An infernal peninsula, jutting out the southeast edge of the U.S.A. like a disgusting tumour. It consists mainly of weak people from the Northeast and Midwest who left classy, excellent areas like New York, Chicago, or Connecticut, their children who were raised here or forced here and are getting out at the first opportunity possible, native Floridians who are a bunch of miserable hicks and wear camo jackets and crap to high school, and immigrants who stay here because this is where they happen to be, and would probably get out very quickly if they found out what the rest of the country has to offer.
The political system of the State is atrocious. There's no income tax, so the State Gov't. gets all its money from sales and real-estate tax. This has many effects.
For example, the educational-system condemns the poor children of this State to recieve a quality of education and schooling that would be considered remarkable sub-par for such a developed country. Class sizes are commonly 35+ and even hit 40 quite commonly, and the teachers are paid such rubbish that many have to live with their parents or rely on their spouse for monetary support. Low pay results in many highly-capable individuals to be turned away from the job. So teacher quality is some of the worst you will find anywhere in the country.
The government having no money also results in a wait time of at least two to three weeks for power if a hurricane hits you. The hurricane months of August-October can easily get as hot as in the middle of the summer, so this situation results in the utter misery of picking rotten food out of the fridge, begging for the power to come back for the A/C to give you some release.
Oh and if a road is being built, take your estimate of how long it'll take to build, and triple it, and you're heading in the right direction.
With anything funded by the State government, just expect the worst every time, in any category, whether education, infrastructure, management, incompetence is the norm. Just come to expect it.
As for natural beauty, there is nothing to be found here. Florida literally has the flattest, most dull landscape, of anywhere you will see in the entire country. Kansas may be flat too, but at least it's scenic in it's own way, Florida is just a huge, swampy sandbar that was developed on for the masochists who moved here. The natural vegetation is just a mix of swampy shrubs and trees adapted for the muggy climate. Entirely dull and uninteresting.
The weather is also, yes, too hot. If you want a nice climate, you don't have to go to the muggiest place in the country. People in cold climates think they want one extreme instead of the other, but never realise somewhere in the middle makes more sense. There's too hot, and too cold, and Florida is too hot. There's no variety to the seasons, just one, sunny and muggy. Or rainy and muggy sometimes. The only bearable months of the year are perhaps December-February. The snowbirds often come during these months, and mistakenly come to believe that the weather is tolerable year around, and get stuck here.
"We were thinking of moving to Florida"
"Don't"
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