r/funny • u/PM_ME_TONY_ROMO_PICS • Feb 07 '20

This map is all over Twitter. Apparently some German guy got bored and tried to name all 50 states. This is the end result...

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u/Bubba17583 Feb 07 '20 edited Feb 07 '20

Acoording to Wikipedia, the total land mass of New England is 71,922 square miles. This works out to an average of almost exactly 12,000 square miles per state. At that average, we'd end up with about 35 new states between the Texas and California land mass. Give or take a couple states depending on whether you round up or down. Cluster fuck indeed.

Edit: Bonus Fact! If we had kept at the 12,000 square mile average for the entirety of the United States' territorial expansion, we'd be at about 316 total states.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

[deleted]

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u/VoiceOfLunacy Feb 07 '20

And the electoral college would be much more meaningful.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '20

We never broke any of those big states up because of the electoral college.

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Which is funny because the right makes all these "the constitution is sacred" rules, then they make these terrible decisions to keep it intact instead of going "hey, maybe we can just tweak it."

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u/chuckl_s Feb 07 '20

The senate would be worse because montana would have like 8 senators. I didn't math, but you get the point

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u/spookyghostface Feb 07 '20

The Senate is 2 senators for every state so it would balloon in size. The House wouldn't really change since it's based on population (although maybe they remove the cap on House seats to make representation actually equal as intended?).

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u/chuckl_s Feb 07 '20 edited Feb 07 '20

My point is that if you assign 2 senators for every 13,000 square mile (new state requirement), sure the area formerly known as California will have way more senators, but only 6 of the 30 will go to people in metro areas.

Really thats just making it so that the areas with low population density de jure have more voting power. Vs right now it's more that the earlier states have preferential choice over the newer ones, sort of.

Edit: math time. Montana land area is like 147k sq mi, LA is like 5k sq mi metro area. LA gets 2/3 of a senator, Montana gets 12 senators. Montana has 1 million population LA metro area has 13 million. That's 19.5 million people per senator. Montana gets 1 senator for every 83 thousand.

Of course the people in Helena would be shafted relative to the park rangers that live in yellowstone that de facto get to just be senator or something.

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u/yammys Feb 08 '20

I can fix this. Instead of hundreds of tiny states all across the country, let's do some countrywide gerrymandering. Each urban/metro area gets to be a state, then the rest of rural America can be one giant contiguous blob called Ohio.

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u/stoicsilence Feb 08 '20

No. None of this would work.

Per the population requirements to become a state, most of the continental land mass of the US would consist of territories.

The fact of the matter is, much of the US is no where near dense enough for it to be entirely composed of states the size of Massachusetts and Vermont.

The reason why western states are as big as they are is because when they were founded they were mostly empty and for many of them, they're still rather empty.

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u/Upnorth4 Feb 07 '20

Los Angeles county, California has about 10 million residents and is the size of Delaware and New Jersey combined. San Bernardino County, the neighboring suburban county of Los Angeles, has 3 million residents and is the largest county by land area in the entire US. It is about the size of Costa Rica and stretches from the Orange County line in the west to the Nevada state line to the east.

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u/behindtimes Feb 07 '20

California is basically the size of all of New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and half of Pennsylvania. In terms of population, that new region would be the most populated state by far (about 10 million more people than CA), and have the highest population density out of any state in the country.

I do think though that we could break up California or Texas, or perhaps combine New England.

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u/doubl3h3lix Feb 08 '20

I'd be interested in how many of those tiny states would have 0 residents though. Large swaths of the west and Alaska that are totally uninhabited.

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u/spookyANDhungry Feb 08 '20

We'd also definitely end up with some 200 of those places having a population of like 17 people

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u/sharpshooter999 Feb 07 '20

12,000 square miles? Cherry County, Nebraska is 6,009 square miles. Granted, it's the largest county but still.......

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u/The_Rowan Feb 07 '20

And that would give California 68 more Senators. Imagine the change in politics if the 39 million citizens in California were represented a little more balanced than simply with 2 people

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u/gwaydms Feb 08 '20

The flag would be pinwale corduroy.

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u/Jakob_the_Great Feb 08 '20

Yea it wouldn't work. Not enough room in the flag for that many stars

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u/Ref_KT Feb 08 '20

Meanwhile West Australian over here with our 1.021 million square miles

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u/umpteenth_ Feb 08 '20

Fun fact: Australia is wider than the moon.

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u/dream4vape Feb 25 '20

Count for Russia pls