A key understanding of San Francisco Bay Area culture.

I was grumbling at kiya about the ways in which the local housing market is messed up (suffice it to say that when we moved from renting half a duplex to buying a house with the same amount of space in functionally the same neighborhood, our property tax became about 80% of what we were previously paying in rent), and stumbled across a sort of key observation about Bay Area culture when I realized that although I have lots of canned rantage about this, it doesn't feel like my canned rantage so much as just part of the local cultural fabric.

See, at social situations like parties or work gatherings where one needs to make unobjectionable small talk with quasi-strangers and acquaintances that we barely know, we can't talk about the weather because we haven't got any to speak of. So, instead, we complain about the housing market. It basically occupies the same social niche that weather does in places like New England.

(I am now pondering the "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it" truism.)