We've all got our charmers.

The thing to keep in mind about California is that it's got the highest state income tax rate and higher sales and property taxes than Washington state, which has zero state income tax, because the whole of California's economy is basically 13.3% grift. It is literally a property scam the size of Chile in which economics is entirely tilted towards the production of new land tracts for existing grifters to sell to new grifters so that they may sell them to new grifters and so on. This is the principle reason you always hear about the crisis of forest fires in California: never mind the fact that prehistoric California burned between 5 and 19 million acres per year (compared to 4m this year, the worst year on record). The real issue is California is full of dream homes and dream property that isn't on fire right now so someone is scamming someone else to make up the money they got scammed out of three years ago. It's a 40 million person Ponzi scheme with earthquakes and a historical predilection for underwater farmland.

I didn't get Pompeii until living in California. It's like "why would you live on the side of an active volcano" and the answer is "'cuz we get bitchin' wine grapes and it's not erupting right now, d00d, chillax". Joan Didion wrote an essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem basically saying "yeah, we all know we're crazy, we all know the fires could come any minute, yeah we all know this is a shitty and stupid place to build a life, stop making us think about it because no we haven't made our peace with it but this is what we're doing so leave us alone."