I bet you would sicko.

Slightly different slicing in a Voronoi diagram:

something close to what you mean: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/563-pop-by-lat-and-pop-by-long

they placed the first and last zones over the pacific, in the shape of their globe projection. Seems fair.

Edit: now realizing that this is exactly what you were saying...

I was thinking more about this and realized that once you decide the first segment, the rest are deterministic. Because the adjacent segments cannot be larger or smaller than containing 10% of the population.

Further, once you define the east or west edge of the first segment, the other edge is also deterministic.

In theory you could calculate every possible arrangement of zones to a certain accuracy, such as to every degree of 360. There's only as many possible combinations as there are starting positions for the first longitude you pick.

yeah was thinking this. I mean right away you would thing you would draw the first border just left of iceland to sorta divide between new/old world. But then I look and it seems like this was done but in the pacific which makes a certain amount of sense given the larger pacific ocean and the cleaner break you get. Looks like it was made to keep the us all in one chunk as it takes part of russia in order to get all the alutian islands.

I was also thinking how much Russia is piggybacking on its neighbors here

Depends on a lot of things, of course you probably wouldn't feel great in Beijing, but the population density of China is almost half the UK's.

On the other hand it's way easier to be invisible, and get lost in the crowd in big cities

I'm the opposite, I hate the isolation of urban sprawl and would love to live in a dencer city

Yeah that's my nightmare.

Africa's doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.