A few weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Thinkpad T520. One that was $100 below the price point of purchasing one. So what the hell. It didn’t have an SSD hard drive, so I went ahead and ordered one. Everything else was just right.

The funny thing is, when it arrived it did have an SSD hard drive. Weird, right? It also had the wrong version of Windows, Home Premium instead of Home Basic. A win! Then I looked at the corner of the screen bezel to see if it was a W520 or a T520 (I couldn’t remember which I’d ordered), and I saw it was a… T510. I looked to make sure that it had the 8GB of RAM, and while it did I noticed that it had an i5 rather than an i7 processor.

So… I must have gotten the wrong computer. Truth be told, the specs were kind of a wash. Better OS and better HD, worse model number and processor. Should I say anything? I decided to go ahead and contact the seller. Maybe I could get them to knock off $25 or something from the price. Or maybe he needed to know that he had sent my computer out to someone else. And if I were the seller, I’d want to know.

I got a very, very panicked response in a few minutes. He asked me to send the computer back and he’d throw in an extra hard drive with the right computer. For a few reasons, namely that working out the timeline in my head the computer would not be arriving until after a trip we’re taking later in the month, I didn’t want to do that. I wrote back saying that I either wanted to buy the computer he sent me, or if he’d sold it someone else, I would prefer to just get my money back.

I admit that I pressed my advantage a little bit because I knew he was panicked. At the same time, I told him that as long as we came to a satisfactory resolution, he wouldn’t get a negative review. It was obviously an honest mistake. It was also apparent that English was not his first language, and I have a real soft spot for immigrant entrepreneurs. We haggled a bit over the price of the machine that I’d been sent. He looked up other T510’s and saw that they were selling for about $175 less than I’d purchased. But, he pointed out, I’d gotten a better hard drive than is in most of those machines. So we added the cost of the hard drive upgrade and that was that. I could have pressed harder (considering that he’d offered me a new hard drive!), but I also could have mentioned that some of the specs on the machine were unusually good (specifically, the 1920×1080 resolution) and that was worth more to me than the hard drive.

The end result is that it was a pretty good deal all around. I would have paid the T520 price for the T510, but instead got it for $120 less than I was willing to pay. He, on the other hand, did not get a negative review and I suspect would have been willing to sell it to me for the $175 discount if I’d pushed him on it.

As most people here probably know, Mr. Obama has proposed changing overtime regulations so that more people will be covered. Megan McArdle’s critique of this proposal is, as usual, well-spoken and in my opinion mostly spot-on. But she unfortunately neglects and seems to assume away one of the arguments in favor of Mr. Obama’s proposal.

Phillippe’s French Dip Restuarant. Photo: MargaretNapier. License: creative commons, attribution, no derivatives.

McArdle points out that changing the overtime requirements to include erstwhile exempt employees would encourage employers to more closely monitor those employees’ hours. For people like her–and like me, who in my current job is exempt–that would work as an intrusion, assuming it would apply to us at all. (Other than snippets from the news and internet, I’m not sure on the specifics of Mr. Obama’s proposal. But I think she and I would still be exempt, even though I, for one, earn less than the $50K+ threshold of the proposed regulations.)

But here is where she errs:

I have a vague idea of what it would be like to manage a Chipotle, in that I can probably specify the major duties involved, like ordering stuff and training workers. But I have no idea what that manager’s biggest day-to-day challenge is, what it takes to do the job well, what he enjoys about his work and what he doesn’t, where she’s hoping to get and what she’s willing to do to get there.

You know who knows that? The manager and the manager’s boss: the people who are currently agreeing to the terms of employment. The administration is proposing to overrule their judgment and force overtime restrictions onto them. But if I asked that Chipotle manager whether he wants the possibility of overtime pay and the certainty of clock-punching that comes with it, he might give an answer quite a bit like my own — all about why his job, like mine, shouldn’t fall under those rigid external rules.

The error isn’t necessarily in what McArdle suggests about the manager and his/her boss knowing their business and interests better than a regulator would. And as applied to Chipotle or to any number of jobs, or to any number of managers, she might be right. The error, though, is that a lot of service jobs–maybe not Chipotle, but probably Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds, Hardee’s, etc.–hire “shift managers” who after a certain training period are put on salary and sometimes must work in excess of 40 hours per week. Their pay may be greater to put them above the current overtime-qualifying wage threshold, and they may very well be managers in key respects, but they are also in many ways just as much workers as they are managers. These aren’t the assistant managers or co-managers or general managers.

There’s much I don’t know. For instance, I just said “a lot of service jobs…hire ‘shift managers.'” Maybe “a lot” isn’t that many, and maybe even those earn so little that the overtime requirements do apply to them. The anecdata I rely on are faulty because in addition to being anecdata, they’re about 20 years old. But Obama’s proposal addresses what to “a lot” of people is a real grievance. Whether that grievance admits of a remedy, and whether his proposal is that remedy or might in some ways make things worse, is another question. I, with McArdle, suspect the remedy might be worse and am at best ambivalent about the proposal.

I probably haven’t done justice to McArdle’s column. It’s about more than this one point I claim she neglects. So of course, read the whole thing.

In 1903, workers at the World Smelter struck for an 8-hour day. The World Smelter was owned by the Trumanverse Smelting and Refining Company (TSARCO) and was located in Worldville, a neighborhood in Danvar, the capital of Cibolia. TSARCO used strikebreakers, from Worldville, from other parts of Danvar, or from other states. By September, the smelters were running again, but the union did not officially call off the strike until spring 1905.

At least two incidents of labor violence occurred during the strike. The first came in November 1903. As replacement workers walked to the smelter, wives of some of the strikers attacked them. They threw red pepper into their eyes and temporarily blinded them. The second incident came sometime in 1904. Someone set off dynamite outside the home of a skilled smelter worker who lived in Worldville. The dynamite shattered the worker’s windows, but otherwise left the inhabitants unscathed.

I wrote my masters thesis about that strike and another one at the same smelter that occurred in 1899. I interpreted the violence differently then than I do now. Neither interpretation is without its problems.

Then: I mostly gainsaid the violence. It was a violent time for union supporters elsewhere in Cibolia. In 1903, the governor had launched a campaign against the Occidental Federation of Miners (OFM), with which the smelter union was affiliated. The OFM had effectively controlled labor relations in the state’s gold and silver mines for about 10 years. The governor used state militia not only to protect replacement workers, but also to intimidate and arrest union supporters on trumped up vagrancy and other charges. He also turned a blind eye to vigilante groups, called “Citizens’ Alliances,” that harassed and deported miners out of the state. The smelter union’s strike was a sideshow to this larger campaign, and Danvar was a different place. But if that union also resorted to violence, I reasoned, the bigger picture made the resort seem less unjustified.

Second, the violence was not so bad because the harms were “mild.” The victims of the pepper spray attack were blinded, but “only temporarily.” The skilled worker’s house was bombed, but the evidence that unionists were responsible was unclear. Also, it was generally conceded in the news accounts, even in those papers not particularly sympathetic to the union, that the dynamite was so placed that the resulting explosion would not harm anyone. Therefore, the bombing was “only” a threat, and not actual harm aside from a few shattered windows. It’s also possible that the explosion was prompted by something other than the labor dispute because the evidence was too scanty.

Now: I’m much more concerned about how violence operated against those strikebreakers and more particularly, how much unionization at that time depended on the threat of violence. I’m more inclined to find reasons to criticize the violence and much more wary of invoking the “community norms” that helped sustain such violence as some sort of justification.  I personally would be quite scared if someone blew dynamite outside my apartment even if the explosion “only” destroyed my windows.  The damage from the red pepper may not have been permanent, but must have been painful. (Last night, I made for the first time what is called “green chili,” a dish I’ve never had outside of Cibolia and that I get homesick for. I got jalapeno seeds on my fingers and they burned for a couple hours. Good thing I didn’t touch my eyes.)

Still, I’d have to concede the points I made above. It was a violent time in Cibolia (and in generally). And the harms, while nothing to sneeze at, did fall short of more severe violence.

One answer to these different ways of telling the story is is to analyze what happened and refer to how it supports or contradicts existing studies in labor history and history of the era. That’s what historians do. And many, not all,  historians like to say, “it’s not the historian’s job to judge, but to analyze the context and the patterns, and understand why things happened as they did.”

That admonition is sometimes used against Marxist-leaning leaning historians like me in 2000 that tried to find a common class-interest among people I knew only through contemporary news accounts and a few other sources. That same admonition could be used against the neoliberal-leaning me in 2015 who tries to find an individualized interest labor market participation. I’m actually compelled, based on the evidence before me (which is the same as 165years ago), that there was something like a class-interest in Worldville. And despite my now strong preference for the liberal presumption, I can’t fully deny this class-based, communitarian sense existed and was part of a reality that would not recognize the policies I support now or the reasons I support them.

Will’s comment here got me thinking about times in my customer service jobs when I refused to bend the rules but probably should have bent them. Here are two examples, both of which pertain to my time as a bank teller.

Example #1: A young girl, probably 8 or 9 years old, came in with a jar of loose change and wanted to use our coin counter. The rule was only account holders could use the counter. I refused to count the change because when I asked her if she had an account, she said no.

Example #2: A young man came in with a cashiers check for $1,000 made out to his mother. His mother had endorsed the check, and because his mother was a regular customer, I even recognized the signature as hers (or strongly resembling hers). I was reluctant to cash the check because I had never met this man before. (The rule in this case was quasi-unofficial. Theoretically, if the check is endorsed by the payee, it’s negotiable. But in practice, we wanted to be very sure before simply giving away so much money.) He said his mother was outside in his car, but according to him was very sick. I told him to bring his mother in so I could verify that it was her. He did, but as the bank was very crowded, they had to wait in line, and by the time they got back to my teller window, she was so weak she almost collapsed onto the floor and would have if her son hadn’t caught her.

I should have bent the rules in both cases. For example #1, I should have just run the coins through the machine. I don’t think the little girl cried, but she was probably upset or embarrassed that I didn’t help her. And I remember what it’s like being a kid and trying to negotiate an adult world with its seemingly arbitrary rules.

For example #2, I think I was right to insist to talk to the mother, although that is debatable because the signature was probably valid. But I could have said, “Bring her into the bank. You won’t have to wait in line. Just let her sit down and I can skip out of the teller line and verify with her.

I think in both cases the “rule”  was defensible, or at least non-arbitrary. But enforcing them the way I did and with such consistency seemed and seems cruel.

Consider this quote from an essay by Leon Fink, a labor historian:*

[Andrew] Carnegie, of course, was the protagonist of the Homestead Strike of 1892, a fateful standoff between one of the biggest corporations and the most powerful union of the Gilded Age. When the Amalgamated Association of Iroon and Steel Workers (AAISW) together with an aroused local citizenry proved unable to withstand a combination of lockout, importation of Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers, and ultimate application of state militia, unionism took a toll beyond the immediate causalities of nine dead and eleven wounded. In the steel industry, declining wages and yellow-dog contracts requiring a binding non-union pledge subsequently became the norm. Overvaluing its remaining resources, the Amalgamated made a final, fateful decision to confront the newly formed U.S. Steel monolith [the successor to Carnegie’s concerns, which he sold to J. P. Morgan] in 1901, a decision ending in crushing defeat. Once the last steel lodge in the country dissolved, Big Steel inoculated itself from trade unionism for the next thirty-four years. [citations omitted]

The “importation of Pinkertons,” which were private security guards, and “the application of state militia” reflect something one sees often in narratives about Gilded Age (c. 1877-c.1920) labor disputes. The idea is that unions could have had more success if it weren’t for violent interference from the state. “Success,” at least when counterposed to the above-mentioned use of Pinkertons and the militia, meant that the strikers would be permitted to harm or threaten strikebreakers, to use violence to prevent strikebreakers from taking jobs that “belonged” to union members.

Before I go too far in decrying “union violence” in the Gilded Age there are two counterpoints. First, in the example of Homestead and many other examples, introducing strikebreakers was a provocative move, an invitation to the very violence that often followed. To be clear, blame for any violence rests with those who actually commit the violence. But if someone introduces a situation they know will lead to violence that person also bears some of the blame for the results.

Second, if you look at the history of labor activism, one finds violence directed against strikers or union supporters either without provocation or with flimsy justifications. The examples are many:  Henry Ford’s hiring thugs to beat up union organizers, the Republic Steel Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre, the deportations and bull-pen imprisonments during the “Colorado Labor Wars” of 1902-1905. I wouldn’t be surprised if such violence counts for a majority of the instances of “labor violence” during the Gilded Age.

So why pick on anti-strikebreaker violence, especially at a time when unions in most sectors seem to be so poorly represented and when most union supporters (I imagine) today disavow violence and do so sincerely?

One reason is a preachy one. I want to point out that such violence is illiberal. If “liberal society” means anything, it means that a person has the right to pursue a lawful calling for which someone else is willing to lawfully hire them. Maybe other norms ought to override at least sometimes this liberal presumption–such as “community interest,” a  notion that jobs are “owned” by the jobholder, a commitment to class solidarity, or a shared opposition to an allegedly monopolistic octopus. And perhaps those norms deserve consideration.

Another reason is, the issue of violence is a more extreme version of the issue of when and whether and how employment relations can be said to be voluntary or coercive. And as one of my interests is labor policy and labor history, I’d like to put the issue of violence out there.

For union supporters, I’d like to ask when, if ever, is it acceptable to use violence and to deter strikebreakers? other forms of coercion to impose or establish a union contract? and what counts as violence and “other forms of coercion”? For opponents of unions, I’d like to ask if anything overrides what I call the “liberal presumption” that each person has a right to pursue a lawful calling? and when and by how much is that presumption overridden?

These are questions that bother me as I try to consider my stance on, for example, the repeal of Taft-Hartley, curtailing public employee unions, anti-union shop (aka “right to work) laws, card check votes, or such workplace related policies like Montana’s “for cause” employment law or raising the minimum wage.

*From Leon Fink, “Great Strikes Revisited,” in The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), page 38.

Out of nowhere, earlier in the week, my Note 4’s camera went on the fritz. Basically, holding the camera reasonably steady, photos started looking like this:

And videos like this:

It was doing this across different camera apps (“A Better Camera” is a good app, if you’re curious), suggesting that it wasn’t a minor software glitch.

Now, there are some features on my smartphone I can do without. For at least a little while. The camera, at this time in my life, is not one of them. The ability to take pictures in a matter of seconds is very important when you’re the father to a two-and-a-half year old girl who happens to be the cutest and most amazing in the universe.

So I found myself wishing that if some core functionality had to go, why couldn’t it just be the ability to make and receive calls?! That I could do without for a while as I try to figure out what the problem is. But camera? I might as well switch to the S5 I use as a backup. That would also allow me to do a factory reset of the Note 4. Which I did, and the problem persisted.

The Quality Assurance dude in me appreciated that the error was so reproducible. Reliable errors are the best errors. But what to do? This was evidently a hardware problem.

My childhood best friend words at Problem Resolution at Verizon, my provider. So I asked him what to do and he recommended I call Verizon. Which I did. And let me tell you a thing or two about their customer service…

It was friendly, sometimes exceedingly so. The woman acted like a dead phone was the Worst Thing In The Universe, even though I was pretty nonchalant about it by the time I called them. This is what I keep the S5 around for.
It was helpful. While we were waiting, she took the opportunity to look over my account. I feared having to fend off some upselling, but she actually tried to downsell me, informing me that we are on a much higher plan than we need to be. I appreciated it, but our use is erratic and I never want to be in the situation of scrambling to upgrade again, even if it costs a bit extra per month. I like not having to worry about it, but it was great that she asked me about it while we were killing time.
It was helpful. I had a problem, with a minimum of fuss and didyatrys. I was kicked up once, but it was pretty quickly established that they would have to send out a new phone.

This could all go to pot if – after I send them my present phone – they say something like “the warranty isn’t valid because you damaged the phone” (I didn’t). It’s also, by a stroke of luck (and Verizon’s stiff measures) not rooted, which kept the warranty valid through no choice of my own.

So the phone is going to be arriving this weekend. I want to be excited about it, because I always love getting new stuff, but this is going to be the exact same phone I currently have (albeit with a working camera).

In the meantime, I am reminded why I upgraded from the S5. If you’d have told me five years ago that I would be upgrading from a phone with a 5″ screen because the screen was too small, I’d have thought you were crazy. I can’t wait to know what kind of phone I will have five years from now. (Though, alas, it probably will not have a removable battery. Sigh.)

The discussion of Indiana, RFRA, and anti-discrimination law and mandatory provision law (think contraception) brings up an argument I often hear: You might be able to let urban locations discriminate, but in more rural parts, you might run in to situations where they are the only X in town and the next one is two hours away!

This… is the case a lot less frequently than you think. And applies to remarkably few people. Sufficiently few that, on its own, it’s not really a compelling argument for national or even statewide policy.

I have lived and spent time in some pretty rural places. One of the things that surprised me is that even in pretty small towns, there are often more than one of just about everything. Callie, Arapaho, has between 4,000 and 5,000 people in it. If we take the county, and even include the neighboring county, you’re still in the very low five digits with a population density of between 1 and 2 people per square mile. Callie has four auto repair shops three pharmacies, three auto mechanics, two coffee shops (more than two, really), two medical clinics, two barber shops, two veterinarians, and two grocery stores, and two towing services. There were ones of some things, and there were none of a lot more.

This is not to say that there aren’t any one-pharmacy towns. But they’re hard to find. First of all, because the cut-off to being able to support two pharmacies seems to be somewhere in the four digits, that includes a whole lot of people we consider to be Rural Americans. Even relatively poor counties often have more than one, or go back and forth between one and two indicating a danger in taking the community for granted.

I blame television.

In the Andy Griffith show, Mayberry had one of just about everything. There seemed to be one of a lot of things in Twin Peaks, too (which technically had 50,000, but only because the studio made them change it from 5,000… trust me, it was a 5,000 town). But that’s a casting decision. Keeps things simple.

Now, there is the phenomenon of places in small towns closing. So a county that has two may go down to one. But… a town with only one may go down to none.

The towns to the east, in the neighboring county, was a single-pharmacy town. But it closed, right about the time that the third pharmacy in Callie opened up. Which is often how it goes. Even within small towns, there is a degree of consolidation. A place in some outlying small town goes out of business in favor of something in the county seat. That sort of thing.

Which brings me to the next thing, which is that as daunting “driving 60 miles to the next-nearest [X] seems”… it’s also a fact of life when you live in the middle of nowhere. My wife and I would drive five hours to get to the airport. To some extent, that’s part of the decision you make when you live in rural America. It would definitely suck if the only pharmacy in town didn’t do contraception, but others live in towns without a single pharmacy. More do, I suspect, though for them “the nearest pharmacy” is likely to be located next to another pharmacy or two. And a store where you need to run errands anyway.

In the case of contraception, I would add, even in some rinky-dink conservative town, a pharmacy that refused to sell one of the most commonly prescribed drugs on the market would have serious problems. If you’re operating out in the middle of nowhere, I’m not sure how much business you can afford to turn away. especially when you’re not just turning away the business for those particular drugs, but often the families of people who need it because they’ll just pick up their other prescriptions when they go to the county seat or the next county’s county seat.

It is trickier with anti-discrimination legislation, but the scenarios I see people concoct sometimes contradict my experience. The things I would most worry about being gay or a minority in ruralia isn’t that “the only barbershop in town won’t cut my hair” but “some employers won’tl hire me and I’m having trouble getting a lease.” My concern for the latter (two) is why I am sympathetic to anti-discrimination legislation, though it has less to do with places where there is the only X in town, and more to do with cultural contagion that spreads to some larger places to, as well as with the fact that job markets and housing markets can be awfully tight – even in larger towns and cities – and a single rejection can have significant consequences.

On Friday, we got a visit from a meat seller. As it happens, we’re somewhat interested in bulk meats, and we definitely want a freezer (which they were throwing in), so we let him in.

His sales pitch was solid. I was initially pretty reluctant, but Clancy (who in particular is interested in bulk meats) was a bit more enthusiastic. I want to start doing a lot more cooking, and having a lot of meat around seemed like a pretty good way to encourage me to do so. He almost had a sale.

I remembered Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, however. Clancy asked if he could step outside to give us a few minutes. Which he did. Remembering Dr Phi’s post on Town & County Foods, I was inspired to look up the company online. While the model of this company differed from T&C, there were enough similarities that I wanted to check up on them. It… did not paint a pretty picture.

On the upshot, this was not a fly-by-night operation. A lot of the complaints I saw involved their aggressive sales strategies. There were no items about hidden contracts, which was a primary concern. There were vague comments about how the business did business, but little in the way of specifics.

However, they do have an “F” from the Better Business Bureau. While they have no obligation to be members, that they aren’t and that they failed to respond to any of the complaints against them… well, that doesn’t prove anything, but also doesn’t fill me with confidence. Given the sheer number of complaints out there, they seem to have accepted or resigned themselves to having a pretty negative reputation online. Which means that if things go sideways, they don’t have a reputation that they would particularly like to protect.

We told the salesperson that it wasn’t going to happen. He made some sale-save efforts, but quickly determined that it was a lost cause. It was a very long few minutes while he packed up his meats and went on his way. On the one hand, I felt bad for him because he really probably thought that he had made a sale. And it fell apart due to no mistake of his own, and on account of something there was absolutely nothing he could do without.

On the other hand, he was an unsolicited solicitor. That’s got to come with the business.

Unlike T&C, I don’t know that what they were offering was a bad deal. I was mostly worried about, once having ordered from them, fending off attempt and attempt at re-order. I once had an ongoing issue when I purchased some printer ink that was alledgely “no obligation” that ultimately resulted in my having to tell shipping “please to not accept any packages from these people.” The salesguy said that wasn’t how they operate. Maybe it’s not. But there was enough out there to make it a concern.

Marc Lore was made half a billionaire by Amazon, and he’s apparently declaring war on them. Here’s his pitch:

Like Costco (COST), Jet plans to make money on membership fees. Every other savings will be passed along to the buyer. And like EBay (EBAY) and the dominant Chinese e-commerce player, Alibaba.com (BABA), it will function primarily as a marketplace, allowing other merchants to compete to offer their wares to customers. But there’s a twist: Shoppers can squeeze out more savings if they can control the urge for instant gratification and let Jet figure out how to deliver the goods as economically as possible. For example, prices can drop when a shopper combines multiple orders into a single shipment or is willing to wait for a seller offering a more economical shipping option.

I’m a happy member of Amazon Prime. It’s the perfect storm for instant gratification. I also frequent eBay, though, when I am looking for something a little less interest, but with a touch less urgency.

The “wait for a better price” model appeals to me, as it is often how I use eBay. I often want something, but don’t need it right away. So I basically keep an eye on eBay once a week or so until the product hits a certain price point. Then I’ll buy it. Lately I’ve been waiting for a good Thinkpad T520/W520 for under $600. I wish there were a way to reverse the eBay model a bit, and instead of bidding price on something I want relatively now, I can simply put a price out there and wait for someone to list it at that price.

Via Vikram Bath, Mat Honan says not to buy another smartphone and instead buy an LTE tablet. Well, that’s not quite right. He says that increasingly, we are already buying tablets:

[W]hat we really use these devices for, according to network operations powerhouse Ericsson, is to move data—increasingly over the 4G wireless tech called LTE. You might think LTE just means a faster Instagram feed. It does. But LTE is also the main reason our smartphones are getting so large. Power-hungry LTE devices want bigger batteries. Bigger batteries mean bigger phones. It’s no coincidence that Apple, Samsung, LG, and Google have all rolled out 6-inch phonelike flagships since the end of 2013.

I say phonelike because, come on, these are tablets. They barely fit into a front pocket. They won’t fit into a back pocket—or at least not most back pockets. The average Levi’s have a back-stash that’s just 5.25 inches deep.

So is that a tablet in your pocket? Yes. LTE didn’t just change our phones into things that look like tablets; it also changed them into things that act like tablets. Older cell networks, even 3G, used dedicated connections to move your voice, just like a landline. But LTE turns your voice into data packets like the rest of Internet traffic. Until last year, carriers were mostly using older networks and technologies to carry voice calls, but now everything’s moving to voice over LTE, or VoLTE. It’s basically VoIP—like Skype.

I got a tablet for Christmas, which has a screen size of 8.4″. It stands next to my Note 4, which has a screen size of 5.7″… the latter still feels like a phone, and the former like a tablet (ditto my wife’s 7″ tablet, which at this point is a glorified Kindle). I don’t know where the line is, but there is one.

On the other hand, my hand is big and so I still have touch capability over most of my Note. For someone that has to use their Note the same way I use my tablet (with two hands), perhaps it is more tabletesque.

One thing that I find kind of annoying is that even though my Note has the size closer to that of a tablet than that of my first smartphone, the apps make a strict tablet/phone distinction. So the text on my email app is unavoidably large, meanwhile on the same app on the tablet is really small. The developers figure, I guess, that they are safe to put more stuff on a tablet than a phone. Which makes sense, except that I keep my tablet farther from my face. But I can’t because the text on some apps is too small. Then some apps that are perfect on the tablet would look much better in tablet mode on the Note, but it doesn’t quite work that way.

First world problems defined, I suppose.