Delightful writing this week. I live in California and realize there's one big reason things are so expensive here - it's a great place to be and too many people want to be here. High demand. I love other places in the US and usually find something nice to say about them. Being rude isn't necessary, ever. Nail on the head about DST, too - much ado about nothing except everyone who hates it would hate the results if their wishes came true.
Atmospheric rivers are nothing new in California and are certainly not more troublesome than they have been in the past. They're actually critically important parts of California's hydrology. Just one atmospheric river can provide 1/4-1/2 of one of the state's region's water requirements for a year. Droughts are also not new and are a frequent part of the state's history. There's an old saying here, "In California, a drought ends with a flood" and it always seems to come true.
I think the productive thing to do is to shift the conversation from *whether* we should shift the clocks to *when*. European DST starts later and ends sooner than North American DST, and yet they vacation sooner and for longer. Discuss!
That painting is positively frightening, you could hang it in your apartment as a warning to people who praise honeydew melons or engage in other antisocial behavior.
I'm sitting here on an unseasonably cold March evening in north Oakland (the temperature has dipped below fifty degrees!), reading about how people in the East and Midwest, where it is considered completely normal to endure months of subfreezing weather every winter followed by months of sweltering heat every summer, think the weather out here must be getting intolerable due to climate change. I must confess I find that kind of weird.
Several of my undergrad colleagues grew up in the Midwest and moved to California after graduation; to a person, I think they all left. If you didn't grow up with the eternal Mediterranean season, it really screws with your head.
Yay it's September again! Again. Again. Again. Again. To each their own, but no thanks.
As someone who has always lived in four season climates, gotta disagree with you there. Having, like, 2-4 months per year of consistently nice weather kinda sucks (summer can also be awful).
Although my platonically ideal climate - which is obviously not physically possible - would have a brief, like 6-ish-week winter, that mostly coincides with the peak of the Christmas season and extends two or three weeks into January just to remind everyone how great it is the rest of the time. Then by February 1, it's 58 degrees and sunny again and everyone's like "well, then, glad we got through that!"
Summer would always be between about 77 and 85 degrees. Warm enough to go swimming if you want to, but never so hot as to make being outside uncomfortable. Ninety-degree days are useless.
Well, the winter you describe is basically Austin. The summers, on the other hand, are miserable. I lived in Texas for 14 years, and one of the reasons I chose to leave is because the heat had become intolerable for me. As I got older I actually liked it less and less (and this coming from a person who hates winter!).
Anyway, I live in the Midwest now, and happen to love having four seasons. I grew up with them, and really missed fall the most when I lived in Texas. It's still my favorite time of year.
Fall is great, unfortunately where I live (the Northeast) it is the only time of year when the weather is consistently nice for an extended period of time.
I agree completely. I moved here from Montana and find the weather insufferably boring. But the idea that it's some post-apocalyptic hellscape is ridiculous.
Reads like cope. You can absolutely prefer bad weather if you like, but you will be wrong and I will think you are lying. I have no clue why anyone would voluntarily live where it snows. Visiting places with bad weather for Christmas or whatever? Maybe. Living there? No.
"Anyone who professes a desire for anything other than California" is the sine qua non of Californianism. I am very glad it exists for people like you, and we hope you stay there.
It works the other way too! I had med school classmates from California train in the Midwest at Mayo or U of Minnesota etc, and they all went back to CA, because Minnesota is cold. As they say, to each their own (I like winter, others do not, people have their own preferences and that’s fine).
Rather than finding it rude, I take great comfort when some out-of-region fellow/fellowette explains to me that there's no way they could cope with our MN/WI winters. It means they're not here fucking things up for the rest of us.
I grew up in Minnesota and have fond memories of my dad bringing in the car battery overnight so the car would start in the morning, of boys spitting during recess so we could watch their spit explode into ice before it hit the ground, of no blizzard ever being too severe to stop flights and in and out of MSP airport, of ten-foot high snowdrifts you could burrow into, of ice rinks in people’s back yards and side streets you could skate on, and of cross-country skiing to the grocery store because the roads were impassable. Whenever someone says that they could never handle the Minnesota winter, I always think, “Wimp!” and also, “Dude, you are missing out!”
I was born and raised in the suburbs of L.A. Personally I think I would prefer a more seasonal climate as I love cold and hate heat, in the end I don't think I would trade it for weather that was less predictable. I spent 2 years in college at Northwestern near Chicago and loved the seasons, including winter, but of course I was in a university bubble and didn't have to try and drive in that crap or deal with it in any real way. The predictability (relatively speaking) of California's weather trumps everything else,. The shifts due to climate change are real but overstated and going Chicken Little about it isn't helping. It turns off the people who need convincing and when California fails to burn to the ground or slide into the ocean, it allows the climate deniers to point and say that nothing's wrong. As far as out-of-staters whining about L.A. (or California in general) politics and lifestyle, when I hear it I usually just tell them I can't imagine living anywhere else, and otherwise do not engage. As the only center-lefter in a family that ranges from center-right to full MAGA, I have enough to deal with trying to talk them down, and they actually live here.
Haaaa, Ryan, I *also* loved experiencing the seasons at NU, but after graduation, as soon as I had to drive around in winter, pay the heating bill, and go out to report on the worst of the winter storms... I was out of there. People said I was weak, but you can probably tell I didn't care. ;)
Up until 2 years ago, I was a life long Angeleno and, as I’ve written here before, I miss it dearly. Great weather, energy, the mountains, the beach, the desert, there’s always something exciting going on -- love it.
I used to travel quite a bit and over the last 15 years, whenever someone would find out I was from LA, they would continue to shit on the place. I remember one guy on a plane who was visiting his son in Irvine. He just went on and on about how horrible the place is...traffic, smog, etc.. He said he thought his son would rather move back, but his wife is a native and didn’t want to move. I thought to myself, “Are you sure your son wants to move?” I asked him where he was from. He said Michigan...but now lives in Vegas! And he’s shitting on LA!!!
I will say that I go back a couple of times a year and the homeless situation seems worse every time and does seem to be affecting the quality of life. Downtown seems to have much of the gains it’s made over the last 20 years. There are encampments in the west San Fernando Valley, where I grew up, and around Silver Lake, where I lived for 26 years. That said, I’m visiting in 2 weeks and looking forward to it.
I can't give one single explanation for it, but shitting on LA is truly in a class of its own — Josh and I kind of touched on it last year in this post (which also happens to be about daylight saving time, hmmmm). https://www.joshbarro.com/p/this-week-in-the-mayonnaise-clinic-ba9
California is paradise and will always be, I reckon. Sure, one season every couple of years might be uncomfortable (god knows I’ve had it up to here with this particular winter) but its weather is still miles better than anywhere else. It’s my home and I’m not leaving for anything, let alone some shitty politicians or politics.
I guess it depends what you've grown up with. As I've rarely experienced it, and never in the extreme, cold is alien and thoroughly menacing to me. And I would actually miss the warmth if I lived in ever-temperate California. A skinny slip of a child in the South is unaware of the heat. It's true that when you get old the humidity in particular becomes enervating, and the summers seem longer ("they *were* getting longer"). But swimming holes achieve their Platonic perfection in complement with hot days. As do popsicles, lemonade, a relieving midday thunderstorm, a certain lassitude in the afternoon which is not entirely unpleasant ...
If you really appreciate great weather and scenery and can afford it, California is great. If you don’t care much about weather and want a suburban lifestyle and more money available to go on vacations (or if your family is there and you are close to them), Omaha or Minneapolis or Tampa might make more sense. People have different values or needs and it’s fine that they make different life choices (there’s a parallel here to insufferable left/right wing politics that can’t imagine the existence of swing voters and others with different values than their own, by the way).
I personally dislike the time change because it disrupts my appreciation of the natural change in sunrise and sunset across the season. Nonetheless, I know you are right in practical terms.
As someone living in San Jose, CA which is (well, the whole Bay Area) arguably the most cosmopolitan part of the US... I ask where else to move to in the US (for cheaper cost of living) that is at least reasonably cosmopolitan and has reasonable weather? I point out that my team of 17 were born in 12 different countries.
I really enjoyed this article. I don't know exactly when everyone became such an expert on everyone else's job, health, lifestyle and place of living, but their eagerness to share their wisdom has become tedious and rude. Constant narrative driven media coverage shoulders much of the blame, but I think people are bored and dissatisfied with their own lives (especially since COVID) and feel free to dump on others to make themselves feel better. It's obnoxious and tiresome.
And FWIW, I love Daylight Saving Time. I used to look forward to it as a child with joyful anticipation as it signaled the start of a carefree summer. As an adult, I feel that tinge of excitement every year. Who doesn't need a little of that?!
Delightful writing this week. I live in California and realize there's one big reason things are so expensive here - it's a great place to be and too many people want to be here. High demand. I love other places in the US and usually find something nice to say about them. Being rude isn't necessary, ever. Nail on the head about DST, too - much ado about nothing except everyone who hates it would hate the results if their wishes came true.
Atmospheric rivers are nothing new in California and are certainly not more troublesome than they have been in the past. They're actually critically important parts of California's hydrology. Just one atmospheric river can provide 1/4-1/2 of one of the state's region's water requirements for a year. Droughts are also not new and are a frequent part of the state's history. There's an old saying here, "In California, a drought ends with a flood" and it always seems to come true.
I think the productive thing to do is to shift the conversation from *whether* we should shift the clocks to *when*. European DST starts later and ends sooner than North American DST, and yet they vacation sooner and for longer. Discuss!
This. I would be less hostile to DST if it started and stopped on the Sunday cloest to the equinoxes. March 21 to September 21.
That painting is positively frightening, you could hang it in your apartment as a warning to people who praise honeydew melons or engage in other antisocial behavior.
As a proud (?) Tampanian, I applaud Josh’s dedication to civility regardless of our life choices.
At this point I want to keep DST around just so I can continue reading Josh's hilarious roasts of the inevitable "abolish DST" pieces.
I'm sitting here on an unseasonably cold March evening in north Oakland (the temperature has dipped below fifty degrees!), reading about how people in the East and Midwest, where it is considered completely normal to endure months of subfreezing weather every winter followed by months of sweltering heat every summer, think the weather out here must be getting intolerable due to climate change. I must confess I find that kind of weird.
Several of my undergrad colleagues grew up in the Midwest and moved to California after graduation; to a person, I think they all left. If you didn't grow up with the eternal Mediterranean season, it really screws with your head.
Yay it's September again! Again. Again. Again. Again. To each their own, but no thanks.
As someone who has always lived in four season climates, gotta disagree with you there. Having, like, 2-4 months per year of consistently nice weather kinda sucks (summer can also be awful).
Although my platonically ideal climate - which is obviously not physically possible - would have a brief, like 6-ish-week winter, that mostly coincides with the peak of the Christmas season and extends two or three weeks into January just to remind everyone how great it is the rest of the time. Then by February 1, it's 58 degrees and sunny again and everyone's like "well, then, glad we got through that!"
Summer would always be between about 77 and 85 degrees. Warm enough to go swimming if you want to, but never so hot as to make being outside uncomfortable. Ninety-degree days are useless.
Well, the winter you describe is basically Austin. The summers, on the other hand, are miserable. I lived in Texas for 14 years, and one of the reasons I chose to leave is because the heat had become intolerable for me. As I got older I actually liked it less and less (and this coming from a person who hates winter!).
Anyway, I live in the Midwest now, and happen to love having four seasons. I grew up with them, and really missed fall the most when I lived in Texas. It's still my favorite time of year.
Fall is great, unfortunately where I live (the Northeast) it is the only time of year when the weather is consistently nice for an extended period of time.
I agree completely. I moved here from Montana and find the weather insufferably boring. But the idea that it's some post-apocalyptic hellscape is ridiculous.
Reads like cope. You can absolutely prefer bad weather if you like, but you will be wrong and I will think you are lying. I have no clue why anyone would voluntarily live where it snows. Visiting places with bad weather for Christmas or whatever? Maybe. Living there? No.
"Anyone who professes a desire for anything other than California" is the sine qua non of Californianism. I am very glad it exists for people like you, and we hope you stay there.
It works the other way too! I had med school classmates from California train in the Midwest at Mayo or U of Minnesota etc, and they all went back to CA, because Minnesota is cold. As they say, to each their own (I like winter, others do not, people have their own preferences and that’s fine).
Rather than finding it rude, I take great comfort when some out-of-region fellow/fellowette explains to me that there's no way they could cope with our MN/WI winters. It means they're not here fucking things up for the rest of us.
appreciate the congrats
I grew up in Minnesota and have fond memories of my dad bringing in the car battery overnight so the car would start in the morning, of boys spitting during recess so we could watch their spit explode into ice before it hit the ground, of no blizzard ever being too severe to stop flights and in and out of MSP airport, of ten-foot high snowdrifts you could burrow into, of ice rinks in people’s back yards and side streets you could skate on, and of cross-country skiing to the grocery store because the roads were impassable. Whenever someone says that they could never handle the Minnesota winter, I always think, “Wimp!” and also, “Dude, you are missing out!”
I was born and raised in the suburbs of L.A. Personally I think I would prefer a more seasonal climate as I love cold and hate heat, in the end I don't think I would trade it for weather that was less predictable. I spent 2 years in college at Northwestern near Chicago and loved the seasons, including winter, but of course I was in a university bubble and didn't have to try and drive in that crap or deal with it in any real way. The predictability (relatively speaking) of California's weather trumps everything else,. The shifts due to climate change are real but overstated and going Chicken Little about it isn't helping. It turns off the people who need convincing and when California fails to burn to the ground or slide into the ocean, it allows the climate deniers to point and say that nothing's wrong. As far as out-of-staters whining about L.A. (or California in general) politics and lifestyle, when I hear it I usually just tell them I can't imagine living anywhere else, and otherwise do not engage. As the only center-lefter in a family that ranges from center-right to full MAGA, I have enough to deal with trying to talk them down, and they actually live here.
Haaaa, Ryan, I *also* loved experiencing the seasons at NU, but after graduation, as soon as I had to drive around in winter, pay the heating bill, and go out to report on the worst of the winter storms... I was out of there. People said I was weak, but you can probably tell I didn't care. ;)
Up until 2 years ago, I was a life long Angeleno and, as I’ve written here before, I miss it dearly. Great weather, energy, the mountains, the beach, the desert, there’s always something exciting going on -- love it.
I used to travel quite a bit and over the last 15 years, whenever someone would find out I was from LA, they would continue to shit on the place. I remember one guy on a plane who was visiting his son in Irvine. He just went on and on about how horrible the place is...traffic, smog, etc.. He said he thought his son would rather move back, but his wife is a native and didn’t want to move. I thought to myself, “Are you sure your son wants to move?” I asked him where he was from. He said Michigan...but now lives in Vegas! And he’s shitting on LA!!!
I will say that I go back a couple of times a year and the homeless situation seems worse every time and does seem to be affecting the quality of life. Downtown seems to have much of the gains it’s made over the last 20 years. There are encampments in the west San Fernando Valley, where I grew up, and around Silver Lake, where I lived for 26 years. That said, I’m visiting in 2 weeks and looking forward to it.
I can't give one single explanation for it, but shitting on LA is truly in a class of its own — Josh and I kind of touched on it last year in this post (which also happens to be about daylight saving time, hmmmm). https://www.joshbarro.com/p/this-week-in-the-mayonnaise-clinic-ba9
As a bit of an outsider, I'll posit that many (most?) Muricans either live in CA or diss CA.
California is paradise and will always be, I reckon. Sure, one season every couple of years might be uncomfortable (god knows I’ve had it up to here with this particular winter) but its weather is still miles better than anywhere else. It’s my home and I’m not leaving for anything, let alone some shitty politicians or politics.
I guess it depends what you've grown up with. As I've rarely experienced it, and never in the extreme, cold is alien and thoroughly menacing to me. And I would actually miss the warmth if I lived in ever-temperate California. A skinny slip of a child in the South is unaware of the heat. It's true that when you get old the humidity in particular becomes enervating, and the summers seem longer ("they *were* getting longer"). But swimming holes achieve their Platonic perfection in complement with hot days. As do popsicles, lemonade, a relieving midday thunderstorm, a certain lassitude in the afternoon which is not entirely unpleasant ...
If you really appreciate great weather and scenery and can afford it, California is great. If you don’t care much about weather and want a suburban lifestyle and more money available to go on vacations (or if your family is there and you are close to them), Omaha or Minneapolis or Tampa might make more sense. People have different values or needs and it’s fine that they make different life choices (there’s a parallel here to insufferable left/right wing politics that can’t imagine the existence of swing voters and others with different values than their own, by the way).
I personally dislike the time change because it disrupts my appreciation of the natural change in sunrise and sunset across the season. Nonetheless, I know you are right in practical terms.
As someone living in San Jose, CA which is (well, the whole Bay Area) arguably the most cosmopolitan part of the US... I ask where else to move to in the US (for cheaper cost of living) that is at least reasonably cosmopolitan and has reasonable weather? I point out that my team of 17 were born in 12 different countries.
I really enjoyed this article. I don't know exactly when everyone became such an expert on everyone else's job, health, lifestyle and place of living, but their eagerness to share their wisdom has become tedious and rude. Constant narrative driven media coverage shoulders much of the blame, but I think people are bored and dissatisfied with their own lives (especially since COVID) and feel free to dump on others to make themselves feel better. It's obnoxious and tiresome.
And FWIW, I love Daylight Saving Time. I used to look forward to it as a child with joyful anticipation as it signaled the start of a carefree summer. As an adult, I feel that tinge of excitement every year. Who doesn't need a little of that?!