The California Exodus

I've been seeing more and more people talking about leaving California. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro most famously, but other pod casters and Youtubers are moving and it's not just them, movie studios have increasingly been filming elsewhere, especially in Canada. But it's also just regular folk as well. Even WF's own @Paladin has expressed his desire to leave. Here's a Mises article that discusses the issue.

The other WF Californians seem to be happy with the People's Republic of California so I wonder why people are leaving?

Ah who am I kidding, it's pretty obvious why some like Rogan and Shapiro left. This would be my guess as the number one reason.

There's also plenty of other reasons to leave such as rolling blackouts, water shortages, wildfires, and draconian corona virus restrictions just to name a few.

What say you CaliforniaForge?

Full article can be found here.
https://mises.org/wire/great-california-exodus

 

Am definitely moving out, but still have more gold to mine before I do.

And the link is wrong.

 

Link fixed.

 

Meh. Movies and TV have been shooting in Vancouver and on-location for decades.

As for us ordinary folk, if I leave it will be because of that "mythological librul climate change."

When I moved here from NY 20 years ago, the climate on the Westside was delightful - temps ranging from 50-70 (with the occasional - occasional - high in the 80s). In the past 4-5 years, the temps keep rising. And rising. And enduring for far longer. This was the first week daytime temps dropped from 85 to 75.

Yah, yah, I know, I've been preaching for years "weather =/= climate." But observing weather over 20 years (climate apparently reflects temps over a 30-year period), I can say the fucking weather that I left NY for (among other reasons; RIP Jack Donner - I'll always miss you!) has followed me out here.

And in NY, at least "summer" only lasts three to four to five months a year (used to be just Memorial Day to Labor Day, but then it got to be September and...). Out here, it's more like nine months.

Fuck Climate Change.

 

Credit where it's due: it's too expensive to live here indefinitely compared to what you get for it, especially during the pandemic, where in-person networking is shot. But that's largely due to anti-growth policies (Dems) and NIMBYism (everyone with money, especially the Greens), and being a shitty place to send kids to K-12 school (Dems' capitulating to the worst teachers' union in the country). Taxes have very little to do with it, except for the extremely wealthy who aren't in tech. Everyone else stays because they can make more money, and the food and weather are good. Well, the weather was good, but then climate change happened (not a Democratic plot) and now we can't breathe without a mask for 3 months every year. So thanks, red state assholes, China, and India, it's your fault we're leaving. And bringing our California values with us.

 

I’ll believe it when traffic gets better.

 

Just back from a few days in SoCal with the family. I hated the 405...what a white-knuckle nightmare. As an outsider the biggest problem I have is the parochialism. New Yorkers get a rap for being parochial, but at least they're aware of the outside world. I had a cashier at Ralph's ask me if we had coronavirus in Idaho. I can't even...
I remember taking a course in semantics and one of the key essays we studied was one called "Hellhaven". I can't remember the author, but it points out how we find good places to live, ruin them and then look for new places where life is better so we can ruin them. It's California (and to a lesser extent, Florida) writ large. California has so much to offer (still) in terms of climate and opportunity that it's become a victim of it own desirability.
This one snapshot from a famous beach location is just one example of something you simply won't find anywhere else.

 

You know what creates high cost of living? Demand.

You know what creates low cost of living? Lack of demand.

Places that are expensive, are generally expensive because lots of people want to live there.

But I have to admit, the literary genre of "conservatives wringing their hands and preaching about how terrible it is to live in places they themselves do not actually live in" is very comical.

 

Meh, Beck bailed out and went to Texas a while back, remember?
Apparently a LOT of folks have moved from CA to TX and the knee-jerk assumption would be "conservative bail on Liberal-topia to come to a nice red state" buuuuut... Texas steadily getting less red and there's no net effect on CA so...


(personally, I'd an advocate for big city liberals becoming small-medium city liberals in places like Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Orlando, Jacksonville, Austin, San Antonio, Omaha, Wichita, Indianapolis, most particularly in battleground states that can be pushed into safer blue states like NC - the best way to combat the systemic bias of the Senate and the EC is to push individual states left)

 

I wouldn't call the 7th largest city in the US small- or medium-sized.

Despite being surrounded by rural counties, the metro area is still top-25.

 

Other than a few years when I was a teen, I've lived in California all my life.

My earliest memory of the climate was the big drought in 1976-77, when my family moved to Sacramento from the Bay Area.

I've lived all my adult life in the Bay Area except for three recent years in Los Angeles.

What's good about California?

The weather. I often joke to friends who live in colder climates that "the 300 days of sunny skies make the three weeks of light rain during the winter almost bearable."

The work opportunities. If you've got an education and/or some experience in anything scientific, technological, or medical, there are plenty of jobs here. Even now, that's the case.

The sheer number of things to do (well, when COVID isn't a thing, anyway). Great restaurants, cultural events, historical sites, theme parks, scenic beauty, skiing, hiking, endless tourist attractions.

If you've owned real estate for a while here, you're going to make out. The median home price is up 70 percent from 2012 after inflation.

What's bad?

The homeless are legion and they're everywhere. And the squalor that grows around them is just a constant eyesore/health hazard. In L.A., every overpass seems to have a homeless village sprung up underneath it. And, yes, there are human feces on the sidewalk. Santa Monica, where I worked while down in L.A., was probably a beautiful place a few short years back. Now, walk through Palisades Park and you'll see vagrants sleeping there. They shout at people having lunch in the sidewalk cafes.

Taxes are high and getting higher, and you see less and less benefit for paying them. California has both a high income tax and a high sales tax.

Fees are high. It costs $7 to cross the Bay Bridge. Car registration fees--that prompted a revolt that ousted Governor Gray Davis years back--have steadily crept back up.

Public employee unions are in charge--ask Arnold Schwarzenegger about that--and their members are living pretty large. Retiring with generous pensions and health care, and utterly immune from competition during their working careers.

Education, once available to pretty much anyone here, is becoming less and less affordable (not to worry: they'll set you up with LOANS!)...San Jose State University (where I went) is now up to about $6000/semester. Public education consistently scores low despite the big money transferred to it.

Traffic is pretty terrible (though L.A. makes the Bay Area look pretty weak by comparison). And gas is expensive, about $3.50/gallon per mid grade. Public works on roads and bridges last forever.

Cost of living is HIGH, HIGH, HIGH. One bedroom apartment in decent area of L.A. or SF Bay Area? Plan on $2500/month or more. Buying a house? Hope you have a rich relative who gives you the down payment, and that you either have a good job in the tech industry or have a few reliable roommates in order to make the payment. The median home price is now tickling a million dollars: $996,000. I make a pretty good salary, and it would be difficult for me to buy the home I'm living in now, and I'm not in anything swanky. And I bought it less than 7 years ago.

So, yeah. I'm sticking it out here as long as I can tolerate it. Filling my 401K, hoping my shares of company stock pay off, collecting the salary. I may have a moderate windfall coming in the near(ish) future--which California will no doubt grab a large chunk of--and if that materializes, I'm going to buy a place somewhere else and get that ready for my eventual relocation or (hopefully not this long) my eventual retirement.

 

Do you have any idea how large the film industry in Canada is and how long it’s been going on for? Apparently not

Apart from the tax breaks the government here provides as well as diverse filming locations, currency is also a major factor

Jesus dude do your research and stop taking the words of you tubers and podcasters as gospel

Apart from that people moving to places with less taxes or lower cost of living is hardly anything new and not exclusive to California

I’ll say one thing though, the chances of me ever going back to San Francisco are slim to none, last city i travelled to before Covid. That place is a fucking shithole. Palm Springs is fantastic however

 

It is pretty obvious if you pay attention to his posts long enough that FF views Joe Rogan the same way that Forbin does Facebook.


FF should youtube some old school fear factor from before he was born and see Rogan with hair.

 

I linked to an article from Moses.org and quoted from it. None of that information quoted came from a YouTube video or a podcast, but you know that, you just want to be a dick.

 

It’s no secret that I watch Jo Rohan’s podcast from time to time. I don’t know why that’s a bad thing and I don’t know what his hair anything to do with the OP and I was in my twenties when Fear Factor was on so you can refer to my avatar.

 

Ah. Yes. The Mises Institute.

In 2017, the president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, gave a speech at the Mises University conference, where in his concluding remarks he stated that the ideas of "blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people".[8]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute

For those who haven’t gotten to World History yet:

Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden) is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a "racially" defined national body ("blood") united with a settlement area ("soil"). By it, rural and farm life forms are idealized as a counterweight to urban ones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil

Yep. The good ol’ Mises Institute... Good people... good people...

 

I see you’re one of those people who attack the source and not the content contained inside. Way to ignore said content, moron.

 

I think the fact that you expect us to take the word of Nazi sympathizers at face value is a valid point to bring up.


I think @tafkats & @Nova pretty much summed up my view on the issue. What we see in California is market forces at work. So if a bunch of Californians, New Yorkers and Chicagoans pack up and move to Texas, North Carolina, Georgia and Ohio then it's all good as far as I'm concerned. If business enterprises move too, then I guess that could be good as well. I'm old enough to remember when Virginia was first a reliably red state, then a swing state and now reliably blue. It seems to me that both diversity and prosperity breeds progressivism while greed and fear yields conservatism. So not only will these trends turn borderline red states blue, but it will also put downward pressure on living expenses and taxes in CA.

Careful what you wish for.

 

This is word for word what John Castle said when I caught him out linking to a white nationalist blog.


Here's a little protip.
If say, aliens landed on the White House lawn, and for some inexplicable insane reason the only ones who had scooped it so far were Nazis....I'd wait a couple fucking hours for the real news to catch up.
Shit, I'd wait 24 hours if I had to.
Or....here's a fucking wacky idea, I'd wing it, and report it myself with my own eyes and brain!

 

I moved out of CA over a decade ago (but go back to visit family friends at least once a year) and a lot of points @Paladin made are pretty accurate. When I started at Cal, but tuition was ~$4k and when I graduated it was ~$13.5k (had some time off, so this was over 8 years).

However, I think that CA is still one of the best states in the country because it is more than just LA and SF. The state has the most natural beauty in the country. Hanging out at the beach at San Luis Obispo is a lovely day. And the small town diners are as a good as anywhere. If the state didn’t have the systemic problems that Arnold tried to fight (and IMO Brown did improve it) - housing prices would be even higher because of the demand.

If Rogan and Shapiro want to leave - good. Fuck those moronic assholes.

 

Almost everyone knows that CA is the fifth biggest economy in the world by itself. And it's #1 in the US in both the tech and media sectors.

Most don't know it's also the #1 state in agriculture and dairy.

While it's had its share of Fortune 500 companies move their HQs out of the state, it has replaced them just as quickly, and has remained stable in the number of top corporations in the state for the last 20 years. Which, once again, is the highest of any state.

And of the top 25 universities in the world, it regularly has 4-6 of them - more than any other nation, let alone state.

It's got its problems, but the #1 problem seems to derive from one word - success.

Conservatives often gripe about CA because they simply couldn't be competitive there.

 

That's a movie, now go write the script and pitch it.

 

A large migration from California to neighbouring shithole states would be a good thing.

Might actually raise the general IQ and income of the populace in those states.

(Although Californians like Paladin would likely be a negative influence.)

 

Paladin isn't stupid. Far from it. He just buys into a conservative narrative that affects the rest of his worldview. I actually like what he has to say, even though I often disagree. But he does a much better job of explaining conservative positions than anyone else on the board.

In rural Michigan, he would fit right in, and be very highly respected. Rural Michigan is all about guns, freedom from gub'mint, and keeping those Ay-rabs out. He'd have a harder time down in the South, though. Down there, atheists are evil, even if they do vote Republican!

 

They called it Paradise
I don't know why
Call someplace Paradise
Kiss it goodbye-eeeeeeeeee.

 

I agree, @Paladin is clearly an intelligent chap, it's such a waste.....

 

Or put up a parking lot?

 

He might change. I used to be about as far right politically as he is. That has changed slowly but continuously over the last 40 years or so.

 

Doubtful, but we can hope.

The impression I get is that his leanings are more a matter of faith than reason.

Might be wrong.

 

There there, Async, we all lose our faculties as we age.