Damn. Because California has been rug pulled. The underground weed economy was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in black market revenue. That money's now gone to Oklahoma because the legal cannabis laws are more favorable there, leaving a absolutely gaping hole in California's economy that can't be replaced by growing alternative crops like saffron, or, in keeping with the illegal theme, poppies/heroin or coca/cocaine. Because it was illegal before legalization, there are scant few stats on just how large it was, but where'd growers used to get $4,000/lb, they're now getting $400/lb. (I have this conspiracy theory level theory, in that San Francisco used to be home to illegal grow ops which forced pg&e to upgrade transformers and substations to support pre-led grow lights, which were massively power hungry. since that power is now no longer needed because those grow ops are no longer viable thanks to legalization, but the upgraded substations remain, the rise of electric cars isn't quite the emergency it should be.)

So much of the arts and Burning Man and entire communities in the Emerald Triangle were propped up by that money, and it's gone.

Time will tell how things go for California. I remain hopeful, but there's just no real data about the black market thanks to its very nature, so it's hard to know just how large that gaping hole is.

That’s fascinating. I always figured that real estate hyperinflation just drove all the arts and cool counterculture stuff away.

The upper Midwest had a lot of culture too. Disco (Chicago was a big place for that), Motown (named after Detroit), techno (also Detroit), industrial (Cleveland / Akron), and house music (Chicago and Detroit) all either came from or had large contributions from what is now called the rust belt.

That whole region used to be solidly Democratic. It drifted a bit R in the 90s and 2000s until Trump flipped it with one word: tariffs. Another quote I remember from a guy in Michigan in 2016: "when Trump started talking about trade... I'd die for this man. I don't care what else he does."

Different people have different reasons for supporting a politician, but for these people it's... I'm not even sure it's hope at this point. For some of them it's revenge. They feel lied to and betrayed.

I guess that's part pretty different from the old Cali weed industry. Nobody promised them anything. For these people the Democrats told them NAFTA would bring jobs.

I lived in Southern California for 8 years and I'd say that Orange County and parts of LA are at least as religious as Southwest Ohio where I now live, maybe more.

It's a different kind of religion, a different vibe, but there's not less of it. There's also a ton of new agey stuff in California that is no more rational or secular than old school religion, just different.

Boston may legitimately be less religious and less superstitious, but I'd be surprised if it was by a lot. Again, the religion is just different. There's a lot of Judaism, mainline Protestantism, and Catholicism up there vs. evangelical Christian and new agey stuff elsewhere.

So it's an issue of fundamentalism, maybe. Those areas like LA and Boston might be as religious in many ways as rust/bible belt places, depending on the metric, but they fundamentally are not confusing a day old zygote with a developed fetus, insisting the earth is literally 6000 years old and dismissing the idea we came from 'monkeys', they don't have issues with homosexualty to the same extent and maybe even belong to a church that is fine with it, etc etc.