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by toomuchtodo 1247 days ago
California is the world’s fourth largest economy and has 12% of the US population (39 million compared to the 600k folks living in Wyoming). It’ll continue to be an economic powerhouse long after people complaining online about the state are gone. If complaining makes you feel better, do so, but it doesn’t change the facts. It’s certainly not going to hurt California [1].

Edit: I have never lived in California.

[1] https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k

1 comments

Nothing hurts some Californians' feelings than the simple fact that the rest of the nation no longer looks to them for guidance.

Yes, California is still big. But it's no longer a leader. The idea "but California did this" is no longer an argument in favor of something. It's often an argument against doing something.

I am sorry if this triggers you, but it's reality.

Source? Says who? Your opinion is clearly evident, but it’s just that, your opinion.
There are many surveys out there. California generally competes with Illinois and New Jersey as the most hated state and the most dysfunctional state.

For example, https://www.cagrocers.com/california-repeats-worst-run-state...

It has a broad reputation for dysfunction in basically every area. Energy -- it imports 20% of its electricity from the rest of the nation's grid to get around wacky anti-carbon rules for domestically produced energy, and as a result has the highest energy costs in the nation as well as suffering from rolling blackouts. It is the state of constant fires because of forest mismanagement due to a politically influential "don't chop down our precious trees" faction. (California's chronic fires are also blamed on global warming). It has one of the worst education systems and a truly insane educational policy ("we will create 5 million Galois' by eliminating math classes!"). Terrible homeless problem. Terrible crime problem. A shrinking population. Massively dysfunctional housing market. And one of the highest tax burdens. Massive infrastructure problems.

Etc.

It's really hard to think of any area of public policy - from tax policy to education to energy or crime -- and say "Hey, what California is doing is working really well, we should emulate that". Just compare how California stood in areas like test scores, crime, housing affordability, energy prices in 1970 versus 1990 versus today. You see a peak and then a decline followed by collapse.

Choosing a 13 year old clearly reblogged article from an organization known as “24/7 Wall St.” (with a dot and all) as your source is an interesting way to provide a credible source showing the current opinion of everyone in the US regarding California. It’s not even a survey, which would have been obvious had you spent the time to actually look at it rather than cherry-pick the first result off Google which lined up with your opinion.

It’s especially ridiculous since that’s literally just one organization’s opinion on California.

And their opinion is solely based on 4 key indicators and nothing else. I’m not a data scientist but even I know that you can pretty easily find 4 key metrics which allow you to rank states in any way you choose.

If you were to actually look up the organization, you would see it’s just a random blog (not that it is at all surprising considering their name), and that their 2021 rankings had California solidly in the middle of the pack, not that it makes a difference considering how limited their methodology is.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2021/05/19/the-states-w...

Finally, just because you can’t think of any areas does not mean any don’t exist. You’ve made your opinions clear already.

I gave multiple examples related to energy, education, environmental policy, crime, etc, and urged you to learn how to use a search engine to look up surveys. You fixated maniacally on not liking that the word "wall st" appeared in a blog title.

FYI, California students have among the lowest reading comprehension scores (and math scores) in the nation.

I fixated on the provenance and methodology of the single source you provided.

Your opinions are, once again, just that. They’re not facts, regardless how convincing you try sounding. I’m not going to respond to them because I made my thoughts on them clear already. You’re entitled to them, but they’re not anything except that.

> You wouldn't happen to be from California, by any chance? I can see the ninja-like reading comprehension and reasoning skills are strong here.

I’m not, but nice ad hominem you tried there. Not that my words would be worth more or less based on where I live, but that clearly matters a lot to you.