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Why does America get states and UK doesn't get England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
by mothsonasloth 5y ago
Why does America get states and UK doesn't get England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
- poniko 5y agoYeah and I'm totally missing Norrland in Sweden. Bummer ..
- Hokusai 5y agoAnd someone has added imaginary places like Finland, as a joke.
- dghughes 5y agoSome people in central Canada I have spoken with actually don't know that where I live is a Canadian province. They've never heard of it. Plus time zones too they said they thought it ended at Eastern time but there are two more time zones past that.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoWhat! There’s only 10 provinces! And I prefer to say it’s one and half time zones past EST ;) gotta respect that half hour time slot. I just love Newfies.
- Toutouxc 5y agoI bet that if you tried to invent a language for this "Finland" thing, it would look like total gibberish!
- foxfluff 5y agoカナカッキタカナシ
- Fuhrer01 5y agoThere is no down vote, IDK how Austrians will vote.
- munk-a 5y agoAlso - Canada is a monolith, at least break out Quebec!
- schlopper 5y agoNow now... You'd just be pandering to the separatists.
- munk-a 5y agoI think now a days most of those are in Calgary if we're being honest... they want an "independent western canada" which some how manages to ignore that British Columbia even exists.
- Apocryphon 5y agoSad no one remembers that Newfoundland was the most recently sovereign polity.
- belval 5y agoNo kidding, why is that guy trying to split Quebec from Canada? :(
- 908B64B197 5y agoIsn’t it… already the case? Culturally speaking, it looks and feel like a separate state. At least that’s the impression I got.
- belval 5y agoOh yeah definitely, I was half-kidding. Quebec and the rest of Canada have a lot of very significant differences. We are probably more divided right now than we've been ever since the last referendum. An example I love to give is the holiday "Victoria day" in Canada which is called "Patriot's day" in Quebec, celebrating the attempted revolution in Quebec that were brutally put down by the English in 1837-1838.
- capableweb 5y agoOP wanted to prove that HN isn't Silicon Valley-centric and instead showed their bias toward US-centrism :)
- jessriedel 5y agoThe more pervasive bias is to think countries are the best way to carve reality at its joints.
- aidenn0 5y agoWell I'm US:California, but definitely not SV.
- xtracto 5y agoThis is the right answer, but it is not OPs fault, it is a typical custom of Americans. I saw it invariably happen while living in Europe and interacting with a highly international community (Americans were the only ones that answered "where are you from" with a state, everybody else, including Canadians, Indians, Russians, Mexicans, etc named their country)
- andrewxdiamond 5y agoWell, we have states that are almost 3 times as large as the entire UK. If the pollster listed every region the size of Wales, this would be a very long list
- mjmasn 5y agoWales and Scotland are countries...
- LAC-Tech 5y agoOutside the UK, "country" usually means "independent state". The UK usage is more local than anything else, because if you're going to call Wales a country you'd really need to call things like Bavaria or Texas countries.
- andrewxdiamond 5y agoTo be fair, there’s a lot of Texans who would like to call Texas a country as well.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoRight and you've illustrated my point - outside the UK country means "independent state". Inside the UK it seems to mean "Independent state + Wales + Scotland".
- andrewxdiamond 5y agoDo you mean to say that referring to countries as regions is incorrect? I thought “region” was a pretty generic term for geographic area, regardless of political boundaries
- dghughes 5y agoCanada has one a territory out of three and that one territory is 20% bigger than Alaska. And only 36,000 people live there.
- tmalsburg2 5y agoIf the US as a whole was a single option, we would not be able to tell whether the people who vote for it are in Silicon Valley or not.
- agilob 5y agoIt's like on the reddit wars: - Americans = stupid, can't tell where Lithuania is - Americans respond: name all states! - Europeans respond: name all regions of all European countries You're right, regions like London, Bristol, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Bracelona, Frankfurt, Munich, Warsaw, Cracov, Wroclaw should have separate options
- croes 5y agoNope, the US should be a single option. Just poll for countries.
- legerdemain 5y agoThe question was whether HN = Silicon Valley. Just poll for "Silicon Valley" and "not Silicon Valley."
- mlindner 5y agoRegions aren't defined by their cities.
- phkahler 5y ago>> Of course, in 2008, pure investment banks largely failed. Each US state is about the size of a European country, sometimes with similar population. That's one of the things that always comes up in polls of what surprised Europeans about the US when they visited - just how big it is.
- capableweb 5y agoChina and India has a bigger population, and China has a similar landmass as the US yet is just one option in this poll.
- tasuki 5y agoOn the other hand, as of right now, China has 1 point and India 9. That combined is less than Poland, which has 15. It makes sense to have finer granularity for the poll options people will actually choose.
- capableweb 5y agoIt's 04:33 in the morning in China (in one of the timezones at least), makes sense.
- Jcampuzano2 5y agoChina uses one timezone as far as I understand, so it's 5am for all of China atm.
- numpad0 5y agoChina is currently has 7 points, 19 hours later. India is 72, Russia is 23, Vietnam 7, UK is 242. hmmm
- jogjayr 5y agoPeople in India are asleep right now.
- Macha 5y ago
- dahfizz 5y agoAt the time of commenting, US states have 3 of the top 5 positions (and the top 1). So it seems that a US state is roughly comparable to other countries in terms of HN readership.
- mlindner 5y agoBecause the premise of the question was Silicon Valley, so they need a category that separates Silicon Valley away from as much as possible without making the list too long. So split every state out and then have every country after that as those are also "outside silicon valley". If it was just the US as a single option it would not actually fit the premise of the question. This question feels primarily aimed at the US population, IMO.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y agoI’m sure Boris promised this in the Brexit Manifesto along with Blue Passports… Someone get him on the phone, oh wait, it’s past 5pm on a Friday evening, he is probably at a “work event”.
- lhorie 5y agoI posted a script above to get a sorted rank. This other one gets you the aggregate numbers for US: [...document.querySelectorAll('.fatitem table .athing')].map(el => [el.textContent.trim(), el.nextSibling.textContent.trim()]).reduce((a, [c,s]) => c.startsWith('US') ? a + parseInt(s) - 1 : a, 0) As of this comment, there are around 10 times more votes for US than the second most voted country (Canada). A fourth of those US votes are for California. Meaning, there are twice as many votes for California as there are for Canada. This suggests that Silicon Valley still represents a significant portion of the HN community.
- onion2k 5y agoMaybe the author looked at the UK and thought "Look at the state of that!"
- binarynate 5y agoSorry about that! This was an oversight on my part. In retrospect, I wish I had included separate entries for regions of UK, Canada, and others. I thought about adding new entries for them now, but it seems a bit too late since folks have already been voting.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoI mean by that logic India is the most hard done by here - (perhaps) the worlds most populated country reduced to a single data point.
- tagoregrtst 5y agoBecause everyone has heard of most the US’ states, but most people wouldn't have a clue where South Tyrol, or Chubut are. Also, in IT or CS, a state like TX or CA are more prominent than any European one. CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe. Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries.
- CRConrad 5y ago> CA is probably more important by itself than all of Europe. I recall reading (years ago) that "If California were an independent country, it would be the sixth-largest in the world"... Which would still (at least at the time) put it behind Germany. So, faaar from "more important by itself than all of Europe". > Even PA or GA are heavy hitters that would smoke most similarly sized EU countries. Given how wrong you are about California above, I very much doubt this one.
- renewiltord 5y agoBecause American states are more significant than British regions. UC Berkeley alone has more Nobel laureates than Wales+Scotland+NorthernIreland. Think of it as Huffman coding on significance.