QUORA: What do you dislike about California?

QUORA: What do you dislike about California? by Andrew T. Post, born & raised in the Golden State, 7/19/21

The politics. Gun laws, taxes, gas prices, housing bubbles, boondoggles, environmental & economic restrictions, blackouts, homeless- ness, illegal immigration, graffiti, garbage, etc. All?& I do mean all?symptoms of decades of Democratic mismanagement at practically every level of govt. I?ve written volumes about this elsewhere, so I?ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that I can't stand (a) the corrupt, tone-deaf, utopian fools who run my beautiful home state, nor (b) the complacent, greedy, brain-dead, idealistic idiots who keep voting them into office.

The overpopulation. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that ?Hell is other people,? & he was right. Half the unpleasantness of living in California stems from the sheer amount of people living there?nearly

40 million souls crammed into an area only slightly larger than Paraguay. Experts say that a space that size should hold, at max, 10 million. (Paraguay?s population is just over 7 million, FYI.) The dire consequences of overpopulation are plain to see in California. Housing prices are sky-high. There?s too little housing & too many people?& too many regs on the building of new housing (see #1 above). Traffic is insane, even in non-major cities. No matter what hour of the day, at least a million Californians are driving around, trying to go God-knows-where?& all of them are in your way. As a result (& in spite of California?s draconian environ- mental & air quality laws), the smog is everpresent & mucks up the view of L.A. & S.F., as well as most of the Central Valley. Need to hit up an emergency room? Prepare for an hours-long wait. And trying to go to an amusement park or a sporting event is nightmarish: the lines of cars going to & from the place, the sheer headache of trying to find parking, the lines to get in, the lines for rides & concessions & bathrooms, the mad crush of people everywhere. Small wonder California leads the USA in mass shootings.

The people. Californians are assholes, Angelenos in particular. This is a well-known fact. Only 10 US states have cities whose residents are ruder, more mean-spirited, more self-centered, & more aloof. And I can say this with impunity because I'm a Californian & I grew up with daily California rudeness. (It was only after I began attending college in N Dakota & made friends with North Dakotans & Minnesotans that I discovered that, in some states, people are actually nice & considerate.) The list of irksome Californian habits, attributes, & quirks is long & infamous. They?re self- centered jagoffs. They drive like sausages. They act as if their state is the best in the country, the pinnacle of cultural sophistication & natural beauty. They shit on other states like Texas & Idaho & other so-called ?flyover states.? They charge exorbitant prices for their craft beers & homemade liquors & scented candles & other Calif- made goods as if they were luxury items. They put up with the most insane abuses of power by their leaders. Hell, just look at our VP if you want to see what a typical Californian is like. All hat & no cattle, as they say in Texas.
The weather. Your mileage may vary, but I like 4 seasons myself. Calif has only two: dry (meaning hot) & rainy. 8 months of broiling heat coupled with 4 months of cold drizzle is enough for me. In the summer of 2019, it got up to 117F in Lodi, Calif, which is as hot as I ever saw it get when I lived in frickin? Las Vegas. Most of the state turns into a convection oven in summer. The highest temp ever recorded on Earth was recorded in Calif. (In 1913 or 2021, depending on who you talk to). Only near the beach &/or way up in the mountains is the weather in Calif somewhat benign & bearable. I get tired of the endless sunny days, too. Sun, sun, sun, day after day. Calif?s Mediterranean climate is good for winegrapes & people with SADs, but it also means endless heat & endless sunburn for the rest of us. I?m with John Steinbeck: weather makes a place interesting. I used to like sunny places, but now I?m leaning toward cold & clouds. California did that to me.

Oh, & as if I needed another reason to hate the weather in California, that aforementioned wet/dry cycle is also a big part of the reason for:

The wildfires. When you have so many people living in one place, you?re gonna wind up with more than your fair share of idiots. That?s just how it goes. Idiots in the govt, idiots on the street. Because the idiots in the govt banned logging, the forests grew wild; because the idiots in the govt mismanage Calif?s water resources, the state is perpetually in a drought; because idiots in the govt demanded that PG&E pour all of their money into developing renewable energy sources instead of updating their existing (& aging) infrastructure, faulty power lines across the state have become ready-made firestarters. So as soon as some non-govt idiot goes backpacking in the forest & forgets to properly put out his campfire, or doesn?t realize that his trailer is scraping against the asphalt & making sparks, or an old & decrepit power line shorts out, California literally bursts into a ball of flame. Every. Single. Fscking. Summer. And California has to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money fighting these fires. And people die. And their houses & even their whole towns are destroyed. And the air quality gets so bad people have to wear respirators. And the leaders & the inner-city idiots blame climate change, & nothing is ever actually done to address the real problem.

...all of which leads back to #1, the politics of Calif. Fix those, & a lot of the state?s problems will straighten themselves right out. Fat chance of that happening, though.