YAY! Libertarian wank!
raincloud314 is in desperate straits. Could libertarianism please, please, please help her out? She needs to know if the police have a special universal key to break into her house in order to search it without a warrant. Of course, the details of the situation are unimportant.
propopdan diminishes the seriousness of the situation when he fills her in on the secret tunnel system ( Read more... )
propopdan diminishes the seriousness of the situation when he fills her in on the secret tunnel system ( Read more... )
Seattle is overpriced compared to the salary averages here, but it's not as bad as, say, Boston or San Francisco. The housing market is kind of insane and likely to keep getting worse, though people keep muttering that the bubble's got to burst sometime (of course, they've been saying that for 18 years).
The paranoid liberatarians aren't a majority, my snarking aside. However, Seattle itself is this really weird mix of supposedly "progressive" and "liberal" values (we're generally unconcerned about sexual orientation or marijuana use) and intensely Puritan, nannyish, passive-aggressive behavior (examples: bans on new strip clubs within the city limits, draconian alcohol sales and consumption laws, laws severely restricting the activities of underage people with regards to live music and dancing.) Our government is endlessly bogged down in "process" and it takes forever to get anything done, but corruption is low compared to many other cities. The Puget Sound corridor in general is reasonably moderate socially/politically; the rest of the state is pretty conservative.
Our public transit is limp and inadequate, and I tend to think the traffic here is terrible until I remember my experiences in DC 20 years ago--it's not really a big deal compared to that.
It's gray, chilly, and dreary at least six months out of the year. This is a real deal-breaker for a lot of people (our rate of SAD is pretty high). In the middle of winter, we only have six hours of daylight. OTOH, at the height of summer, we have 14 hours, and summer is truly, unremittingly gorgeous. Any kind of "extreme" weather (which includes such things as snow, wind, and any rain that actually falls to the ground instead of hanging in the air as mist) causes people to freak out and act like idiots.
The biggest problem many people from other places have with Seattle is the "Seattle freeze." People here are almost unfailingly polite, but they're rarely outright friendly, and it can be difficult to get to know people or make friends if you don't have a ready-made subculture of some kind to latch on to. Seattleites are also prone to being *extremely* passive-aggressive and circuitous in their communications; people who are used to more direct communication find this very frustrating.
On the good side? Crime is comparatively low (seriously, I live in a supposedly "bad" neighborhood, and people from Oakland or Detroit or Houston would roll on the ground laughing at the thought if they saw it). The landscape is truly stunning and you're never more than an hour away from either mountains or water. It's easy to eat well (in both the good-food and healthy-food sense) for not a huge amount of money here.
And yeah, I do like living here. :) I was born here, moved around for much of my childhood and adolescence, and then came back in the late '80s intending to only stay a few years, and yet here I still am. I've thought about going somewhere else, but I have a (rather hard-won) social network and I love the beauty of the area and the food options and the film scene and all the little quirks peculiar to Seattle and would find them hard to leave; and I haven't found anyplace else I want to go that I can afford (or get into, most of them are in other countries).
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Other than that and the weather, it sounds a lot like Austin. Liberal spot in a conservative state, pretty chill about some things and not others, etc. We have plenty of strip clubs, though. Where else would the state congressmen go for lunch?
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