(I meant to post this yesterday, but didn’t due to the DDOS combined with a headache after the first day of the conference)
Previously, I’ve written about the book “How the States Got Their Shapes“, which details the fascinating story of how the state boundaries came to be. I’ve also written about an interesting article describing how the U.S./Canada border came to be at the 49th parallel. Borders are interesting things, and the story behind them is sometimes quite odd. Take, for example, the border between Signal Hill and Long Beach. This border arose from disputes between oil companies, and was drawn based on the oil fields of those companies at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, this means that there are arcane lines that aren’t based on streets or other easy things. This means that the positioning of a cash register becomes important, because one side of a store may be in one city, and the cash register in another. This can mean, depending on the layout of a building, that an office is in one city, and the bathroom in another. This makes it a mess for trash pickup, building codes, and a myriad of other city services.
