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Comment by NeoTar | Hacker News Reader

Can I make my periodic reminder to US-Americans that two-letter state abbreviations are not universally recognized, and please to use full state names where possible.

The case of California / CA is especially bad, since this is the ISO-code for Canada, so the article title is unnecessarily ambiguous.

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I was curious about the historical precedent here. The earliest usage of "CA" referring to Canada I could find was a 1913 British abbreviation guide, and it doesn't seem to have been in common use until ISO 3166 was published in the 70s. "CA" referring to California was standardized by the USPS in 1907 to avoid confusion with Colorado, and the term seems to have been in wide use well before that point because it's documented in the 1880's Webster dictionary as referring to California.

It doesn't help that the official subdivision code for California according to 3166 is "CA".

I used to work for UPS at their Ontario California air hub as a sorter. We would constantly get packages for Ontario Canada. UPS must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year shipping packages to Ontario Canada via California.

California has more people, a larger economy, and more mindshare. It's probably safe to assume "CA" outside something obviously Canadian is California. Even Ontario CA is 50/50.

In the past few years, Canada's population passed that of California. Canada's population is growing very fast, while California's has grown modestly for a decade, and slightly shrank over the past few years.

Go into Spotify and search for songs with Canada in the name. Now try California.

This criteria seems odd to me.

Why? It's mindshare. The world thinks about California a lot.

Sorry about that! I updated the title

Thanks so much! Shouting into the darkness sometimes has results! :-D

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