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im not sure i follow the logic of state boundaries being a useful level of granularity for any audience. if some suburb of Austin has a power outage affecting 10k people in a 3mi radius, that means i get to see 8.7% of the contiguous US land area turn yellow unless i specifically select to zoom to TX to discover that the affected area is 10,000x smaller?

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Because our priority is having the page load quickly, and having to load data for 3k+ counties on a national map would slow things down. The state view is a compromise between speed and giving the user enough info to then go more granular by checking the state view they're interested in.

Texas is an especially interesting example you've chosen. For political reasons, people will often focus on the entire state due to its completely independent grid from surrounding states. Whether that tells the story you or I want to read or not, is something else entirely though.

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