I'm comically late on this, but I'm goin' there anyway.

I totally, shamelessly <3 Scalpel, which is kinda funny because I generally don't like doctors. This post is tangentially related to this post of his, but is really more about the comments section, wherein the great one says the following (which is why I refer to him from now on as the great one):

Re: Economic policy Texas/Ohio. Ok, but you don't see any other differences between the two? No confounders?


Well, in Texas we have lots of Texans, who generally are superior in almost every way. So, yeah.


But our low taxes and low tolerance for unions (and other forms of BS) are equally important.

Of course, he is right. We are generally superior in almost every way. I didn't really believe this until I married a sailor & moved to the Northeast. Of course, Groton and San Antonio aren't really a fair comparison on any level. But that was followed by moves to Norfolk and then to Honolulu.

One thing that always amused me about Norfolk: Most of the people who retire from the Navy there seem to stay there. Except the Texans. They always go home. (Even if they don't start out with that plan, it always seems to happen.) There would be these occasional, brief conversations along the lines of

"So, are y'all planning on staying once your husband gets out?"
"Dear God, no. We're going back to Texas the second he's processed out."
"Oh. That makes sense."

I really did used to get out of the car at the welcome center in Texarkana and kiss the ground.

San Antonians have an odd sort of inferiority complex about our city. The people who grew up here seem to think there's something better elsewhere. There's not. Not even Honolulu, which I loved and adored (because, face it, there's something wrong with you if you don't love Hawaii). There's the new conversation I have here.

"So you lived in Honolulu? Why'd you come back?"
"Because it's not San Antonio."

I loved Hawaii, and I miss Zippy's and the twenty thousand Korean barbeque joints that Hawaii boasted, but it ain't Texas. It's the bluest of the blue states (they're quite proud of having legalized abortion in 1970, three years before the rest of the country was forced into it), hypocritical as hell on social issues (it's illegal for you to let your dog bark & annoy your neighbors, but it's a-OK to kill your baby by constantly taking meth during your pregnancy, including on the day the child is born), even more crippled by unions than Ohio, and hellaciously overpriced. They've got something like the #46 or #48 school system in the country (still better than the olden days, when they flunked out people on purpose to supply the sugar plantations with ignorant workers), a raging racial divide, and a collective ego that'd even make a Texan blush. (Hey, at least we've got stuff to be proud of! Besides palm trees and coqui frogs.) Our monthly housing allowance, had we not been in base housing, would have been larger than one of Rob's biweekly checks and still not paid for rent & utilities like our allotment in Virginia did. Rooms start at about $900 there, and there's this lovely little law they passed that allows an "ohana unit", essentially a second house, to be built on a normal-sized residential lot.

Not somewhere I'd want to live the rest of my life, especially since quite frankly rich Mainlanders cause a huge amount of economic and environmental problems. (There just isn't the room to build Mainland-style McMansions on the islands, but they're doing it anyway.) Love the place, but Hawaii is best left to the Hawaiians.

'Sides, here in SA we've got low unemployment (which actually kinda sucks when you're looking for a job), a low cost of living, an economy that's growing by leaps and bounds, and a housing market that, thus far, has been largely insulated from the allegedly horrific housing crash.

And we have the Spurs, who are going to start winning again soon. Honest.

For that, I'll put up with Phil Hardberger and his constant, insane plans to enlarge the RiverWalk.