It would be pretty f’d up if you had a population of undesirable people and just parked them at the bottom of those cliffs so they’d be completely cut off from the rest of society

If it could be drawn as a straight border, we wouldn’t be having this conversation—no one would care if it were off by a few feet one way or the other. It matters because it’s off by more than half a mile in places, and can’t be just hand-waved away as “straight enough”… which is the point of the article, that Colorado actually has 600whatever sides.

In measuring coastlines, there is no “straight enough.” It’s ALWAYS changing. You say you don’t need to account for every grain of sand. Fine, what about every large rock outcrop? Every small inlet? Every major bay? The length is 100% dependent on what measuring stick you use, and there is no right answer for which is the correct measuring stick.

No, it’s completely different. They aren’t the same in any way.

Colorado is supposed to have straight borders. When surveyors went and staked out the borders, they didn’t place them right on the theoretical straight line, sometimes they were off by thousands of feet. And once the markers are placed and everyone shook hands on it, those became the “ground truth” - not the theoretical straight line. That didn’t really matter (or was even discoverable) until the advent of GPS, when they figured out that their “straight” line really zigged and zagged all over the place, and fixing them is real PITA as described in the article. So, they got left as-is.

Coastlines are jagged, not straight. You can measure a coastline with a mile-long ruler and get a value, but you’ll have skipped a bunch of zigs and zags along the way, so the coastline is actually longer than what you measured. So you get a shorter ruler, maybe 100 yds long. Same problem. You can use a normal 1-ft ruler, but you’re still missing the zigs and zags of individual rocks at the waters edge. Etc, etc…