State Borders Were Drawn in the Distant Past. Time to Reimagine the Map? (2014)
slate.com
slate.com
January was "the distant past"? Granted, that modified state line affected 19 properties, but it's not trivial _to them_.
There's quite a bit of neat history and a silly series called How The Stats Got Their Shapes is worth watching. It was on the History Channel, about a decade ago.
Why yes, yes I am old. But I'm kind of skeptical about that being the 'distant past.'
Damned kids! ;-)
Either way, as someone pointed out, it's really not that long ago and there are still changes being made. On December 8th, 1941, they were going to hold a vote about separating a part of Northern California. December 7th, of course, meant that the legislators were preoccupied and the vote was never held.
I think they were going to call it Jefferson? I dunno... I watched the documentary series for amusement and it wasn't a scholastic pursuit. It's probably out there to be watched, if people are curious. I think there was a book by the same title?
Saying that state shapes are still in flux because 19 properties were shifted from state X to state Y earlier this year is a bit like saying you've got a new computer because you replaced your mouse.
Ah well, at least the map makers got some work to do. There's also a number of other examples besides what they mentioned. It's a nice documentary series, of you're interested.
You can see the transfer of a few square miles on a continent-scale map like the ones in the article?
The North/South Carolina border change represents about 700 sq miles changed over. The smallest state in the US is Rhode Island, with 1.2M sq miles - four orders of magnitude more. South and North Carolina are 30M and 50M sq miles respectively - five orders of magnitude more than this parcel of land.
Do you think that miniscule corrections every few decades are really enough to counter the author's claim that the state shapes were 'drawn in the distant past'? Seems excessively pedantic to me - especially since the shapes involved didn't change all that much.
In any case, if you were born several generations ago and still don't consider your childhood to be in the distant past, remind me not to get on your bad side :)
But, less than sixty years hadly seems like the distant past. However, that's mostly an addendum. You may not have clicked the Wikipedia link but, if you do, you'll see quite a few changes.
It turns out that I'm older than the State of Alaska and Hawaii. I'm am pretty old, but, damn it! That's not the distant past. Dinosaurs roamed in the distant past. I am not a dinosaur. Well, I'm not a fossil.
Edit: By the way, not all of the Hawaii territory is part of the State of Hawaii. And some islands are changing their borders all the time.
These little corrections are tiny, and there's been no state border changes of any real significance for almost a century.
I'm not sure how long a session would last, but it sure would be interesting.
My persona; hope is that they just double or triple the number of senators and representatives to allow greater specialization.
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/aug/water/part...
It gets my vote, watersheds are the strongest constant we have next to continents. Technology, language, rivers, and coastlines all shift.
While I view our current situation and system as imperfect, I do think one of its redeeming characteristics is the attempt (not really successful) to create a system that can both protect from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of locality.
Equal population redefinition seems likely to merely exacerbate urban/rural tensions and vast geographic differences and create more conflicts.
On the other hand, equal area represents a cleaning up of our current system - Senators would now clearly represent something: land/area, apportioned equally, as a more appropriate check on a hypothetical population-only apportionment of a house of Reps, which should have its size uncapped so as to have the proper granularity for purely population based representation.
As I said, areas don't vote. People do. Why should ten people living on a hundred acres get more representation than ten people living on one? Painting "one person one vote" as colonialist is flat-out dishonest. It's the alternative that's discriminatory, treating some people as more deserving than others because they own more land.