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Going California here, for a lot of reasons. It is truly its own "thing", with a GDP of 3.4T (larger than the UK), and natural beauty that can stand up to most any Country in the World. From wine country, to white sand beaches, to cliffs over the pacific, to the mountains and lakes north.
Despite a preference for NYC, SF/LA/SD/SJ are no slouches, and I'd take that combination over NYC/Buffalo/Rochester/Albany on the aggregate.
First place: California. New York gets a lot of love, largely on the strength of its namesake city. When I was in my 20s, I absolutely loved New York (the city). I never lived there, but I visited often. But now that I'm a middle-aged family-man suburbanite, the appeal of the Big Apple has largely worn off. All I see now are the negatives: too loud, too crowded, too dangerous, too dirty, too expensive. To be sure, California's largest cities share some of these negatives, with some added ones all their own (such as aggressive crazy homeless people). But as an entire state, California just has so much to offer that, in the aggregate, it tops New York for me.
Third place: Hawaii. I used to like this state, and also Colorado, so much that I applied for jobs in both places. But with the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad I didn't get offered either of those positions. Hawaii is not only crazy expensive, it's just too isolated. I like being able to take road trips, and that just wouldn't work in Hawaii. However, the natural scenery is just so amazing (and the pothead culture infesting Colorado is so off-putting) that I still rank it the higher of these two.
California. Everyone keeps saying there’s no place like NYC in the country. There’s no place like San Francisco and Los Angeles either. Death Valley, Catalina, Redwoods, Mt Shasta, Monterey, Yosemite, Tahoe….the geographic diversity alone places CA in first place. California also feeds and entertains us (New York entertains us too of course). California’s GDP is more than double that of New York State’s.
Colorado. I personally think it’s overrated but it is undeniably beautiful and I’d live 100 lives there before a single life in one of the most isolated places on earth.
Gotta barely go with New York here. NYC is one of the best cities in the world, and the best in the US! Upstate NY and Long Island are under-rated. California geography is stunning, but NYC beats it overall.
Third Place Match:
Colorado vs Hawaii
Easily Hawaii, for me. Hawaii has 3 of my favorite places on earth with Oahu, Maui and Kauai.
Why is this round going so much slower? Where are all the voters?
You lost all the New Englanders when Maine got knocked out in the Round of 8.
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