These comparisons come up all the time, and the issue is the Mercator projection makes Europe looks much larger than other countries on most maps. Much of Europe lies at a more extreme latitude than to the rest of the world. Basically nothing is at the same latitude in the Southern hemisphere and the only comparisons in the Northern hemisphere are Russia, Canada and Greenland. Other than Greenland, those countries don't generally get compared because they are gigantic in their own right, despite being much smaller than the appear on normal map projections.
Every time this discussion about different projections comes up, I just want to ask: has no one ever seen a globe? When I was a kid, we had them in classrooms and I had one in my bedroom. I never got the impression that that was unusual or unique. Have globes just gone wildly out of fashion in recent years?
You can't see both Mexico and Europe on a globe at the same time, but you can on a map. Globes are great, but the ones you see in most households are quite small with very little detail.
Atlases can help by showing geographical regions in appropriate projections on each page, but again you can't easily see full page appropriate projections of both Europe and Mexico at the same time because they'll be on far separated pages.
Sure it's possible to do that, but this discussion is about the experience people actually have with maps and how that affects their expectations. I don't think it's common for people to do that.
I actually did, but they both so distorted by perspective that I doubt many people have done that to build an understanding of their relative size in practice.
You can do, but how many people actually do that in practice when building an understanding of the relative size of regions, relative to looking at them on a flat map?
It's too bad Maps doesn't behave more like 'Earth' does / did (?). I haven't even installed Google Earth in years, but now that I zoom a maps window all the way out I'm sad it doesn't become a sphere projection in 3D.
Weird, when I zoom out on https://www.google.com/maps/ it becomes a globe, I thought that's the default behaviour, but maybe I changed a setting at some point?
Google maps zooming out does become a globe for me (Firefox/Linux), why not for you? I see it has an on/off option for globe in the layers selection.. let's check in incognito.. aha, it's non-globe by default!
Another thing that’s interesting about Europe is that it’s approximately at the same latitude as Canada, with a climate that is substantially warmer. If it was as cold as northern North America, humanity would have taken a completely different course.
Definitely is. New York is at the same latitude as Spain but tracks in winter temperature with Southern Finland. Scandinavia is way up in the same latitudes as the Canadian Northwestern Passages but is not nearly as cold.
The majority of people in Scandinavia live in the south, where the temperatures are much milder. However, I think that even in the north of these countries, temperatures are still not as bad as in much of Canada during winters.
I don't know why this discussion is never ending, but I'm fed up with the Mercator projection. I hope things move along. Google maps has done their part, when you zoom out you get a globe, but others need to follow even more.
The projection is used way more often than those features are needed, so use other alternatives like <favourite projection here> anytime you reasonably can.
When I was a kid in grade school we had lots of different maps using different projections on the walls and in our text books. We learned about how Mercator is good for navigation and other maps are better at showing comparative size. It makes for a good topic in geography. Have we just given up on education?
A fun way to realize different country extends is this game where need to match moveable country shapes to their location on a mercator map: https://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-redux/
Maps are hard. The world is 3D and maps are 2D and something is going to be distorted because of it, especially so if you want to show the entire world.
It's a case of "pick your poison" and maps tell us as much about the mind of the map maker as about geography, sometimes more.
So maps tend to display and emphasize what's "important" to the map maker, which means a lot of them exaggerate the size of developed countries and give short shrift to other countries.
The distortion is not because the Earth is 3D and maps are 2D, it's because the surface of the Earth isn't Euclidean like a plane is.
That means the meridians (the vertical lines you see on a map) which are perpendicular to the parallels (the horizontal lines on the map) intersect themselves at the poles (!). You can easily see how this leads to distortion of the areas closer to the poles (like Europe) on any projection where the meridians are parallel. Projections like Mercator account for this distortion by making the distances between the parallels bigger as one moves towards the poles. That's what makes Europe and Greenland huge, but more importantly makes it possible that any arbitrary straight line on a Mercator map corresponds to a straight line on the globe, which was huge for navigation.
> So maps tend to display and emphasize what's "important" to the map maker, which means a lot of them exaggerate the size of developed countries and give short shrift to other countries.
That might have been the case 50 years ago but far less today.
This poking fun at Mercator is starting to feel like tired meme at this point, especially when in reality alternative projections, like Winkel-Tripel popularized by natgeo, are plenty popular.
Fun fact if you add the size of North Korea 120,540km2 to the state I live in Queensland 1,852,642km2. The total size is 632km2 larger than Mexico's 1,972,550km2
Sometimes I'm not sure what the point of these Mercator criticisms are. GDP per land area is kind of more interesting, in that if you have a lot of land, but not much money, then there are probably a lot of desolate or lawless areas. https://ssz.fr/gdp/
When I think of Mexico I think... Manifest Destiny. Come on for the 53rd State of the Union after Puerto Rico and D.C. It will decimate and solve the southern border illegal immigration problem. From there, we just continue moving south all the way to Antarctica, liberating the oppressed and taxing their income.
For the huge tracts of natural resources, and, of course, the señoritas, and the fashion, too. Also, cartels are a clear and present danger to national security, so we should force those kids to graduate high school and entice college or trade or nursing school or something instead of killing, dismembering, and burning people. It's so wrong.
It's one projection among many, given we're in the age of digital mapping we have the means to smoothly morph from one projection to any of many many others that all have their pro's and cons.
Regular users of (say) Google maps aren't generally exposed to a mecator projection as they zoom in from a rotating globe dwn into a local area of interest.
"Map Projections - A Working Manual" is, in my humble opinion, THE definitive reference for map projections and the author, John P. Snyder is the expert. [1]
Would not be easy but could bring huge benefits, solve Drug violence, solve Southern Border problem and bring a massive reduction in Mexican poverty since it would unleash a tremendous wave of dynamism and growth.
Would also maintain US lead over China as the world’s dominant economy for much longer.
Since NAFTA, corporations can already essentially treat US and Mexico as one nation for most purposes— with the added benefit that labor cannot! Workers in Detroit are now competing with workers in Chihuahua; Ford can move jobs across that border but workers cannot similarly move to chase better wages or favorable laws.
It wouldn’t make sense for the nations to further merge; the government’s true constituents (the corporations) already have the best of both worlds.
I think that's a big reason why the EU's common market has freedom of movement for not just goods and services, but also people. So people can also move to where the wages are highest, eventually levelling out the differences, rather than letting corporations exploit those differences.
From what I can tell, young people move to where the job market is hot (e.g. Germany) to work and that's pretty much it. They might return when they retire (but let's face it, after 30 years, they'll have a life and friends and a family in Germany, and they'll likely stay), or, if you're Spain or Portugal, you might get some German retirees in return, but it doesn't seem to do much closing the gap.
Essentially, local companies just can't hire people locally, and they can't raise their wages easily, because it's still a single market, so they'll compete with every other company on that single market, and the most efficient one (or the one where government subsidies are hidden the best) wins. If you have fewer people to hire, your best chance is probably to move your company to where the people are.
If people move out of lower wage countries to where the well-paying jobs are, then it will become harder in those countries to hire people at low wages, driving the wages up.
Of course that shouldn't be the only factor, and it isn't; the EU also invests in its poorer members. Ireland in particular is a massive success story in that regard. It was poor when it joined the EU, and now it's rich. I hope more countries will follow that path, but obviously there are tons of other factors at work as well; government policies, corruption, etc.
> it will become harder in those countries to hire people at low wages, driving the wages up
Sure, if there's demand for jobs. But when you can't hire people, how do you keep your company running? And how do you compete without the appropriate number of people? Not being able to hire has an effect on the economy as well, and companies will likely be outcompeted by those that can hire. And if the company goes away, who's trying to hire people, driving up the wages?
I believe that's why you'll often see a combination of high unemployment, low wages and high emigration.
And sure, investments will work, but I'm not sure if you can replicate Ireland's success to e.g. Portugal or Spain. You can't turn every country into a tax-scheme for multinational corporations with a friendly regulatory environment regarding privacy, we don't have enough Googles and Facebooks for that, and transitioning that into continuing success isn't as easy when your country isn't English speaking.
We were talking about companies moving production there to take advantage of lower wages, weren't we? So presumably the jobs are there. If they aren't, like I said, investment is very important, and the EU does that to some extent. It's worked very well for some countries, but not (yet?) so much for some others.
We'll see how it plays out, but in general, I'd say that if goods, services and money can cross borders with no problems, people should be able to do the same.
I realize this comment was probably made in good faith but I can't help but feel it needs to be called out as egregiously ignorant if not derided for the same reason. Solve the southern border problem? What year is this? Most illegal immigrants aren't Mexican. If they were then the "Remain in Mexico" policy wouldnt have been as wildly effective as it was. Most illegal (if you're Republican)/Undocumented (if you're a Democrat)/Whatever immigrants heading to America aren't Mexican and haven't been for a bit now. And that's just the issues with the presented idea on the border front.
It would actually 'solve' the problem by limiting the border to a manageable size.
However that's the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
It should never have been about blindly stopping everyone. America used to have the right idea, paperclip in the best and brightest to fuel the next business revolution. A rational policy isn't about denial, it's about control and management. To legalize, to tax (profit from), to regulate.
Seasonal labor work visas, documented workers; and for the workers, safer working conditions and better pay (though still not the pay a farm would have to give Americans to make them want to do that job). Even a real process for identifying an applicant's history so that refugees can be integrated, positive influences can be allowed through, and criminals can be (mostly) stopped at the border.
Most illegal immigrants aren't Mexican, but Mexico is the only country with which we share a southern border, and all illegal immigrants crossing the border come through Mexico.
How does that figure? It's not like the US doesn't have its own drug violence, and lots of it. A lot of Mexican drug violence would probably move to the north, where the more lucrative markets will be, especially since movement would be much easier.
>solve Southern Border problem
It wont solve it in the sense of addressing the concerns behind those seeing it as a problem today: it will just declare it not a problem.
It also ignores these being two different nations, with different cultures, priorities, etc., as if the peoples in them are mere assets to be managed/merged/unify/etc for economic benefit.
I'm not so sure Mexican native "indians" for example will be very happy with their most likely treatment from WASP Americans (given how the latter treat and view their "own" minorities).
> I'm not so sure Mexican native "indians" for example will be very happy with their most likely treatment from WASP Americans (given how the latter treat and view their "own" minorities).
You speak as if Mexico doesn’t have its own problems with racism/discrimination/prejudice/etc against its indigenous peoples
Latin America has its own history of racism. On the whole, more subtle, less in-your-face, less over-the-top extreme, than that of the US, but still very real
>You speak as if Mexico doesn’t have its own problems with racism/discrimination/prejudice/etc against its indigenous peoples
Mexico can and does have its own problem against its indigenous people, and the situation under a supposed "merger" (not that it will happen) can still get much worse.
Mexico has its own equilibrium and power balances regarding its racial issues, developed over the centuries, that wont be transferrable to a whole added country of 350 million different people, a good chunk of which already considers the whole population, latinos and natives, as inferior and "not belonging here", and has worse skeletons in the closet regarding the treatment of its own natives.
> and the situation under a supposed "merger" (not that it will happen) can still get much worse
Well, hypothetically speaking (given we both acknowledge a US-Mexico merger is rather unlikely to ever actually happen): yes, it could be worse, maybe even “much worse”; but it could also be largely the same; it could even be better.
One way in which it could be largely the same: the remaining racism in the US is largely of the subtle/systemic kind rather than the blatant apartheid/Jim Crow kind, which makes the racism problems of the US and Latin America much more alike today, despite historically the former being drastically worse than the latter
One way it could be better: for all their limitations, American tribal governments actually have significantly more powers than their Mexican equivalents - federally-recognised US tribal governments are partially exempt from state jurisdiction, while all Mexico has is indigenous-controlled local governments with significantly less legal autonomy. So you could argue that the US shows greater (albeit still limited) respect for indigenous peoples’ rights to autonomy and self-governance, and if a merger of the US and Mexico happened, it might result in that US approach being adopted in Mexico too, resulting in improved rights of autonomy and self-governance for Mexico’s indigenous peoples
The US has been a rich democracy for its entire existence and its homicide rate is on level with those of third world countries. I don't see how bringing a country that has been enduring constant poverty, unrest and revolutions into the equation will make anything better regarding violence.
This would make sense, but for the US’s sake, it should be a veeery gradual process taking several generations to complete. Maybe in one or two hundred years. But who knows.
It won't happen. But I agree this would be good for the world, because I expect the merge to make US politics a lot saner. Mexico's population is more than California, Texas, and New York combined, and since US electoral college votes are apportioned according to population, people living in Mexico will have tremendous influence on US politics, unlike today. I expect such influence to be greatly positive for the world.
> Wouldn't the idea be to merge USA to Mexico and adopt the Mexican system in whole of USA? Might make lot of sense really.
The Mexican political system isn’t really that different from the American - both are federal presidential republics. If you are looking to give the US a better political system, merger with Mexico wouldn’t make a huge difference
A merger with Canada would be a different story. Many political scientists argue that parliamentary systems (a Prime Minister, with the executive de facto subordinated to the legislature) provide superior political stability and effectiveness compared to the presidential system found in the US and most of Latin America. Allowing the executive to be independent of the legislature instead of subordinated to it results in ineffective governance due to legislative-executive conflict, and centralising so much executive power in a single individual with very limited accountability promotes the development of strongmen with personality cults (caudillos) such as Peron, Bolsonaro or Trump. So if the US adopted Canada’s political system (whether by merging with it or otherwise), that would arguably be a big improvement.
Of course, Canada is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, and many Americans may object to coming once more under the British Crown. But you can have a parliamentary republic, with a figurehead/symbolic President with little real power, and a Prime Minister making the big decisions - as in Ireland or Israel or Finland. You can even have a federal parliamentary republic, with states, as in Austria or Germany. Australia voted on switching from a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy to a federal parliamentary republic in 1999-the republican side lost, but most people expect there will eventually be a re-run in which they win. If Australia goes down that road, it increases the odds that Canada may eventually follow. The thing about Canada’s system which would arguably really improve the US is the parliamentary vs presidential distinction, not the republic vs monarchy one
Transitioning the former US people to Mexican law and dismantling the constitution, federation and states might be the hard part. Oh you didn’t mean like that…
The land that Mexico had from 1821 - 1848, only the farthest 27 years out of the past 200? That no ones great great great grandparents were even alive for? That makes the most sense to you?
This is looking only at geography in simple land area terms. The reality of life for people in Mexico is that most of the population, around 80%, are concentrated in a horizontal band around Mexico City. Hydrology and soil conditions make a really big difference as well as access to ports. Mexico is still very big and has great influence, but not really so much in the way implied by this article.
I think the thing that trips up most people about Mexico is that the country is (all but the southeastern tip) pretty much entirely mountainous, like unless you can see the ocean you're probably a mile above sea level, which also means the climate is way cooler than you probably think.
