The 100 Best Places to Raise a Family

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by ute4ever

Some of the rationale for ranking Honolulu #1 was:

-Schools spend almost $9,000 per pupil
-Unemployment ranks less than half the national average
-The island has 125 beaches

And this one's for SU:
In #54 Seattle, the residents spend $266 per person annually to maintain the city's parks.

Hmm, Reno and Las Vegas were considered better than Seattle. Hmm. yeah, this seems to be a good estimation.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Yes, Utah has a long way to go in the museum category. But I will take national parks over museums any day.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by ute4ever

Some of the rationale for ranking Honolulu #1 was:

-Schools spend almost $9,000 per pupil
-Unemployment ranks less than half the national average
-The island has 125 beaches

And this one's for SU:
In #54 Seattle, the residents spend $266 per person annually to maintain the city's parks.

$9000 doesn't seem like a lot. And everything in Honolulu is expensive. I wonder how far that $9000 goes. Here is a listing by state:

http://www.epodunk.com/top10/per_pupil/index.html

I just spent a week in Honolulu. Seems like the last place in Hawaii that I would want to live. Traffic, congestion, high prices, graffiti, etc. But the climate is fabulous and there are lots of excellent restaurants. I can think of worse places, that's for sure.

[il Padrino Ute]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

I actually agree there. Utah really needs to get its act together with museums. I am still furious with downtown SLC (read Anderson) for not jumping at the opportunity to take all of the dinosaur bones from BYU for FREE. SLC could have a world class natural history museum right downtown, but they didn't have the vision to put it together (or an Olympic park, or (so far) an arts district). It is a travesty. Instead, they wound up at Thanksgiving Point. I get angry every time I drive past it.

Anderson did a lot of good things for the city, but the biggest things of all he totally dropped the ball on (including RSL's stadium, which should also be downtown and not in Sandy).

Anderson was too busy humping the legs of the DNC with all of his bitching about GW to be mayor of SLC. The residents of Salt Lake deserve it for being stupid enough to elect him twice.

He did good things? I can't think of anything good that he did other than decide not to run again.

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski

Yes, Utah has a long way to go in the museum category. But I will take national parks over museums any day.

Museums are nice when they are convenient and inexpensive. But for me, most our US museums are not inexpensive or convenient. Europeans museums are far nicer.

National parks are a great benefit of this country.

[il Padrino Ute]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski

Yes, Utah has a long way to go in the museum category. But I will take national parks over museums any day.

Amen.

5 National Parks within close proximity is something that I'd much rather have. Museums are nice, but you can't touch anything and the folks that run them frown on camping.

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by il Padrino Ute

Amen.

5 National Parks within close proximity is something that I'd much rather have. Museums are nice, but you can't touch anything and the folks that run them frown on camping.

Museums take a long time and a lot of money to develop. Unless you have a major philanthropist willing to contribute and kick start it, it's hard to have a nice one.

[il Padrino Ute]

Originally Posted by Archaea

Museums take a long time and a lot of money to develop. Unless you have a major philanthropist willing to contribute and kick start it, it's hard to have a nice one.

Yep, which is why The Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point has turned out to be a terrific museum. And kids can touch stuff there too.

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski

Yes, Utah has a long way to go in the museum category. But I will take national parks over museums any day.

Of course they're not mutually exclusive. We have three national parks within 1-2 hrs. of downtown Seattle (Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades), one of them (Olympic) is on the seashore and has glacial mountains.

On the other hand, national park status is not necessarily the sine qua non of natural beauty. I think Oregon has one national park, but I wouldn't trade the Oregon coast for Utah's national parks (subjective judgmet, I know) as much as I love Utah's national parks. National park is of course a political designation, and places designated national parks invariably weren't in high demand for anything else when they were so designated.

It's not an easy thing building a respectable art museum. Art museum is in many ways a misnomer since they're as much as anything museums of culture. You find the Rosetta Stone in the British museum and the Code of Hummarabe in the Louvre and there are mummies and clay pots, ancient and medieval weapons and armor, etc. in the great art museums. We don't have much like that here in Seattle, some Renaissance art, etc., but our museum has grown beyond respectable just when I've lived here, and the Asian Art museum is arguably world class.

Utah could have a decent art museum. It has enough money in-state and a rich aboriginal culture for starters. There would probably be some Mormon art worthy of secular art museum status if it weren't sucked into the LDS vortex. And some people could buy expensive European works and bring them as they have here to some extent.

The reason Utah has no decent museums (outside the U of U natural history museum, which is respectable) is simple--values. Go to Chicago and you see its public libraries, its aquarium, look like temples. Of course CHicago has a world class art museum. I once went with a Mormon relative to the Met. We visited the Mesopotamian stuff, and I told her that this came from the oldest known civilization in the West, when people first gathered in a city. I talked some about the cradle of civlization, the Tigres and the Euphrates, etc. She started trying to correlate it to stuff she'd read in the Book of Abraham. Yuck!

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

The reason Utah has no decent museums (outside the U of U natural history museum, which is respectable) is simple--values. Go to Chicago and you see its public libraries, its aquarium, look like temples. Of course CHicago has a world class art museum. I once went with a Mormon relative to the Met. We visited the Mesopotamian stuff, and I told her that this came from the oldest known civilization in the West, when people first gathered in a city. I talked some about the cradle of civlization, the Tigres and the Euphrates, etc. She started trying to correlate it to stuff she'd read in the Book of Abraham. Yuck!

She was just trying to redeem you, SU. It was an act of love.