The disappearance of the real world

Yesterday it was 72 degrees and sunny. T-shirt weather. As I worked outside, I remembered a reader's recent charge that I am enjoying a vacation of sorts, and while that was not true, I must admit that yesterday's balmy weather (in contrast to the coldness and dampness which characterized most of this trip) generated something akin to a vacation-like feeling which was wholly inappropriate, and downright disruptive of the Puritan work ethic which has haunted me all my life with its constant lurking. This disruptive sensation was aggravated by the fact that I am in Berkeley, California, a place arguably not even in the real world. (And where John McCain received 3-4% of the vote.)

On top of that, I hear that back at home in Ann Arbor, the temperatures are now in the single digits or lower!

What's a transplanted Californian to do? More and more of them seem to be retransplanting themselves:

The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period -- more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.

The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost just over 126,000 residents.

California's loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state's population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.

A losing streak that long hasn't happened in California since the recession of the early 1990s, when departures outstripped arrivals from other states by 362,000 in 1994 alone.

In part because of the boom in population in other Western states, California could lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

It doesn't help much that the statist busybodies who run things are regulating normal life out of existence; just last week a plumbing supplier told me that hot water heater prices are going way up in a couple of months because of new "green" anti-nitrogen technology (although I see that the new rules are spreading eastward.) I've kvetched about the mandatory pet neutering movement, mandatory CFL lightbulbs, and more, but I wonder whether moving to flee statist regulation is a workable long-term solution.

Pretty soon no one will be living in the real world.

posted by Eric on 01.13.09 at 11:23 AM





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