A border is a line on a map, agreed to by people, enforceable against people. Smoke doesn't read the agreement. Neither does a falling company, a failing crop, or a signal that has to reach another network to mean anything at all. Four unrelated domains, the same fact underneath every one of them, whether the culture built on top says so or not.

Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and pieces of Colorado and Wyoming were Mexican national territory, governed from Mexico City, until the US took nearly half of Mexico's land in a single treaty -- then spent the next forty years deciding how much of its own promise it actually intended to keep.

The Colorado River is over-allocated by a 1922 legal compact, running through a multi-year drought, cut back by the federal government three years running. And a golf course in the middle of a Phoenix-area July can still be green, because of a decision Scottsdale made in the 1980s and 90s that has nothing to do with any of that.

The Bureau of Land Management controls 245 million acres -- one-tenth of the entire country, three times more than the National Park Service. Yellowstone and Yosemite are household names. BLM, the agency managing the larger share by far, isn't.

In 1680 Pueblo peoples drove Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico for twelve years -- and the same small city later became a zoning-mandated tourist brand, the secret front door to the Manhattan Project, and the reason modern computing runs on the architecture it does.