> I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing. I rarely see them at all.

Same for me, but I live in America.

The specific location matters a lot. The LA area is more population dense and bigger than might be obvious.

To put it in perspective, the GDP of the LA area is about 1/4 as much as the GDP of your entire country.

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rootusrootus 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> bigger than might be obvious

That's underselling it a bit, IMO. You can look at an aerial map and observe that it's pretty big, but experiencing it in person ... it's enormous. It just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes ...

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sneak 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s pretty much only because of Hollywood’s film industry. It isn’t comparable otherwise.

	▲	toast0 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The greater LA area has Hollywood film and television and a lot of music stuff too. It has the 16th and 19th busiest container ports in the world (Los Angeles and Long Beach) [1]. It has the 11th busiest airport by passenger volume [2], and several other airports because that one isn't enough for the area. It has a pretty extensive computer industry. There's a lot of petroleum processing. There's a lot of agriculture. There's some financial services (many cities in the US are bigger in finance, but there's still a lot in the LA area). A pretty good amount of manufacturing. Several top tier universities. It drives a lot of tourism. And then there's all the GDP that arises from the population itself: construction, healthcare, education, real estate. If you take away the entertainment industry, it becomes a different place, but there's a lot of economic activity and most of it isn't film and tv and music production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa...