While I agree that the other poster was being a bit dramatic, it's no stretch to say that California performs objectively poorer in a number of areas that people tend to pay attention to. Just take one crime - the murder rates in California are 4.3 per 100,000 and only 0.8 in Australia.

I can see why some people could see a 450% increase in the likelihood of being murdered as a comparitive warzone.

Market St in SF is what most Australians see when attending conferences. The homelessness, human waste, open drug use, and visibly serious mental illness is pretty confronting for anyone not used to it, and that's at daytime - it gets significantly scarier at night if you make the mistake of walking back to your hotel. I've never understood why all the hotels international guests stay in are in by far the worst neighborhood.

> Where exactly is this war zone in California...?

No idea how universal these things are in all of California, but nearly every Australian that visits LA and a few other areas come back with stories about hearing gunshots from the hotel, accidentally ending up in a seedy/crime ridden part of town or something similar. This is very alien to us and more in line with what we'd see on the news from Somalia. Statistics like homicide rates and gun crime show there's at least some truth it.

We're also a fairly egalitarian society, so much more likely to judge other nations on how well off the poorest are and not the richest.

People in San Francisco will threaten you with violence just for wearing a nice-looking jacket. Nothing about that is healthy.

I lived near 5th and Market and walked to a tech company I love very much near Giants Stadium. This is a short walk. One place I regularly walked by was the site of a random slaying by a person who had been released from prison after being arrested for randomly assaulting people in the same place years before.

The poster was being hyperbolic. I love California, but as on outsider I didn’t have the sense of which areas were or weren’t dangerous, and to be honest just couldn’t read it, and got myself into dangerous situations. That would never happen in Australia because I can read people and places in ways, and it surprises me that this is true, that I seemed to be culturally blind to in the US. I’m still confused about Compton, to my eyes it read as an easy going middle class neighborhood, is it? - was Dre exaggerating all this time? . In both LA and Oakland (where I mostly lived) there were nights where there was extended gunfire. To be honest this happens in Australia too, but I assume that it’s people out hunting. Oh hang on - I take that back the Proudlock brothers used to shoot each other with air rifles.

sssshhhhhh