I’m just going to come out and say it. The only reason people live in California is because of the weather. That is what makes California what it is. If you somehow airlifted California and dropped it on top of Saskatchewan, leaving everything else intact, people would flee the state en masse because it’s a crappy state to live in.
I have always been skeptical about people who move to a place because of its weather. The reason is simple.
Suppose you’re an archaic homo sapien, say, circa 900,000 years ago. Your middle eastern stomping grounds are getting kind of crowded and you’re an ambitious young buck who wants to be the chief of your own tribe. Why not? The chief always gets the hottest tail.
East? Nah. Persian gulf. West? Nah. Mediterranean Sea. South? Nah. People live there. North? Sure! That sounds good.
Except the farther north you go, the farther into Europe you go. And guess what? It’s freaking cold in Europe, and cave bears who literally stand 12 feet tall live in all of the caves. If you’re a half-wit, you’re going to either freeze to death or get eaten by a cave bear. It’s harder to live in cold places. I argue that if the entire world had the climate of California, we would still be living in caves because there would never be any incentive to progress any further. You aren’t going to freeze to death and there’s food growing on trees year-round because it’s sunny, warm, and 75 degrees for 350 out of 365 days per year. Nothing inspires creativity and ingenuity like otherwise inevitable starvation and hypothermia.
You’ll note, mind you, that most of the people who start enormous businesses that everybody has boners for like fucking Google were started by people who emigrated to the state from somewhere else because they were sick of winter.
I’m not going to deliver a littany of all of California’s problems; you know what they are. I will instead share with you a brief anecdote: my college buddy who hails from Capetown, South Africa moved out to California with a girl who grew up about 10 minutes from where I currently live on the east coast (although her family came from Boston). They love the weather. They live near fucking Google’s offices. But she is now pregnant and they are seriously talking about moving back to the east coast. Obviously, part of it is so that she can be close to her mother. But the biggest part is the fact that they have no chance in hell of buying real estate in California. They complain about the taxes and they don’t want their children going to school with classes half full of illegals who don’t speak English. She is a raging liberal, by the way, and they both voted for Obama.
Despite the reality of California, Time posted this bullshit in 2009. To quote:
Its voters approved huge bonds for stem-cell research, high-speed rail and repairs to aging infrastructure while Washington was dragging its feet; its politicians adopted first-in-the-nation greenhouse-gas regulations, green building codes and efficiency standards for automobiles and appliances that have rearranged the national energy debate. Yes, it was also an early adopter of subprime mortgages — Countrywide, Golden West and IndyMac were all California-based — but life on the frontier has always been risky.
This paragraph is trying to make it sound like California is cutting-edge and that these supposed pros are actually a good thing. Stem-cell research? How is that good? Greenhouse-gas regulations? When your children are laughing at you for being so fucking retarded that you actually believed in global warming, remember that you read this blog and if only you had listened to me you wouldn’t have elected some assclown who raised your energy bills by 25% so you could pay for an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.
And of course, the coup de grace of this piece: yes, our companies fucked the entire nation with subprime mortgages, but “life on the frontier has always been risky.”
What the fuck. What frontier? The pacific ocean? Give me a break. So when California adopts bullshit expensive legislation that does nothing but bankrupt them they’re leading us with steady, sage-like wisdom and carrying the torch for the nation’s progress, but when its companies play a huge part in throwing the entire world into a recession, we’re supposed to chalk it up to the romantic notion of the wild wild west? You’ve got to be kididng me.
Normally I wouldn’t give a shit because blaming a U.S. state for problems caused by companies that are headquartered there is fucking stupid, but the author of this propoganda turd does so fully in trying to establish how great California is because fucking Google has its offices there and Steve Jobbs invented the iPhone in San Francisco. It works both ways, jack ass.
The 1855 book The Land of Gold dismissed it as “lawless, penniless and powerless.”
The author of The Land of Gold – yes, we underline book titles – was a prophet. See? Some ideas stay relevant for a very long time and don’t require “progress” to correct. Another example of this would be the United States Constitution. Lawless? If immigration is the standard, then check. Penniless? Who would deny that? Powerless? Debatable. But money talks and bullshit walks, so no matter how sunny it is in the Sunshine State, if California’s coffers are empty and its checks bounce, then no one will care what “California” thinks.
TIME published a woe-is-California issue called “The Endangered Dream” in 1991 after the aerospace industry collapsed.
But of course. TIME was wrong then, but now it’s right.
But even with 12% unemployment, California still has an enviably young and productive workforce.
It’s amazing what happens when millions of Latinos flee the stinking shit holes they were unlucky enough to find themselves born into and grab on to the sides of trucks heading north to wind up in a slightly less stinking shit hole where they can collect free services and become parents of American citizens and therefore virtuall undeportable simply by having unprotected sex.
There’s only so many lawns that need to be cut and so much trash that needs to be picked up. That young productive workforce is unskilled labor that quite frankly we can do without. The only reason California gets away with it isbecause these people are illegal and they get paid under the table. If California’s young, productive workforce were legal and then tried to compete with China’s young, productive, and massively cheaper workforce on unskilled labor such as manufacturing, they’d get their asses kicked.
When it comes to energy, California is not just ahead of the game; it’s playing a different game. Its carbon emissions per capita are less than half the U.S. average. And from 2006 to ’08, it attracted $3 of every $5 invested in U.S. clean tech — five times as much as the No. 2 state. It’s by far the national leader in green jobs, green patents, supply from renewables and savings from efficiency. It’s also leading the way toward electric cars, zero-emission homes, advanced biofuels and a smarter grid: its electric utilities plan to install smart meters in every California home.
Bwahahaha. Total waste of time and money. This just makes an already expensive place even more expensive. And you wonder why California is bankrupt? Not, of course, that there is a direct correlation between its budget woes and it’s green industry – I’m sure there isn’t – but this kind of senseless and stupid government regulation is merely a symptom of a deeper problem – a legislation prone to believe in stupid things and voters prone to elect stupid people who also believe in stupid things themselves.
This public-sector foresight has created alluring opportunities for the most tech-savvy private sector on earth. The venture capitalists behind the high-tech and biotech booms see clean tech as the next big score.
This is called milking a fad for all it’s worth. Liberals hate the rich. This is what the rich do. They play on the public’s mass stupidity, make a fortune selling them stupid shit they don’t need, and then laugh all the way to the bank in their 16 cylinder 8mpg hogs with supermodels bobbing on their dicks.
But the state’s business culture fetishizes long-shot ventures and game-changing ideas. Failure is appreciated, not stigmatized, and an entrepreneur without a few busted start-ups on his résumé is almost suspect.
Where do I sign up?
I need to stop. TIME magazine will probably sue me if I keep quoting their bullshit story about bullshit California.
Ugh.
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