What made you laugh today - Fifth Edition

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@Nega-Brutus I am gonna play devil's advocate here and say that that doesn't necessarily mean that people are happy because of any of the policies implemented. Let's not forget that California has probably the best weather of all states in the US, among other things.


However I do find the whole "California = pit of lib degeneration" rather silly, just like "Texas = cove of rep bigotry" is silly. They are both stereotypes that do not actually match the reality and are used by people who want a scapegoat to hate on.
 
@Nega-Brutus I am gonna play devil's advocate here and say that that doesn't necessarily mean that people are happy because of any of the policies implemented.
For me, the two points of policies and state success were separate. I didn't conflate them, I adressed it in response to kurczak. Although I think you can't have a happy state if you don't govern sufficiently well (by means of policies).

Let's not forget that California has probably the best weather of all states in the US, among other things.
There's a reason why there is such a socioeconomic discrepancy (hence also in happiness, I assume) still in effect between West and East Germany, despite both being German. The way you govern your society by means of social and economic policies is just going to produce a happy or less happy population.

There's a city in Arizona called Nogales with a fat border running down the middle (making it technically two cities). One side is US territory whereas the other is Mexican. Both are historically and ethnically majority Spanish-speaking. The US one does better on almost all metrics. I can't think of any other reason than because of the way the cities are governed.
 
Well I am not saying that good policies do not create happiness and bad policies do not create unhappiness. I am just saying that they are not the only thing that create happiness/unhappiness and a flat "happy state" evaluation doesn't really explain why that state is happy. I tend to agree that truly awful policies would prevent people from being happy no matter how good the weather is though.

(Also for a state as populous as California there's all sorts of possible complications like for example how did they sample the population for their surveys, which is one of my biggest gripes with surveys. You can't ask 200 people what they think and the say "Americans feel that...")

Edit: ok I see now that that was not a survey, scratch that. It would be interesting to look at the individual metrics and separate those that are influenced by policy from those that are not. Interesting link, thank you for sharing it.
 
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the rest of the state is polluted af, has had like 15 years of non-stop drought, meth AND opioid epidemic, gang violence, homelessnes etc etc. People usually use the Appalachia as a metonym for misery in America, but it's places like Bakersfield where dreams and hopes die a slow and agonizing death.
That's just America tho, none of those things are unique to California except for maybe the extreme drought. Spend time in a place like Lubbock Texas and Bakersfield will seem like a wonderland.
 
Weather influenzing happiness is a weird parameter. Some of the 'happiest' people in the world are the Finnish, Icelandic and Danes (iirc).
Wasn't Denmark ranked as the happiest nation on earth at the same time as having one of the highest rates of depression on earth? I think that asking people to score their happiness is never going to give accurate and readily comparable results on a global scale, not just because it's totally subjective but also because some cultures will be more likely to be dishonest about it due to what is considered the polite response to this question and stuff like that.
 
Yes. Happiness scores are strange. I think it's better to look at objective parameters, like poverty, unemployment, crime, drug use etc.
But you can still have high happiness score with high depression rates. In very developed countries mental illness is diagnosed much more.
More people have access to (free) healthcare. In Denmark depression rates have soared in the past 10 years e.g. That doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of people have suddenly become depressed. They're just getting a diagnosis.
 
There's an index or a study to back up any claim. I'll stick to what I saw with my own eyes over the many visits to the state.

There are red states and areas that are ****. There are blue states and areas that are very nice. New England for example, although its best parts are kind of purple or even reddish.

@Krik Lubbock violent crime rate 10/10,000, total crime rate 57/10,000 Jesus Christ, just run, man
 
There's an index or a study to back up any claim.
What you link and what @Nega-Brutus linked used completely different metrics. So they don't actually talk about the same thing (although I am sure they do in the eyes of people reading them without digging in deeper to actually try and understand what they say).

Also, I don't know where you found your crime rate data on Lubbock TX but here's what I found, it's 10/1000 and 57/1000. Run indeed.
 
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The most recent of the report that the USA today cited ranks California 24th in quality of life, ie still above the US average.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states

USA today (right-leaning outlet) itself ranked California 14th on happiness.

Personally, I've been to California many times as well. I hadn't seen any crime. Therefor crime doesn't exist.

For the record, happiness is always going to be the metric you're going to try to capture to your best ability. "Traffic" isn't an indicator of anything but traffic. The real question is, does it bother people that they have bad traffic, or does it not affect them mentally whatsoever? What if the traffic is bad, but the culture is very transit reliant? All metric are geared towards satisfying the people in question.

It's equally absurd to visit the Netherlands as an Englishman and conclude it's a ****hole because the Dutch are cool with drugs and hookers or some other arbitrary metric; but the Dutch are perfectly happy with drugs and hookers.

You can reverse it and argue that it's equally absurd that an urban progressive visits a rural conservative community and concludes it's a bumhole because the people aren't aggressively progressive. The people there don't even have black people, they never felt the need to be progressive, these things don't map onto eachother.
 
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Personally, I've been to California many times as well. I hadn't seen any crime. Therefor crime doesn't exist.
You jest, but still pretty based, ngl.
What you link and what @Nega-Brutus linked used completely different metrics. So they don't actually talk about the same thing (although I am sure they do in the eyes of people reading them without digging in deeper to actually try and understand what they say).

Also, I don't know where you found your crime rate data on Lubbock TX but here's what I found, it's 10/1000 and 57/1000. Run indeed.
Yes, we used the same source, I added an extra zero as a typo, my bad.

Yeah they are differently compiled, but they are both an answer to the central question: Cali good or bad?
 
Yeah but the point is what @Nega-Brutus was saying. The two studies use different metrics to quantify happiness, and thus pretty much use the same word to indicate two different things. Turns out that "good" can mean different things if you ask different people. Like most things, it's complicated.
 
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ELITES are OPPRESING us by telling us what to do

Also, California is a ****hole because I'm comfortable projecting my feelings onto others

Bro it's one or the other. Please reconcile
 
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Turns out that "good" can mean different things if you ask different people.

I would go further and say that "good" and "happy" mean different things to the same person. Like with most abstract terms, the English language has crunched down half a dozen contradictory concepts like contentment, material consumption, ecstasy and fulfilment down to one word and tried to use this as a metric to measure things by.

For example I think people go a bit crazy if they don't have something unjust or corrupt to be angry about. From my short stint in retail I had people ringing me up getting super mad about something that was essentially nobody's fault, and they would get agitated if I told them it was just an accident. Or how some of the parents I dealt with would storm into the school high on life when they saw their child had bruises, but then leave completely deflated and frustrated when they slowly realised it wasn't from being abused or bullied.

A more extreme example is how a lot of Eastern Europeans and South Americans run away from corrupt authoritarian regimes and construct the rest of their lives around the opposition to a government that no longer exists. I feel like for those people, the corrupt untouchable regime gave them a perfect enemy to construct their identity against, and America gave them a perfect aspiration. But actually having those fantasies be resolved in real life drives them mad. But by all these analytic metrics they are "happier" now, even though they're some of the most miserable people to be around.

This isn't a snide jab at kurczak, I swear.
 
Yeah my wife currently works in retail and people definitely do... interesting things.

In addition to everything you said, to make things even more complicated there's the fact that what "good" and "happy" means for one person can also change over time. So yeah, good luck quantifying that.

And to be fair, once you get a large enough group of people and put together all the factors that can reasonably be correlated to each of them being happy, you can indeed get some metric of "average happiness". However, with everything we said so far in mind, is this really a reliable predictor? Debatable. I would think that it is probably possible to identify places where things are objectively miserable (e.g., a warzone), but then we didn't really need metrics to do that.
 
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This is America California. Man, I used to love SF.
ELITES are OPPRESING us by telling us what to do

Also, California is a ****hole because I'm comfortable projecting my feelings onto others

Bro it's one or the other. Please reconcile
Uh, not sure, what's going on with the ELITES. Ar you referring to my neuroses over the lockdowns? Yea, bro, imagine having a problem with over a year of martial law with lipstick. What are you some sort of alt right troll?!?

"So what you're saying" is you can't criticize the government for doing x and for failing to do y? You either have to root for any and all government action or be the most hardcore ride or die ancap?
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But as a gesture of goodwill, I acknowledge that a number of my post in the past few months were rather lower efforts as to their form than I wish in retrospect.
A more extreme example is how a lot of Eastern Europeans and South Americans run away from corrupt authoritarian regimes and construct the rest of their lives around the opposition to a government that no longer exists. I feel like for those people, the corrupt untouchable regime gave them a perfect enemy to construct their identity against, and America gave them a perfect aspiration. But actually having those fantasies be resolved in real life drives them mad. But by all these analytic metrics they are "happier" now, even though they're some of the most miserable people to be around.

This isn't a snide jab at kurczak, I swear.
I don't know about the most miserable people around, but generally, yes, that's true. One's opinions and views are informed by one's previous experiences, upbringing etc. It works all kinds of ways, omg the westerners are not even afraid of the government putting half of their family in a labor camp. They think the government is there to HELP them LMAO.
 
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But as a gesture of goodwill, I acknowledge that a number of my post in the past few months were rather lower efforts as to their form than I wish in retrospect.
Thank you for that. You are an intelligent person who is perfectly capable on nuanced thought, and to be honest it bothers me to see you abandon that completely when it fits your bias :smile:. That is when one needs their nuanced thought the most.

Regarding SF, I found this an interesting read.
 
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