enad

I put Adsense on my website in 2004 on a Thursday. Logged in Saturday and discovered that I'd earned $25! I immediately click one of my own ads, then logged back in to check my earnings per click. Later that week I got a warning email from Google. Told my wife.

She made me take all of my Adsense ads down immediately for the rest of the month and the first couple weeks of the next until we received our first Adsense check.

Then, and only then, did she let me put the ads back up. That first check bought us a freezer. The next paid our rent.

Those were fun times: $50 CPM was not usual 2004-2005.

There are no school age children.

I played all $1 million of my starting money, and finished with $3,674,383. I don't think I learned the lesson I was supposed to.

Yes! That is exactly me. Coast to Coast AM at 11:30 in the morning, through headphones, in a cubicle is just wrong.

Also the audio needs to go out when you go through a tunnel or around a bend. And then you have to hunt for it again on the dial through all the static on another station.

Nothing beats late 1990’s Art Bell on the middle of the night, growing more enthralled (and paranoid) by the minute!

I disagree.

I grew up and lived as an adult in central and rural California (and the Bay Area) before moving to Texas.

I thought I was pretty conservative, like many in rural California.

But coming to Texas it was shocking how liberal I was. Not in anything specific, but in the overall. Texans and California’s government and voter just don’t even think about the same kinds of things. What is perfectly reasonable in California is completely foreign in Texas and vice versa.

The big example: the taxpayer. In California I never thought about them. Who’s going to pay for this great new law or public policy? In California we never ask. In Texas, everyone knows: the taxpayer.

No conservative one in Texas is going to support a law, no matter how good, that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to pay for.

I don’t mean to imply that you can go outside. You can. And we do. Just that when it’s 85 at night and 85% humidity, you run your A/C all night, every night.

Just don’t try to send your kids to the schools in the affordable parts of the state. Low cost of living = lower property values = low property taxes = poorly funded schools.

The schools are very good compared to what they had in California. We live in one the top 500 school districts in the country (there are about 10,000 of them).

Re: "The conservatives"

If by conservative you mean something akin to capitalistic, and unabashedly out to make money, from the housewife to the CEO, then yes.

If you mean something else, then it really isn't that cut and dry.

Everyone (a very large majority) is from somewhere else, and most came to Houston not because it was some kind of Shangri-La, but because of the opportunities.

Plus, for what it's worth, Houston is one of, if not the, most ethnically diverse city in the US. (Google it so I don't have to provide biased sources.)

Houston. It is very humid. Most of the time.

But we have air conditioning. Every place has air conditioning. And it run's constantly. But still my power bill is just a fraction of what it was in California.

From late fall through early spring the weather is very California-like: cool and crisp in the morning and warm and dry in the afternoon.

I grew up in Central California and then lived in the Bay Area from 2001 until 2010. Had kids, and a online job, so we next moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where we lived for a decade.

We moved to a suburb of Houston, Texas about a year ago. Best decision ever.

In a nutshell:

Overall, quality of life has gone way up.

Taxes have gone down. Wages have gone up. Everything is cheaper, which means we all get to do more fun stuff.

On the negative side of the equation: The avocados are smaller here.

Me too. In 1999.