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Am I Crazy for Considering Moving to Los Angeles


Ceptorman

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Back in the old days (2001-02) there was a "letter to a crackhead" written which you may still find on the net. Its likely a fake story - just sounds very very true, about how someone's spark plugs on their motorcycle were getting broken off for a crackhead to smoke crack … basically it says - you're a crackhead, why dont you own a crack pipe. Crack is what you do, like I'm an engineer, you don't see me shaking down people on market looking for a calculator do you. I'm an engineer, I own a calculator, you're a crackhead, why don't you own a crackpipe. LOL.

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3 hours ago, CECAA850 said:

So California................  Isn't that the place that they outlawed plastic drinking straws and hand out hypodermic needles for free?

Don't forget motor voter registration and $500 covid 1984 gifts to illegals either. And if you are of a felonious nature stealing under $900 is not prosecuted anymore so go shopping without cash. Organic recycling is very big in LA and San Fran right now though so green things are moving right along.

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12 hours ago, BigStewMan said:

I think where we grew up is often close to our hearts -- thus my fondness for Oakland/SF Bay Area and Los Angeles.

 

I grew up in a beautiful Oakland house designed by my parents and built single-handedly by my father, except for the electrical.  But each member of the extended family got to drive a single, symbolic nail.  As, I'm sure, @BigStewMan knows, Oakland, as advertised, is a beautiful "Mediterranean city."  I loved Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley.   My wife and I moved into an Oakland house near that of my parents, and we each worked for more than 20 years in San Francisco.   We loved the (often face to face) All-Channel Communication Net (before the INTERnet), and the cross fertilization of ideas and points of view from the very diverse  populace.  We had U.C. Berkeley, wich had more Nobel Prize winners than any country in the world, other than the US.  We had the U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964,  just after the the San Francisco Auto Row Sit-ins (Civil Rights Movement), and just before the beginning of the anti-Vietnam War protests, followed by the 1974 founding, by veterans, of Swords to Plowshares, and other institutions of healing, including the journal Tikkun, from tikkun olam; "healing or restoring the world," founded by a Rabbi who was a member of the Free Speech Movement years before.  We had the San Francisco Theological Seminary, the Graduate Theological Union, and the Pacific Theological Union.  Door-to-door evangelicals (both Trinitarians and non) were frequent visitors at the front door, and one pointed up at the Mormon Temple, and said, "There's Babylon, right up there."  Our next door neighbor, a very old man who never raised his voice, did, yelling at these doorbell ringers, "Whadda you mean, I've been studying it for 80 years!"  We had Hell's Angels, who, sometimes, were interesting to talk to, and Oakland was the birthplace of the Black Panthers, who were, as well.  On the Right, we had the brilliant Edward Teller, and the dull William F. Knowland.  On the New and Old Left, we had too many to count.  Before I was born, we had the brilliant Oppenheimer.  Outside the box there were quite a few anarchists and libertarians.   Ginsberg and Kerouac lived there off and on..  We had the Experimental College at SFSU, and the first invited professor was Paul Goodman.  In the Haight, we had Leonard Wolf and Allen Cohen's Happening House.  And poetry readings at Glide Memorial Church.  There were four Klipsch Heritage owners in a three block radius.  Good taste.  See below:

 

11 hours ago, Dave A said:

looking out the front door where they deer and turkeys play. I get up at night and sometimes you pull the curtain back and the deer are 10 feet away grazing. My traffic jam to get to work on many days is the "wild" turkeys out there giving me the evil eye because I have not fed them yet.

 

Now we live in western Oregon, where it is very, very quiet.  In a way, it is just as diverse, but quiet and nearly all white (except for the Midnight Monks in saffron).  We do have a University nearby, and a mosque, two synagogues, an Eastern Orthodox Church, and every other kind.  When we first moved here, Republican and Democratic headquarters were in the same parking lot.

 

@Dave AWe, too, have to weave through turkeys on the road, both the feathered and unfeathered kind.  We have deer in he yard, and raccoons, owls, about 10 kinds of other birds, squirrels, and mountain lions roaming nearby.  Occasionally, a male turkey will challenge us.  The snakes are neutral.

 

Why did we move? 

  1. Traffic.  Our 1 hour commute to work became a 2 hour commute.  We had the same jobs, in the same places, and lived in the same house, and the travel time doubled!
  2. Crime going up, then down, then up again, then down after we moved ... I haven't checked in the last three years.
  3. Selling a house in Oakland produced a great deal of cash.  Houses twice as big cost half as much up here.

 

@Cleptorman

 

I spent quite a bit of time in L.A., thanks to the attraction of the film industry.  To me, at least:

  1.  It seems less intellectual than the Bay Area
  2. It is very, very hot too many days.  104 degrees tends to stick in my mind.
  3. They have cleaned up their air quite a bit.  When I first went there, I couldn't focus my camera because my eyes were watering so much.  Now one can actually forget about the smog for relatively long periods of time.
  4. Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic. 

 

 

 

 

 

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I did a job in Orange County back in 1983 or so. Spent some time with my parents who lived in Westminster and with my brother going to Sequoia and the Redwoods for cross country skiing.  It was a whole different world out there then and I could have lived and afforded CA then. I don't recognize what I see anymore other than land mass.

 

  Went from there to Seattle for another month or so to build another night club. That was interesting too but not now. Rural areas can shelter you from the big cities until election time when people who have no clue about country life tell you how to live it. 

 

 One of the interesting things about Tennessee is the nature of the forest which is loaded up with native fruits and nuts. Real hardwoods too like Hickory and Oak for smoking and tons of varieties for woodworking. The south east forest is my favorite though the trees are miniscule compared to the west.

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4 hours ago, garyrc said:

We, too, have to weave through turkeys on the road, both the feathered and unfeathered kind.  We have deer in he yard, and raccoons, owls, about 10 kinds of other birds, squirrels, and mountain lions roaming nearby.  Occasionally, a male turkey will challenge us.  The snakes are neutral.

Priorities just seem to change in the country. I dug a hole for the spring runoff to collect in so I could hear frogs again this summer. I find it fascinating to see how it changes weekly as life begins to thrive in it. Have to finish digging out the last 2' of dirt stopping me from getting into my cave this year too. Grand kids are itching to see whats in there and so am I. This time of year the Barred Owls may spend most of the day going from tree to tree and they are fun to watch.

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5 hours ago, BigStewMan said:

Gary is he the namesake of the Knowland Park Zoo?  I remember going there as a kid. 

My family roots are in Jingletown. Not fancy, but that’s where it all started. 

 

Knowland Park Zoo was great!  I remember Effie the Elephant, but better yet there was a concrete riverbed that wound around and through the park that had no water in it (during my time) but was overgrown with bushes (with a few reaching the bottom of the dry riverbed) we used to crawl through it, hide out, play all kinds of games of the imagination.  

 

As a zoo, it was started by the Snow family, but owned (and donated, or whatever) by William F. Knowland's father, Joseph Knowland, who was an Oakland-Alameda-Piedmont pioneer of sorts, I guess.  He was born in the 1870s.  He held several positions, and once was in charge of an investigation into Chinese women slaves in San Francisco.  He was the owner and publisher of the Oakland Tribune, a position his son William F. Knowland took over later.  The Snow family also ran Snow's Museum in Oakland, where you could push a button near a stuffed rattlesnake and make it rattle, view shrunken heads, and see a stuffed "Man-eating tiger." 

 

My gripe with William F. Knowland was the yellow journalism of the Tribune.  When Knowland was running for governor against Edmund G. Brown, (Jerry -- "Governor Moonbeam" -- Brown's father) there were headlines (every day, I thought as a kid) in the Tribune, saying "Knowland Hits Brown," "Knowland Hits Brown," with endless repetitions.  William lost the election.  Later William demonstrated an astounding insensitivity, and, in my view, racism toward most minorities.   He ended his life by shooting himself, under strange circumstances.  Rumors of many kinds surfaced -- that he owed a great deal of money -- gambling debts -- that he was afraid that the Symbionese Liberation Army would kill him or harm his family (a conceivability). 

 

Jingletown may have been named after mill workers of Azorean Portuguese descent who would jingle the coins in their pockets to show that they were flush.   The two Azorean Portuguese people I knew in Oakland didn't share any information about that, but informed me that the Azores were the mountain tops of the sunken continent of Atlantis, being beyond, as Plato said, the Pillars of Hercules.  Later Jingletown became home to Chicano and Latino families, who helped organize the Chicano faction of the anti-Vietnam War Moritoria. 

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10 hours ago, garyrc said:

Jingletown may have been named after mill workers of Azorean Portuguese descent who would jingle the coins in their pockets to show that they were flush.  

That is a true story -- that is the story my uncle told me and i’ve heard others that have lived there say that is also the story that they were told. People from the “Old Country” who used to be poor, now had money and they wanted others to know that they weren’t poor anymore. My grandparents were born and raised in the Azores -- the islands of Faial and Flores. Both came to Oakland as adults circa WW1. My grandmother's sister lived in Jingletown most of her life -- dying at the age of 102. i was always shocked that she could climb those very steep steps up to her house from the street -- maybe that’s what helped her live so long. She was interviewed once and i remember reading the story and her telling about how when someone died, the body was kept in the house for a viewing (way back in the old days). She said, “the women would be inside praying and crying and the men would be outside drinking, fighting, and playing cards.” yeah, that sounds like my family. not sure what it is like now, but the neighborhood got rough for a while -- think it started getting bad in the 70s. i’ve been back to Oakland many times; but haven’t been back to Jingletown in a very long time and don’t suppose I ever will as it’s not the same place as it was before and i don’t think i have any relatives in the neighborhood anymore, they have either moved or died. 

 

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22 hours ago, Dave A said:

I did a job in Orange County back in 1983 or so. Spent some time with my parents who lived in Westminster and with my brother going to Sequoia and the Redwoods for cross country skiing.  It was a whole different world out there then and I could have lived and afforded CA then. I don't recognize what I see anymore other than land mass.

 

  Went from there to Seattle for another month or so to build another night club. That was interesting too but not now. Rural areas can shelter you from the big cities until election time when people who have no clue about country life tell you how to live it. 

 

 One of the interesting things about Tennessee is the nature of the forest which is loaded up with native fruits and nuts. Real hardwoods too like Hickory and Oak for smoking and tons of varieties for woodworking. The south east forest is my favorite though the trees are miniscule compared to the west.

How true. We live rural Riverside county. Life is nowhere near like when we lived in Long Beach which is really just an extension of the city next to it and the one next to it and next to it. All in all there are 88 different cities in "Los Angeles" Except for a sign at each city border, you never know the difference ONE BIG city mushed together from 88. Looking at the state land mass wise, in an election and seeing which counties voted for the Elephant or the A$$, 98% of the state is RED but the big cities, LA, SF, Sac. are blue. THEY tell the 98% of the state how to live while at the same time the 2% land mass have NO CLUE how the rest of us live. Our son moved to Georgia about 5 years ago for a job at Lockheed, he loves it there while he was born and raised here, in So Cal, mostly in the country as we moved here when he was 5. That was 31 years ago and now we are moving to follow him. The state gov is SOOOOOOOOO  rigged against other than radical left folks it is impossible to take the state back. For decades the voting districts have been carved out to give Dems every advantage. Many times, two sections of a district DON'T EVEN TOUCH EACH OTHER with a second district between the two parts of the first. Lets not forget about the BILLIONS of dollars wasted on the train to nowhere. It starts in the desert, runs through farm land and ends in a place that few want to go. It was supposed to be a high speed (over 100 mph) connector between So and North Ca. Now it is a slow speed, local to local train that will be supported by tax dollars as it can't possibly earn what it costs to run. The "new" Gov. did kill it but because if it does not actually work, even if poorly, the state must give back the funds to the Fed gov that were spent. Heaven forbid we take a one time hit and give the money back but no, we must live for decades and decades paying for a train that no one rides.

 

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I’ll get to the point
F —- California.
Someone needs to place a massive dose of explosives along the fault line and ignite it, so we can all watch as California breaks and floats away from the United States
Good riddance to the place


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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12 hours ago, Cal Blacksmith said:

. Our son moved to Georgia about 5 years ago for a job at Lockheed, he loves it there while he was born and raised here,

This is one of the things that will kill CA. Up until recently companies could not move because their high talent irreplaceable workers would refuse to move and just get another job. Today one of the premier aerodynamic Universities in the world is right next to Martin Marrieta/Lockheed and the people being trained there have no interest in moving to lala land. Haas Machine tool is another one. Quietly building a huge facility in Nevada and the largest machine tool builder in the USA will soon be leaving the peoples republic. The exodus is really just starting and I hope people don't bring their socialist ideas with them and it is just conservatives leaving. That sadly is not what I am seeing though as the people from out there I talk to seem to think all kinds of taxpayer funded things are cool. I am truly grateful that I am 20+ years behind modern places like LA and wish it was even more.

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9 hours ago, oldtimer said:

Yosemite is pretty cool, the native Americans called it sacred.  The redwood forests are amazing places to be.  It's not all bad.  

The real estate is magnificent. The rest not so much.

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15 minutes ago, Dave A said:

The real estate is magnificent. The rest not so much.

I tried to plant an raise 15 giant redwood seedlings ordered from California and they lasted about 15 years before dying in the Ohio weather. What did it was all day 20 knot winds at 20F.

Also they required an extra 1 gallon of water every day whether it rained or not. The bigger ones would have required over 300 gallons of water per day. Come to find out the redwoods in California get 40% of their water from ocean fog.

JJK

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3 minutes ago, JJkizak said:

I tried to plant an raise 15 giant redwood seedlings ordered from California and they lasted about 15 years before dying in the Ohio weather. What did it was all day 20 knot winds at 20F.

Also they required an extra 1 gallon of water every day whether it rained or not. The bigger ones would have required over 300 gallons of water per day. Come to find out the redwoods in California get 40% of their water from ocean fog.

JJK

One of the oddest things I have seen was a single Redwood in the front yard of a house out west. Here is this towering behemoth at least 20 feet across it seemed and who knows how tall. It was the only tree in the yard and made that house look like a postage stamp.

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On 5/21/2020 at 11:19 PM, carlthess40 said:

I’ll get to the point
F —- California.
Someone needs to place a massive dose of explosives along the fault line and ignite it, so we can all watch as California breaks and floats away from the United States
Good riddance to the place


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

-where are you get all the Semi-Conductors from silicon valley  -------China -----no way

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I moved to San Diego from Kansas City in 1990, and I'm never going back. 

Pete's right, do the math, list the pros and cons, then make your decision. 

Get a serious salary, because everything's more expensive out here. If you can afford to buy a house, or even a nice condo, do it. You will never lose money over the long haul on California real estate. 

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