The Obama administration wants to give states more ability to charge tolls on existing Interstates:

In a major shift for how governments fund transportation projects, the administration wants to let states charge tolls on interstate highways. A federal ban currently bars states from doing so in most places, but the latest White House push could change that.

Tucked into the GROW AMERICA Act, the White House’s $302 billion transportation bill, is a toll provision that calls for eliminating “the prohibition on tolling existing free Interstate highways, subject to the approval of the Secretary, for purposes of reconstruction.”

It also allows states more flexibility to use toll revenue for repairs “on all components of their highway systems.”

The proposal reflects the growing need for new sources of funding to maintain the nation’s aging transportation infrastructure. But it’s also a slippery slope — any driver knows that once a toll is in place, they become a handy tool for milking motorists. Tolls, for instance, just increased on I-95 and elsewhere in Maryland last year.

Of course, we wouldn’t have to engage in slippery slope Interstate funding if we more properly funded Interstate construction and upkeep. Fox, I presume, looks at this as a new tax of sorts. But more than anything it’s a biproduct of our unwillingness to consider higher gasoline taxes.

It should also be pointed out that this addresses an issue through a mechanism economic conservatives and libertarians should generally support, which is that it’s user-fee based. The percentage of highway funding taken care of through usage fees has declined precipitously as costs for an increasingly complex automobile infrastructure have increased but the gas taxes have remained static. But we want things built and building things costs money.

I would be perfectly find with insisting that virtually all roads be usage-funded if it weren’t for the regressive nature of such a funding system. I tend towards skepticism of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) taxes, in addition to tolls and the gasoline taxes we pay in part due to the slippery slope concerns Fox has about increasing tolls. But… the solution to that is increased gasoline taxes, which I doubt Fox is in favor.

It’s been a bit of a shock to the system how many tolls we have to pay for roads out here. My inclination is to wonder why we can’t do this through gas taxes, but there definitely are cases where you pass through an entire state without refilling the tank. In those cases, it does make sense for it to be toll-based. And the user-based approach is inherently problematic off the major thoroughfares. Ideally, we would put GPS in our car and monitor our driving habits for better federal and state funding allocation. Perhaps then we could rely almost exclusively on a VMT (taking into account weight and perhaps environmental impact if we want to get Pigouvian about it). That would, of course, require a trust in government institutions that is now lacking.

In addition to the ability to add tolls, it will also increase variable price tolling. I have mixed feelings about that. Jonathan Last discusses peak pricing in his article on High-Occupancy Toll lanes:

At first the economists fixated on “peak pricing,” that is, charging a toll during rush hour. But flat tolls were a crude mechanism. What they longed for was a dynamic system that would always reflect the “true” cost of usage. In 1993, two economists at the Reason Foundation, Gordon Fielding and Daniel Klein, proposed a regime of variable pricing: When traffic was light, the toll might be 50 cents; when traffic was heavy, it might jump to $8. Dynamic pricing would force drivers to pay a true price to avoid traffic. The market would then cause driver economicus to regulate his behavior in the most efficient manner.

The creation of cheap, passive Radio Frequency Identification transponders in the early 1990s made dynamic pricing possible. Drivers registered for transponders (such as the E-ZPass system in the northeast, or SunPass in Florida) that were tied to a credit card. Tolls could be collected electronically while the car was moving. With the problem of collection solved, adjusting prices on the fly was easy. All that was needed was a system of sensors at on-ramps and exits to track the movement of vehicles within the network and a computer algorithm that could raise or lower prices so that traffic volume in the HOT lanes was kept moving at some predetermined minimum speed, say, 50 mph. The first HOT lanes in America, on SR-91 in Orange County, California, opened in 1995.

I support variable pricing at least in theory, but start having a problem with it when it’s as opaque as described here. Not that I mistrust whatever formula they’re using, but that it’s hard to use prices to nudge people when they don’t know at the outset how much it’s going to cost before you leave. Raising prices from the hours of 7-10 AM and them from 4-7 PM on Monday through Friday to nudge people to modify is fair and predictable. Adding costs because as it turns out on 2pm on a particular Tuesday there are a lot of cars on the road on that day is adding insult to injury as their blood pressure is rising and they are stuck in traffic. There’s not much nudging to be done when they’re already out in traffic.

The Economist looks at the cost and payoff of college and asks is it worth it? As with most things, higher education would be a better value if it were less expensive, but getting from here to there is easier said than done.

It’s good to be a business grad.

Jordan Weissman isn’t against raising the minimum wage, but thinks Seattle’s $15 proposal is a bad idea.

SeaWorld’s trainers are no longer allowed in the water with orcas.

The Yakuza, Japan’s famous crime syndicate, has a website and theme song.

The Japanese Ministry of Education is going to start conducting meetings in English.

What’s the matter with Illinois? The poll on who wants to leave whichever state they live in is quite interesting. Illinois, which also topped the list of states where faith in government was least, tops this list as well.

Some western Americans are worried that Obama is planning to monument up some western land.
Archaeologists are looking at why the vikings abandoned Greenland. It turns out, they may have just wanted to go home.

Kaitlin Thomas didn’t like the finale of How I Met Your Mother. Dan Hajducky did, though, and explains why. I was going to write a post on this before realizing that almost almost nobody I know online was watching it.

I agree with Alan Sepinwall, the US version of House of Cards doesn’t hold up particularly well on reviewing and reconsideration.

FiveThirtyEight tries to define the midwest:

Indiana, Iowa and Illinois appear to be the core of the Midwest, each pulling more than 70 percent of the vote (that may partly be because of their substantial populations). Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota each pulled at least 60 percent of the vote, so we can probably put them in the Midwest without too much fuss. Ohio, Missouri and Kansas each got more than half.

As for the rest of the states, it seems unclear whether they’re in the true Midwest.

When I was young, I actually had a very different idea of what the midwest was. It included a lot of overlap with the “real” midwest, but from a different focal point. The map basically stats out in the three states and expands to varying degrees outward. Ask me to define “midwest” and you would get the central column (from North Dakota down to Kansas) and then expand eastward. I’d not have included Ohio, which as it turns out is exactly what a lot of people think of when they think of the midwest. East of Iowa, you start getting into what I mostly think of as the Great Lakes region.

Kansas gets a fair amount of inclusion in the popular mind, but in my mind it’s the first state I think of when I think of “midwest.” Not sure why. I’ve never been there.

They do the same for the south, but reach more concrete results:

While the top few Midwest states barely pulled 80 percent of the vote, nearly 90 percent of respondents identified Georgia and Alabama as Southern, and more than 80 percent placed Mississippi and Louisiana in the South. South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and North Carolina all garnered above 60 percent.

Southerners seem remarkably content to mess with Texas, giving it 57 percent support. Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky hovered at about 50 percent.

Here, of course, we have a more immediate reference point: The Confederacy. That doesn’t explain all of the states, but you can start from there and then diminish the “southernness” of various constituent states like Texas.

I wonder the extent to which Virginia might join Maryland as a former southern state. North Carolina, too, but mostly Virginia. Or will its membership in the confederacy define it ever forward?

The only surprises to me were Florida, which I figured would be more on-par with Texas as a slightly more marginal sort of southern state, and Arkansas which I consider to be very southern. I’m also a little surprised that South Carolina wasn’t 100% because who in South Carolina doesn’t think of it as southern?

Don’t you hate it when you get a new phone and all of your old chargers no longer work? Well, the EU intends to do something about it:

A common charger should be developed for all mobile phones sold in the EU, to reduce waste, costs and hassle for users, said MEPs voting on an update to EU radio equipment laws on Thursday. This draft has already been informally agreed with the Council of Ministers.

“The modernised Radio Equipment Directive is an efficient tool to prevent interference between different radio equipment devices. I am especially pleased that we agreed on the introduction of a common charger. This serves the interests both of consumers and the environment. It will put an end to charger clutter and 51,000 tonnes of electronic waste annually”, said rapporteur Barbara Weiler (S&D, DE).

There was a time when I might have welcomed this development. I once had a phone end up getting crushed and my “insurance plan” gave me a phone with a different brand that required a whole new set of chargers. The chargers, at the time, weren’t cheap.

But this is the equivalent of a parent yelling at his kid that he has to do his homework before he can leave the house… while the kid is sitting at his desk with his book open. This is a problem that has already, more-or-less, resolved itself. The apparent scam where every phone maker had a different and proprietary charger is pretty up, if there ever was a scam at all.

There already is a standard, called Micro-USB, and even dumb phones seem to be using it. Heck, even a lot of bluetooth earpieces use it. The only major holdout is Apple. But Apple has their own standard, which they’ve been sticking to for a while, replacing a standard that survived from the iPod to the iPhone. Plus, since they’re Apple, you can get charger cables relatively easily in a pinch. And once you have them, you can generally rely on them being good for a while.

It’s convenient for me that the Android devices all use a single charger, compatible with other devices, but it’s not without its own problems and isn’t (or shouldn’t be) permanent. On the first score, if I get a generic Micro-USB cable, it’ll work but often kind of shoddily. The connection won’t be firm, for instance, on generic cables. Some of the chargers don’t supply enough power. They’ll work in a pinch (usually), but I get and use Samsung OEM chargers when I can. The proposed EU regulation would do nothing to fix or standardized that, though, and I will still have plugs I use mostly for earpieces and others I use for phones.

And the thing is, I don’t want to be using these forever. Back when this idea was first floated, I was surprised that they went with Micro-USB instead of Mini-USB, which my phone at the time used and I considered to be better. It had more firm connections, wasn’t as fragile, and so on. But as it turned out it was too fat and Micro-USB was necessary for the slimming of devices. Super-thin devices are not my think, but they’re clearly what a lot of people want. At some point maybe someone will come up with an cable that has a thin barrel at the end that will take up even less space in the phone and be less fragile. But how much would they want to invest in something that isn’t compliant with the standard?

And for a problem that has been resolving itself for several years now. Apple will almost certainly continue to go its own way, but the Android makers have been converging on a single standard for a reason. People don’t want to replace the power cables they have if they switch phone brands. Since most phone brands want you to switch (to their brand, obviously), they have an incentive to use the standards. And if they have an even greater incentive to do something else, well maybe that’s a reason they should do it. The innovation isn’t done yet.

Hollyfame has a list of 15 actors who turned down roles that turned out to be pretty big.

Though not on the list, Sandra Bullock only got her career-launching role in Speed because Halle Berry turned it down. Barry apparently made a point of mentioning this, and it came across to some as sour grapes. I remember hearing about it on the radio, with the morning talk person making the point that Sandra Bullock playing Annie Porter was what launched the role and that it wouldn’t have been nearly as big a part for Barry as it turned out to be Bullock because she wouldn’t have played the role in the same way.

I’m not sure how true that is or isn’t, but I think there’s something to it. Speed was a fun movie, but it wasn’t exactly an Oscar thing. Barry would go on to play a very similar role in Executive Decision, which in my mind was a superior movie. The movie garnered less attention than Speed, and Barry garnered next to no attention for the role.

I thought about Halle Barry while reading through this list. There are some cases where I think the actors really missed opportunities. For example, I think that John Travolta would have made a fantastic Forrest Gump and it would have been tremendous for his career. In other cases, though, the part wouldn’t have been the part with someone else playing it. Pretty Woman was made by Julia Roberts and Jennifer Garner, talented and beautiful though she is, would probably not have had the same effect.

The biggest example of the latter, in my opinion, was Paul Giamatti as Michael Scott. It would have been a different role with Giamatti and one not nearly as successful. In a later episode, Bob Odenkirk demonstrated that Carrell was not irreplaceable. But Odenkirk mixing up Michael Scott and Saul Goodman might not have had the same chemistry and things might have unfolded quite differently. It took The Office a bit of time to find its footing. With Giamatti, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have happened.

Matthew Broderick as Walter White in Breaking Bad is intriguing to think about. It’s cable, so there’s less expectation, but I think the Ferris Bueller association would have been too much to overcome.

So it’s hard to look at this through the lens of plugging another actor in there (even a talented actor) and assuming that everything would have worked out the same. In some cases, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have.

Frustrated Fathermade some news when he wrote a letter to a teacher expressing frustration over the new style of teaching math:

I have a bachelor of science degree in electronics engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other higher math applications,” he wrote. “Even I cannot explain the Common Core mathematics approach, nor get the answer correct.

Mindful Mathematician responded:

The “new” methods you’re seeing are not being taught. They are methods that students naturally invent. Just the way that mathematicians invented them before our formal mathematics system existed. Believe it or not, simplicity and efficiency are at the forefront of our classroom discussions EVERY day. We are guiding students through their own sense making methods not only to understand numbers and operations but to find the most efficient methods for each problem.

I was first confronted with the brave new world of math teaching when I was doing sub-work. I ended up writing a post about it. The method taught in Arapaho schools, “Cluster Math” appears to be mildly different from the worksheet, but the thought behind it seems to be the same. Old Math was strictly algorithmic. As MM says, you didn’t always know why you were doing what you were doing. You just learned how to do it. It’s not quite rote memorization as MM suggests, but unlike the new stuff it is fixated more on getting the right answer than understanding why it’s the right answer.

The algorithmic method is still what I prefer. That’s not mutually exclusive with other ways of getting the answer and indeed, sometimes the math I do in my head actually more closely resembles what is being taught. I do think, though, that it was best for me that I went through algorithmic and came out the other side.

A few people scoffed at Frustrated Farent for making a mistake in his own work. The Frustrated Parent actually sees it as a sign that the new way is deficient, which isn’t quite right. Critics of FF suggest that he shouldn’t be saying much since he himself is prone to error. The thing is, though, my somewhat limited experience in Arapaho demonstrated to me that error-proneness is precisely the problem with the new method. As I previously described it:

Kids try it out one way, hit a wall, then start over. Before you know it, they have multipliers or 38 written down all over the place and when it comes time for the final addition, they don’t know which counts. In the above case (38×27), his answer was over 2,000.

Maybe the new new math isn’t prone to this sort of error. I do know that for me, knowing the best and quickest way to get the right answer helped me figure out other ways to get to that answer. Perhaps that’s redundant in the Age of the Calculator (on your phone, which you have on you at all times). For my own part, since I am very much the sort of person that forgets which 38 gets applied to which problem, I am not at all optimistic that any method other than the one I was taught would have worked as well (though the Lattice Method, which I was also taught, was fun).

For other kids? I don’t know. I do know that I am a bit disturbed by the Culture War aspect of this. That includes parents high-fiving FF for the wrong reasons (and I do think some are) but also those scoffing at any skepticism towards the new teaching as being anti-math or anti-education. And/o making fun of their computational errors.

Owls are good husbands and dads.

Most Americans live within 25 miles of their mothers. It warms your heart, if you ignore the inevitable economic inefficiency of misallocated labor.

Jon Fortenbury looks at sexual late-starters.

Over Easter, atheists had a convention in Salt Lake City. Which may sound odd on both accounts, but who else is going to have a convention on Easter? And Mormons and Atheists may have some things in common.

UPS may be able to teach us a something or two about our automated future.

An article in Academic Medicine makes the case that hospitals refusing to hire smokers is contrary to the principles of medicine.

First they went after the smokers, then they went after the fatties.

What is missing from news coverage of the GMO debate in Vermont? Science is missing.

NASA is trying to entrance youngsters with space and science.

As some predict a post-employment future, others see labor shortages.

Ever want to know what they call the planets in other languages? Here you go.

Article title of the year (of 2011): Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought.

Social worker Helen Redmond writes about the link between mental illness to smoking. She implores us to give them access to ecigarettes, but the really interesting thing is the history of the tobacco industry actively courting the mentally ill.

The FDA has announced its initial regulatory intent with ecigarettes:

Health warnings would also be required and the sale of the products in vending machines would be prohibited. Initially, the only health warning required for e-cigarettes would be about the potential for addiction to nicotine.

Manufacturers would be required to register all their products and ingredients with the FDA. They would only be able to market new products after an FDA review, and they would need to provide scientific evidence before making any claims of direct or implied risk reduction associated with their product.

Companies would also no longer be allowed to give out free samples.

After the public comment period and once the proposed rules are finalized, manufacturers will have 24 months to submit an application to allow their products to remain on the market or submit a new product application.

E-cigarettes deliver nicotine to the user as a vapor. They are usually battery-operated and come with a replaceable cartridge that contains liquid nicotine. When heated, the liquid in the cartridge turns into a vapor that’s inhaled.

As someone who was expecting our own regulatory proposals to mirror Europe’s, I am honestly quite relieved. Counterproductive in some areas, but in others I don’t think they went far enough. Yet, that is. Which is the caveat. The indications are that there will be more to come. (more…)

Rabbits: Cute, furry, and ready to be weaponized.

One of my favorite videos is a primer on how to pick up chicks. It shows an ugly guy walking up to a woman and asking her what her sign is and says that is the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is a hunk walking up to a woman and asking her what her sign is. Apparently, this by-the-seat wisdom is wrong, and here’s how to flirt.

Children bring with the more positive and more negative emotions for the parents.

New research suggests that cohabitation is not a predictor of divorce so much as when couples cohabitate. Here’s a somewhat old primer on the downsides to cohabitation.

Here’s a job we need to automate: Umpiring. They not only get it wrong, but they do so with systemic bias.

Bob Weber explains why we should wear productivity sensors on the job, and what they’re telling us.

The story behind the scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.

Removing tobacco branding may not do anything to stop people from smoking. I have no real opinion on this.

The New York Times discusses an issue of interest to me: Smoking and economic class. I’m glad that Clay County discovered vaping and wish the guy at the end all the luck on saving money for a down payment on a house.

Reports that free contraception makes women less careful appear to be misguided. My own view is that in a vacuum it could make a difference, but we’re not in a vacuum and any effect is has is overwhelmed by cultural influence.

-{So yeah, this is a post about immigration. Feel free to voice opinions on the immigration topic. It’s a relatively wide – but not unlimited – berth here.}-

Bryan Caplan reluctantly points out a possible solution to unauthorized immigrant labor enforcement:

Still, there is a way to make Unz’s proposal even more diabolical. I hesitate to reveal it, but I seriously doubt the nativists will listen. The heart of darkness: Give a green card to any illegal immigrant who testifies against his employer for labor law violations. You solve for the tragic equilibrium.

This may sound familiar, as it’s something I have proposed before. To clarify, my “proposal” being less of something we should do, but something that we can do if we ever want to get serious about it. The response I have historically gotten is that it’s something conservatives would never sign on with because they want it to be all about the immigrants and not the employers. Which I actually find to be a misunderstanding of the border hawks by the border doves. Border hawks strongly dislike employers who illegally hire people who aren’t here legally.

The “green card” aspect may be a tougher sell. But not nearly as tough a sell as it is to the people who say that there is just nothing we can do to stem the tide.

Ultimately, the big problem with illegal immigration (or at least the workforce component) is that it’s a win-win situation for those most involved in the situation. Employers get cheap labor. Immigrants get jobs. Those that are (at least theoretically) being hurt are not in sufficient proximity to the situation to do anything about it.

The key, then, is to turn employer and employee against one another. Sew mistrust. Make the employers scared of the employees, who will have the ability to get above the table simply by diming out the employer. You might not even have to, but if you threaten to deport everyone else who works for the company, you turn the employees against one another, too. It would make it much, much more difficult to keep these arrangements going.

There are some downsides. It would, likely, result in some anti-Hispanic and anti-Asian discrimination (including against those here legally). Just as any effort to come down on employers would. Verification schemes tend to penalize everybody equally. With this, employers would simply be more wary of demographic profiles that are perceived to be disproportionately likely to be here illegally. On the other hand, if an employer has a degree of indemnity by following verification protocols, it could work. You could possibly mitigate the racism problem by offering indemnity only in the event that you verify everybody’s identification.

The other downside, though, is just that. The result would probably be at least a mild uptick in identity theft as getting paperwork in order becomes more important. The result of this could be green cards for assisting in the prosecution of those assisting in the identity theft. Or tighter identity monitoring more generally, though that’s obviously going to have its opponents.

This would primarily affect those who come here to work. It would do little for border-hoppers who are explicitly here to further criminal enterprises. However, I suspect that if we didn’t have so many people trying to cross over to work, it would be considerably easier to work on those who come over here for other reasons. Right now, the weeds can hide in some pretty tall grass. The less border enforcement focused on migrant workers, the more that can be focused on drugs.

I strongly believe that after all this, the need for migrant workers likely would become more apparent. At that point we would be able to talk more about how many migrants we need rather than how many can find their way across. Others, of course, will disagree with this strongly.

Ultimately, of course, this problem does have a self-regulating aspect. Illegal immigration has never been a priority issue of mine, though a combination of factors lead me to start asking the question “What would work?” And I started taking a turn against illegal immigration when the economy hit the skids. But that’s when the self-regulation did start to kick in and the pace abated. I know that I have a higher tolerance for immigration than the readers at Hit Coffee, and a lower tolerance than those at Ordinary Times, so there’s at least something in here for everyone to believe that I am an inhuman monster or an unpatriotic American.

Back in the land of reality, though, as nice as it might be to have control over our borders (regardless of how many people we let through them), there are some significant problems. It’s not simply a matter of opportunistic Democrats seeing future voters or weak Republicans shuddering in fear of being called racist or permanently losing the Hispanic vote. It’s mostly that the nation as a whole seems to feel about immigration as I do about other issues. The steps and laws required to enforce the prohibition are further than a lot of people are willing to go. Polling tends to vary, but as immigrants are loaded onto buses en masse the optics would shift points of view that are already tepid on the matter. Leaning heavily on employers is extremely popular, but it was one of the hallmarks of Romney’s “Self-deportation” plan that went over like a lead balloon.

Or put another way, the biggest problem in all of this is an inability of the American people to decide what we actually want.