Good-bye, Californee

The NYT reports that Californians are leaving the coast and going to the Midwest. Maybe I'm feeling mean-spirited this morning, but I found this opening paragraph humorous:

A year ago, Melanie Fischer, a lifelong Californian, was not entirely sure where Missouri was. So when her husband proposed that they consider moving there, she raced to locate the state on a map printed on her children's placemats.

It's one thing to be ignorant of a large state's location, but then to blithely admit it to a reporter?

The substance of the article, doesn't paint a pretty future for California:

Last year, a half million people left California for other parts of the United States, while fewer than 400,000 Americans moved there. The net outflow has risen fivefold, to more than 100,000, since 2001, an analysis by Economy.com, a research company, shows, although immigration from other countries and births have kept the state's population growing.

Depending on the character of the immigrants (are they there to assimilate and thrive or individualize and leech?), those could be scary figures for the coast.