Originally Posted by Rochard

California is perfect. The reason why the cost of living is so high is because people WANT to live here. No one says "I want to move to Minnesota".

We have the perfect weather. I live in Northern California, just north of Sacramento. We have four seasons, it never snows here, and summers aren't too bad. Some months I can go swimming in my pool and then drive an hour and hit the ski slopes.

We have all of the things that all states have. We have rural living, big cities, lakes, deserts, mountains, beaches.... We also have things that no other states have - Hollywood and the Silicon Valley. We have our share of state and federal parks too.

Too expensive? Perhaps. But I have friends and family who live in NJ and they complain bout the same thing.

And of course people will say "earthquakes" and "fires" but those are limited in nature and don't affect the overall quality of life. The earthquakes are mostly in SoCal, not often, and don't really do much damage. I was here for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (I lived closer to San Francisco then) and we went without power for a few days. We have fires too; The town of Paradise is about an hour away and we could surely smell the smoke for a few days a lots of people lost their houses we aren't the only state that has fires. The fires here are bad because we have a lot of rural areas and we are very dry.

Every now and then one of my Republican-ish friends will say "I don't like living in California because of the political climate". This doesn't even make sense to me. In fact, I find it comical. I don't wake up in the morning and think to myself about how local state politics affects my life here. Oh, no, we allow gays to get married here and we have some gun laws and we allow non citizens to get a driver's license - how horrible. These things have zero impact on my day to day life. (And I own firearms.)

Don't like California.... Then leave.