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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

> The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them

I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels, so what else is a map provider supposed to do? Should they have also refused to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali? I mean, I'd actually be proud to see an overtly partisan declaration that they won't honor a single name change from this administration, but that's a much different matter than taking it case by case. I suspect the real reason the rename hasn't happened is that MapQuest's software simply isn't capable of doing it gracefully.

Also, hope you have a good adblocker when you use MQ. They are owned by bottom feeders of a sort that makes Bending Spoons look like the FSF.

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> what else is a map provider supposed to do?

Deferring to Government naming is only one possible approach. OpenStreetMap takes another: “the name that people use on the ground”. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico in OSM and will remain so until popular parlance changes.

The proposed rename breaks the HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eerie, Superior) acronym all of us in Michigan learned, and is thus doomed to failure. Because SHAME is a much worse acronym.

> I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels

LOL, the Trump appointed buffoon at USGS who fell over himself to tell Trump in a memo that he'd gone ahead and made it happen even before it was official?

Good thing it's official, then. That's what matters.

What "official channels" exist for renaming things that aren't even within your borders? It's less like renaming McKinley to Denali and more like "renaming" the Atlantic Ocean to the America Ocean. It's blatantly stupid, not acknowledged by most human beings, and won't last five minutes in history, and all of these facts are obvious to anyone who isn't stupid or corrupt, so what is the big mystery? What are they supposed to do besides what? You either adopt a frivolous rename or you don't.

It is actually fairly common for bodies of water that have more than one country on their shores to have different names in different countries. Same goes for mountains and mountain ranges on borders.

Some examples for bodies of water:

• Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf

• Sea of Japan/East Sea

• South China Sea/West Philippine Sea/East Sea

• English Channel/La Manche

Some examples for mountains and mountain ranges:

• Mount Everest/Sagarmāthā/Chomolungma

• K2/Chogori

• Kjølen/Fjällen (the range on the Norway/Sweden border)

• Krušné hory/Erzgebirge (the range on the Czech Republic/German border)

• The Misty Mountains/Hithaeglir

• The White Mountains/Ered Nimrais

Yes, the renaming by the Trump administration was stupid, and almost certainly will be reversed.

Nevertheless the US government is now required to use those names. If the FAA needs to mention those places in a NOTAM, or NOAA in a weather alert, etc., they use those names now, so it would be a mistake for a map company to just ignore them.

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