Lady Scylla wrote:Major-Tom wrote:
^^.
Despite Texas' many flaws, I'd say with a degree of confidence that I would much rather live in Texas than California, not just because of ideology, but merely because Texas has better education, better job opportunities, better business environments, better roads and infrastructure, cheaper real estate, and lower taxes.
Sounds pretty nice, actually. Eat a dick, California.
Pretty low bar. Education here sucks, job opportunities are laughable, unless you're military, business environment is hilarious because of the right to work bullshit, and Texas can't even build a damn highway right. Real estate is iffy, owning a house here can range from $250,000+ and rent in just the projects can be $800-1,500. Taxes? Pfft. I pay taxes for water coming in and out of my place. Accounting city ordinances, I can't build anything without a permit, my grass can't be over 3 inches -- even on the spot in the back yard of the alley which is technically the city's land, not mine because it's where the utility lines are. I have to do the same for the land in the front which up to 10 feet from the road is technically not my land but the city under public accommodation. (Which is funny because if I want a sidewalk there, I have to pay for it) As a result, the streets here are a patchwork of sidewalks-no sidewalks. If I don't keep those areas mowed down, it's a hefty fine. You can't park vehicles on the grass, you can't park them out front, they must be in a driveway or parking space.
A lot of this seems to relate to your city and its local laws or rules made by a local HOA. In my neighborhood there are plenty of houses with overgrown lawns and none of them seem to have ever gotten in trouble.
Also, 250+ for a home is really on the upper end and really only applies to Austin, which is only the fourth or fifth largest metro in the state (depending on whether you count DFW as one or Dallas and Fort Worth) and some parts of Dallas. That aside, rent in Texan cities, outside of Austin anyway, are lower than in most other cities of similar size.
Road-wise. They've been working on I-35 since the 70s. Non-stop. They're newest expansion, they enacted eminent domain and shutdown all of the business running alongside the highway in-town. This was a problem for several people, including some family friends, who didn't have the money to reopen a new one. State was just -- oh well. They then go through and waste a bunch of money on these coloured tiles, and lay them alongside the highway in a cute pattern (Because I'm totally going to look at this while driving at 75), and then waste more money laying down grass and trees. OOPS. They didn't wait for the utilities company to move their damn lines. So now they had to go back in and tear it all up, let the utilities company pull this lines and move them, then redo it all. The grass has since died because everything in this godforsaken state likes being dead and yellow, and the resulting dirt has covered much of the tiles. They then turn around and are asking the state for more money.
I-35 is always being worked on because the population is always growing and has been growing faster than projections from the 1990s and 2000s expected. About grass, our lawn is still green and we haven't watered it since the summer, and even then it was only a couple of times a week. Granted, El Nino has really helped, but our grass is hardly dead (the same appears true for the rest of the neighborhood, though I have seen some of them continue to water their lawns about every night, which annoys me). I can't really address the middle of this paragraph since, well, it doesn't seem really supported by anything.
Education, education, education. Texas is all about testing. You study most of your time for the TAKS tests, taking practise tests and hoping to go you pass these because if you fail the TAKS, you're likely to flunk. The elementary school down the road from us runs a cellphone jammer that, at times, disrupts our cellphones in the houses around it. I'm still waiting for the FCC to strangle them. The schools got an $8 million dollar grant to renovate said elementary school as well. All they did was knock out the first wall, redo it, paint it, expand a tad on the front entrance and that was that. $8 million dollars? Where in the hell did the rest of it go? Now let us ignore the fact that, on top of the American pledge, we must do the Texas pledge. (Wat.) Yes, Texas is such a snowflake it has its own pledge. Then you've got the consistent religious bullshit with churches showing up to pass out bibles, and holding prayer at the start of the day, and at school events. The city has one highschool. They refuse to build a new one because of costs, so the school is overcrowded with over 3,000 students. My classrooms were anywhere from 30-50 kids. Its become such a problem that teachers quit en masse this past year because the pay was too awful, and they were getting no support from the superintendent. No, what, you may ask, could they do to further waste money? We're going to buy every student a touchscreen laptop. Yes. A touschscreen laptop. A touchscreen laptop that I ever used but twice my entire time in school.
IIRC Georgia also has a state pledge. Not necessarily a bad thing, just seems to be something you personally have an issue with. I've never had problems with it and never had a classmate who minded, or at least any more than than American pledge.
Maybe your experience at school was different from mine. It is worth noting that all but one school districts are different. Perhaps at your district teacher salaries are low but the state, as a whole, has rather average salaries even with a notably below average cost of living. Besides that, I will agree that schools care too much about tests. In all my classes, teachers seemed to care about nothing but the AP tests (until after the tests passed), but the people I've talked to from other states (including some on NS) have told me it is no different where they are from, including California, Georgia, Indiana, New York, Oklahoma, and Virginia.
On the topic of the school size, I wouldn't say three thousand students is too much for a single high school. In my opinion, it is more important how large the school physically is and how large the average class size (as in a period not a graduating class) is. The high schools in Plano each have 2.5 to 3k students and the school district is considered a pretty good one.
Now let us talk about jobs and healthcare. Texas is a Right to Work state. Given, I'm not a massive fan of unions, but with Texas, is a means to fuck you. A lot of places will merely terminate you for simply discussing, or talking about a union. That's it. Have a nice day! It's not uncommon, especially in the factory environment, to see businesses hire illegals. But Texas is a Republican state, everyone doesn't like illegals.Every factory I've worked at here has had a room, or a few rooms, full of illegal workers who were doing simple tasks. They never ate lunch with us, they never talked much to us (to me, in my case, because I speak Spanish), and they used an entirely different door from the rest of the plant. Given, I don't mind illegals so long as they're willing to work and pay taxes, but I do find the hypocrisy palpable.
You could post proof that the practice is widespread. There are a lot of things in your post which seems anecdotal, which is an issue because, one, we cannot know if that is even true and, two, because it could just be an quirk rather than something common or the norm.
It is difficult to pinpoint it as hypocrisy since in many cases it isn't the same people hiring illegal immigrants who are complaining. Perhaps the reason some people in Texas are against illegal immigrants is because some other people choose to hire them instead of legal residents or citizens, possibly to get away with lower pay or less benefits. Not to say I am anti-illegal immigrants or anything. I have my personal stance that seems unpopular with people on both sides of the spectrum.
Seeking employment, well, that's a funny thing. Most of the people working at McDonalds here are older people in their 40s. This has created a problem because those getting out of highschool (like myself) couldn't find the jobs that were meant to have to get ourselves started. 9 times out of 10. If you're sitting in an interview, and there's a soldier -- they'll take the soldier over you. It's happened time and time again, because they're given upmost priority here. Now, because of Texas' lovely mentality, businesses here lack oversight to the point that every job I've taken has done something that really teeters the line of being just outright illegal. I've seen factories fire people for injuries, and outright threaten people with their jobs, I've seen restaurants where there were roaches running around, or they'd drop raw chicken on the floor and simply cook it anyway.
Average age for a fast food worker seems to be twenty-nine. I couldn't find anything breaking it down by company or state. That number seems right, based on my experience.
For everything else, my response is that it is horrible but, again, not supported. I've only worked at a handful of restaurants in Texas before and the shadiest thing I've seen was a small Vietnamese restaurant watering down its Sriracha sauce, which I don't think is illegal exactly. I've also heard of a few restaurants lowering or increasing the temperature to get customers to leave near closing times, but I also don't know if that is illegal (although I think it is still very shady). Besides that, I personally know a lot of business owners, including some family, and the one time I've heard or witnessed them doing something illegal was when one of them placed two chairs in their bakery or something, which is illegal in the specific municipality since the store only had one public restroom. Even then, the chairs were removed after they learned about the law.
I've seen, especially in factories, where employee safety was given not even two shits about. It rained one day. The roof has holes apparently, so it flooded much of the factory floor I was in. Why's this a problem? Well, the voltage boxes for the lights and machines were surrounded by pools of water. We were told to work anyway. We had constant fires thanks to the welders and they never threw the firealarm, even though, during one fire, three booths caught fire. They didn't make people wear paint masks in the paint room, which apparently had awful ventilation -- my friend there got so lightheaded he started throwing up.
And, they never had us wear protective sleeves if you were doing things with freshly hot welds -- this is where I got injured. So the frames we were welding had to be moved and measured, then balanced. There was no doing this slow because we had a quota we had to meet everyday. I had always been real careful about handling these because, well, it's a hot friggin weld. One day it slipped, the weld hit my arm and I got instant 2.d and 3rd degree burns to the point my skin was hanging off my arm. It's really kind of funny with businesses, they don't start caring until someone gets hurt. Naturally, I go to the ER. They treat it, unfortunately I have permanent nerve damage in part of my arm where the burn was, and so begins the fun. OSHA, for whatever reason, shows up. Now, you want to talk about a company busting ass.
Suddenly, they're all so surprised why none of us were wearing sleeves. Despite the fact the plant managers walked by us everyday up til this point. (Keep in mind, despite my injury and because I needed the money so badly, I went back to work the next day -- thank you painkillers) From there, I got pulled into meetings between OSHA and the plant supervisors for weeks on end. Everyweek, they made me write, and rewrite what happened. They were looking for one tiny, itsy detail they could use to say they weren't at fault. I wasn't even aware there were thermal sleeves, so it's not like I could've known any better, I was 18. Needless to say, OSHA apparently jumped down their throats and suddenly there were presentations about safety, bla bla bla. Once OSHA was gone? Pfffft, everything went back to normal. We then had a guy rivet his hand a month later. When I did security, I guarded a chemical plant. A plant that had a lovely chemical spill just months before (all of which you could still see because it had solidified in the parking lot as this rock hard orange substance). A plant with some really nasty chemicals.
Just a month before I got posted there, they also had a fire. After that, security was posted to watch the room where said fire had happened to ensure it didn't do it again. What I always found so funny on our Emergency plan was that, if something happened, we were suppose to call the plant managers before the emergency services. Not evacuate the plant or anything, call them first. If there was a spill or a fire, we were told to go find it. Keep in mind, we're dealing with some chemicals that, if it got into the air, it'd kill you outright. Thankfully, nothing happened while I was there.
Now, what about healthcare? Well, Texas decided to say fuck you to Obamacare, which rather sucked because I would have qualified. My income is just high enough, and just low enough that I couldn't get covered for any other plan. In fact, because of income, I didn't have health insurance since I was 15. I hadn't been to a dentist, eye-doctor, nada. There was no way I could afford it, and it was so bloody expensive, even before Obamacare was a thing that I'd sooner wait and see if why I was sick was something that was going to kill me.
So, I thought, if Texas did the medicaid expansion, looking it over, I would've finally had health insurance. I couldn't do insurance through my work because that was a $5,000 deductible. I don't even go to the doctors that bloody much. However, Texas didn't do it. When my bipolar got so bad, and I got suicidal for the fourth time, there was little choice. I needed to do something because I had been unmedicated for faaaaar too long. So, the only insurance plan I could qualify for was Indigent, which meant I had to make under $700/month. So I quit my job. Now, if you know anything about me, you're well aware how my treatment with these people who are the state has gone. It's funny really. Medicaid, I could've gotten good care, and the state would've covered it. Instead, the state's covering my healthcare here anyway, but it's shit care and I must see their doctors. It was soon after that I found out I had skin cancer, and thankfully got it checked out, but given another 6 months, I probably wouldn't have been here. Let us also ignore Baylor Scott and White whose monopolised the centre of the state like the cancer they are. So yes, Texas is a hellhole.
I won't touch this part further. It is too personal and I rather not question you on the issue. Though, I don't disagree about Obamacare.
