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>Texas is absurdly large You weren't kidding. I just checked a map and Texas is as wide as France and Germany combined. No wonder Americans can afford to all h

>Texas is absurdly large You weren't kidding. I just checked a map and Texas is as wide as France and Germany combined. No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space.

gottorf 3y ago
> No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space I live in one of the many states both smaller and less densely populated than Texas. As someone who immigrated to the US from a tightly-packed Asian country, the argument against immigration on the basis of "there's no room" never made any sense...
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  Texas is definitely NOT densely populated. Apparently, despite the large cities (Dallas-FtWorth and Houston mostly), we still only rank 30th in the US. Texas ranks 2nd in terms of population (29M; only CA has more) and also area (261,000 square miles; Alaska is more than 2x as large), so our overall density is nothing of note. Texans are VERY unevenly distributed -- a simple majority of us live in the metro areas of either Dallas-Ft Worth or Houston. It's like 70% if you include San Antonio and Austin. And there's a LOT of big empty space west of all those cities.
ubermonkey 3y ago
So the US has a system of higher-speed expressways we call Interstates. They all have numbers. The southernmost east-west Interstate is called 10 ("I-10"), and runs from Jacksonville, FL (which is on the Atlantic Ocean) to Los Angeles, CA (which is, obviously, on the Pacific). These highways have frequent, standardized signs on them from time to time to tell you how far away upcoming cities, towns, or even roads are in miles. Just inside the eastern border of Texas, on the westbound side, there's a highway sign that I'm pretty sure just exists as a flex or brag. It says something like -- and my numbers may be slightly off, but they're roughly correct at least: Beaumont 18 El Paso 857 The gist is "one place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is 20 minutes away; another place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is MOST OF A THOUSAND MILES AWAY." I believe it's true that crossing Texas on I-10 constitutes about 1/3 of the distance across the US -- like, it's about 1/3 from Jacksonville to the border, about 1/3 across Texas, and about 1/3 from El Paso in the west to LA. There's a highway sign on Interstate 10 just inside the TX/LA border, and I'm pretty sure it just exists as a flex.

gottorf 3y ago

> No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space I live in one of the many states both smaller and less densely populated than Texas. As someone who immigrated to the US from a tightly-packed Asian country, the argument against immigration on the basis of "there's no room" never made any sense...

ubermonkey 3y ago
Texas is definitely NOT densely populated. Apparently, despite the large cities (Dallas-FtWorth and Houston mostly), we still only rank 30th in the US. Texas ranks 2nd in terms of population (29M; only CA has more) and also area (261,000 square miles; Alaska is more than 2x as large), so our overall density is nothing of note. Texans are VERY unevenly distributed -- a simple majority of us live in the metro areas of either Dallas-Ft Worth or Houston. It's like 70% if you include San Antonio and Austin. And there's a LOT of big empty space west of all those cities.

ubermonkey 3y ago

So the US has a system of higher-speed expressways we call Interstates. They all have numbers. The southernmost east-west Interstate is called 10 ("I-10"), and runs from Jacksonville, FL (which is on the Atlantic Ocean) to Los Angeles, CA (which is, obviously, on the Pacific). These highways have frequent, standardized signs on them from time to time to tell you how far away upcoming cities, towns, or even roads are in miles. Just inside the eastern border of Texas, on the westbound side, there's a highway sign that I'm pretty sure just exists as a flex or brag. It says something like -- and my numbers may be slightly off, but they're roughly correct at least: Beaumont 18 El Paso 857 The gist is "one place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is 20 minutes away; another place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is MOST OF A THOUSAND MILES AWAY." I believe it's true that crossing Texas on I-10 constitutes about 1/3 of the distance across the US -- like, it's about 1/3 from Jacksonville to the border, about 1/3 across Texas, and about 1/3 from El Paso in the west to LA. There's a highway sign on Interstate 10 just inside the TX/LA border, and I'm pretty sure it just exists as a flex.