Why I moved to Miami

Almost all those things in his post can be made about CA as well. In southern CA, not only do you get great year round weather, but if you want to go skiing it's just a couple hours drive.

We moved to CA for our family. We lived in the midwest, and there just wasn't much to do. There are endless things to do out here. I imagine Miami is about the same in that regard.

One thing I think he left out is the political standings. I came from a blood red state. My way of thinking is more in line with a blue state. It is so much nicer to be around people who think similar to you.

As for the taxes, yeah that's a pretty tasty difference. But I got to have my skiing & mountains :)

My general impression is that people in south Florida (in business) are looking for easy money. Not easy as in no work, but easy as in huge sums for minimal work. The homesteading act certainly attracts people from outside Florida who believe they could be sued for everything they've got. May be was a combination of the drug money in the 70s & 80s, along with the real estate boom more recently, but they don't seem very motivated.

A lot of the shadier companies I've been aware of have their offices, or at least mailing addresses, in Boca Raton. Others have agreed with me on this point. Especially in the internet advertising market you have all kinds of strange players.

I hear a lot of complaints about the ultra rich in NYC. If you have a $50 million apartment in Manhattan, when your walking down the street it doesn't matter. You enter a building, even if its an expensive one, who knows what your living in. If your being driven around in a Maybach no one cares. In South Florida, its more like LA, lots of wealth flaunting.

Before the real estate crash, these high end luxury condos were brand new and not cheap (well, still cheap compared to SF.) The boom basically created the infrastructure, subsidized by a bunch of greedy people, ironically. The reason some of these buildings still are cheap is because banks won't lend for them. (that is changing)

Florida has some neat places if you're into nature but that was totally flipped upside down for me when I moved here.

For that extra McDonald's employee's salary I'm paying in taxes I'm getting back quality hiking, camping, rock climbing, mountain biking, road biking, surfing, and snowboarding as well as gorgeous sights of mountains, caves, waterholes, forrest, and rivers.

It's a nature lover's paradise out here in California.

My takeaway from most of these "why I moved to X" stories is generally not "wow, that seems like a great place to live", but rather "living in SF or NY sucks". (I happen to live in a town of about 200 people in the mountains of Washington State and couldn't be happier)

I feel compelled to defend myself as I don't live "a life of self-gratification and night clubbing" & your generalizations / stereotyping have hurt my feelings.

1. I went to not one, but two blue ribbon schools growing up, in a city where the income per capita is $25k/yr. It wasn't in Miami but it was in South Florida.

2. I volunteer regularly, donate regularly & I'm vegetarian. Hardly the life of a self-gratifying heathen.

3. Our interns at 1Sale.com have come in from Dartmouth & we've received applications from kids that are at Stanford. There are MIT grads at startups down here too (don't want to put anyones name out who doesn't want).

If I was seeking self-gratification I'd be out every night drinking & partying, not in my office working on features for customers or optimizing processes for the company. I really didn't appreciate the personal jab, MattsterToo.