The price of cigarettes

I no longer smoke, but I used to, and I am slightly fascinated by the price of cigarettes, and what it says about a society.

I lived in the Republic of Ireland until 1991. In the few years before I moved, a packet of cigarettes cost slightly under £2. (We used pounds back then!) That was about an hour's wage for a teenager (me!) at the time, so not cheap.

Way back then, way more people smoked than today. There were ashtrays everywhere. It was assumed that you could smoke everywhere. Presumably everything smelt faintly (or heavily) of cigarette smoke. When you woke up from a night out, your clothes would reek of cigarette smoke.

There were no cigarette ads on TV, those had been banned, but there were cigar ads. "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet" ads were quite amusing. Also there were billboard ads, print ads, and cigarette companies sponsored Formula 1.

ANYWAY, it was common for bars in Ireland back then to have cigarette vending machines. It was not common to buy them from the barman - having packets of cigarettes behind the bar in piles was too much like having piles of cash. Vending machines encouraged honesty. These were often simple mechanical vending machines - you put in four fifty pence pieces (or, later, two pound coins) and the combined height of these unlocked a tray.

But here's the thing: people were extremely sensitive to the price of cigarettes in the south of Ireland back then. Extremely. Premium cigarettes might cost merely several pennies more than cheaper cigarettes. And if you went to a tobacconist (newsagent, petrol station) to buy them, they might cost merely £1.93. And everybody knew that e.g. a packet of twenty John Player Blue should cost £1.93. That was the price. So it was normal for the folks who ran the cigarette vending machines to tape 7p to the packet of cigarettes!!

This close attention to the price of cigarettes was a purely Republic of Ireland phenomenon, I'm told. It didn't exist in Northern Ireland, or the rest of the UK. Back then, this was before the "Celtic tiger", and Ireland was a poor country, with extremely high taxes. (In fact, every year in the budget, the minister of finance might increase the tax on beer and cigarettes, and the price of a pint and a packet of twenty would go up by precisely that amount. Plus whatever Guinness added to the price of a pint - they also put the price up slightly twice a year. Man, what a business franchise that was. Such pricing power!!!)

I moved to Northern Ireland I 1991 (to go to college), and it was so ... different. There was more money there at the time. The Troubles were still a thing, but I was 17, I didn't care. And cigarettes were much cheaper. Maybe as cheap as a pound (sterling).

But more than the price difference between the south and the north was the price variation in the the north. Nobody seemed to really care about the specific price of cigarettes - so vending machines instead of taking £2 and giving you back 7p would ... just ... charge ... £2 !!!!

And cheap cigarettes (e.g. Spar's own brand, "Sky", or Rothman's "Royals" ... which came in packs of 25!!!) were much cheaper than premium cigarettes (like Marlboro). I don't remember prices exactly, but cheap cigarettes could have twenty, thirty percent cheaper than premium cigarettes. This was so weird to me: that such price discrimination could exist.

It also became normal around this time to be able to buy cigarettes in packets of ten. Because they were expensive. Weirdly, in the south, it was never possible to buy Marlboro in packets of ten, but it was in the North. If you're used to packets of twenty, packets of ten look impossibly cute and weird. (But they fit a lot better into a denim jacket's breast pocket along with a lighter.)

Over time, the governments of both countries (Ireland, UK) gradually, steadily, inexorably ratcheted up the price of cigarettes. People still smoked, but fewer and fewer. And smoking became less socially acceptable. I gave up in the noughties at some point, as one does. But I kept a mild interest in the price of cigarettes.

When I moved to California in 2010, I was amazed at how cheap cigarettes were. Like, five dollars for a pack of twenty. And hardly anybody smoked!

Even today, in Massachusettes, a pack of twenty Marlboro costs about ten dollars! They're maybe the equivalent of $15-20 in the UK and Ireland (AFAIK, I haven't been there in a while). 

The price of cigarettes definitely tells us something about a society. My vague hypothesis is that a society with a deathly poor underclass must have cheap cigarettes. And, conversely, a society with expensive cigarettes cannot have a deathly poor underclass.

California has an underclass; Massachusetts doesn't, not really.

Wouldn't it be funny if the price of cigarettes in a country was a better measure of  inequality than the Gini coefficient? (Lower cigarette price meaning a more unequal society.)

I sometimes joke that a first world country is one where you can drink the water. But really, a better measure is that a first world country is a country with expensive cigarettes. The more expensive, the more first world.

Neenaw

 In Ireland and the UK, the sound made by emergency vehicles (police, fire, ambulance) is "Nee Naw", so that's the the generic term for vehicles that make this noise: neenaw.

Sirens in the US are quite different, so the word makes no sense at all. There don't really have one distinctive sound, so even the idea of having a soundy name for them doesn't translate. Such a shame.

When you call 999 in the UK, you have to choose between police, ambulance and fire brigade. In the US, when you call 911, the ambulance is usually part of the local fire department.

Also in the US, calling 911 "for" somebody can be quite a hostile act: you can end up bankrupting them by your "kindness". In the UK there is no concept of paying for it, so you needn't hesitate.

Power! Voltage! Plumbing!

 One of the things I dislike about the US is how slow our kettle is. A 120V kettle at 10A or so is just slow.

There are many good things about 120V AC: sockets in bathrooms! Sockets beside sinks!! Sockets outside the house, even in the rain!!!

Code in the UK and Ireland doesn't allow sockets in bathrooms, and even switches are often outside the room, or activated via a pull cord. Sockets outside are rare.

UK/IE wall plugs are serious things. I like them a lot. They're child safe. When they're in, they stay in. (It helps that the cable usually exits the plug down.). I've never seen one spark when I pull it out. (It's unthinkable, really.) US plugs spark when you pull them out sometime - shocking the first time I saw it (not literally), but now unremarkable.

Apart from the restrictions on where you can put sockets, there is one problem in practice with having 240V everywhere: some people are tempted to heat water on demand with it, for showers. For a while, in Ireland, it was somewhat common to install 8, 9 even up to 10kW electric showers. Now, you might think that you can do a lot with 10kW, but one thing you cannot do is have a decent shower. At best, in summer, you'll have a borderline awful shower. In winter, you won't even have that. Most US showers are a bit crap - the shower head is often annoying low - but they are miles ahead of heat-on-demand electric showers.

Electric heat-on-demand showers almost always have a pump in them. This makes sense when your water is coming from a  tank, like, three feet above your head: British & Irish plumbing, whereby water for toilets and sink and baths and showers - everything except the main kitchen tap - comes from a tank in the attic, often an open tank, occasionally used to catch pigeons (*) and rats. While it's nice that we all have a small reservoir of water, useful in emergencies, the American way is mostly better.

(*) When talking of pigeons in the water tank [in the attic], it is normal to pronounce it "pig-ee-on". In any other context, the word is pronounced normally, like "pidgin".  

It turns out you can buy three phase electric on-demand water heaters. That might be acceptable. My girlfriend (now wife) converted her house to gas once, and put in a "combi" - it heats water for radiators, and heats water on demand for baths and sinks and showers - and I worked out that it was the equivalent of a 27kW on-demand heater. That is a lot of electricity.

(Before she did that, she had an "immersion" tank: it heats water in a big copper cylinder. America has these too, but they are always on. Of course!! In Ireland, we turn them on when we want hot water, and then we turn them off. If you have never gone out and left the immersion on, you are lucky.)

PS. The british think of having separate taps ("faucets") for hot and cold is weird. Just weird. I will never understand it. Mixer taps are obviously superior.

Watching people from cars

 Back when I lived in Ireland, whenever I'd watch an American drama and see cops or spies staked out in a car watching somebody, it always struck me as ... odd. I just assumed it was a trope (I didn't know that word then) of American TV, something that happened only in TV, not in real life. It made no sense to me that two grown men could just sit in a car somewhere and not be noticed by everybody. walking. past. They would be so obvious, my inner logical voice would say. Still, I happily suspended disbelief for the sake of the show.

But then I moved to the US, and it turns out it wasn't fake, it wasn't unbelievable. In fact, it's totally believable that somebody could sit in a car and watch a building or whatever and not be noticed by anybody nearby. Totally plausible.

I think it's to do with the fact that cities in the US are for cars, not for people. Even the relatively car-hostile cities like Boston seem outrageously car-friendly to a European. And it's plausible that you could sit in your car and watch something here and not be noticed.

Dogs off leash

It's illegal in California to let your dog off the leash. Seriously. I guess this explains why there are no dogs here just ... wandering about. They get picked up by the dog catcher.

In Dublin and Belfast, it seems to be fine to let your dog off the leash. As long as it doesn't bother anybody. It's kinda bad form to let your dog just ... wander, but I don't think it's illegal.

The only caveat is that if your dog worries sheep (i.e. out in the countryside), a farmer might shoot it. So don't let your dog worry sheep. It'll get shot. (Folk don't let their dogs run wild in the country, just in the city and suburbs.)

Keyboards

Keyboards in the UK have a slightly different layout to those in the US.

I think I prefer US keyboards, but obviously I have a soft spot for UK keyboards.

US keybaords usually a double-wide enter key. Backslash is above it. UK keyboards have a tall, narrow enter key. Backslash is either beside it or beside Z. (UK keyboards often have a narrower shift key as a result.)

Hash ('#') can be more awkard to type on a UK keyboard: shift-3 is usually the pound sign.
The number two usually has the double quote symbol above it (except for apple keyboards) in the UK, so @ is near the enter key. This is just wrong: the apple way is the right way.

Applying for passports

Applying for US passports is much easier than applying for Irish/British passports.

If you want a US passport. you can just go to a post office (having made an appointment first), pay them some money, have them take your photo, swear you are entitled to a passport, show them a birth certificate or other suitable documentation, and wait a week or three for the passport to arrive.

To get an Irish passport, you have to get your photos and form signed by one of a tiny subset of the population who must have known you personally for at least two years. It's really tedious. Especially if you've only recently moved to the USA. British passports are less strict, but still a royal pain.

Also, you can't pay for an Irish passport with a personal check or credit card. Money order only.

Also, kids over seven have to sign their Irish passport application forms themselves. (I kid you not.)