ctwickman said:
I'll tell you why I came in here though---it's when the bashing of everything "not-California" started. Read through the thread again. And the reason I even brought up Florida having nicer, warmer water is when the FLORIDA BASHING started by your fellow Californians in this thread, saying you had "superior" beaches.
Yes, and the reason that Alabama was brought up in the context of the Mid West is because they are equally unable to even try to stake a claim of being great places to live in trems of what they have to offer relative to California. I'll conceed that Miami was brought up by Shaz, but likewise, he grouped some areas together as they mutually fall into the "only a mother could love"-type category.
Quite frankly, one of the things I love about California is that Californians love California in a way that I've only really seen rivaled by Bostonians, New Yorkers, and Texans. You can go ahead and try to bash California by trying to piece together an amalgam of other states, but no city/state in the country can really go head-to-head against SD, LA, or SF, except, perhaps, by pitting one of those against the others.
ctwickman said:
And California *IS* a provincial, isolated country from most of America, and all my California friends will admit this. They have even brought it up to me.
Methinks you're using words without knowing their definitions. California is not provincial. A really quick and easy search rapidly reveals:
"Of the total U.S. population, 11.8 percent were foreign-born and accounted for 44 percent of the nation's population growth in 2002. A majority of the foreign-born residents live in four states: California (28 percent), New York (11.8 percent), Texas (9.8 percent) and Florida (8.9 percent)...
...Among states, California (26.9 percent) ranked first in the proportion of its population who were foreign-born. It was followed by New York (20.9 percent), New Jersey (18.9 percent) and Florida and Hawaii (17.9 percent each). States with some of the lowest foreign-born percentages included Mississippi (1.1 percent), West Virginia (1.2 percent) and Montana (1.6 percent)."
http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/foreignborn.htm
ctwickman said:
There is nothing wrong with this man, because look at the geography of the US and where most people live. I mean, I'm sitting here in Chicago and it takes 4.5 hours to fly to California, but it takes only 2 more hours to fly to London, England! California is a LONG way from even Chicago, which would explain the feeling of homesickness you would experience if you lived here or even further east. Out East and in the Midwest, for instance, it is a days drive to roughly 80% of the US population. If I left now, in a CAR, I could be in Atlanta or New York City in time to party tonight, passing all the cities in between. Just look at the diversity of license plates you'll see in Chicago versus LA, for instance. In California it is MUCH more rare to see a license plate from other states than it is here. California is far removed from where most people in this country live. Period. No shame in this, just the way things are. Yes it is very international, especially Asian international, but it is still *domestically* isolated. Just look at an urban population map. You guys are pretty much on your own out there as far as big cities.
I don't give a rats ass how long it takes you to fly to England. It would take you longer to fly to Hong Kong.
Way to make a dumb point. And to pretend as though the diversity between any two states is greater than the diversity within any single state is just dumb. California has more people than any other state, and it has more area than any but two states--it is incredibly heterogeneous. More importantly, it is a state that has been housing the major innovations in science in this country in recent decades.
Even if the state is *domestically* isolated, how does that possibly mean provincial in light of the international integration? Good God, talk about having an inflated sense of importance--you're placing the Great lakes population above that of Asia and Latin America. Lawdhamercy.
And who gives a rats ass about license plates? You have small-ass states! When I see a license plate frame from San Diego while I'm in Berkeley, it has travled further than most of the Indiana plates or the Wisconsin plates that you see, and there is a big cultural differnce between here and SD. And I see those plates all the time. But more significantly, I see stickers where people boast their national origin in the windows and on the bumpers of those cars with CA plates--and those come from everywhere.
No doubt, you live in a sprawl of a greater number of widely distributed tiny towns, and you surely have to drive further to see the stars clearly. Bravo for that mighty accomplishment. Here in Califonia, the cities house a dense population, while there remain vast expanses of undeveloped land, farm land, or grazing pastures. Here's some interesting reading:
"Most Dense Urbanized Areas: Los Angeles extended its lead as the nation's most dense urbanized area (an urbanized area is an urban area with 50,000 or more population). At 7,068 per square mile, Los Angeles leads second place San Francisco by more than 900 (6,130) and fourth place New York by more than 1,700 (5,309).
San Jose has emerged as the nation's third most dense urbanized area, at 5,914 per square mile. Virtually all development in San Jose has occurred since World War II and, as a result, San Jose is nearly all suburban (auto-oriented) and has no strong central core (downtown)."
http://www.demographia.com/db-uaprison.htm
So basically, the reason you see a spread is because our urban centers are more urban, but the sprawl is limited so as to not consume the countryside. How does that equal "provincial?" (Ans: It doesn't, it just means that California has greater civil development planning.) But it sure as hell blows your "As for me, LA doesn't have dense urbanity" argument the hell out of the water.
Now who's making stereotypes about places they don't fully understand?
ctwickman said:
And sorry, we don't get acid rain out here and the Great Lakes are not polluted anymore. Environmental restrictions dealing with our region's greatest natural resource (the Great Lakes) are strict as hell. This isn't the 1970's man.
BULLSH*T. Take another look at my post--that thing is dated 1999. Has there's been imporvement since the '70s? Super! But there has likewise been improvement in the smog condition in LA. I can assure you that my first trip to LA proper ( a field trip to the UCLA campus) was in a far smoggier city than I saw when I lived there ten years later.
Granted, that graphic shows how much worse LA is than Chicago. But you're still ignoring the fact that my other graphic shows that no matter how stringent your laws might be, your state government sucks at actually enforcing the state laws. Check out the maps; California leads all of the Great Lakes states in actually observing/enforcing the environmental protection laws.
ctwickman said:
Per your street lighting comments, spare the reasons why you don't have lights on the freeways, because it ain't because of your observatories, because you guys have no problems lighting up your arterial road grid and have no problem putting out a bright night sky. The fact is the freeway infrastructure is old and most of it was built and planned in the 50's-70's, and back then they didn't put lights on the freeways, so that's why you don't have them.
BULLSH*T. You are talking (typing?) straight out of your ass here, my friend. While it is true that in large part the reduction of light is also due to energy conservation efforts (
http://www.energy.ca.gov/efficiency/lighting/outdoor_reduction.html) it is also true that in making their considerations for how to conserve energy, the observatories (Lick, Palomar, and Wilson, in particular) played important roles. In my home town of SD, I remember battles being fought when law enforcement wanted to use brighter city lights, but that ran contrary to city laws specifically directed at reducing light pollution--which blows your "[you]guys have no problems lighting up your arterial road grid" argument right out. They do have problems, for what it's worth.
