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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

The UK is not all that small or all that densely populated. Great Britain is the world's ninth largest island. its marginally smaller than Honshu which has a bigger population, and England alone is about the size of Java (which has a bigger population than Russia). I know offhand that it has a lower population density than Sri Lanka

Its a long way from even Cornwall to the North of Scotland, and significantly further between the islands.

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People in Sri Lanka are not the ones exchanging personal messages via AM radio broadcasts. Much of this article is about the province of Chubut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubut_Province which has a population density of 2.6 people per square kilometer. The UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom has a population density of 287 people per square kilometer. Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland has a population density of 71 people per square kilometer. The northernmost district of Scotland, Caithness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caithness has a population density of 41 people per square kilometer.

41 is not the same order of magnitude as 2.6.

In conclusion, from the perspective of the people this article is about, the UK is very small and densely populated.

> Its a long way from even Cornwall to the North of Scotland

Indeed, driving from Land’s End to John o’Groats is basically the same distance as the longest drive across Texas!

Google maps says it is a 15-hour drive. That is a long day but still is just a day. It would be akin to Seattle to SF, or Vancouver to Calgary. Most people with cars on the west coast wouldn't really blink at such a drive. It is still in that range where one can debate flying v driving in terms of money/time/pollution.

You must be made of sterner stuff than I am. It was 14.5 hours for me to go to college, and after freshman year I always crashed at a friend’s place along the way. 12 is fine, 13 is stretching it, but at 14 hours there’s no way I’m doing it in one day.

14 and 10 used to be the trucking standard. 14 on the road, 2 for eating and 8 for sleeping. Many people did that continuously for weeks. Doing it for a couple days isnt impossible.

Not impossible, just so unpleasant that I wouldn’t do it on vacation. If you’re getting paid for it you probably do have a different opinion on the matter.

As I say in the other post, it is unevenly populated (much like Honshu). The thing is that parts of Scotland have been deliberately depopulated by the aristocracy (and to a lesser extent government).

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