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.

  • @finitebanjo
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    31 hour ago

    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%.

  • @buddascrayon
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    52 hours ago

    Can we talk about the fact that Wyoming shouldn’t even be a state based on their miniscule population.

  • @[email protected]
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    185 hours ago

    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

    • @[email protected]
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      144 minutes ago

      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.

    • @Telodzrum
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      72 hours ago

      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.

      • @PM_Your_Nudes_Please
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        148 minutes ago

        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.

      • @finitebanjo
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        21 hour ago

        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.

        • @blazeknave
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          147 minutes ago

          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

          • @finitebanjo
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            034 minutes ago

            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.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 hours ago

    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!

    • @affiliate
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      66 hours ago

      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.

    • Amon
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      117 hours ago

      Holy hell the urban sprawl is insane

      Just grid for hundreds of miles around

    • @[email protected]
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      109 hours ago

      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.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      -97 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        97 hours ago

        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 suck

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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          57 hours ago

          Being 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 hours ago

            No one said they were and no one disagrees with this. What’s your point? He literally said the trains between cities are good and the buses suck.

            • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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              -17 hours ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                341 minutes ago

                Building your city so that you can’t survive without a car is what a city having a car addiction means.

              • Max
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                42 hours ago

                I think the idea is that the larger society/city/culture is addicted, not the individual people

      • @[email protected]
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        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.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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          37 hours ago

          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.

  • Nougat
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    11112 hours ago

    It sure is a good thing that land elects presidents.

    • @[email protected]
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      67 hours ago

      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.

  • @raspberriesareyummy
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    -203 hours ago

    Los Angeles County has a population of approximately 9.66 million residents, making it the most populous county in the United States.

    yawn No one cares. Especially Europe no longer cares about news from the divided states of southern northern america.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 hours ago

      Here here! Fuck knows I don’t give two shits about Europe’s problems, yet for some reason, on an international forum, I keep hearing about it.

    • @GrammarPolice
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      21 hour ago

      Sure looks like you care enough to make a comment complaining about it

  • scops
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    89 hours ago

    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.

  • @dance_ninja
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    119 hours ago

    It’s one of the 33 megacities in the world, so it makes sense.

  • @vivavideri
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    58 hours ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    610 hours ago

    is something you have to experience to truly understand.

    I’m sorry I’m too European-public-transport to even want to understand, darling

    • Flying SquidOP
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      710 hours ago

      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)…

      • @joostjakob
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        26 hours ago

        The MJT looks like it is worth making a huge detour for

        • Flying SquidOP
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          13 hours ago

          Absolutely. It is one of the best things in L.A., or at least was when I lived there.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 minutes ago

      You’re right by most accounts, but there’s the whole fire thing that makes this insensitive.

    • Flying SquidOP
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      22 hours ago

      There are a lot of reasons to complain about L.A., but acting like Hollywood and L.A. are equivalents and Hollywood isn’t just a really shitty part of L.A. with a lot of tourists (so of course a lot of panhandlers will be there) is like acting like all of Las Vegas is just The Strip.

      Most of L.A. is not Hollywood. I lived in the Valley and you didn’t see what you’re seeing in that photo. The places you will see a huge number of homeless in L.A. are Hollywood, for the reason I already stated, Downtown because Skid Row is long-established and hospitals actually dump people there when they discharge them (when I lived in L.A., they dumped someone’s grandmother with advanced dementia there in a hospital gown) and Santa Monica and Venice on the beach because of both the tourists and the fact that sleeping on sand is a hell of a lot more comfortable than sleeping on concrete.

      Like I said, L.A. has a lot of problems, but calling L.A. a miserable dump based just on Hollywood is silly. Don’t base your opinion on a city on where the tourists go, it’s always going to be one of the worst parts of town.

      I lived most of my time in L.A. in North Hollywood. It has nothing to do with Hollywood proper. It’s in the Valley and there’s a mountain range between it and Hollywood. It was never like that when I lived there as it was gentrifying, and now it’s a hip arts district that you would have no real reason to see if you were a tourist.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 hours ago

        Homeless: serious problem, been a problem. Heartless evil the way they’re treated now.

        Water supply: serious problem, been a problem. Los Angeles is the highest consumer of electricity in California, mainly because the energy is spent on treating and transporting water. Highly inefficient.

        Air pollution: serious problem, been a problem. Closely tied to…

        Traffic congestion: serious problem, been a problem.

        There has been major improvement in drug deaths. Actually quite good numbers there.

        • Flying SquidOP
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          12 hours ago

          Okay, but your characterization as L.A. being full of panhandlers because of a photo of a bunch of people panhandling in a tourist area was not exactly an honest view of the city.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 hours ago

            I thought the photo was impactful, with the stars. It’s similar to a photo that first got me looking at LA and some of it’s problems.

            I know it’s a big city. But the leadership seems so inept.