Some time ago, the FDA announced that they were going to ban tobacco-makers from using the word “Light” on their light product lines. The rationale was that people are smoking these things under the false impression (an impression encouraged by tobacco companies) that they were a healthier alternative to full flavor cigarettes. Whether they are indeed less destructive than real cigarettes depends on how you look at it, but in practice people who smoke lights tend to smoke more and the compensatory behavior undoes any health benefits that might exist.

It strikes me as fair to object to the term “light” and “ultra-light” in this context. As always, the tobacco companies do themselves no favors when it comes to advertising.

The end result is that tobacco companies swapped out the “light” and “ultra-light” labels with various color designations. Some tobacco control experts argue that this is a circumvention:

Manufacturers substituted “Gold” for “Light” and “Silver” for “Ultra-light” in the names of Marlboro sub-brands, and “Blue”, “Gold”, and “Silver” for banned descriptors in sub-brand names. Percent filter ventilation levels, used to generate the smoke yield ranges associated with “Lights” categories, appear to have been reassigned to the new colour brand name descriptors. Following the ban, 92% of smokers reported they could easily identify their usual brands, and 68% correctly named the package colour associated with their usual brand, while sales for “Lights” cigarettes remained unchanged.

Another word for what they did is “compliance.”

The products were not pulled off the shelf. They are not necessarily more dangerous than regular cigarettes. The problem was in the marketing. That they changed the marketing and people still found their level of choice is ultimately neither here nor there. At worst, it means that people have internalized the alleged health benefits. Just as likely, it’s because they failed to understand the cause and effect.

I rarely smoked lights. Quite the opposite: I went for the meanest, dirtiest tasting cigarettes that I could find. I never wanted smooth, I wanted rough. I don’t know if this is because of my diminished tastebuds or because I didn’t inhale. But the people I know who do or did smoke lights didn’t compensate in volume because they thought it was healthier, none of them have ever cited health benefits which have long been exposed as questionable, but they tended to smoke lights precisely because it allowed them to smoke more or more intensely. The body tires of them less quickly. You don’t feel quite as bad the next morning. If your smoking time lends itself to smoking two packs a day, and/or if you like to take harder puffs, then irrespective of health claims, smoking lights makes that more doable.

To be fair, if asked n a poll they might answer that it’s about health, but smokers are notoriously unreliable when being polled by strangers. Or perhaps they have internalized the claims, but smokers are creatures of habit and that isn’t going to be done so easily. The next generation may be duly confused as to what tar level they’re buying. So there’s that.

If more cigarettes or greater puffs were the problem that was meant to be addressed, then you need to go and ban the lighter stuff, pure and simple. I’m not sure if that would be beneficial to smokers’ health or harmful, but I simply don’t know what in the world gave them the impression that relabeling them would have any effect. The people behind the counter know where to direct them. Of course the smokers would seek out their favored products. They’re their favored product. I suppose it’s too much to ask anti-smoking advocates to know any smokers, but the assumptions that lead them to believe that there would be any conclusion other than this one suggests that they need to learn how smokers actually operate instead of making assumptions based on whatever they’re presently basing their assumptions on.

I personally think it’s a failure to appreciate that, whatever our faults, we are actually thinking, autonomous individuals and not actually living statistics of tobacco company marketing. Whatever the case, they wanted the marketing changed and the marketing was changed. That’s compliance. People didn’t care because it wasn’t strictly about the marketing. If there is a compliance failure, it is ours.

-{Regarding my precise verbiage, I do still refer to myself as a smoker. Not because of the vaping, and not because I’ve picked the smoking habit back up again, but because I still do not feel completely out of the woods yet and won’t for some time.}-

From Jonathan V Last’s What To Expect When No One’s Expecting:

In 1976 only 26.8 percent of the counties in America went for either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford by a margin of 20 points of more. That’s a pretty remarkable statistic. The 1976 election was an incredibly polarized moment with the country shaken by Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. Carter won 50 percent to 48 percent, and in three out of every four counties, the vote was reasonably close, which meant that Republicans and Democrats were, for the most part, evenly intersparsed at the local level, even if, in the aggregate, their states tilted one way or the other.

But after 1976, something happened. As people began graduating from college at higher rates they became increasingly mobile and willing to put down roots far away from where they were raised. And they began to cluster around other like-minded people. So much so that in 2000, America had one of the closest presidential elections in the nation’s history: George W. Bush won the race despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore, 47.9% to 48.4%. Yet in nearly half the counties in America (45.3 of them) the vote wasn’t close at all: Either Gore or Bush won by more than 20 points. In 2004 – another very close election – the percentage of what Bushop and Cushing refer to as “landslide” counties increased to 48.3%. The end result is fewer neighborhoods that are ideologically mixed and more places that look like Old Town [Alexandria] (or its Republican doppelananger). Bishop and Cushing’s conclusion is inescapable: We are sorting ourselves into communities of the saved.

I’d argue, that in addition to sorting, politics is more than ever defined by cultural issues, cultural signalling, and so on. The sort and signalling issues may be related. As a town becomes more Republican or more Democrat, the peer influence for undecideds, cluelesses, and wafflers intensifies.

Men on a construction site acting out of accordance with cultural norms.

Apple booster Daniel Eran Dilger wrote a long screed about how Apple rules and Google drools. He makes some good points (it’s hard to argue with Apple’s business acumen, while Google’s is genuinely more puzzling), though relies heavily on “they all said” when, in fact, I heard nobody say that. I’m sure somebody, somewhere said that Symbian would knock Apple off its pedestal, but I was pretty late to acknowledge Symbian’s utter collapse, it seemed like pretty much everybody was saying differently, and even I wasn’t saying that Symbian was going to eat Apple’s lunch. I just thought they would survive, and I was more optimistic than most people seemed at the time.

It coincides to some extent with what has become one of the overwhelming themes of the smartphone wars. Actually, not the wars, but the wars between boosters. A huge sense of defensiveness. It hasn’t exactly been symmetrical. Early on it was much more the Android fans that were defensive and were, in retrospect, by far the more hyper participants in arguments about which ecosphere was superior. Apple fans were less defensive and mostly dismissive. Dilger rallies a degree of defensiveness in the other direction.

Ultimately, the truths seem quite clear. Apple isn’t the only game in town, or the biggest in terms of marketshare, but its business model is amazingly profitable and that’s what matters. Both to Apple, and to an extent to its fans as it gives them something to point to. To Android fans, marketshare does matter and Android’s dominance there is the most important thing. Not as a bragging point, though it’s used as that, but mostly as a solidified alternative to Apple’s extremely limited range of smartphones.

Looking back at my own animosity towards Apple, I suspect that a lot of it was rooted in the fear that there actually wouldn’t be an alternative. Especially once Microsoft made clear that it was going much closer to the iPhone route (in terms of a restricted, closed OS), I was worried that Apple’s model was so effective that the Windows Mobile model actually wouldn’t have a successor.

But Android persevered, and I’m mostly past worrying about that. Even if Android were to falter, or be displaced by Tizen or something else, it’s been demonstrated that there is a huge market for alternatives to the iPhone. That the “fractured market” isn’t prohibitive and isn’t exclusive to a sufficiently intuitive, functional device that suits my needs (a flexible power device), the needs of my wife (a device with a keyboard that’s easy to use), and the needs of my family (a sufficient, inexpensive device).

If Google quits, someone else will step up. I am free to have device preferences that Apple doesn’t want to deliver on. Which, ultimately, is the primary problem I ever had with them. It wasn’t that their devices weren’t good. It was simply that they weren’t what I wanted. If it is what you want, you should absolutely get one. That, more than anything, has lead to a live-and-let-live attitude. For the most part. For the past year, excluding when Apple was trying to take my phone off the market, I have tried to take this to heart:

Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. You there, with the blog, in the comments, in the pages of the newspaper or the magazine or on Twitter or Facebook. Whatever your opinion is, as soon as you employ it in partisan fashion, it’s deeply and profoundly wrong. Just by sharing it, you are wrong. And nobody cares. Except for the people who do. And they are wrong too. Myself included.

“But, but, but,” I hear you stammering like some sort of horrible person who has mistaken a code base for a system of moral beliefs, “the screen is too big and not big enough.” No. You’re wrong. It’s just right. It’s just right for whoever is holding it, unless it’s not, in which case they’ll decide that it is wrong on their own and get a different one. And then they’ll be right, while you’ll still be wrong.

And I don’t care if Apple is brilliant, or stupid. I don’t care that they have no desire to produce the sort of phone I want to use. I don’t care if their screens aren’t as big as I would prefer. I don’t care if they have no keyboard, no external card, no removable battery. I don’t care if they block the sort of apps I want to use. None of that matters. Nor should it matter to Applytes that my phone sometimes crashes. Nor should they care if Google’s experiment with Motorola failed. Nor should they care if OS updates are less frequent. Nor should they care if I have to deal with bloatware that they don’t. Unless you’re considering buying one, it really doesn’t matter.

They’ve got their phone. I’ve got mine. There is indeed plenty of room for both.

When I was a kid, we had an Atari 2600. By today’s standards, of course, the games were incredibly crude. Frogger and the like.

One of the more complex games was called Adventure. Adventure actually had a plot, of sorts. Your job was to get a chalice from a castle. To get the chalice, you had to get a key. There was also a sword and a couple of dragons that you had to avoid. And a maze. You can play the game here.

There were three levels, though the story was the same. To make things more complicated, one of the rooms in Level 1 was a half-visible maze with another castle tucked away. The dragons were faster. There was another maze inside a castle. But the biggest thing was that there was a bat. The bat would fly around and steal stuff, placing whatever it previously had at the spot where it took its next item. So unlike with Level 1, you never knew exactly where things were on Level 2.

I was reminded a bit of the bat in Adventure recently because my real life has begun to emulate the game in a similar respect. Which is to say, I don’t know where a lot of things are because there is a little bat coming and going and picking things up and putting them down somewhere else. The bat’s name is, of course Lain.

So as with the sword and the chalice and the key, things sort of enter and exit the periphery at random. The other day, Lain produced the tape measure, which had been missing forever. Then, the next day, it was missing again. Batbaby had swooped in and taken it to parts unknown. As with Adventure, there is a limited range of places it could have gone. But in the main area, there are more things she could have hidden it behind and such. So it may be a while before it resurfaces again.

Thankfully, there are no dragons involved.

Google Glass may be a key innovation for doctors.

Physicians are concerned that under PPACA they’re going to get stiffed.

SEC employees are not only allowed to use their inside knowledge to sell stocks, they’re required to.

Washington may not be working, but James Fallows says that our cities are.

The world’s largest solar farm is causing headaches for pilots.

The United States has West Texas and West Dakota, Australia has Western Australia, where there is a mining boom.

As we allow pot sales, the Netherlands is reversing course.

Germany has the right to kick out unemployed Spaniards.

It’s interesting how hypocrisy sometimes seems to be the most unforgivable of sins. Clancy Martin wonders if this is how it should be.

According to Alex Berube, cities and suburbs are converging.

The Guardian looks at floating cities.

Airlines are increasingly charging fees for simple seat placement:

He talked about another annoyance that travelers who buy basic coach fares encounter routinely when booking a flight these days: the unavailability of seat assignments at the basic fare. Instead, airline booking sites typically offer customers an upsell to seats that are available — for a fee.

“What I see when I book is a map showing no free seats available, or just a few middle seats way in the back, but lots of upgradable seats that you pay $39 or more for. These — they have plenty of available,” he said. “I think that’s the direction they’re all going in, trying to get everybody to book a flight and then pay extra for everything, which is kind of disappointing. I mean, you look at the price and then what you get is, well, you’ll also need to pay extra for this, for that.”

I am, in many ways, a defender of modern airline practices of upcharging for every little thing. I am okay with cramped seats and charging people more for humane amounts of leg space. I am cool with charging for checked bags. I am even okay with charging for carry-ons.

This one, however, rubs me differently. Given that the premium is often for any seat that isn’t an undesirable middle seat, it’s essentially charging a fee so that families can sit together. We have an eighteen-month old daughter, of course, who tends to be a ticketed passenger. But you don’t have to have a daughter who is a ticketed passenger to see a problem here.

It also raises questions of whether “premium” seats outnumber basic ones, which opens up questions about deceptive advertising. If a flight ticket is $450 and it only applies to a middle seat in the 27th row, then that’s not really a price. Not the price that should be listed. And if you have to click-click-click to find out what the actual price you’re paying is, that opens up transparency issues far more than charging for luggage does. Unlike deceptive advertising, price opacity (tranlucency?) is not something that is or should always be legally prohibited. But it’s something that consumers should push back on. Especially given that such upcharges are less predictable than a blanket “$25 per checked bag” fee when calculating the price.

I would feel better about it if they had a sort of deal where two people could get seats together, including the middle seat, and not be upcharged. Or failing that, if there is a premium for sitting in a non-middle seat that it was listed on the price itself (“$450/$470”) or, as with luggage fees, the pricing were reasonably predictable.

(Link via James Joyner.

Koichi Toyama ran for the Governor of Tokyo on a very unusual platform, starting off by saying that the nation is horrible and he has no interest whatsoever in political reform or any kind of reform. The nation, he states, must be destroyed.

It looks like those of us in the US missed the chance to vote for him in 2008, because we didn’t know about him and because he was ineligible to run. He makes his pitch (sort of?) here.

(Both items are subtitled.)

via Clark Popehat

Uninsured patients are more likely to get shuffled out to a trauma center, which turns out not to be such a bad thing for them, care-wise.

Checklists are supposed to prevent unnecessary medical errors, but recently in Ontario, they didn’t work. Why? Bill Gardner explains.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, there is the hoverturbine! World’s highest.

Nevada is going green, thanks to the green energy industry.

The various scenarios of an American-Russian war.

For fear of the demographic problems looking, Japan is considering the previously unthinkable: Immigration.

The role that a wet climate played in Genghis Khan’s conquering of Asia.

Off-the-grid living is off-limits in Florida.

A woman who purports to be an undercover cop who goes to frat parties to catch (attempted) rapists says the worst part is “Knowing that every single time I go to a party, without fail, there will be someone who tries to rape me.” … “[It takes] 30min-1h30min generally”

Conservatives are tackling criminal justice reform.

According to the New York Times, collegiate athletic costs are rising. On hearing this, you’re probably thinking of the Big Names like Michigan or Texas that are flush in TV money to spend extraordinary amounts of cash on sports. But that’s not quite it. You might be thinking of those just outside the window spending like hell to get inside, like East Carolina or UTSA. That’s not quite it, either. A lot of the growth is occurring at some of college sports’ lowest levels:

For years, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a watchdog group of academic leaders and others, has been documenting, and deploring, the race in sports expenditures at the most competitive level, Division I. But this report is believed to be the first that also compares educational spending and athletic spending, over time, at Division II and III schools and at community colleges. {…}

Using data from the United States Department of Education, the N.C.A.A., and its own surveys, the association paints a sobering picture in its report, titled “Losing Focus,” of a sector in which the growth in educational spending trails far behind that of athletic spending — especially at community colleges and Division II and III institutions.

Does every school need a football team? But that’s not exactly it, either:

The fastest growth in athletic spending was at Division III schools without football programs, where median inflation-adjusted spending for each student-athlete more than doubled from 2004 to 2012.

During discussions about whether college athletes should get paid, we often forget that the vast majority of them compete from schools we’ve never heard of. Few reports on college sports really surprise me, but this one actually does. The vast majority of the time D2 and (especially) D3 schools aren’t among those angling for more lucrative conference situations. They’re not caught in bidding wars for high-profile coaches. It seems to me the most expensive thing they can be doing is starting football, and those aren’t even the ones that are hardest hit.

Granted, schools at those levels have lower baselines from which growth can occur. In numerical amounts, the rises from Michigan down to Old Dominion down to Abilene Christian College are probably rising faster Louisiana Centenary (and probably rising faster in direct relationship to how familiar with them we are. Even so, it’s quite odd to me that there is a rat-race that far down. Then again, I regularly hear people express exasperation that colleges care whether they are in the Sun Belt or Conference USA which is a distinction that makes a huge difference to the schools involved. So maybe there is a rat race through and through.