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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Holy crap, Australia has approximately the same population as New York City. That's nearly an order of magnitude less than I would have guessed. I had no idea!

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An order of magnitude higher and it'd be of similar magnitude to the entire USA.

I tend to think of Australia as pretty similar (if literally polar opposite) to Canada. Similar population and standard of living on a similarly large but largely inhospitable landmass.

Australia is basically Hot Canada.

Australia: Our brother to the hot south with more sex appeal and far less marriage material.

I was just quoted a stat that said boomer retirees have sex way more frequently than any of their younger cohorts. So weird and depressing if true.

Maybe single people are less likely to retire

Travelling there it felt like Big California.

Except that Canada is just cold while Australia has the whole evolutionary arms race thing going on.

Australia has almost everything wrong you can think of climate-wise: cold Antarctic currents hitting the west coast causing dry winds with little moisture, on the east coast there's a narrow strip between the coast and the long N-S mountains that gets moisture, but even then the mountains are barely high enough to trap winds and cause rainfall. The very north gets monsoons, the inland is a baking desert and only the very south is temperate.

If you want an idea of scale, there's a single cattle farm in Australia operated by less than a dozen people that is larger than Texas.

Anna Creek is 23,677 km2 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station and 15,746 square kilometres according to https://www.williamscattlecompany.com.au/anna-creek .

Texas is rather larger than Anna Creek, at 676,587 km2 of land according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas .

To a good approximation Australia is a desert surrounded by a narrow, narrow strip of livable land. It would be pretty remarkable if it had a population close to that of the US.

An order of magnitude! That would be imagining that Australia has >200 million people. Given that the US has a little more than 300 million, well... No, they aren't comparable.

Australia by an large is an inhospitable island with only a few pockets of population.

I'm pretty sure NYC has a population of like 7 or 8 million, about a third of Australias.

Depends where you draw the line. The 5 boroughs alone is about 8M, but the broader metropolitan area is something like 20. (And even beyond that it's still pretty densely populated compared to most places.)

The broader metropolitan is not usually what people consider as NYC. New York state maybe

The broader area is more like that little corner of the state plus half of New Jersey.

New York MSA is 20M, CSA is 23M

NYC = NSW approx then.

Lol and I think Sydney is getting “too busy”

Australia also happens to have the seemingly same amount of useable land space as NYC.

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