Boulder named 4th best city for the next decade: Check out the virtual ego boost

There are three better places than this?

Citing Boulder's mishmash of granola-eating tree-huggers and a flourishing entrepreneurial landscape intersected by academe and technology, Kiplinger's Personal Finance has rated the city among the most promising for the next decade.

Here's how "Best Cities 2010" describes the community, which ranks in the fourth position, behind Austin, Seattle and Washington D.C.: "Boulder is a wealthy, intellectual hot spot where environmental and scientific ideas blossom into businesses."

In a video on view below, the magazine lauds the city's CU campus, bike trails and business like IBM, Xcel Energy and Sun Microsystems -- but it makes no mention of the area's booming medical marijuana industry, which is sooooo Boulder.

This is just the latest in national laurels bestowed upon the trustafarian hotbed. In February, Boulder was ranked the happiest place to live by Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which didn't mention pot in its findings, either. And in a similar poll, Boulder was ranked the second least obese city in the country, behind Fort Collins.

So the skinny, happy, rich folks of Boulder have their fair share of bragging rights, which they will so undoubtedly flaunt. But as Kiplinger's points out, "Boulder is not without it's issues."

According to the magazine, the median cost of a house in Boulder is about $530,000, which means many wannabe Boulderites are forced to live outside the city. That takes a toll on even the most tricked out hybrid vehicle.

So if you've got your money-grubbing eyes on Boulder, drop the soy milk and buy a environmentally friendly house already -- before it's too late, or they spend millions to lift the city so that they can literally look down on the rest of the state.

Here's the Kiplinger's video: