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Poll: Where do you live?

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371–380 of 563 posts

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#371

Great to see several people from Mexico! BTW, the fact that only the US country has options separated by state reminds me of when I lived in Europe, and sometimes we got together with a bunch of international. Invariably the "where are you from" question would pop up, to which almost everyone would answer with their country... except Americans, who would answer with their state haha. Once, I asked someone where they…

I was very glad too, and I'm pretty sure not everybody has answered yet since it's "viernes godín".

I'm from Michoacan, and reading or seeing the clueless expression when I answer gives me some sort of joy and proudness.

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#372
post #42

A useful poll! But the very-literal should be reminded: the linguistic mechanisms of synechdoche & metonymy often result in a fuzzy use of parts, or regions, or emblematic examples, or associated items to mean some other closely-related more-amorphous entity. For example, "the White House" for the entire elected president's policy team, no matter which part (or if it's operating from some other place). "Wall Street"…

My anecdata, as an outsider who is a researcher, is that silicon valley is either the south SF bay area or the mindset. I certainly mean the latter when describing HN to others.

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#375
4 Vatican City is probably people on wifi in the library/museum? I know a decade back our IPv6 measurement consistently picked up 1-2 people from a v4 /24 and associated v6 /32 which I think were the Vatican library. There's said to be a transient population down in the low thousands and a far smaller low hundred resident overnight. Wikipedia says pop. 829 but I think the census night may be a bit different. (If I was a college or sorority I'd ask everyone to book in on census night because it helps with funding models based on capitation. It's probably true in all nations not just micronations but the distortion would be higher for small populations)

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#376

Great to see several people from Mexico! BTW, the fact that only the US country has options separated by state reminds me of when I lived in Europe, and sometimes we got together with a bunch of international. Invariably the "where are you from" question would pop up, to which almost everyone would answer with their country... except Americans, who would answer with their state haha. Once, I asked someone where they…

US states and EU countries are generally similar in size. If you ask an Italian where they are from it would be a bit odd if they said “Europe” wouldn’t it?

I think it also speaks to the degree of autonomy and identity among the states. The US originally thought of itself more like the EU is now, a collection of sovereign nations that agreed to a very strong alliance (first confederation, then federation). The difference is when the US’ “brexit” moment happened the northern states decided the southern states didn’t have the right to leave and enforced their opinion at the cost of 1 million lives (out of a population of about 32M at the time).

So that settled that and now the US is one country, not a collection of countries.

But the original idea still plays a large role in how people think about things.

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#377
I was curious if the UK or Germany will rank higher and am somewhat surprised that after you adjust for population (which is a small adjustment) they basically rank the same and are only outpeformed by Canada (by a fair amount) which surprises me somewhat.

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#379
> I read a tweet that referred to HN as "Silicon Valley"

CA is more than SV. (That said, while the Los Angeles basin has a lot more people, it and the San Francisco bay area are more alike than they are like central valley CA, let alone mountain or desert CA, even though many SF people like to think that they're different than LA.)

Note that many of the "where is investment going" surveys count San Francisco and Silicon Valley separately. (That may be to keep the graph axis reasonable.)

Re: Poll: Where do you live?

#380
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we have states that are almost 3 times as large as the entire UK. If the pollster listed every region the size of Wales, this would be a very long list

Wales and Scotland are countries...

Outside the UK, "country" usually means "independent state".

The UK usage is more local than anything else, because if you're going to call Wales a country you'd really need to call things like Bavaria or Texas countries.

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