Quote:
Originally Posted by stevenc
Be prepared to be disappointed. LA is mostly aweful. Homeless and tent cities everywhere. Traffic everywhere.
There are plenty of nice places but you are going to be shocked what 90% of LA looks like.
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The pedestal is brittle with age.
The problem with LA is how utterly huge, spread out, and crowded it is. Unfortunately that means that the population is a microcosm of the socio-economic diversity of our country. That means there are more poor people than wealthy, and both ends of the extreme spectrum are ever present on a county scale. While it's easy to criticize the state of affairs to the people or the government or the politics, realize that the the same criticism should be made of the entire country, where the gap between the classes are even more separated, both socio-economically and physically. Our neighboring cities here in California might categorize LA's problems collectively shared by both Bel Air and Inglewood for example, yet on the federal level the responsibility is shared by both San Francisco and Los Angeles with in the state of California, and on yet a bigger global scale: California's problems are shared with Texas under the flag of the USA. Hence in the realm of international politics, it is not California or New York responsible for the foreign policy of the US, but US itself.
And yet on a bigger scale, while we are accustomed to see US problems separated from China's problems: one day we will see how small minded we once were when we didn't realize that the US problems are also China's problems: It is a global problem separated by imaginary lines on a piece of paper. Imaginary lines keep us isolated and divided and those lines create the luxury of a dismissal of accountability. We are all connected: if one country can profit off the cheap labor off another then that responsibility is carried beyond borders.
Then there is geographic distribution of supply and resources: Keep in mind where Houston's income comes from: energy. Who's buying it? Economics 101: the consumer-supplier reliance is a two way street. Your profit depends on the existence and needs of others. So not only is your success built upon the relationship you have with others, but on the complications of economic diversity itself. Their need creates opportunity and exploitation both fair and unfair. Thus Bel Air and Inglewood's are linked, LA's and Houston are linked. California's and the US's are linked and the US's and China's are linked. We're all on the same rock.