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In the world of television, there's nothing quite like a soap habit. People watch characters evolve not over the 10 or 15 seasons that might mark a long run in prime time, but over 30 or 40 years, until they have kids and grandkids — sometimes played by the same actors the entire time.

That's what has made the cancellation in recent years of big chunks of the soap lineup so upsetting to people — most recently in 2011, when ABC canceled both All My Children and One Life To Live. As All Things Considered reported over the weekend, both of those shows are making their debut today online at Hulu, a streaming service that will carry both exclusively, with much (but not all) of their casts intact.

The question, of course, is whether anybody is going to watch, and if so, who?

Traditionally, soaps are habit-based. People pop the TV on while they're having lunch, or in the break room, or in the dorm room, and the habit reinforces itself. It's not that soap fans didn't embrace VCRs and DVRs and time-shifting in general, but the original soap model is rhythmic; it's about the show fitting into your day somewhere that's predictable. The model for making money off that habit was relatively simple: viewers tune in, they watch ads, the show gets paid for.

Hulu has ads, too, but there are fewer of them, and they can be packaged differently — when I watched AMC this morning, it offered me one long commercial at the beginning in exchange for seeing the rest of the show without any at all — and they can't be skipped, unlike time-shifted ads on a DVR. At the same time, audiences are expected to be smaller; The New York Times reported yesterday that while these soaps pulled about three million viewers on ABC, they'd break even with about half a million when you combine Hulu, Hulu Plus (a paid service that will offer back episodes as well as new ones) and iTunes.

One big question concerns the fact that soaps on television have traditionally skewed toward older audiences. Back in 1994, one Kaiser Family Foundation study found that viewing was highest in young women (18-29) and older women (50 and over). But Reuters reported that as of the end of All My Children's run on ABC, the median viewer age was 57. Hulu, on the other hand, has a younger viewer base — earlier in April, it was reported to have an average age of 38.

So the challenge for Hulu is presumably in two parts: they need a younger audience (candidly, you can't just let the audience age and age and then die), and they need to keep a base level of the older audience that has sustained these shows always. The opening episode of All My Children on Hulu is fairly transparent on that point — it introduces some younger characters and a high school plot, but also focuses on people who were on when I was a teenager, including Angie and Jesse Hubbard, who became a so-called "supercouple" in the early 1980s and are still making out 30 years later. (And good for them.)

The tension shows at times. On the one hand, soaps can be very traditional and very corny, and on the other, Hulu has apparently opened up the opportunity for not only more explicit sex scenes than I remember from TV soaps, but different language. The way they manage it in the premiere is that the young characters swear and the older characters don't. It makes sense in its way (seeing Adam Chandler say "s—-" would be super weird for me personally), and maybe they think younger viewers won't feel like they're watching their grandma's favorite show if it's a little more salty. But if a traditional soap viewer who's been watching since the 1970s makes her way to Hulu and tunes in on the first day, and the first thing she notices is that now Adam Chandler's son says the s-word, how is that going to go over?

They're in a tough spot here. They can afford to sacrifice a certain chunk of the audience, as they've said, and they're already going to lose anybody who won't seek out online television as well as anybody who specifically liked how relatively clean soaps were.

Undoubtedly, there are older fans who previously had no interest in seeking out streaming television who, with their favorite show available nowhere else, might try out viewing on a tablet or a set-top box for the first time. But it's interesting that at the same time the new Netflix episodes of Arrested Development are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's understood to have a niche with those who are most plugged in to what pop culture decides is cool, soaps are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's treated as hopelessly uncool but is beloved anyway.

Previously online-only television has largely been billed as event television (like Arrested Development) or limited-run (like Netflix's House Of Cards). Soaps will make an interesting test of whether the most traditional of TV habits can be translated from broadcast to online.

Smoking has its risks, but in California higher prices for health insurance probably won't be among them.

The federal health law allows states to charge smokers up to 50 percent more for a health plan, but a bill moving forward in the California Legislature would prevent that from happening.

The Affordable Care Act is supposed to remove discrimination in the pricing of health insurance for things like gender and medical condition. Critics say a tobacco surcharge creates a new category of discrimination against smokers.

Furthermore, a surcharge for smokers would mean they wouldn't get the benefit of the subsidy that's supposed to make buying insurance through the marketplaces in 2014 more affordable, says Karen Pollitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

For a low-income person, a $3,000 subsidy makes affordable a policy otherwise costing $6,000. A tobacco surcharge would push it back up to $6,000, she says.

If the state opted for the maximum surcharge, health insurance would become unaffordable for those with the lowest incomes, according to Rick Curtis, president of the Institute for Health Policy Solutions in Washington. And, he points out, it's that group that's most likely to smoke.

"For somebody who is totally hooked after many years and older ... and those kinds of people are more expensive and often do need more medical care, they have two bad choices: go without health insurance and be impoverished that way, or get health insurance and be impoverished."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says tobacco use costs the nation about $190 billion in medical care and lost productivity each year.

And that's exactly why Micah Weinberg, a health policy analyst with the Bay Area Council in the San Francisco region, thinks higher rates for smokers make sense.

"If we're ultimately interested in bringing down the price of health care for everybody, including low-income folks, then we need to make sure we get a handle on unhealthy behaviors such as smoking," he says.

Weinberg says higher insurance premiums for tobacco users — as long as they're not too high — provide the type of financial penalties that studies say cause people to quit smoking. By contrast, he says, banning higher rates because smoking disproportionately affects the poor reflects paternalistic policymaking that does nothing to fix the problem.

"I think we have to be very careful what types of favors we're doing for people. Because if the end result of this policy is greater numbers of smokers, then that's not actually helping the populations that we're trying to help," he says.

But California Democratic Assemblyman Richard Pan disagrees. He's a Sacramento pediatrician who wrote the legislation. Pan believes rate increases of any amount on smokers' premiums may dissuade some from buying health insurance altogether.

"We want smokers to actually have health care coverage," he says. "And through having health care coverage they will have access to smoking cessation treatment as well as, of course, health care for not only smoking-related but even their nonsmoking-related illness."

And for many in California, at least, that seems to make sense. Pan's proposed law has so far encountered no formal opposition from anti-smoking groups, cigarette companies, insurance companies or the American Lung Association.

It's essential to provide tobacco users with affordable health insurance — rather than to make them pay more for it — because it's so hard to quit smoking, officials at the ALA's California branch said in a written statement.

If the measure passes, California would join Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia in making sure smokers aren't charged more under the federal law.

This piece is part of a partnership with NPR, KPCC and Kaiser Health News.

Iceland has become the first country to elect members of parliament from the Pirate Party — an international online freedom movement.

Three Pirate Party MPs will take seats following historic polls in Iceland that saw a new coalition come to power on a promise of easing economic austerity measures.

According to The Associated Press:

"The conservative Independence Party and rural-based Progressive Party — who governed Iceland for decades before the 2008 [economic] crash — each had 19 seats in Iceland's 63-seat parliament, the Althingi. ...

"The pro-Europe Bright Future party took six seats and online freedom advocates the Pirate Party three."

Iron Man 3 doesn't open in North America until this Friday (May 3), but this weekend, it's already up and whomping The Avengers at the international box office. The new adventures of Tony Stark, directed and co-written by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black, brought in $195.3 million. That beat a mere $185.1 million when The Avengers opened internationally to make it the biggest opening weekend ever in a bunch of countries, including Argentina and Indonesia. (There are some countries where it's yet to open, including China.)

So if you were hoping that the superhero movie might loosen its grip on the public consciousness, you've got bigger problems than your local mall; you'll have to take it up with Buenos Aires.

Marvel has plenty more where that came from — another Thor movie, another Captain America movie, another Avengers movie, and more. It's been a pretty ho-hum year in theaters so far, with movies like Oz The Great And Powerful and Identity Thief making good money but hardly seeming to make a cultural dent, so this may very well be the first widely beloved movie of the year.

As for the domestic box office, as the number-crunchers at Box Office Mojo point out, you might have expected that as Pain & Gain had a big weekend and everyone started gearing up for action movies, a comedy engineered to give an older female audience somewhere else to go might be welcome, but that didn't help The Big Wedding. It made a very modest $7.5 million on a cast including Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Katherine Heigl and Diane Keaton. (Perhaps people saw Robin Williams as a priest in License To Wed, and quite justifiably ran far, far away.) (Seriously, did you see License To Wed? Yikes.)

At any rate, Iron Man 3 will be bringing its enormous clanking body to U.S. theaters this Friday, where it will surely stomp just about everything else into tiny pieces.