People who have never been to L.A. really have no idea how insanely huge it is. Driving to my apartment from the start of city (before you even get to L.A. county) and having the city just keep going and going and going for two hours and not because of traffic jams is something you have to experience to truly understand.
It sure is a good thing that land elects presidents.
Don’t forget Senators too!
How else would the slave-owning states have the slavery powers they so needed?!?
Land electing presidents is bad, but Senator’s have a purpose. The better solution for the legislative house is uncapping the House so places like California are properly represented
It’s also a good thing those shitty presidential candidates come from major population states too. Trump has never lived Nebraska and Harris didn’t grow up in northern Minnesota.They both come from states where the real power and money reside.
LA seems to have so much amazing culture but it is drowning in an addiction to cars perhaps worse than almost any other US city and it totally turns me off from going. edit, I didn’t mean this as a dig at the average person in LA I literally mean the city itself
I have flown over the endless sprawl and traffic jams on approach to LAX and like vomits in trash can nope. It looks like 1000% the kind of city where it takes at least an hour to get somewhere no matter how close on paper it is.
It is a phenomena of a place, and easily creates and does more to make the world better than all of those rural conservative states combined I just wish it wasn’t a car hellscape so I actually desired to visit.
It seems like LA has been making serious progress on becoming more walkable, so I am excited to see where it goes though!
Holy hell the urban sprawl is insane
Just grid for hundreds of miles around
It’s nothing specific to LA, it’s what any city with that population and a car centered infrastructure turns into.
I know that’s probably what you meant, just wanted to add a bit o’ clarity.
as an expert on the topic of los angeles (i spent 3 days there, many years ago), i can confirm that it is exactly the kind of city where every drive takes 1 hour. if you have to get on the highway to go somewhere, you better cancel your plans for the evening because your new plan is to sit in traffic forever.
but it is drowning in an addiction to cars
That’s like saying people are addicted to food and water. There is no significant effective public transportation in Los Angeles. You have a a car, or you suffer immensely. It’s not a desire, it’s a necessity.
that’s exactly why it’s addicted to cars, correct….
there is a decent light rail system connected all the cities in socal, but the buses suckBeing able to travel from one city to another doesn’t mean anything if you’re not able to get to where you need to go within that city. These are not small, walkable cities.
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The phrasing is what bothers me. Saying they have an addiction makes it sound like they’re abusing something they don’t need, when in fact you do need a car if you’re going to live in Los Angeles. It’s like comparing food to cocaine, they’re not equivalent.
Building your city so that you can’t survive without a car is what a city having a car addiction means.
I think the idea is that the larger society/city/culture is addicted, not the individual people
You’re being shat on for something SO FAR beyond your control and they’re just not understanding… well they understand, but they’re disingenuous in their arguments.
if you repeat that enough maybe one day you’ll even believe it yourself
I understand that reaction but I didn’t mean to blame this on a mass addiction of the average person to cars nor did I intend a tone that implied any high horse from which I was trying to beat up on some cultural aspect of the humans who live there.
When I said “LA” is addicted to cars I literally meant the city in all its infrastructure, systems, and narratives allowed or not allowed to be repeated and canonized about the past, present and future by the rich who actually have a say on the trajectory of the city…
Believe me in my head I am chillin with Doc Sportello having a blast with how many amazing different kinds of humans LA contains. I didn’t mean shade at the average person who live there only that LA exemplifies in many ways the tragedy of american car centric urban design because of the cities incredible vibrance and ability to imagine alternate futures.
Right on. Thanks for the response. Commuting is somewhat of a nightmare down there. It would be a much better place to live if they had effective public transportation. I used to live down there and I would spend 3 hours in my car commuting to and from work every day. It fucking sucked! Especially since my car was an old junker with no climate control, and no stereo. Eventually I got an old boom box and put it on my passenger seat to try to maintain some sanity.
Taking the idea further, it is notable that the entire population of California is smaller than that of Tokyo.
Tokyo is also unfathomable large, but the most astonishing thing is the amount of people. Tokyo has about 10 times the population of L.A. on an area of the same size. Of course there’s traffic jams too, but not as bad as in L.A., because the metro system is a lot more efficient than the highways. During rush hour each train carrying thousands of people depart from each station every 2-3 minutes. You have to see it to believe it.
I was in Tokio last year and it’s really amazing. I have never seen such perfect efficiency and punctuality, and I’m German! A huge factor though is that all the people follow the rules and are mindful of everybody else. Nobody standing in the way, nobody pushing or shoving other people. Also, despite being a mindboggingly huge metropolis, there seem to be hardly any traffic jams. The world could learn a lot from Japan concerning transport.
One of the big reasons we can’t have nice things in the US. High speed rail, for instance. There’s just plain old NIMBY, to start. Concern over property values. Then eminent domain. Then the lawyers drag it through courts over whatever argument because billable hours. We haven’t even looked at what expensive safeguards are necessary because every idiot will try to get around the rail crossing restrictions or do shit to the tracks thanks to “me first” and a complete lack of social responsibility like Japan displays in this context. Then every fool politician will try to starve it of funds because good public transportation costs money, and we can’t have evil taxes happening when you should buy a car or pay for an airline ticket. Hundreds of millions spent and we can’t even get started thanks to people just placing their wallets and special interests first.
Have no fear, Elon Musk will solve traffic with his magical tunnels
There is no reason to push and shove and stand in front of the door to get in before letting people out if there is a train every 3 min. Seen the same in Singapore. You arrive at the station, see your train is already there but you dont care. You dont run you dont rush because it doesn’t matter. You just take the next one
I’ve had the same experience in Copenhagen. Their metro is fully automated, and the schedule is published as “one train every x minutes during rush hour, every y minutes otherwise”, which is very nice. You just turn up at the station knowing you’ll only have to wait that many minutes. The automation takes it to the next level as well, because the trains run on this schedule through the night.
i mean this is how most public transport is in any vaguely populous area in europe, only for rural lines is it standard to actually have to look at the schedule.
Even though Tokio is absolutely massive, it’s just a nice place to be. Not loud or overly crowded (apart from the tourist spots). Its clean and you feel safe. You also don’t feel like you’ll get scammed on every corner
If you come to Taiwan, we are exactly the same.
Paris is quite insane too, smaller but with an insane number of inhabitants per square km. Their metro isn’t as clean but ut shuffles people around for sure, 650.000 passenger per day for metro number 13 for example. Or so it was when I lived there.
Okay, but to be fair, metro 13 is not a good experience.
Ha ha no you are right about that!
LA does not have a bigger population than Georgia, and probably not Michigan and a few others. Map is bs.
Still, a shitload of people in trouble rn
California, Texas, Florida , New York , Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio , Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan are the ten states that aren’t less populated than LA county, to save anyone else who’s curious from needing to look it up.
Yeah it looks like NJ makes it in by the skin of its teeth and over that the top 10 most populous states all have more people in them than LA County — of which Michigan is one.
2 senators each.
I mean that’s why we also have representatives that match the population.
Unfortunately no because in 1929 the House of Representatives got capped at 435. For example, a Congressman from California represented
494,709 people while one from New Hampshire represented 3,448 people in the year 2020.Those must have been state congress numbers or something, idk, real numbers would be 750k cali and 700k NH, probably better examples out there for large differences.Edit: these numbers are not for federal congressmen, clearly. Correction made.
Maybe time for a Port of Oakland tea party but with… Oh wait… we don’t need imports from the rest of the country and should just stop paying taxes without representation or something
I’m not an advocate of secession under normal circuimstances, what with the looming threat of WWIII if ever the power scale tipped against the USA, but it’s especially a bad idea when California is covered in fire.
Yeah. I just hate taxes and believe my state is an economic powerhouse. Not in favor of civil war
NH only has 2 congresspeople, so one per 700,000
Yeah I must have used a bad source, might have been state congress numbers.
Every state still gets at least one. Even if the population is 584,000
Even that is capped though, so the smaller states are still vastly overrepresented. Living in LA means your vote is only represented at ~1/100th as much as the least populated areas. Because even the least populated areas still get a representative, but the populated areas are capped on how many they can have.
But the power differential between large population states and small population states matters a lot. Ain’t much national news coverage of Vermont’s or North Dakota’s senators or representatives. But a California, Texas, New York, politician can get major news reporter’s ears in a heartbeat. Low population density state politicians either need some unique point to make or be batshit crazy to garner attention. And when was the last time a viable presidential candidate came from one of those low population states? Let alone actually achieved office? On the national stage, no one cares much about what happens in Montana or Minnesota.
While I agree that California needs more members in the House, there is also a limit to just how much the House can expand before the whole thing becomes so unwieldy that it stops to function at all. Perhaps those large population states should be broken up into smaller population states to make a more manageable system of representation. But, I suspect California’s lack of representation per person will be be solved by the untenable living conditions they have created for themselves soon enough.
Not much coverage of Vermont’s senators? Did you miss all the Bernie Sanders coverage even when he’s not running for president?
Well, there’s one. But just one. And it can be argued that Bernie, due to being a failed presidential candidate, has earned some national notoriety thanks to Hilary Clinton.
How much national coverage does the senator’s from Nebraska and South Dakota get? Or Montana? Anybody heard from Oklahoma lately? Does anyone care what happens those states?
Even worse is the electoral college distribution among those populations. And the winner-take-all nature of our presidential elections
It’s one of the 33 megacities in the world, so it makes sense.
Which population numbers are you using for this graph? Census data for 2020 has LA county at 10.01 million and NC and Georgia at 10.45 and 10.73 million respectively. (for the second link, click on the Table 1 PDF. I didn’t want to link to a PDF directly). 2023 numbers seem to have LA county trending down while those states are trending up.
It’s still a staggering visual to compare population densities. I just thought the claim was a bit suspect regarding my state.
Map is missing a few based on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
Maybe it was based off the 2020 census where it had a higher population, but even then it had less than Michigan, so idk where this is coming from.
Can we talk about the fact that Wyoming shouldn’t even be a state based on their miniscule population.
If you put everyone in wyoming in the same place they wouldn’t even qualify as the second largest city in sweden lmao
In a global warming world it’ll be prime real estate in a couple of generations though
[slaps car] “this thing will hold so many… climate refugees!”
Except for the whole lack of water problem they’ve got.
If the Pacific gets warmer, it will eventually increase rainfall coming into the US west. Probably around the same time Wyoming becomes prime real estate.
Not a meteorologist but my understanding of the climate there, is that it is desert or close to it because of the topology. Very very windy where it isn’t mountains.
And because I cannot try and know, this indicates it’s going in the wrong direction.
Having “interacted” with people there, they don’t deserve to be a state.
You know, this would be much more accurately captioned as a map of how a president could win with as little of the popular vote as possible. Lowest possible score is 21%.
is something you have to experience to truly understand.
I’m sorry I’m too European-public-transport to even want to understand, darling
I don’t blame you for that. I would also never go to L.A. as a tourist unless I knew someone to actually show me around the city and know where to take me.
Otherwise you think that it’s worth doing things like walking down Hollywood Boulevard and seeing the Chinese Theater and it really isn’t unless you actually plan to go watch a movie there. And even then, there’s better options.
(That said, the only time I went, I got invited to the Aliens vs. Predator premiere and we ate really potent cannabis brownies beforehand and I was so high I barely remember anything about that movie, so I could be wrong and it could be the best theater in the city. But I vaguely remember it as kind of unimpressive.)
But yeah, unless you are going to a specific place in a touristy part of town, just don’t ever go there. And find someone who can tell you where the places that are worth going to are, like the beaches that are not full of idiot tourists and the museums that would actually be worth your time (I miss the Museum of Jurassic Technology so much)…
The MJT looks like it is worth making a huge detour for
Absolutely. It is one of the best things in L.A., or at least was when I lived there.
NC has a higher pop than LA county.
Wake county (NC) has a higher pop than MT.I lived near Orange for a while. The way the cities and towns have 0 gaps between them was nuts to me. It’s just… you cross the street.
In MT you have 2 lane roads with several miles in between. The county I’m in now doesn’t touch the interstate. Wild.
Also means the fires out here, as terrifying as they are to my hurricane-seasoned ass, are more likely to take out stuff in the middle of nowhere and a handful of houses, not entire swaths of suburbia.
rare ohio victory
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New York is grey… Are you looking at the wrong state?
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My state is not there. Is this all states or just some of them?
I don’t see any missing states. Maybe I’m mistaken but I do believe I see 50 states
There are states in other countries.
It’s pretty obvious what people mean when they are referring to the states. When referring to states that are not the United States of America, we usually use the word country. Context provided indicates we are specifically talking about the USA in this post. Thank you for playing the smart ass game
I’m not talking nation states, either. Other countries are sometimes make up of states and territories and sometimes provenances.
I live in the state of Victoria. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(state)
The title is “states with”. Surely it should say “US states” if it just covers Mexican America.
The State of Depression is not on there 🤷♂️
