Asklemmy

As a tourist from Canada, my wife and I drove through parts of the US for about three weeks in 2018, and we absolutely hated California. It was our least favourite part of the trip. It is clear that LA is struggling with massive homelessness. The roads were the worst ones we encountered on our road trip. The beaches were littered with garbage, to an amount that we just found disgusting. They were also incredibly overcrowded, though that is what happens in heavily populated places. We went to Disneyland, and that was nice. However, we did cut our California stay short and moved on.

Now, I don't have many places to compare California to, as we were only in about four states. However, we have travelled extensively in Canada, where we have been to most of the provinces. We enjoyed the states and provinces we have visited. However, California is definitely in our no-no zone for vacations.

Again, this is a tourist perspective. I do not really know what it's like to live there.

I don’t live in California but visit the bay area frequently for business. Here’s a typical experience:

Depending on travel budget, I’ll either stay at a motel for $400/night, or a regular hotel for around $800/night. It’s not my money, but it’s still ridiculous to need to file a budget exception to stay at a Motel 8.

When I arrive in the evening, I try to watch Netflix but the cellular bandwidth is so shitty I can’t even watch at the lowest resolution, and the hotel wifi isn’t much better. I boot up a wifi scanner and find nearly a hundred different base stations in range all stomping on the spectrum, so I just play Switch for a while and go to bed. When I get up in the morning, I go down to the free breakfast which is plastered with Prop 65 signs indicating the food served at the establishment is known to the state to cause cancer.

On the walk to the convention center, I have to sidestep multiple people strung out on who knows what. A person riding by on a bike yells “FUCK YOU” to all passers-by, including myself. Multiple vans with oversized LCD screens advertise a variety of AI and Blockchain startup “solutions”. One company has set up a 20-foot display on a parked “van” opposite the convention center to advertise to conference-goers despite being unaffiliated with the conference. Conference staff call the police but apparently the van has a permit, and it’s public parking so there’s nothing they can do.

When I arrive, I’m stopped by staff because I’m carrying my own demo machine. They tell me their union contract requires that all hardware setup must be handled by contracted staff. I leave my machine in the area they designate, and fill out the form indicating it must be ready in room 1005 by 2pm for my presentation.

After attending several morning sessions, I walk to find lunch. A local sandwich shop doesn’t sell Diet Coke or Doritos, but they do have cucumber water for $8. I decide to go to CVS for my Diet Coke fix, but almost every product is locked behind a door. Overhead speakers announce “Security, walk the floor” as several people enter the store, casually stuff their pockets full of M&Ms, and walk out without paying. Nobody stops them, including the security guard who just watches them until they leave. I decide to skip the soda.

When I return to the conference center to prepare for my presentation, my demo machine is there but is not connected to any of the room equipment. The contractors who plug in the machines are apparently different than the ones who move the machines, and they are on strike.

On the way back to my hotel, someone asks me for money for a bus ride. I ignore them, but they begin following me. I tell them no but they follow me back all the way to my hotel, where a security guard turns them away.

I get my bags and head to the airport. My driver thinks he’s in the Indy 500 despite being in stop and go traffic. It’s about 78 degrees and humid inside the terminal - The AC is off because PG&E is having capacity issues due to wildfires, which were incidentally caused by downed lines (owned and poorly maintained by PG&E).

Never been to California, don't hate it, but don't exactly have a super high opinion of it as an outsider either. My personal reasons are

Much of the state has had a water crisis to one degree or another for most of the last century. That seems like a pretty clear sign that the environment can't really sustain the amount of people and industry it has, and yet we keep at it.

A lot of the state is prone to earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, and other crazy shit. Again, seems like a less than ideal place to live.

The climate really isn't for me, I personally like cold winters with snow, that's not really a thing in a lot of California.

I'm from the northeast, I happen to like the overall vibe of people from this part of the country, west coasters have a different vibe, not necessarily a bad one, but it's not one I want to surround myself with full-time. Some (but not all) people get really snooty about the East vs West Coast thing, and while it definitely goes both ways, and I'm certainly biased because my experience is pretty much entirely from the east coast perspective. It seems to me like when that happens west coasters activity dislike the east, whereas the east is more indifferent towards the west.

Politically I overall tend to agree with the trends in CA in broad strokes, but it feels like they go weirdly overboard in some things (like the prop 65 warnings) and take weird half-measures in other. That's not a unique California problem, but because they're such a political and economic powerhouse their missteps have bigger ripple effects than most other states. I think overall most of the country could stand for our laws and policies to be more California-like, but we shouldn't be holding California up as some sort of gold standard to copy exactly, and I think that's a distinction that is lost on some people.

It's also expensive.

We moved to California from across the pond and love it. Socal weather can't be beat. Great food, great outdoor exercise and playtime options. The people are nice. Yeah theres issues but all told we really like it. I don't get the hate from other states and seems to be simply sour grapes

Full of Americans? They don't get on that well

I live in Colorado and there's a lot of California hate here. I don't feel this way but I know some is directed at the real estate investors who have been buying up homes and making the Denver housing market even worse. During the pandemic so many people lost out on houses to cash deals so they started working with these shady companies that would front you a cash offer for a % of the sale, then you'd just get a loan.

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)

I lived there and made $90k a year. Lived like 50 minutes from work, still paid $2.5k per month for a 500sqft studio and qualified as low income for the area. If people making that much are considered low income, something has failed.

Politics wise, it is seen as a hub of liberals. That means you have conservatives doing their best to knock California down the same way that liberals will do the same for Texas and Florida.

That said, there is a cost of living crisis that is caused a lot in part by the wealthy blocking increased density while locking in low property taxes due to date of purchase. So, a lot of coverage gets portrayed as rich liberals say they want these things, except near them.

It is also easier to film homeless in California since the weather makes it easier for them to live outside and the state is failing bad at providing housing for them.

I don't know that California is super disliked (maybe politically if you're conservative?) - I think its among the great states in the US and while I may have some political disagreements with what California has done (Prop 13 for one has distorted the housing market despite good intentions) and it has awful mass transit and zoning, its the vast majority of the US west coast. It's got amazing scenery, food, people, and its an economic powerhouse. I am from NY, and love NYC, but its not nearly as important to the country as California and the economic disparity between urban and rural isn't nearly as bad as in NY state.

I grew up in CA but now live in the southern US. I get really tired of hearing this. Yes, the cost of living is ridiculous and the wildfires are terrible. But it’s actually a lovely place, on balance, and I enjoy my visits. The folks here seem to think CA is a crime-ridden urban hell.

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.

California has progressive taxes. That means the wealthy pay a higher tax rate than the middle class. The wealthy have gotten taxes raised on the middle class and lowered on the wealthy in most red states. So they continue to pay for a disinformation campaign that rails on California taxes.

But CA continues to carry the US in GDP. It has a tropical weather, that allows outdoor activities nearly year round, not found anywhere else in the US. It also has a lot of support for lower and middle class (this shows up in places like infant mortality rates).

But like almost everywhere else in the world, except countries like Japan and China that have addressed planning at a federal level, they have not built houses near fast enough to keep up with demand. So the cost of living is high (They have changed laws recently to try to partially address it). But if you make enough to live there it is a wonderful place to live.

Basically right winger media likes to paint California as the enemy (the right wing puppet masters currently hate the governor to really explain it), and the right wing muppets will not realize when they are out of their echo chamber and they will make some comment about commie Cali and your just supposed to agree and be mad. If you ask them to explain why they hate an entire state, the inability to actually explain why "California bad" is a sign that they don't really know and are victims to the right wing propaganda industrial complex

I wonder the same thing, especially since we managed to buy a house close enough to the shore for a breeze. Not too close, but while everyone complains about 100 degree temps, we've capped at 82. People are friendly, I can eat just about any type of food in the world, and the government keeps giving us tax breaks and helps with utility costs since there was a price hike this year (which supposedly the state is investigating), especially since we make below average wage. We literally paid no taxes last year!

That said, this is considered a ghetto neighborhood. Years of poor urban planning (and honestly, white flight, racist redlining, and manufacturing leaving in the 60s/70s) have made our neighborhood pretty neglected over the last half decade. And yet, our schools in the area, despite being 90% free lunch status (i.e. poverty) they are rated 8 and 9 out of 10 by most reviewers; the violent crime rate about the same as most parts of LA, and businesses are coming back--- albeit hopefully not replacing locals with gentrification. If all you see is Compton at it's worst, I understand the concerns, but they're unfounded.

I guess there's still homelessness to figure out... And I suppose property value, although again, kind of a boon for us. So yeah, tl;dr, I'm with you on this confusion!

Extreme cost of living.

Whatever else is good or bad about the place doesn't matter very much if you can't afford to live there.

The houseless problem seems extremely poorly managed. I lived in NYC for six years and have visited California a few times. From my experiences, both SF and LA appear to have much larger populations living outdoors (I checked and this is true, 75% of LA’s population vs 6% in NYC, and the cities are comparable in both population and houseless population).

I would imagine it has most to do that those people world have extremely hard time surviving winter outside in NYC.

California as a state and population seems to be at least as much bluster as action. I don’t want to detract from some real actions, like car electrification requirements, but for example, prop 65, the “known to the state of California to cause cancer” labels. A) California seems to “know” many things that science does not. B) no one pays any attention to these labels, but they sure cost a lot to produce C) if anything, this will cause people to ignore future warnings for real things or even current ones like on cigarettes.

The proposition 65 aka The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, actually is much more successful at reducing harmful toxic chemicals and affects other states too. Businesses are encouraged to change formulations so they don't have to use the label.

Here's list of chemicals that require such label: https://www.p65warnings.ca.gov/chemicals

What you saw, likely was businesses trying to fight it, by being to opaque about it, and make it ridiculous (since there's no penalty for overusing it, and they are doing which results as you pointed out that waters it down) for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65#/media/File%3ADisneyland_Prop_65_Warning_crop.jpg

Although since enforcement is done via civil lawsuits. If they served food or something that did contain these chemicals, a sign like this won't be a good defense that they complied and warned their patrons.

They also trying different ways, like introducing bills on federal level to block it for example https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6022/text

They are trying also via lawsuits, which meant are filled on behalf of strawman. Many businesses were created just for the purpose of filing prop 65 lawsuits.

Though probably biggest issue is that the prop 65 is being used for frivolous lawsuits (as anyone can sue for not informing and get a settlement because no one wants a trial). So now AG needs to approve such settlements to reduce it. There were attempts to reform it.

So yeah frivolous lawsuits are the biggest issue that needs addressing, but other than that the law actually helped reduce exposure to those chemicals not only for Californians but also people from other states.