yeah that checks out

I can't even fault the original anon for not knowing and preferring reaching out to someone since we're social animals. But what really boils my blood is all the people in the notes doubling down on their lack of knowledge and passing on their faulty half knowledge to each other by comparing them to counties.

Guys. Germany has sixteen states. Counties are not just smaller states, they're an organizational unit whereas the states are almost fully functional. And our states have counties themselves, in various different shapes and forms.

They all have their own governments, legislation, executive forces.
Did you know that the state of Hessia only outlawed the Death penalty in 2018? It only hasn't been used because a federal law overruled it. There's many such overrulings, which is why it might appear that the federal government has more power than it should have and why most of the differences show up in the 16 educational systems that we have. That doesn't change the structure though.
Look up Federalism please.

As a reward you get to burn your eyes at this clusterfuck HRE map of 1789. The predecessors of our states were even smaller, and not even contiguous.

That's where we're coming from. Landmass is really not the most important factor in defining statehood here. See the Saarland. By the way, don't underestimate the population density here.

Our current 16 states are fairly sane in comparison. Because they've been remade in 1945/46 by the allies, including you, USA, copying the US federal system with the goal of preventing totalitarian structures from taking hold as easily again. That's why we now have constructs like North Rhine-Westphalia or Rhineland-Palatinate which used to be completely unrelated separate regions and make 0 sense historically. Imagine you wake up one day in New Jersey-York.

I mean even without the historical context -

Germany has a population of 84 million people

That’s just a few million less than the population of California, Texas and New York (the state) summed together

Which is a lot of people

It’s not so wild to split them in partly politically autonomous regions...