle, but they're conservative enough. That said, many Californicators aren't moving to Tex-ass. Per the Wall Street Journal, high property taxes (and they are, for Texans who still think they may not be, but refuse to look at an income tax). a $10K cap on state and local tax deductions, while not hitting Texas as hard as California or New York, is hitting it hard enough.

The non-Californicated part is simply a picturesque small-town version of the sharing economy world. Houses in Frederickburg are apparently being snapped up in part for Air BnB type rentals. Again, not Aspen. A few of the rich may rent out their rich places; most don't.

Besides, this is capitalism, allegedly the second Texas national religion after football, hard at work. Kwitcherbellyaching, you Hill Country Krauts!

Third, a lot of this BnB grifting, per the story, is being done by yer fellow Texans.

The real thing TM is missing, per that, is that this is just old-fashioned Texas fucking greed on steroids. I'm sorry, let me be more precise. This is just old-fashioned ANGLO Texas fucking greed on steroids. It's no accident that Fredericksburg is just a shoot and a shout down the road from Johnson City.

As for Marfa? It had its own Hispanic high desert soul long before Anglo artists and hipsters started overrunning it. Their high dudgeon over the latest interlopers is hypocritical as hell.

But, of course, that's how the Pointy Abandoned Object State™rocks.

North Texas snow wussies turn out

Barely an inch or so of granular snow early Saturday morning? And the results?

• Old Courthouse museum in Denton never opens.
• Half the Saturday staff at my normal bank branch don't show up.
• Area libraries in Texoma don't open.

Why?

I think it's three parts.

One is that climate change means younger North Texans have seen less snow, if any, than their parents. And their parents have forgotten it.

Two is the number of Californicators who have moved to North Texas, expecting no snow because they got none in the Southland.

Three is the SUV owners who treat them like precious cars.

Carry on.

Californios stay home — go ‘discover’ yourself

Irvine, Calif. is No. 4 on MONEY magazine’s best places to live.

As I told Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly:

The bright side is, at least a place in the Southland ranked in the Top 5, so a bunch of yahoo Californios don't have to leave their own back yards to "discover" some place.

If you look at the full list, many of the places are pretty white and pretty conservative Sun Belt suburbs.

Indeed, Madison, Wisc., is the largest central city to make the list, at less than 250,000.