Do you spend much time on Hacker News? Such opinions are expressed here regularly. More seriously, it's not unusual to see, say, Florida casually compared to, say, Eastern Europe without any sense of how absurdly one-sided such comparisons actually are (e.g. on measures like GDP, standard of living, number of jobs, etc).

Opinions are opinions. That's fine. But what I find as a Missourian living in NYC is that people on the coasts (who didn't move there from somewhere else) are largely ignorant of important factual properties of the South and the Midwest. It's not uncommon to see someone off by an order of magnitude about, say, GDP or population or whatever (expressed with extreme confidence, of course).