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California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

mercurynews.com

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Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#41

Post by masonic »

freejulian wrote: post #35
enraged_camel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Tennessee is very religious and also backwards as hell[1], and if you aren’t white you will have a difficult time fitting in. [1]Just one recent example: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tennessee-lawmakers-pass-...

Counter-counter point: the valley is filled with over inflated egos and developers whose sole business model is stealing people’s private data to sell ads. They tend to think tech wouldn’t exist without them when in reality their only contribution to the world is a few crappy web frameworks. Edit: looks like I struck a nerve with the valley script kiddies. Keep on downvoting. You’re the reason n-gate.com was created.

  whose sole business model is stealing people’s private data to sell ads
Well, a few actually do make things or provide identifiable services. They just don't get much press.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#42

Post by beebmam »

I'm 33. Literally no one my age or younger I know owns a home unless they live in a smaller city somewhere in mid-america.

I'm a senior engineer at a large tech company. I cannot afford a home where I live unless I want to live in a shitty condo, which I do not. I cannot work remotely, so moving is not an option unless I want to find another job, which I'm considering.

Once baby boomers start retiring and moving to assisted living homes, a large supply of houses will enter the market. This should hopefully alleviate some of the cost issues. But millennials are a ticking time bomb. So many millennials have no hope for lucrative careers, unless they're engineers or in finance, which is a small percent.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#43

Post by calinet6 »

EZ-E wrote: post #9

From a foreigner point of view who keeps reading about California, it seems both like a fascinating and terrifying place. So advanced yet so backward in some ways

To be clear, it's absolutely not terrible or backward by any stretch. Please visit and see for yourself.

Expensive, sure. But there's a reason (another word for price in a decent market is 'value'). And not every city in California is San Francisco in terms of cost of living.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#44

Post by eecsninja »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #40

I left California last September. Moving someplace cheaper allowed me to get back into housing. That was all I expected to get out of it. Other than getting off the street, I didn't expect significant improvement in quality of life. I moved to a small town that did not have all the stuff I wanted. I expected to kind of put up with it in order to be able to afford housing. But after getting here, our mantra has become…

Where did you move to? I do agree that many of the problems in California will not be easily solved.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#45

Post by sdubois »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #8

From the article: > In case it makes you feel any better, while California stinks in terms of quality of life at least it didn’t rank dead last in the overall rankings. We came in at No. 32 overall, although that’s well behind New Jersey (at No. 19), Florida (at No. 15), and Nebraska (at No. 7). Ouch. > The bottom line? The state performed well in terms of its economy, coming in at No. 4 (hello, high tech boom) but i…

It would be interesting to see the correlation between overall ranking (or economy) and quality-of-life ranking. Looks like many comments point out that they're often opposite.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#46

Post by IAmEveryone »

This is a bit weird...

"Quality of Life" is, in my understanding, a synonym for happiness. But just asking people to rate their happiness doesn't really count as research.

So this appears to be a two-step process: Find certain objective factors, such as time spent with family or environmental factors that are good determinants of peoples' reported levels of happiness.

Next, rank areas according to these factors.

The first part is obviously useful, because it sets specific goals to inform policy that otherwise doesn't really know how to make people happy.

But the reverse step seems unnecessary complicated. And while I wouldn't dismiss the results completely just because they are counter-intuitive, I do believe people tend to do well on judging their own happiness. And there'd be a lot of people moving from California to North Dakota if the results are completely true.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

cpt1138 wrote: post #24
ihsw2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rampant homelessness and drug use for one, the putrid mess that is downtown SF for another.

I believe other states send us their homeless cause here you can find places you wont actually freeze to death in winter. It may skew things a bit. Not sure.

[deleted]

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#48

Post by ryanobjc »

ihsw2 wrote: post #12
plusbryan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand?

The rampant homelessness and drug use for one, the putrid mess that is downtown SF for another.

One of the consequences of the liberal tendenancies in California is visible homeless people.

Californians just don’t want their cops regularly as policy beating homeless people and arresting them for existing.

That’s why other downtowns don’t have homeless, they’re swept aside.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#49

Post by ojbyrne »

jjeaff wrote: post #23
matmo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like to buy a house outside of California, I can't imagine living in cold weather constantly. I really need sunlight/warmth, and I can't help but feel like I would miss California's weather.

Luckily, there are plenty of other states with similarly nice weather.

Specifically?

The thing that I like about California is that it’s warmer than the rest of the country in the winter and cooler in the summer, generally expressed by the locals as “if the temperature is below 60 or above 80, everyone complains.”

Even inland California is too damn hot.

Re: California’s quality of life is the worst in the country?

#50

Post by ajross »

sehugg wrote: post #25

Here are the criteria: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-... Among the measures used to evaluate states' natural environments are drinking water quality, air quality and total toxic chemical pollution per square. The ranking also considers how much each state puts its citizens at risk for long-term, chronic health effects from pollution. Social environment, on the other hand, investigates ho…

Indeed. To put it more bluntly: the social criteria seem almost purpose-designed to punish immigrants specifically. Put more mexicans in a state and virtually every one of those measurables is going to drop. This is a measure of whiteness.

Now, sure, you could make an "objective" case that these immigrant communities are less involved in traditional community and employment structures, pull down voter turnout numbers, and just generally don't fit in well with the, ahem, Normal Americans.

But that would be vile, so USN doesn't go there. Instead they cook the books to make Stuff Done By White People the metric for "quality of life".

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