At least in my experience, having worked in both Florida and California, that's more of a wash than people imagine it's going to be -- and more so than the "cost of living calculators" tend to demonstrate, at least if you're a renter.
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
That math breaks down if you have kids and need 4bdrm house commutable distance to work in good school district - prohibitively expensive in Bay Area and affordable on engineer salary in most tier 2 cities. If you do not have kids, Bay Area clearly wins, especially if you are ok with studio/1bdrm.
there used to be a lot more shared hosting in the world when Slashdot ruled the geek news roost
it'd be fine if it's one site on a dedicated machine, but these shared webhosts would routinely cram 500-1000 hosting accounts onto something like a single-core, HT-less 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with two gigs of RAM, running mpm_prefork on Apache 2.0, with single-node MySQL 5.x (maybe even 4.x!) on the same box... which was not terribly efficient as others observed
you carry about 20x the compute power of that machine in your pocket, even a Raspberry Pi 4 could triple the workload
The PIF of Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in Take-Two (the parent of 2K Sports) since 2021, which is relevant to the larger discussion about Saudi "sportswashing".
in the case of Azure, the users are the engineers tasked with implementing the infra
I'm not sure I've ever heard of a shop adopting Azure on pure engineering merit but my anecdata are hardly exhaustive. it tends to be forced for weird business reasons (retailers mistrusting Amazon, data residency requirements, sweetheart credit deal, CIO convinced by Azure rep over golf)
I always liked going to well-stocked stores and browsing for stuff. That was Fry's until they shot themselves in the foot.
Micro Center might not be optimal on price, but sometimes you just want to wander a store full of cool stuff and maybe walk out with something you didn't expect, instead of another anonymous box of schmutz from Amazon or wherever
Unfortunately, Microcenter’s selection often leaves me disappointed. In particular, they stock almost no ECC RAM for AM5 machines. They do not stock many graphics cards that have ECC VRAM either. Their best card in stock that has ECC VRAM is this nearly obsolete ampere card:
I get it, but as "professional" grade equipment, most customers would acquire that through their employers' vendors.
It also depends on your local market; my location seems to carry more server and HEDT gear than others (they stock more A- and W-series GPUs than 5090s, at least). They've also purchased things I've requested, like ECC DRAM for my Threadripper, which I also purchased from them.
I wouldn't be surprised, most retailers can place special orders for things they don't have in stock. I do this at my local record store, book store, and comic store with some frequency.
Texas DPS was selling driver registration data to car warranty spammers as recently as 2022. This pearl-clutching from Abbott and Paxton is a bit amusing.
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