los angeles is a dump: evidence presented in easy-to-read bullets!

I’ve said it before many times: LA is a piece of shit city that has a few nice spots and good weather that makes you trick yourself into thinking the whole place is nice.  But it isn’t and you’re just an idiot trying to convince yourself that you didn’t make poor life choices to end up in this god-forsaken desert of humanity.

Well, say this for me–say I always present both sides of an issue.

Pros

• weather

• culture
  • Lots of music, art, film, TV, comedy, theater, etc. is here.  I can’t deny it — there’s a lot to choose from.
• women
  • Talk to friends from around the nation.  It’s not really in dispute that LA has some of the most beautiful women. (Stay tuned, though.  This one makes the cons list, too)

If you’re looking for “beach” on the list above, you’ll find it in the roughly half dozen other states that have better beaches than Los Angeles.  LA beaches are overcrowded, dirty, and have freezing water and zero parking.  I almost put it on the “con” list.

 

That’s right, kids, it’s not a long “pro” list.  Right before we do the cons, though, let’s do another quick list.

Things People Think are Pros but Actually Suck

• beaches
• “mountains” and “hiking”
  • In Los Angeles, “mountains” means dusty, barren, crowded hillsides with a view of something that might be pretty if there wasn’t so much smog in the way.  “Hiking” means walking up said hillside along a mild incline and taking a selfie at the top, the whole trip taking a total of 2 hours at most.
  • True, there are more reasonable mountains close enough to Los Angeles that I will talk about them here.  But, like the rest of LA, these too are run down and covered in garbage.
  • For those of you who are confused, this is what real mountains look like:  Click here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
• sports
  • Los Angeles is a terrible sports town.
• being better than everyone else because you live in a city that “matters”
  • OK, maybe this one should have been on the “pro” list
• palm trees
  • As the current and eternal drought testifies, Los Angeles is in a naturally arid region.  So does it make sense to plant a bunch of non-native trees that require lots of water?  Maybe it does in LA logic, where perhaps the goal is to have plants as superficial as everything else.
• the hollywood sign
  • Speaking of superficial, here we have the ultimate symbol of LA: a sign that is contrived, useless, and for some reason has everyone obsessed with it.

 

So to recap, except for “culture,” literally everything people think is good about living in LA either sucks or is better-enjoyed by leaving LA.  California on the whole has a lot to offer, but LA stinks.

 

With that, now we’re into the meat.

Cons

• douchebags
  • LA is full of normal dudes but we also happen to have a higher share of douches than the rest of the country.

(whoops, those are just run-of-the-mill Dodger fans… actually… never mind)

• women
  • A well-known fact about LA life is that whatever party or gathering you are at, if you are talking to a girl the amount of times she will look over your shoulder for a “better option” while pretending to listen to you is inversely proportional to 1) your looks, 2) your social status, 3) your money.  Yes, this is true everywhere, but it’s especially true here.
    • BTW, it works the same when it’s the other way around.  But since I’m not (always) flirting with guys, I don’t notice (as much).
  • Just look at the numbers and you know it sucks.  Los Angeles has one of the worst single man to woman ratios of any large city.  Here’s a map of places you should live instead.
• overcrowding
  • More crowded than New York City in many parts.  But we live out west where there’s so much space, right?
• infrastructure
  • Are water mains supposed to do this?

• potholes
  • It used to blow my mind that there could be so many nice cars in a city so full of shit roads.  Like, didn’t the rich owners care that their cars are getting destroyed in the city of potholes?  Guess not. *

• bums

• graffiti
  • Look how they have to put barbed wire over the damn freeway signs to keep them from getting tagged.  Also, a nice shot of a private business having to do extra cleaning work just for the privilege of operating in this area (to add to the high cost of running a business due to the regulations, bureaucracy, and taxes).

• garbage and litter
  • Internal City Report: Los Angeles is Full of Trash (and the garbage is a problem, too.  Ziiiiing!)
• water
  • What water the city does have is terrible.  This reddit guy had it right regarding the tap water: you just get used to the “iridescent glow.”  Don’t worry, though, because it will all be gone in a year.  Wait, that story was written almost a year ago?  Son of a bitch.
    • Coming from the Pacific Northwest, the land of green, water, fertility… life, really, it boggles my mind that this many useless morons have moved to an arid region and decided it wasn’t arid but in fact a paradise.
• corrupt politics
  • Surprise, surprise.  A billion-dollar project to help all the widely-regarded-as-horrible LA Unified schools by giving each child an iPad was full of waste and probably fraud.
  • Los Angeles is 88 Cities, Many of Them Corrupt
• cost of living
  • Hmm, let me count the ways.  No one can afford a house and so the ones who want one are leaving.  This leaves LA with an interesting dynamic in which only the very rich are the new homeowners who maybe actually care about the city and the rest of the people are renters who are more likely to be apathetic (like me) towards anything that might improve the state of this place.
  • Instead of investing in houses, we invest in cars.  Don’t worry, though, there’s plenty of room for home improvements.  We pay an extra 2 1/2 g’s each year towards these wheeled money pits just because we live in Los Angeles.
  • Rapid fire: #8 in tax burden, #1 in highest poverty rates for a big city, and #8 nationwide in overall cost of living.  Now I’m sad.
• hit-and-run accidents from all the godless citizens who drive here
  • 48% of L.A. Crashes Are Hit-and-Runs
  • Don’t worry, a new system that costs the city more money will totally fix this.  Spoiler alert: the only fix is firebombing the entire valley.
•  traffic
  • No need for lots of stats here, everyone knows this: shitty roads, too many cars, and insufficient efforts from our rulers to fix it.
  • It’s also most of the reason we’re #7 on the dirtiest cities list.
    • Here’s another list of dirty-air cities with Long Beach and several other LA-area cities near the top.
•  parking
  • What’s better than having zero available parking in a city known for cars?  Having a government that uses gibberish laws to fund itself and screw the tax payers out of money for parking on the roads they pay for.  Plus, there’s a dickhead mayor who acts like he cares about the people and then does nothing to lower fees which fall disproportionately on poor people.
• Lastly–and this is a minor complaint–these assholes are infuriating.  A restaurant that sells water.  No jokes necessary here because all of us are the joke.

 

I once thought of starting an Instagram account named, “LosAngelesOrTijuana” in which I would post pictures from news stories or a dumpy end of town or whatever and then play a game.  People would guess which city it was: one of the “coolest” cities in the most powerful nation in the world or a run-down border city in some random Third World country.  The winners would be everyone who didn’t live in either of these places and the losers are me and my depression.

I think the solution to all these problems with Los Angeles is something that really involves normal people.  A grassroots solution, if you will.  Something that would torch this place all the way down to the grass and its roots.

This is why when Day After Tomorrow came out, I’m pretty sure everyone in the theater saw the scene where LA gets destroyed by tornadoes and just went, “Ha. Good.”

 

 

 

* That’s because all the nice cars are owned by 3 types of people: 1) transplants who don’t plan on staying long term and thus don’t care, 2) poor people who “invest” in a car instead of a house because if you’re an American you better be overextending yourself and be in debt to some bank or you’re not doing it right, and 3) rich people who don’t care because they sell their really nice cars after a couple years to the first 2 groups and then buy a new one.