There's a shitty part of California that runs from SoCal upward through the Central Valley toward the Bay Area. While the lattermost seems nicer the former parts are just the same with less surveillance tech and with the masks off.

Just one example: the state made sale of new internal combustion cars illegal at a certain point in the future, at a time when the electrical grid is unreliable.

This is a way of trying to use government power to fight global warming.

But it hurts people. It’s a state where the general philosophy of “sacrifice poor people to save the planet” is being enacted in government policy.

Antennas

You're selling sexism
You're selling racism
You're selling anything you get your fucking hands on
An understanding, you got a plan in a
Presentation to advertisers who demand it
When you plan that
Your antennas are pointed in the right direction
You make a deal in any situation
So with no evacuation
Let California fall into the fucking ocean
Oh they talk to ya, oh you're the town man
High profile Hollywood scum-bag
It's a done deal, signed and sealed
Deal makers making it all happen
When you plan that
Your antennas are pointed in the right direction
You make a dead in any situation
So with no evacuation
Let California fall into the fucking ocean
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!
Let California fall into the fucking ocean!!!

-Tim Armstrong/Rancid

I loved California. I just couldn't afford it anymore.

Also, their power grid has to be the only one worse than Texas. My power was ALWAYS going out there. Last time I visited my parents there, their power was out for 3 of the 7 days I was there.

California is disliked by other US states for the same reason other countries might not like the US. It gets a disproportionate level of exposure and then you go there and it becomes a "don't meet your heroes" type of situation.

I think California is an okay place, but there are several things that annoy me about it, and here are some:

The houseless problem seems extremely poorly managed. I lived in NYC for six years and have visited California a few times. From my experiences, both SF and LA appear to have much larger populations living outdoors (I checked and this is true, 75% of LA’s population vs 6% in NYC, and the cities are comparable in both population and houseless population). Additionally, I’ve had more issues interacting with houseless people in CA than in NYC despite having lived in Manhattan many times longer than I’ve spent in CA. My guess is this is due to worse services/mental health services in CA. I would frequently buy food or coffee for houseless individuals in NYC and never had an issue. I once gave a couple of dollars to someone CA for bus money. They yelled at me because they needed a couple more for the bus. Another time I was followed for several blocks.

California as a state and population seems to be at least as much bluster as action. I don’t want to detract from some real actions, like car electrification requirements, but for example, prop 65, the “known to the state of California to cause cancer” labels. A) California seems to “know” many things that science does not. B) no one pays any attention to these labels, but they sure cost a lot to produce C) if anything, this will cause people to ignore future warnings for real things or even current ones like on cigarettes.

As a longtime resident of Hawaii, this one just annoys me. California claimed it was the first state to plastic bags. This is false; As of May 11, 2014, they were banned across Hawaii. https://www.surfrider.org/news/hawaii-becomes-the-first-state-in-the-u.s.-to-ban-plastic-bags. This did not stop California from claiming the victory when a law was signed later that year that didn’t go into effect until July 2015. https://www.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2014/09/30/news18742/index.html. California doesn’t just not know what causes cancer, they don’t know how to use google despite it being from their state. I suppose you could argue semantically that Hawaii’s ban was not statewide, as it was technically four bans, one in each of the counties, but that’s splitting hairs.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?

Consider the possibility that the "hate" is not an opinion being reached in good faith.

What part of CA did you move to? I moved here a few years ago and love it. The weather is great (depending on where you live of course - coast is always temperate) and I've traveled to most of the regions in the state and they all have something unique and amazing to offer.

The fact that I don't fear my personal rights getting stripped T the federal level as much is because California does so much in the way of protecting and bettering our lives here.

You won't find any Aussies remotely worried about the Gun laws by the way

I think one reason is the news portrayal like others mentioned—though this often goes two-ways—ask a native Californian what they think the South or Midwest are like and you’ll often get some crazy off base responses.

I think another big piece is that CA policies have a disproportionately large impact on everyone else’s policies (they share this characteristic with NY to some extent). CA has the 3rd largest economy in the world and therefore companies often have to adhere to CA policies in order to keep from losing an extremely significant market share. For example, CA committing to no more gas cars by X date immediately made gas vehicles an obsolete product for the manufacturers’ bottom line.

Instead of helping Britney Spears, guardianships increased without a fiduciary duty lawyer for "gravely disabled" or predicted to get worse. Homeless people need shelter, not chemical restraint.