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Comment by cowsandmilk | Hacker News Reader

The decision to say Michigan borders Minnesota and Illinois is weird to me. They have borders that are in the water and none on land.

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Many states have borders in the middle of a river. Just pretend the lakes are wide rivers, topologically.

What about California and Hawaii or Alaska then? Where do you draw the line?

International borders? There is not-US between each of Hawaii and Alaska and any other part of the country.

There is no not-US between Michigan and Minnesota.

> There is not-US between each of Hawaii and Alaska and any other part of the country.

What's the not-US between Hawaii and California?

Update: oops, I get it. The ocean itself. Never mind, move along, nothing to see here.

State territories, which include the waters of the Great Lakes but not the entirety of the Pacific Ocean

I would draw the line when I could stand on one shore and not visually see the other side.

Adding bodies of water (great lakes, gulf, 2 oceans) may help fix the Rhode island issue and this one. Or perhaps make it worse (my expectation is they'd act as anchors of a sort)

So? The political boundaries between the states lie inside Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, respectively.

We are talking about a political map. So the essential question is: Are the Great Lakes managed by the federal government or by the states?

The answer to the question is yes.

PA is similarly disconnected from NJ via the Delaware river, would you also say they don't border each other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_River#/media/File:Del...

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater body of water in the world. Claiming there isn’t a material difference between that and the Delaware River is weird.

When we are looking at a map of the US, they don’t draw the Delaware River. They do draw the Great Lakes.

> freshwater body

This implies volume. Baikal doubles LS in this respect.

I think it implies surface area.

Lake Michigan-Huron is hydrologically just one lake and outsizes Lake Superior.

So in your mind Alaska borders Texas?

Your comment is a good example of a strawman.

No, it’s a serious question as topologically they do border each other. So, are they arguing being able to sail from A to B is enough or must they be sailing across freshwater etc. Borders do get drawn across bodies of water all the time, but deciding if France and the UK border each other but Spain and Italy don’t is arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary. You can get from France to UK without entering international waters, and without crossing waters controlled by another entity.

I don't think you can do that with Spain and Italy? To get from one to the other you'd have to go through French or Algerian waters I think.

And I might be agreeing with you; not sure here. Conversation went from rivers to lakes to "a coffee cup is the same as a donut" pretty quickly :)

Spain is the closest country to some parts of Italy. So, they limit each others economic exclusion zones. That said it’s close to 400 miles between them across open ocean. Further economic exclusion zones are a fairly recent and thus an arbitrary thing.

Minorca and Sardinia give you a path that avoids other countries’ waters, it seems (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Hypothetical-200nm-l...)

Land borders are also arbitrary.

Topologically, Alaska borders Texas.

Politically, since you can't walk from one to the other without crossing intervening political entities or relying on bulk transportation carriers, no.

Then again, same with Minnesota and Michigan.

Get in a row boat in Michigan. Row really hard. You can get to Minnesota without crossing any other border. And you'll come out the other side with ripped arms!

People can make the Atlantic crossing in a rowboat as well. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/29/uk/rowing-solo-trans-atlantic...

I suspect with the right boat someone could row from Alaska to Texas. Though it would probably take a full year.

Yeah, but those would leave US territorial waters....

That may be the real key. Michigan to Minnesota stays within US territory. New York to Rhode Island and Providence Plantation stays within US territory. Texas to Alaska does not, no matter which mode of travel you chose. Texas to New York might. Shall we go there?

It depends how oceans count as far as state barriers go.

I have to imagine that going from Texas to New York along the coast would hit a state border somewhere around Louisiana.

>They have borders that are in the water and none on land.

So? They still have borders. Borders are a geopolitical construct (that is, decided by treates and politics), not a geographical.

They are merely informed/influenced by geography.

> Ah, then the post should have gone farther: every coastal state, including Alaska and Hawaii, should have been bordered by each other.

That's not how geopolitical borders work. A country's segments (e.g. states) could have borders between them, but that doesn't mean that each has border with each other.

They just all belong to the same entity (e.g. here, the US).

(And state borders != country borders).

What does that mean? What is the difference between "borders" and "border"?

Sufficiently far out from land (IIRC 10 miles) the ocean becomes "international waters", and no country legally controls it. There's a border between the territorial waters of a given country and these international waters along the coast.

There's also noun/verb confusion. A state has borders (noun). A state can border another (verb). State A has a border, state B has a border, and A borders B.

California has a border with International Waters. Hawaii is directly surrounded by International Waters. California does not border Hawaii, though both have borders and border International Waters.

No difference, that grammatical change from plurar to singural wasn't part of my point. You can also read it as:

"A country's segments (e.g. states) could have borders between them, but that doesn't mean that each has borders with each other."

Another commenter explained what I meant well, but here's my explanation:

The US might have a border with Canada, but doesn't mean that Colorado also has a border with Canada.

Similarly, Alaska and Hawaii might be part of the US, and thus their borders are the US borders too, but that doesn't mean e.g. Hawaii borders Nebraska.

Now borders might be on land or on water, but they're still borders. As long as another entity is not in between (e.g. Canada, as is the case between e.g. US and Alaska, or the Ocean between the US and Hawaii).

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