• exasperation@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      At 9.1 million square km, and 3143 counties, that’s an average of 2910 square km per county.

      England has 84 counties covering a land area of 130,300 square kilometers, at 1550 square km per county.

      So our counties are, on average, twice as big as the country we derived our legal/administrative systems from.

      • lemming741@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I think everything west of Nebraska skews it. Georgia is almost exactly 1000 sq km average. Ohio is 1200, Kentucky 872, Arkansas is 1836.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      It’s because we never had actual Counts governing subsections of our country as their own fiefdoms. Instead its an engineered system to suit our desire for decentralized, individualized and fairly inefficient government.

      You should see how our education system is governed, it’s even worse.

      • lars@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 days ago

        Holy moly as an armchair linguist how the heck did I never see count and county being related 🙃🙈

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        It’s interesting, with western expansion they become more squarish and normalized just as states become somewhat more square. Then eventually they hit the Rockies and just gave up as you had the more chaotic western land grab.

      • Syl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 days ago

        That’s the origin of the word county‽🤯

        Makes perfect sense, just never thought about it ig.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      And here in Georgia, some dipshits are trying to create even more! (A bunch of racists from north Fulton County want to secede and re-create Milton County because Atlanta/south Fulton has too many blacks and liberals in it.)