-{This is a crosspost of my submission to the Work Symposium over at Ordinary Times.)

When we moved from our previous home in the Mountain West to our current one in the Mountain East, it was a very long and stressful drive. The best evening we spent was in Ohio, where we somehow ended up snagging a hotel room at a rustic golf resort hotel off Kayak. Our least pleasant is equally as easy to determine: Dickinson, North Dakota. Hotel rooms in Dickinson were virtually non-existent. We found a Super 8. The outside whole hotel smelled like sweat and cigarette smoke. Our room hadn’t been cleaned when we got it. Housekeeping – or somebody – stole my daughter’s Cat in the Hat book.

Dickinson is over two hours south of Williston, North Dakota, which is the focal point for the oil boom that has come to define the state. I thought that would be enough distance from all of the activity that we would be able to avoid what we weren’t.

The previously small town of Williston has been getting a lot of national press lately due to the insanity that has followed the oil boom. There was initially some positive coverage, but it was quickly followed by a different type of article. One that stated, in effect, the economic boom is great for some, but… but… but… there’s crime, sexual harassment, housing shortages, doctor shortages, and on and on.

The problems range from annoying to serious, but the overall tone I think gets it backwards. It’s not that there’s a great things but all of these problems. It’s that there are these problems, but there is this great thing!

I sacrificed my career for my wife’s. Her career needs resulted in five moves over ten years, including to places that are inhospitable to a career in IT. I made the most of every landing while I could, but each new location meant a step back from the promotions and capital I’d built at the previous. Then we landed in ruralia, and there simply were no opportunities. While there, our daughter was born and I became a stay-at-home father.

I find myself preoccupied at times with what happens to us if something happens to my wife. She’s ineligible for any sort of significant life insurance. I’m beyond mere long term unemployment. I would also have a daughter to take care of, which means that I’m not sure I would even have the breathing room to “start at the bottom” in the way that I did. Even with the recognition that I have it better than so many, it’s a sense of vulnerability I have never really experienced before.

If, heaven forbid, something did happen to her, I would not start looking for work in North Dakota. I would start in my home town, to be near my family. Or my wife’s home town, to be near her’s. I’d exhaust every personal contact that I have there and elsewhere. I’d ask former bosses and if I needed to I would move back to the Mormon West if that was where opportunity is. I’d look in Kansas. I’d look in South Dakota.

If all else failed, though, it is of enormous relief to me that there is a North Dakota. Some place that could very likely use me if I have nowhere else to go. We might be living in a repurposed FEMA trailer, but there is a place to go. I would worry about crime and specifically my daughter, but there is a place to go. Life is accepting that not everything can happen on your terms, and if North Dakota’s terms are what there are, I’m glad that they are there, to the extent that they are, for however long they are.

By the time I was in high school, I had resolved never to leave the city where I grew up unless I needed to. Fortunately, it was a big city with enormous opportunity where having to leave was unlikely. I grew up there, I went to college there, and it seemed unlikely that anywhere could offer me what that city could. I wanted to be near family. I wanted to be near friends. Big city amenities with small city prices. Who could ask for more?

Then I met my wife, with her plans to go west and her need not to be in a city. Her professional training would be built around living somewhere else. So for love, and not money, I packed everything in my Ford Escort and left. Into great personal and professional uncertainty. Into a part of the country that was very much not North Dakota. Or, for that matter, the place I left. It was incredibly difficult to leave my family behind. I still lament, at times, the social network I left behind and have been completely unable to rebuild in one move after another.

Whether for love or money, leaving is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Sometimes, it’s an impossible one. It’s financially impossible when you’re underwater on your mortgage or you have a spouse who is nailed down where you are. It’s personally impossible if you have family to take care of. Moving for money is also not a broader solution to the economy. There are 20,000 jobs in North Dakota, and far more than that looking and waiting for work.

For some, though, it represents a fantastic opportunity. A friend of mine from out west has hit a dead end, career-wise, and is considering getting a commercial drivers license and heading east. It would mean being away from his wife and step-children for six months of the year, but in that time he can earn more than he earns year around where he currently lives. People like myself who need reintroduction into the workforce when all else fails. Kids just getting started in need of experience and job skills.

When I was substitute teaching in a decaying Mountain Western town, I was always depressed at the dim prospects of a lot of the students I saw over. Many of the best and brightest would leave for the bright lights of Denver, Seattle, or Salt Lake City. But the rest? What of the rest? Towards the end of the year I would start getting more high school assignments and I heard a lot of them talking about what they planned to do next. College, for some. Others talked about going east to the oil fields.

The New York Times published a piece on young people in Montana going straight to the fields out of high school. The piece had a somber tone, but for a lot of the kids it truly is a great opportunity straight out of the gate. There are opportunities for people just graduating college as well, as the South Dakota School of Mines at least temporarily passed Harvard for graduate incomes. Obviously, that’s major-dependent, but opportunities abound.

I don’t begrudge those who look at North Dakota and think about living in a trailer (or worse) and living amidst the chaos, and simply want no piece of it. I don’t blame those who don’t want to leave family behind. I know that a lot of people can’t. I also know that the life calculations are going to be different for everybody. Ten years ago, North Dakota would have been a lot less unattractive to me than it is now, and ten years from now it will likely be more unattractive, and that’s despite holding a lot of the “me” of the equation constant.

I don’t blame those who don’t want to take the journey. I can’t blame those who can’t. I am not unsympathetic to those who don’t want to. But I wholeheartedly celebrate those who can and do.

Beneath the weeds, through all of the chaos, lies opportunity. The vast majority of the chaos caused by that very opportunity. It’s the bad that comes with the good. They are all textures of an unspeakably beautiful painting. When you attract the good, you attract the bad. Rapid growth is by its nature chaotic, but with it lies opportunity. Beautiful, scary, wonderful, chaotic, glorious opportunity.

While it’s not for everybody, and it’s not a universal solution, but for those of whom it is an opportunity? I’m giddy and elated that it’s there.

As time passes, it too will eventually pass. Hopefully it will be because we have made innovations in renewables that render such resource exploitation unnecessary. Or else, eventually that particular well will run dry. Perhaps to be replaced by another somewhere else, or perhaps not. Maybe replaced by some new wizbang technology that will allow us to turn the entirety of northern Nevada into a power generator for the entire country. Hopefully, some new industry will come along somewhere and put us to work.

If something else does come along, it will likely cause chaos wherever it occurs. And it will be beautiful.

Vox has a piece outlining some of the changes that are coming with the next iPhone. A lot of it is unimpressive and that I don’t care all that much about. Some of it is kind of cool.

I do think it’ll be great to have more interoperability between Macs and iPhones, which is something that I will probably never have since my phone OS and computer OS are done by different people.

I definitely applaud this move:

The onscreen keyboard on original iPhone was a breakthrough, but in the last seven years Apple’s competitors have come up with innovations of their own. iOS 8 makes two major changes that Apple hopes will help Apple regain the keyboard lead. First, a new technology called QuickType attempts to guess which word the user will type next and allow her to select it with one tap. The technology learns the user’s typing style, even customizing the selections depending on who she is talking to.

Users who aren’t satisfied with the iOS keyboard will have the option to ditch it altogether. For the first time, iOS will support third-party keyboards.

This is, of course, old hat for Android users (except the part about customizing depending on who you are talking to. But considering that I criticize Apple products for their unwillingness to let third-party devices on, I should applaud them when they become willing.

At this point, I am actually still using the default Samsung keyboard. They finally got it right. Before upgrading to my current phone, I bounced around a bit from SwiftKey and TouchPal. The frustrating thing is that while all of these keyboards are capable, I have yet to find one that I am really comfortable with, despite having no physical keyboard for quite a while now. I had genuinely expected that I would get settled in. Which I might have, if I’d just stick to one. Which is an advantage to what has historically been Apple’s approach.

Apple is getting some criticism for getting rid of the audio jack:

The tech giant is said to be considering doing away with the headphone jack when the iPhone 6 comes out this summer — and the rumors have even die-hard Apple customers wondering if it’s time to iTune out.
“I have a pair of Beats headphones that cost hundreds of dollars,” griped David Fu, 24, outside the Apple Store on 14th St. “They would really piss off a lot of people if we couldn’t use headphones like that anymore.”

The iEverything faithful are still sore from two years ago, when Apple replaced its 30-pin input on iPhones with a smaller Lightning connector.

Suddenly all those expensive charging units, external speakers and docking stations didn’t work with the new iPhone — unless customers bought a $30 adapter.

With regard to the chargers, Apple would be more vulnerable to criticism if they did it more regularly. But technology changes, and improves, and it’s perfectly reasonable to change charger standards every now and again.

I also think that some of the criticism about the headphone jack is probably misplaced. Apple people are obsessed with space-economical design and the headphone jack takes up space. With the right adapter, it’s usually going to be a non-issue. Keep the adapter more-or-less attached to the headphones (most people aren’t going to use the headphones for much else. Maybe have another adapter for the car, which could actually be more convenient for some people if they are able to plug their car into power and audio with a single click.

Some of my old HTC phones didn’t have separate headphone jacks. I was excited when I finally did, but as I put my phone on the dash of my car and plug it in I realized – long before hearing about Apple’s intentions – that the process would be one step shorter with a dual jack.

Matt Phillips explains that the use of personal checks has been in radical decline:

The usage of checks as a payment system has plummeted in the U.S. in recent years. In 2000, checks were used in more than 40 billion transactions, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve’s Cash Products Office. That number is down to less than 20 billion, according to the Fed’s most recent numbers, which are based on a survey conducted in October 2012.

When it comes to American payment preferences, checks run a distant fourth. (At least when you measure the overall number of transactions. Checks are used for about 19 percent of the value of all purchases, slightly higher than debit or credit cards.) {…}

While the number of check payments continued to rise into the mid 1990s—they peaked at an estimated 49.5 billion in 1995—checks began to lose significant market share to alternative forms of payment like debit and credit cards and direct, electronic, automatic clearinghouse payments (ACH).

The trend toward electronic payments only gathered pace, and by 2003, the Fed estimated (pdf) that other forms of payment had overtaken checks in usage. And by 2006, checks accounted for barely one-third (pdf) of non-cash payments in the U.S.

This had more resonance for me several years ago than it does today. When I lived in Cascadia and Estacado, check-writing was more or less non-existent. When I had to write a check, it was actually a big ordeal because it meant that I would have to track down the checks, the envelopes, stamps, and so on. The infrequency of all of this meant that I didn’t have to be organized about where these things were. And I wasn’t.

That changed when we moved to Arapaho, where suddenly checks were required for just about everything. Neither the power company nor utility company accepted electronic payments. Nor did trash pick-up, though that was quarterly instead of monthly. Notably, the monthly charge for all of these things changed on a regular basis, so I couldn’t do the automatic payment system through the bank (where they essentially cut you a check). Strangely enough, I actually found this to be reasonably convenient. Once I was in the habit of writing checks, whether I was writing one or four didn’t really matter so much. With four, I could develop a system – mostly a matter of having a station for my check-writing stuff.

That continued when we moved out here, where once again neither the power company nor city utilities accept automatic payments.

Eventually, one would assume, all of these recipients will accept electronic payments. But prior to moving to Arapaho, I’d assumed that almost all of them had. The statistics about the relative decline in usage are a bit misleading, though. It’s not just that people are paying with credit cards and debit cards instead of checks, but they’re doing so instead of cash. Despite the fact that I currently write four checks a month (power, utilities, rent, storage), it’s a distinct minority of the non-cash payments I make, due mostly to a decline in cash payments in favor of plastic.

Yahoo has taken to sending me a lot of emails I didn’t ask for. They have an unsubscribe option, but I have to unsubscribe to each category of mail they send me separately. So they send me something for Sports, I unsubscribe, and ten days later I am no longer receiving “digests” from Yahoo sports. Then I start getting them from Yahoo Fashion, and the process repeats itself. Now they apparently have a new digest to tell me about the features of their mobile email app.

I’m pretty sure they’re just making categories up at this point. I subscribe to this one, and there will soon be a digest for Yahoo digests for their iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps separately. Heck, they’ll probably create an app for Tizen just so that they can send me ten days worth of digests for it.

(The obvious solution to this is that I am going to have to work harder on filtering.)

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.}-

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.

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.

Last Christmas, there was some egg on the faces of UPS and FedEx when it turned out that they couldn’t get their packages delivered in time for the holiday. A number of USPS-boosters pointed and laughed about the non-existent efficiency superiority of the private sector.

Truth be told, UPS and FedEx were somewhat consistently bad about getting things to me in the appropriate window of time when I lived in Arapaho. I was at least moderately forgiving because, well, rural Arapaho. What can you expect? Living there changes your expectations when it comes to such things, for sure. We were five hours from the nearest major airport, two hours from the nearest minor one, an hour from the nearest Walmart, and on and on.

What’s puzzling to me in West Q is that it’s the USPS that simply cannot get its act together. I was forgiving for a while because of the weather. There are limits to the postman’s creed, after all. But the weather has gotten better and the postal delivery has not. Arapaho changes your expectations. But here? Here I am within 75 miles of two major cities and three airports. I’m within 200 miles of at least two more. I’m within ten minutes of Walmart.

Perhaps most importantly, I’m within three or so hours of Hanover.

I say “most importantly” because that seems to be where a lot of the stuff I am having shipped comes from. I don’t know why, but it seems every other thing I order comes from Hanover. And takes more than two days. Stuff sent from Floridia is getting here faster. Some ecig supplies are sitting in central Queenland right now that were ordered a couple of days ago. Perhaps the Hanover shippers are particularly bad about how they drop the shipments off? Maybe, but it’s still registering as out for shipping more than two days ago.

No complaints about UPS or FedEx here, where packages sent from Amazon that arrive ahead of schedule and often the next day. I have always explained the fast turnaround times by how close we are to the fulfillment center in Seneca. Until I realize that we’re even closer to Hanover.

By which I mean, “The consumer market does not produce the results – and therefore the products – that I would prefer.”

It’s mildly frustrating to me when people don’t make what I consider to be the ideal product. They don’t include features that it would seem relatively easy to implement.

It’s more than mildly frustrating when I watch things move away from what I want. Or when I have what I want, and the market moves away from that.

The latest two instances I have run into have to do with Bluetooth earpieces and wireless remotes and keyboards for smartphones.

In the former case, I have recently purchased an obscene number of Bluetooth earpieces because it’s really, really hard to get a precise combination that I want (single-ear, AVRCP-compatible). And the industry is moving away from providing me what I want. So when these people stopped offering the model that I used, I ordered 20 from one of the few outfits that sold them (not exactly a wholesaler, but very much priced to order in bulk). The problem occurred when this place didn’t actually have them in stock. So they’re going to ship them as they get them.

They’ve stopped making the part in question, so it may take a while. The fact that they haven’t made it and none of the major manufacturers produce it gives me the impulse to stock up. So I found one other model that does what I want. Like the C&D, it’s low-end. It’s ironic that it only appears to be low-end makers that produce this. Indeed, I have found a number of producers that do it, but they’re all Chinese countries and I can’t plug them into US power jacks. Anyhow, so I ordered one of these to see if it did in fact do what I wanted to do. Except it didn’t work at all. It cost $12 or so, but returning it for a refund cost $6. So I only got half of my money back. Actually, I just ate the $6 and got a replacement. The replacement works, though it’s not comfortable in the ear. I have since ordered a large number of replacements.

None of this would be an issue if people would just make a point to buy the products I believe they should buy.

With the news that CVS stopped stocking cigarettes, it was argued by some (though not many) that they shouldn’t be able to make consumers’ choices for them. James Taranto tried to tie it in to the PPACA’s mandate:

Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose Congress enacted the following statute: “Any drugstore that is part of a chain with 20 or more locations doing business under the same name (regardless of the type of ownership of the locations) shall offer cigarettes and other tobacco products available for sale to its customers.” Call it the Marlboro Mandate.

You may object that this would be a foolish law. We agree, but it would not be entirely without precedent for Congress to pass a foolish law. {…}

By contemporary liberal lights, however, the Marlboro Mandate would be a legitimate exercise of congressional power. The Supreme Court has long held to a highly expansive interpretation of the power to regulate interstate commerce. Thanks to the ObamaCare decision, Congress doesn’t have the power to mandate that individuals purchase a product, though even that would have been an open question if the liberal dissenters had prevailed on that point. But a command to retailers, especially to a nationwide retail chain like CVS, clearly qualifies. In fact, we borrowed the “20 or more locations” language from Section 4205 of ObamaCare, which mandates nutrition labeling on chain-restaurant menus.

He then goes on to try to tie it to health insurance contraception requirements.

The argument fails, though not for most obvious reason that cigarettes are bad and contraception is good. There is that reason, to be sure, though that’s going to fall mostly as a matter of perception, and therein lies the rub. No, I think the most straightforward differences are that neither the contraception requirement nor nutrition labeling actually fall into the level of coercion as forced sales (and stockage) no matter what we’re forcing sale and stockage of.

In the case of the contraception requirement, PPACA doesn’t actually require contraceptive coverage. Rather, they are setting a minimum bar for what constitutes sufficient insurance to justify (a) the tax-exemption and (b) avoiding the penalty for not insuring your employees. This is a distinction with a difference because employers are still free to allow their employees to purchase their own health insurance plans on the exchanges. Which isn’t really a punishment because some employers are voluntarily doing it.

Likewise, information disclosure is not exactly novel with the PPACA.

Where I initially thought Taranto was going with his argument, though, was more interesting where he actually did. Forced stockage actually is a contemporary issue. Even more closely tying in to the Marlboro Mandate, it even involves phamacies like CVS. I speak, of course, of the proposed (and in some places enforced) requirement that pharmacists dispense birth control regardless of any conscientious objections the pharmacists might have.

There are differences here, too. The main objection to the comparison really does fall under the “cigarettes bad contraception good” though I have the same objection as I mentioned above. I believe pretty strongly that contraception serves a valuable purpose that tobacco doesn’t, but others are going to disagree with that and it’s not particularly something that can be proven as it is a matter of morals and philosophy in addition to science. And I can think of other things with health benefits or medicinal uses that we also wouldn’t require stores to carry. Including, for that matter, some contraception like condoms.

The next argument for there being a difference is that pharmacies are pretty explicitly places we go to have prescriptions filled and not to be subject to the moral whims of the pharmacist. There is something to be said for this argument, but going to a pharmacy to have your prescription filled is not the same thing as it being guaranteed that such an item will be in stock.

One of the challenges of laws trying to force pharmacies to stock contraception is that pharmacies make the decision not to stock things on numerous bases. A law in Washington State was shot down by the courts. Why? The law had to make accommodations for the fact that there were pharmacies that didn’t want to stock certain drugs for “acceptable” reasons and the court reasoned (among other things) that disregarding religion as a rationale to decline to carry drugs but allowing non-religious reasoning was de-facto religious discrimination.

My objection to these laws are two-fold. First, the same logic that can be applied to pharmacists with regard to contraception can be applied to obstetricians and abortions. When I bring this up, the response I usually get is that there is a difference between having to perform an action that is immoral and giving someone something that you believe to be immoral. It’s true that there is a distinction there, but there are also distinctions in the other direction. A pharmacy that declines to dispense contraception will not likely be an effective barrier to a woman and contraception, but the lack of abortion providers does appear to have an effect on the abortion rate. I suspect that the real difference is that people are simply more understanding of opposition to abortion than of opposition to contraception.

The second objection is the extent to which this is a solution in search of a problem that justifies it. Here is where people like to lecture me on what I don’t understand about rural America, but the number of places where there is “only one pharmacy” is not one I have actually run across and I have looked extensively. What I’ve mostly seen is that there are places with multiple pharmacies and there are places with none. You could run into a place where there are two but neither offer contraception, but that strikes me as unlikely. If these places were remotely common, I suspect that I would actually hear about places instead of theoreticals.

And beyond that, one of the costs of living in rural America is that things such as pharmacies are more of a hassle. As I said, there are places with no pharmacies. These seem to take secondary importance, however, and I’m not sure why. Though I have my suspicions. If we were really interested in trying to universalize access to contraception, we should be looking more into telepharmacies and pharmacy-by-mail so that we can not only give contraception options to that theoretical place with only one or two pharmacies that don’t offer contraception, but those who simply don’t live near pharmacies.

So what are my suspicions as to why this hasn’t been a greater priority? Honestly, because I think forced stockage has as much to do with animosity towards judgmental pharmarcists than it is the logistical problems that this is actually causing.