I was chatting with a conservative friend who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1990s and has worked his way through Big Tech and into AI, earning between $400,000 and $1 million per year over the past 10 years or so. He is opposed to almost everything that his California neighbors support, e.g., late-term abortion care, lockdowns, trans surgery on children, mask orders, school closures, Muslim immigration, coerced injections with ineffective Covid “vaccines”, H-1B “non-immigrant” immigration, birthright citizenship, low-skill immigration, four generations of welfare, taxpayer-funded health care for undocumented migrants, restrictions on gun ownership, reparations for Black Americans, giving the Gazans their own country, and allowing “justice-involved” individuals 15 or 20 chances before finally imprisoning them.
We’ll refer to him as “Abdulrahman” since that’s likely to become one of the most common given names here in the U.S. soon. “This election proved that you’re a genius, Abdulrahman,” I said. “It used to be that you were compromising on your political beliefs by paying taxes to support progressivism by living in California. The compensating factor was that you stayed relevant and participated in the most important technology development of your era.” Abdulrahman asked what changed on November 3. “Now nearly the entire rest of the country, with the exception of Florida, is just as progressive as California. So you’re in the heart of the AI revolution and no larger a part of the slide into ‘socialism’ than people in Texas.”
At least for the moment, he pays a higher percentage of his income as tax than he would if he were in Texas, but his AI industry work requires being in the office and his salary would likely fall by more than the difference in taxes and cost of living if he moved. He doesn’t have kids so he doesn’t need to worry about them being exposed to debauchery, becoming trans, joining Hamas, etc. (Not having children also compresses the difference in cost of living among states and cities. A childless never-married person doesn’t pay for a lot for housing, pays nothing for child care and private school, and doesn’t have to look at a $150 bill after what seemed like a basic meal at a counter-serve restaurant.)
Readers: What do you think? I felt somewhat dumb for not having invented the transformer architecture that has enabled all of the LLMs. Then I felt dumb when I failed to start an AI company a week after trying out ChatGPT. Given that 48% of Floridians voted for a self-described “socialist” for U.S. Senate should I also feel dumb for thinking that there was anywhere in the U.S. where a conservative could escape progressivism/socialism?
Loosely related, a person of undetermined gender ID wears and “I’m gay” T-shirt while practicing the sacrament of outdoor masking. February 2026, Berkeley, California:
From a Jewish academic who moved from Massachusetts to Austin, Texas, “Thoughts on a historic week”:
I remember that, when Dana and I moved to Texas in the summer of 2016, we were excited to be a small part of what seemed at the time like Texas’s impending transformation into a cosmopolitan blue state.
And now the prophecy is finally being fulfilled. But so many strange and harrowing things have happened in the interim, that I feel like Murph when her father finally returns to her at the end of the movie Interstellar.
Let’s see what all of the silicon that we can’t afford to buy anymore has been up to….
Mohammed is the most common Muslim name, not Abdulrahman