Lawrence Finch wrote:
It’s not actually even the middle; the US “owns” less than half of the gulf; about 45%. The balance is divided between Mexico and Cuba (and a couple of small countries).
In the government's defence, the executive order clearly describes this, "rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico."
This next sentence is interesting too, "The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law."
You can lookup these features on the GNIS. This is clearly a US-centric database. It ignores the rest of the world. When I search for "Bay of Fundy", I get a result that is most definitely NOT the Bay of Fundy.
But of all the ultimate ironies here, if you check the actual continental shelf on the US government's own Continental Shelf project and compare that to the actual label position of "Gulf of America" on both Google Maps and Apple Maps, you can see that both Google and Apple have done it wrong. They are both labelling the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. By that I mean the actual label position is just outside of the boundary of the Gulf of America.
But of course, everyone is trying to make a political point by virtue signalling how much they don't like President Trump. That's a total waste of time. Anyone who has actually read the executive order, and can read a map, can make a strong geographic point that both Google and Apple have labelled the map incorrectly. Now this is not the Google Support Community, so I don't care about Google. How should it look in Apple Maps?
Well, we can start by looking at how the US government itself labels the map. Don't bother checking the GNIS. They have a note stating they haven't fixed it yet. But we can check that State Department site above. This is what their map looks like:
This is correct, folks! For all the trash talk of the US government, they actually can read their own laws and a map. Go figure.
But Apple needs our help. We can overlay the correct government map on top of Apple Maps to see the problem:
This is how it should be labelled on Apple Maps:
(This is just an example. My labels aren't correct either but I'm constrained by transparency and other labels. But this is the right idea.)
If anyone wants to file a bug report citing this correct geographical information, you have my full support.
