I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
It’s just because they don’t put enough homeless people in concentration camps. That’s the entire thing. Mind you, California, like the rest of the country, still treats homeless people like they’re less than human, but the weather’s nice and the housing prices have skyrocketed in the past decade, so there’s a lot of homelessness, and therefore a greater call for mass executions.
Two words: Techbro Ethnocracy
Perhaps you should use more than two words.
Better to be concise.
Antennas
You’re selling sexism
You’re selling racism
You’re selling anything you get your fucking hands on
An understanding, you got a plan in a
Presentation to advertisers who demand it
When you plan that
Your antennas are pointed in the right direction
You make a deal in any situation
So with no evacuation
Let California fall into the fucking ocean
Oh they talk to ya, oh you’re the town man
High profile Hollywood scum-bag
It’s a done deal, signed and sealed
Deal makers making it all happen
When you plan that
Your antennas are pointed in the right direction
You make a dead in any situation
So with no evacuation
Let California fall into the fucking ocean
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!!!-Tim Armstrong/Rancid
deleted by creator
Okay, let’s start with the environment: most of California doesn’t have enough water, and they’re not doing anything to directly remediate that. Environmentally, a lot of the farming is going to be a disaster when the consequences of climate change really set in. Most of SoCal is a desert, but you wouldn’t know it from the expanses of lawns that you see in wealthy enclaves. (…But you’ll figure it out really fast when you try to go mountain biking without puncture-resistant tires.)
The gun control policy is awful, and likely illegal in light of the last few SCOTUS rulings. But here’s the kicker: California has a Democratic supermajority, and they could do things about the underlying conditions that lead to violence in general, and don’t. They’ve consistently failed to seriously address the economic issues that are closely tied to violent crime, things like economic inequality and poverty, criminal justice reform, systemic racism, and so on and so forth. Instead they’ve opted for policies that make wealthy white people happy without fixing the issues.
Housing; this is where wealthy “liberals” are directly to blame. Dems say that they believe in housing that’s affordable, but wealthy elites–which are overwhelmingly Democratic in California–oppose zoning changes that would allow for high density, affordable housing. The result is shithole houses that can cost over a million dollars, studio apartments in sketchy parts of town (see point #2, above) are thousands of dollars a month, an exploding homeless population, and fuckin’ awful sprawl.
Taxation: California has long had the chance to show that it’s progressive with taxation, and to institute wealth taxes. They don’t.
Education: California still relies on funding largely through property taxes, which ensures that school districts with a poorer tax base will have less funding. Again, this is the product of wealth elites–who are overwhelmingly Democratic in California–working to oppose funding changes that would have the effect of making schools in super-rich neighborhoods less desirable, but would also improve schools everywhere else.
Public transit: California barely has it, and it’s consistently underfunded. Combined with point #3, it leads to traffic gridlock that’s famously awful in major metro areas.
Most of these problems can be solved. The problem is that Dems are being hypocritical; they have a NIMBY attitude that means that, even though they say the right things, they don’t do shit.
There’s a lot of truth to this, however for public transport, there were plans to modernize the public transport until Musk derailed those plans with a failed hyperloop
Pretty broadly speaking, it’s a population center and they’ll always have a problem with those. There’s more to it than that, but fact of the matter is even if the shit they tend to latch on to wasn’t a thing they’d just find something else.
Expensive, will be hit hard by climate change, subject of right wing propaganda portraying it as a hive of removed debauchery(lgbt people and abortion rights)
California is the target of conservative fear mongering.
I live here and it’s all propaganda. From my lefty perspective there are no shortage of things to criticize about California, but most of the criticism in the mainstream comes from the right and more or less 90% of it is made up.
Example: last year San Francisco elected a DA who said that they wanted to reform the justice department, used Black Lives Matter rhetoric, etc, and the conservative media sphere drummed up a propaganda campaign against them and against San Francisco generally that convinced everyone that a spike in crime had occurred even though there was no actual evidence that crime had gone up (and even if it had the new DA hadn’t been in nearly long enough to be the cause of it). This resulted in that DA getting recalled and replaced and everyone outside the state thinking that San Francisco is Mad Max, even though statistically things are basically exactly the way they’ve been for the past couple of decades.
The real problems are what other people said, things are expensive and the cities have a lot of inefficient sprawl which makes the cost of living worse and starves the city governments of funds for social services. We’ve been staring down the barrel of a water crisis for like two decades and the state government is seemingly incapable of taking any action on it, we spend way too much money on cops, the government is completely captured by the local industries, the only thing we seem capable of doing to homeless people is systematically brutalizing them - but none of those problems are unique to California.
California gets trotted out in the conservative media sphere as “liberalism run wild”, a place where being what they consider to be a “real American” is illegal but crime is subsidized by the state, where everything is expensive and dangerous, and homeless people have gay sex in the street. There’s an entire industry focused on filtering for the most extremely awful news they can find in a state of almost 40 million people, packaging that news as though it’s the typical experience everyone there goes through, and then blasting that news into the brains of Americans 24/7. That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
That’s the thing. No one I’ve ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the “news” has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.
The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.
But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren’t being purged by fucking nazis. So there’s that.
I moved from Canada to California a few years ago and spent almost 5 years in the San Jose area. Loved California; the food, the people there, the scenery, definitely the weather. End up hating America though.
The liberalism run wild concept is kinda what I’m curious about. Like what things? I know California protects abortions and has stronger gun control laws. But is that really it? There’s gotta be more actual examples
Nope. Conservatives are a simple people. You tell them something is bad because god doesn’t like it and they won’t question it.
Ronald Reagan began California Gun control as a response to the Black Panthers. supported by the NRA.
It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.
An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.
I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.
As far as I understand, the problem stems from the fact that places like skid row provide infrastructure to help homeless people, so more homeless move there to get at least basic healthcare, food etc.
If all larger cities did that instead of repressive measures, the problem should spread among them, making single places less problematic.
Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.
But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.
Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.
As a very left leaning individual who does not like California my reasons basically come down to all the benign neglect of the homeless (leaving people to rot in the streets with their fentanyl addictions isn’t progressive, assholes) the militant oppositions to building housing anywhere (progress is being made but it’s like pulling teeth) and the huge focus on performative laws that effect 0 actual change.
… Notably these are all problems in other states too. Most of them just use police to lock them up instead. Not better.
But California rubs me the wrong way because they act smug about it.
Notably these are all problems in other states too. Most of them just use police to lock them up instead. Not better.
They don’t always lock them up. Sometimes they put them on a bus to California.
california is the largest “sub-national” economy in the world. if california was a country, it would have the fifth largest economy. bigger than the uk, or bigger than india.
if i had to guess, the answer is “success breeds jealousy”
If anything, it should be California thats pissed off, having all its tax money go to support the failed red states and their failed policies via the federal redistribution.
I maintain that if red states want to end government handouts, we should respect their wishes, for them.
The problem is that policy hurts the poorest who have the least say in thr policy
Just one example: the state made sale of new internal combustion cars illegal at a certain point in the future, at a time when the electrical grid is unreliable.
This is a way of trying to use government power to fight global warming.
But it hurts people. It’s a state where the general philosophy of “sacrifice poor people to save the planet” is being enacted in government policy.
Are the poor buying new cars? With a greater supply of evs, the poor will buy used evs which require less maintenance, other than new batteries that can be financed.
EDIT: to be fair, you used to be able to buy a used foreign car for $500 (foreign for reliability) and even the cheapest ev (with actual usable range) costs 10 times as much, mostly because of the battery. The fuel costs are lower but the up front costs are higher.
I agree with your edit. Those below the poverty line shouldn’t/can’t finance an EV battery. Combustion cars can be purchased for ~$500 and are usually fixable for only a few hundred dollars with enough time and tools. Most engine problems are more expensive in labor than in parts, so almost anyone can fix for cheap with YouTube tutorials. If all else fails, junk yards are full of parts, including engines and transmissions.
Even if EVs may have better reliability, when it comes time to sell it, someone in poverty can’t afford to buy and fix it. The raw materials in the battery are worth too much, and the batteries don’t last forever.
People may not have (or have access to) banking, financing, etc and shouldn’t need to finance everything in their life. Financing is like a tax on the poor.
Hopefully these things change in the future, public transit improves, we make combustion cars cleaner, or batteries get cheaper, but right now it’s the poorest that will be paying most for this environmental crisis.
It’s still capitalism.
As opposed to…? Are you saying that collective ownership over the means of production would solve this problem, or that under communism people just simply wouldn’t be able to have cars?
I don’t know much about this topic, but it can generally be said that cutting off the supply of new anything necessarily reduces its availability in the secondhand market and that this will also produce an increase in price.
It’s more that a lot of people move out from California and trash-talk it to anyone who will listen. This happens with everywhere, but because CA is so populous it has more people doing this than other places.
Though, IMO, the weather sounds terrible to me.
the weather where? it’s a big state, with quite a lot of variation. there’s a huge difference between san francisco, bakersfield, and truckee. i think most people could find some local weather to hate, but i suspect most people can also find somewhere to appreciate. unless you just want tropics or arctics or something similarly extreme i guess.
I like arid and cool best, but what I really value in my weather is variety and seasonality.
you want seasons, we’ve got seasons:
that’s an old image though, we’re actually in summer now.
The weather is one of the largest reasons people migrate to california.
Even if your homeless, its of the few states where you could be outside year round and not die due to the more extreme points of weather that you would experience in mamy other states
Exactly. I prefer more variety in my weather. I need the highs and the lows, the sun and the snows, the days when wind blows, y’know?
