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U.S.A might get two more new states.


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Here's one of the artcles: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-split-three-states-20180612-story.html

 

Please, with all policy on the side. We are only going to talk about it from the geocaching point of view.

 

From the geocaching point of view only, How many of you geocachers feel about this?  I am sure many of you are working on the 50+1 state challenge(or even finished it) and this might cause a few setback(s). It will set me back as well if California become a three states. I never geocache in one of the "future" planned section.

 

I do wonder how much headache this was cause for Groundspeak.

 

I am not saying I am against it or for it. Its just a setback or more on my challenge goals.

 

Anyone else?

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Based on the limited coverage I saw recently on one of the political satire TV shows, I got the sense that this 3-state split - as well as a competing proposal for a 2-state split - is considered fanciful and unlikely to actually occur. I'm admittedly typing this from western Canada, though, so I neither have a horse in the race nor have anything more than minimal knowledge of the situation.

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4 minutes ago, The A-Team said:

unlikely to actually occur

Correct. Even if it passes in the California ballot (unlikely), it will then have to go through congress (even more unlikely).

 

But since the OP asked us to limit discussion to how we feel about it as cachers, I say "great!" It would give me an excuse to visit other parts of the "current" California since most of my finds are in the southern part of the state (and a handful in San Francisco).

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14 minutes ago, Team Christiansen said:

Correct. Even if it passes in the California ballot (unlikely), it will then have to go through congress (even more unlikely).

 

But since the OP asked us to limit discussion to how we feel about it as cachers, I say "great!" It would give me an excuse to visit other parts of the "current" California since most of my finds are in the southern part of the state (and a handful in San Francisco).

Yes, thats the plus side of it. I would make a special trip just to get that area of California.  I dont think this will change any counties line but I might be wrong.

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2 hours ago, Team Christiansen said:

I say "great!" It would give me an excuse to visit other parts of the "current" California since most of my finds are in the southern part of the state (and a handful in San Francisco).

Oh surprise. It looks like I wouldn't have to make a new trip. Comparing my Project-GC map to the proposed new-state boundaries, my finds in San Francisco get me in NorCal; those in LA county get me in Cal; and the rest of my finds get me in SoCal.

 

ps_map.php?mapHash=dfbbd9e1b637afc5d708c8108cd6a75b 

Is there any way to resize graphics in a post so they don't take up so much space?

Edited by Team Christiansen
Grammer and punctuation.
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It makes no difference to me. I'm not working on a state challenge, but if I were, I'd just adjust if needed depending on how the challenge was worded. If it says "all 50 states", then I'd consider anything in the old California to qualify. If it said "all the states of the union", then I'd have to go track down another cache or two if I don't have one in either of the new states. (Yes, I'd say that even if I didn't live in California.) My bet is that any CO with a 50 state challenge will rewrite their descriptions to explicitly say whether you need a cache from the two new states with some going one way and some, the other. A slight glitch will be that it might be impossible to write a challenge checker one way or the other, so GS might force COs to do it the way that can be checked.

 

I can't really think of any other way it could impact me. Anyone with the CA souvenir will still have it even if the cache they were awarded it for is no longer in CA, so nothing related to that will matter.

 

It's true that GS would have to make some adjustments, but I don't think it would be a big deal, especially since they have plenty of time to think about it. The proposition has no actual effect, it just tells the CA government that the people want it to happen. If it passes, the CA government has to figure out what to do about it -- hint: my guess is the CA government would find a way to ignore it -- and then starts the long hard process of convincing the U.S. government to actually make it happen. States are defined by the federal government, not by the states themselves. So even if this passes and everyone takes it seriously, it'll still be decades before it happens.

 

Off topic: I think it would be great fun to try to split California up, so I wish it would pass, but it won't. It's going to be clobbered.

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One of my favorite Hidden Camera pranks stopped people entering California and showed them proof (the newspaper headline) that CA was now part of Canada. They had to learn the new pledge to enter. 

I see the CA split in the same spirit: ain't gonna happen.

Never say never!

 

What a headache this would be for Groundspeak. I can't imagine how they'll handle a change like this. But I too think the new CA souvenirs would be released very quickly!

 

And by the way, what the heck is a 50+1 state challenge? Do you mean like Puerto Rico?

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8 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

One of my favorite Hidden Camera pranks stopped people entering California and showed them proof (the newspaper headline) that CA was now part of Canada. They had to learn the new pledge to enter. 

I see the CA split in the same spirit: ain't gonna happen.

Never say never!

 

What a headache this would be for Groundspeak. I can't imagine how they'll handle a change like this. But I too think the new CA souvenirs would be released very quickly!

 

And by the way, what the heck is a 50+1 state challenge? Do you mean like Puerto Rico?

No. Its Washington DC.  

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4 hours ago, Team Christiansen said:

Correct. Even if it passes in the California ballot (unlikely), it will then have to go through congress (even more unlikely).


I'd like to point out that California is currently a solid blue state, and congress is pretty solidly red. I think the current congress would support this as it would break up California's electoral votes in presidential elections and possibly give them up to four more seats in the Senate.

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1 hour ago, Max and 99 said:

What a headache this would be for Groundspeak. I can't imagine how they'll handle a change like this.

 

The marketing department could announce that, over the next two months, they'll be releasing two new state abbreviations in the drop-down for membership payment.  Much fanfare would ensue.

 

Hey guys, you're drifting into politics...  (Blue?  Beats me; I'm Canadian.)

 

Edited by Viajero Perdido
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I don't think it would be that big of a mess for GS. The cache locations are automated, and while I'm no programmer, I'd assume they would need to adjust the area and give it a new name. The souvenirs would probably come in short order, since GS is a US based company.

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8 hours ago, SwineFlew said:

We are only going to talk about it from the geocaching point of view.

Well, I'd get a couple more states in my statistics. I'd still have just as many to complete for a 52+1 state challenge, so it really wouldn't help me for that. Not that I expect to complete such a challenge anyway.

 

Although I don't see much grassroots interest in a split, other than the modern revival of the movement for the State of Jefferson. And the proposed "Northern California" include far too many other counties for the Jefferson advocates to support it. So I don't think this Three Californias proposal is going to matter any more than the Six Californias proposal a while back.

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11 hours ago, mimaef said:

I don't think it would be that big of a mess for GS. The cache locations are automated, and while I'm no programmer, I'd assume they would need to adjust the area and give it a new name. The souvenirs would probably come in short order, since GS is a US based company.

California, and many other States/Provinces/Regions are identified with a "stateID" (in this case, a 5).  Splitting the state into 3 regions would required assigning a new stateID for each region.  When hiding a cache the stateID is not derived from lat/long coordinates.  It is user selected (I've seen several listings where the wrong "State" was chosen).  Going forward, selecting one of the new State IDs would not be an issue but all of the existing caches in California would still be using the existing ID.  

 

When Sudan split into two countries South Sudan got a new country ID.  At the time, however, there were not geocaches in South Sudan.  In 2010 the Netherland Antilles was split into several (5, I think) countries yet GS still hasn't cleaned that up.  

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I don't think this will really happen. Here in Michigan the U.P. (Upper Peninsula) has wanted to split from the Lower Peninsula for many, many years...... hasn't happened, probably never will.

 

An interesting thought though..... how many states are there that would want to split if they started letting it happen??

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Congress has organized larger territories into separate states when admitting states to the union.  The last example of this was splitting up the New Mexico Territory into Arizona and New Mexico (and giving other chunks of the territory to Nevada and Colorado).  Interesting fact: there was a short-lived Arizona Territory, a Confederate attempt to split the New Mexico Territory between north and south and keep Arizona in the Confederacy.  It lasted just long enough for the USA to bother to split off a small number of troops to go to Arizona and smack things around a little.

 

Outside of that, the only actual states that have been divided are Maine from Massachusetts (by referendum in 1820, later recognized by Congress) and West Virginia from Virginia (when Virginia seceded in 1861).

 

I don't anticipate California being split up any time soon, or Texas for that matter.  I'd say there's a slightly larger chance of a territory, such as Puerto Rico, being admitted as a state.

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15 hours ago, Team DEMP said:

I was hoping California would secede from the US and those of us with a find would get a new country. 

 

Especially those of us outside of CA hope they secede.  LOL.

 

From a geocaching perspective, I will be at two out of three new CA states.

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20 hours ago, SwineFlew said:

I do wonder how much headache this was cause for Groundspeak.

 

Well, here are my guesses. Let's pretend that CA does in fact split into three states. Old finds will remain as they are are (that is, the "state" field in your My Finds gpx file) will not be changed. They'll add the two new states and their geographical information, and any new find once the new states are established will show as "SoCal" or whatever. I do NOT think that they'll take the trouble to go through old finds and update to the new state, and I agree that they should not.

 

And then of course we get a couple of new state souvenirs. You'd have to find a cache in the new state AFTER statehood to get the souvenir.

 

I would likewise imagine that the old challenges will remain as they are (any find in the three Cali states would count as CA in an existing state challenge) but new challenges and checkers could be created to reflect the new states. Hopefully that burden will be born by the project-gc gurus and not Groundspeak; I love challenge caches and would just as soon the mothership leave them alone (as opposed to throwing up their hands in despair and tossing them all out).

 

FWIW I bet that we'll see Puerto Rico as a state before CA splits up.

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2 hours ago, The Snowdog said:

Well, here are my guesses. Let's pretend that CA does in fact split into three states. Old finds will remain as they are are (that is, the "state" field in your My Finds gpx file) will not be changed. They'll add the two new states and their geographical information, and any new find once the new states are established will show as "SoCal" or whatever. I do NOT think that they'll take the trouble to go through old finds and update to the new state, and I agree that they should not.

That isn't quite how it works. Finds aren't recorded on the servers as "The Snowdog found this cache on this date in this state with this D/T...". It records the "Found it" log (or equivalent) with a timestamp and a reference to the cache it was logged on. When the My Finds GPX file is created, the system collects your logs and fills in the rest of the information by querying the details of the respective caches as of today. Since some aspects of a cache can change over time, like the name of a cache, the D/T ratings, etc., this can all change in the My Finds GPX depending on when you run it. If a cache in one of the proposed new states had its location changed to the new state, the next run of the My Finds would have the new state for finds on the affected caches.

 

It's either all caches in the new states retain the old (and now incorrect) state, or they get updated to the new state and everyone's finds get retroactively updated. It can't be both without a major rewrite of the geocaching.com system.

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However, Country and State are entered by the CO when the cache is created; these fields are never updated by Groundspeak. So a cache placed in what might become "Southern California" would still have "California" entered in the State field.

Edited by The Snowdog
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Personally, I would've preferred a 2-state split - Northern and Southern, rather than a 3-state split.  But either way, it's extremely unlikely to happen.  Good work by the proponents of the effort to actually get it on the ballot though. I give them credit for that.

 

It might be more interesting if the Cascadia movement got that same amount of traction, but that would be a secession from the country and create a new country.  HQ would be in that new country.

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19 hours ago, noncentric said:

It might be more interesting if the Cascadia movement got that same amount of traction, but that would be a secession from the country and create a new country.  HQ would be in that new country.

That would be tricky, because BC is proposed to be part of that too. Having a couple of states or one province secede would be one thing, but having both of those happen and then join a confederation/union with each other would be much trickier. It would be interesting, though. A separate country composed entirely of environmentalists, hippies, and hipsters. :laughing:

 

...it would also eliminate the border crossing between me and HQ. Hmm...

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The California split-into-3 referendum is going to fail miserably, and even if it passed, the US Constitution requires that both Congress and the California state legislature approve the splitup.  The same is true for any other attempt to subdivide states.

 

A territory could become a US state, though.  Perhaps Puerto Rico will become a state someday, or Washington, DC.  But that wouldn't affect our game, those places are already regions of the US and no changes would be needed.

 

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Probably will not fly:   

 

       The renegade sections of S. Oregon and N. California were primed to vote on establishing the "State Of Jefferson" in late 1941 or early 1942.  Then some event occurred Sunday Morning December 7, 1941 the mood changed and traction was lost.

 

       That having been said, there has been an upwelling of interest in the aforementioned regions to look once more at the issue.  There are numbers of folks feeling disaffected.

 

        From a geocaching perspective ... hmmmmmmmm ... one more "souvy"  for each area **(if that floats your boat)**.

 

 

Edited by humboldt flier
expanded commentary
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On ‎6‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 5:28 PM, not2b said:

A territory could become a US state, though.  Perhaps Puerto Rico will become a state someday, or Washington, DC.  But that wouldn't affect our game, those places are already regions of the US and no changes would be needed.

Nothing would change in the case of DC, but things would need to change if any of the territories became states. Currently, territories like Puerto Rico and Guam are treated like separate countries by this site, not as sub-regions of the US. If they were to become states, the site would need to be modified to list these as sub-regions rather than countries.

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On 7/20/2018 at 5:12 PM, colleda said:

Where would the extra two stars go?

Here's one possibility:

 

Notice that 52 = 13 x 4. Since 13 is odd, you can make that 52 = (7 x 4) + (6 x 4). So you have a row of 7 stars, then a row of 6 stars positioned below the gaps of the previous row, and so on, like this:

*   *   *   *   *   *   *
  *   *   *   *   *   *
*   *   *   *   *   *   *
  *   *   *   *   *   *
*   *   *   *   *   *   *
  *   *   *   *   *   *
*   *   *   *   *   *   *
  *   *   *   *   *   *

 

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There won't be a vote on the state split, but interesting to guess where capitals might be.

 

1 hour ago, cerberus1 said:

Montecito, Westlake, San Francisco, or  Los Angeles.

SF - The current state capital, Sacramento, is only 1.5 hours from San Francisco.  It would make sense for Sacramento to remain the capital of "Northern CA", especially considering that it already has government buildings.
Montecito and LA - both would be in "California".  Not sure there's enough room in LA for government.  I think SLO (san luis obispo) would be better.  More central.

Westlake - where's that?

"Southern CA" could have their capital in Bakersfield.  There's not much else there and it would be close to the other two capitals.

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9 hours ago, noncentric said:

There won't be a vote on the state split, but interesting to guess where capitals might be.

 

SF - The current state capital, Sacramento, is only 1.5 hours from San Francisco.  It would make sense for Sacramento to remain the capital of "Northern CA", especially considering that it already has government buildings.
Montecito and LA - both would be in "California".  Not sure there's enough room in LA for government.  I think SLO (san luis obispo) would be better.  More central.

Westlake - where's that?

"Southern CA" could have their capital in Bakersfield.  There's not much else there and it would be close to the other two capitals.

 

Capitals?  I was simply saying where most "stars" go in CA.   ;)

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On 7/20/2018 at 8:12 PM, colleda said:

Where would the extra two stars go?

 

A likely arrangement would be the "7-6-7-6...6" arrangement suggested in another post.  Many people - including me, until I saw a TV game show where a person couldn't come up with the current "6-5-6-5...6" arrangement - can't really describe the current pattern.  It's interesting to see the roughly two dozen different flags the US has had in the past as it grew, with ever-increasing # of stars as the # of states increased.

 

But GS will probably not face the new states issue, at least not with a split of California (won't happen).

Edited by wmpastor
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