Michael Williams observes that Putin is conquering Ukraine by referendum, then asks whether or not this could happen in the United States.

The biggest danger would be Maine, I would guess, or possibly Vermont. That would, of course, require that Canada is actively interested in expanding into the US, and that Maine or Vermont would be worth it. North Dakota for the mineral wealth, perhaps?

I think this line of questioning is backwards, though. The real question is who they United States could conquer by way of this methodology. There could be some interested Mexican states, though there aren’t any states in Mexico that I think we are itching to bring into the US.

So, I nominate British Columbia and Alberta. A couple years ago, Vancouver sought to disavow national support for the Canucks hockey team, after all. And Albert is the only state that has elected senators-in-waiting for the sole purpose of making a statement that Canada’s upper house should look more like ours. I have a better solution…

All we’d have to do is convince them! Throw in Yukon, and we are contiguous with Alaska.

Is George W Bush experiencing a renaissance in time for his brother’s possible presidential campaign? For those of you who missed it, check out his paintings.

Are today’s ministries too focused on the family?

Gay marriage does not, in my view, weaken the institution. Some proposals, I believe, would.

Mark Kleiman writes up a potential hole in the lead-crime theory.

One way to reduce drunk driving may be to elongate pub hours.

Baylen Linnekin looks in on bans on sharing food with the homeless.

The Verge doesn’t let it’s writers look at the traffic numbers for fear that it will taint the process.

According to Matt Asay, more companies are using open source, and not because it’s free.

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at a Polish memorial and helped repair FRG/Polish relations. Should Japan’s Abe do the same? Alexander Lanoszka says not.

Simon and CGHill wonder why the Obama Administration wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, precisely:

If $10.10 is good wouldn’t $5,000.00 be 495 times better? And why stop at $5,000.00? Why not a $1,000,000.00 an hour minimum? Think of the economic improvement to our poorest workers that would give. A minimum wage of $1,000,000,000,000.00 an hour would allow the government to run a surplus with ridiculously low taxes.

Well, the reason why not $5,000 an hour is that most supporters of raising the minimum wage do recognize that there can be adverse effects. Economists all agree on that, though many economists believe that raising the minimum wage by a more modest amount either won’t have much of an effect or will have a marginal one. There are studies to support both arguments for smaller hikes, but a consensus on larger ones. Most of them probably think we could go above $10.10 an hour, but few are under delusion that you can go however high you want.

The interesting part to me is the extra ten cents an hour. Why? I suspect the answer is “thinking ahead.” A lot of supporters of a higher minimum wage will want to raise it again before too long and some states will want to raise it immediately. $10.00 is such an even number that there might be more psychological comfort with that number. It’s not unlike how some states are finding 10% to be the cap for sales taxes. There’s no particular reason why raising it from 9.5% to 10% should be different from 10% to 10.5%, but there is.

$10.10 isn’t as comfortable a stopping point as $10, and that’s a feature.

David Jarman looks at how the Daily Kos has changed congress. As interesting as that, however, is a look at the general shifts that have occurred in congress.

The Tea Party has a candidate selection problem, and the GOP establishment has figured out how to respond.

Market forces are an important factor in the marriage gap.

Scandal! On multiple levels! A homeopathic drug company was exposed when it was discovered they put actual drugs in their products.

Cuba is complaining that forcing plain tobacco packaging is anti-capitalist.

ArsTechnica looks at the first two Ubuntu smartphones.

According to Quartz, Dropbox wants to “own your phone.” I’m pretty sure Google already owns mine.

The crisis in Russia has spawned a (somewhat minor) identity crisis in Germany. My mind has replaced the old “West Germany” with “Germany”… which leads me to forget that it’s not quite that simple.

Germany is often hailed as the superstar of the European economy. It hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it wasn’t that way pretty recently.

Mashable has a great piece on the history of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which is a good read for those of you old enough to remember it and young enough to have used it.

AIM played a critical bridge in my life, in between the old BBS days and the Age of Facebook. When my friends all went off the college, instant messaging was the primary way that we stayed in touch. Or got back in touch, as there was a brief gap in between the BBS and ICQ. ICQ was what most of us used before AIM. It was superior in some respects like keeping automatic logs. But AIM understood the Instant in Instant Messaging, and became the default before too long.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my file server are mountains of old AIM chat logs, sitting next to old BBS logs and some ICQ ones. I was meticulous in my record-keeping. Countless early conversations with Eva, for example, are meticulously recorded. As is the heartbreak that followed. I don’t expect to ever read them, but they’re there for posterity.

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s really kind of surprising that AOL didn’t figure out how to make AIM work for them financially. It was a social network waiting to happen. One that, in my view, could have been strong enough to withstand MySpace and later Facebook had it been remotely well done. They had the userbase, which it turns out is worth quite a lot. There was, as the article says, some critical underinvestment because it didn’t turn around and make money right away for one of the few companies at the time that was used to making money.

Download AIM today! Wait, you can’t… (well, you probably can somewhere, but it won’t work.)[/caption]When Facebook came along, and texting became more prevalent instant messaging (as its own thing) started becoming largely redundant. It’s no coincidence that I discovered Facebook and stopped bothering to install IM apps within a year of one another. Not just because Facebook had its own messaging apparatus, but because it served as the bridge to regular chatting with people that AIM had been.

The company that really ought to be kicking itself is Yahoo. They also had a capable messenger program and a whole lot of the trappings of a social network without managing to put it all together in a Google+ fashion. Given that they were already dependent on advertising revenue, they would have been a natural fit to be a market leader, with comparatively little investment.

Which brings me to Google Plus. Google Plus has hit allegedly hit the skids. The showrunner for G+ has announced his departure and there are rumors that the project is being dismantled, at least somewhat. I personally find Google+ to be superior to Facebook in just about every way except that almost nobody uses. Like Yahoo of yesteryear, Google definitely has the customer base. They’ve got the messenger and more! So why hasn’t G+ succeeded? Timing, as they say, is everything. The key for AOL and Yahoo is that they had an opportunity to jump in the game before Facebook started dominating it. Google entered later.

Contra the doomsayers, though, I don’t see Google Plus going anywhere. The key to Google+ is that it is the unifier of the Google platform. It brings together various Google utilities, everything from Android phones to email to messaging to calendar. Where it hasn’t succeeded is as a social network (given that “nobody uses it” problem). But that’s probably okay.

The purpose of running a social network, from a business standpoint, is that you get to know the users better and can sell them more stuff by having a better idea of what they want, and that when they use your products you’re acting as a salesperson. Google owns so much of me and a lot of other people that it’s hardly necessary that I kvetch on G+ instead of Facebook. If Google Plus does pivot, they should actually make it more formally a “home base” and replace the feed streams with useful things. Of course, they’ve cancelled some of those “useful things” like Google Reader and iGoogle, but unless they can make progress on the social networking thing it makes sense to me to revive Reader in some way and transition the mobile Google Now onto the desktop.

Google, though, has lots of options. Yahoo, on the other hand, doesn’t. Their options are much more limited. But at least they’re not AOL, who had everything they needed to take off and didn’t see the money it.

Colleges are spending more on athletics than ever. The biggest increases, however, are occurring at the lower levels. My own take.

The football players at Northwestern got their union vote, though we won’t know the results for some time. Not all of the players were on board.

It would say something irredeemably ugly if having worked at McDonald’s hurt your career. Fortunately, despite the recent study, it’s not quite that simple.

The “zero hour contract” is definitely indicative of a problem in the labor market. It’s hard for me to see it as not revolving around a worker surplus.

Japan has taken to making killer single malts and weapons. And it’s not just alcohol and weapons.

Japan is reinstating its nuclear program.”

Even if we had an optimal immigration policy, city-based visas would still make sense.

Low-income kids thrive in Salt Lake City, though some are worried that’s changing.

I previously wrote about the phenonon of Hollywood-generated beefcakes. Logan Hill of the Men’s Journal has more.

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the first modern cop drama, Hill Street Blues.

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?