How big is Switzerland compared to California?

looking it up for my own purposes, but I’ll cop to making a cheap ploy for traffic, as various map comparisons are one of the biggest drivers of stray Google searches to this site.

And here’s Switzerland compared to Colorado:

Here by the way is Jim Simons musing on a possible future for the USA:

Zierler:

And Jim, on that point, thinking about where China is headed in the 21st century, where are the similarities to the Cold War? In other words, when we had Sputnik, it was almost like it was a zero-sum game. Russia’s advance was our loss. To what extent do you see that same dynamic at play now with China – where is there competition and where is there cooperation?

Simons:

You know, I don’t know enough about it to talk very intelligently. It’s clear that the Chinese are spending a lot on science and building it up. You know, I see the United States— Look, China is five times the size, four times the size of the United States. We have 300 million people, I think they have 1.2 billion or 1.3 billion. India has a lot of people. So relatively speaking, we’re not such a big country. But we do have some wonderful things. We have great universities in the United States, and so what I’m hoping, although like Switzerland, it’s a small country but it’s very prosperous country, because it’s focused on what it can do best. And done very well for years, Switzerland. So if you compare, sometimes, the United States could be a very big Switzerland, focusing on education, keeping our great public and private universities, that attracts people to come to the United States, and does a lot of research and so on. So in China with all its people, will, you know, be a very big force. There’s nothing we can do about it, but we can, you know, cooperate with them to some extent, so we don’t have to fight with them. But we want to stay ahead as long as we can.

I think we’re a bit too manic to settle into that, but it’s an intriguing thought.