Hey anti smoking bullies....I told you so!!

reply to post by Milkflavour


I just want to add to your post that when they banned smoking in pubs and clubs for us, they didn't ban it in Westminster bars and didn't they build a smoking bunker for themselves.
That cost the tax payer a small fortune because they had to use the same building materials as the original building.
I'm also from the North.

reply to post by hellbjorn012


Haha you say jog 20 miles to ride a bike or horse......keep the bike or horse at home and ride one of them the 20 miles. your example.

reply to post by hellbjorn012


Then I guess people like Winston Churchill had a massive mental weakness judging by the size of the cigar he had hanging out of his mouth, according to your logic.

Can we help the man out and name more famous people who we wouldn't consider having a mental weakness because he/she smoked.

reply to post by hellbjorn012


Giving in to peer pressure is a mental weakness also.

No one is winning when freedoms are taken away.

Here in NY it wasn't put to a public vote...so where's the fairness in that?

reply to post by Milkflavour


No problem, thanks for bothering to read it!

I believe I have an answer for your question about cars: money!

I'm not educated on the economy in any formal way, so this is a shot in the dark really. I've had a quick nose through your profile and I've noticed your background in psychology and counselling, so what I'm about to say might be familiar to you.

Shopping is an important part of our economy, I'm not exactly sure why, but I remember the UK government a while ago urging us all to spend more money to help us climb out of the recession. They want us to spend, that's how the system keeps itself going.

Unfortunately, humans are inherently lazy beings, given two options we take the path of least resistance. Recently, Teper & Inzlicht published a study on active and passive actions, in it, they gave participants a test, at the end of the test there were a variety of different scenarios. All the scenarios involved the participant being asked to help a fellow participant with the test - the general trend was that the easier it was to say yes, the more people said yes. The easier it was to say no, the more people said no. This also has significant implications on the act of impulse buying.

If you combine this with the convenience of using a car to not only drive to the shopping centres, but to provide large amounts of carrying capacity for the return journey, cars make it easier for people to spend money by orders of magnitude. If a shopper takes a bike or a bus to the city centre, they can go home with at most 3 or 4 bags of various items. If you give them a car, they can load up the boot, back seat and floor and stop off for a burger on the way home. The same is true of grocery shopping, people tend to buy more when it's easier to carry. If someone has to walk 3 miles with food shopping AND a crate of beer, they might just leave the beer.

This has knock on effects in other ways too, the time lost in transit when compared to a car could be used to passively generate income for other companies in unlikely ways. For instance, it takes me 10-15 minutes in to town in a car, so a 25 minute round trip. The same trip on a bus is almost 2 hours. The 90 minutes where I'm in transit is dead time, I'm not watching TV, so I'm not increasing channel ratings and increasing the value of their ad space, I'm not idly consuming food and drink forcing me to shop more often, I'm not using electricity, water or gas which means a loss of revenue for those companies.

Even more unlikely, but still a factor, I'm not using my appliances like my microwave, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, TV, xbox, pc and so on. This increases their chronological longevity meaning it will take longer for me to replace it.

Cigarettes cost the taxpayer millions a year in NHS care (I'm not arguing that fact with anyone, according to the government, cigarettes are bad, for the purposes of this post, we're accepting that as fact) and the reduction in consumption would, overall, save money as they do not generate enough in taxes to offset their cost.

Cars however, have multiple economic benefits as described above (as well as the cost of tax, insurance, mot, repair, new cars etc, how did I not think of that earlier?!) which offset any potential damage they might cause.

-------

Actually, I'm not even sure how harmful car exhaust fumes are these days. Catalytic converters have pretty much nullified any old knowledge we might have had. If you had asked me 20 years ago which kind of smoke I would rather inhale daily, I would have said cigarette smoke, but now catalytic converters have cornered the market. The output from modern cars consists mainly of water, carbon dioxide and monoxide (in higher levels as the engine ages) and nitrogen, which is inert and totally harmless, and is in fact 79% of our atmosphere. There are some particulates, sure, but I would argue that cigarette smoke is more dangerous than car exhaust in comparative volumes these days, I'll have to look in to the volume ratios of cigarette and car exhaust smoke and compare how cancery they are. That's my weekend sorted then!

reply to post by grey580


If you took the time to read the whole thread, you wouldn't have to ask me that.

reply to post by timetothink


I've been following the whole thread and I'm still not convinced of the answer.

reply to post by hellbjorn012


So I am to assume you have not one vice? Eating, drinking, cursing, spending too much money.

And it is not a minority, majority thing....it is overreaching government doing whatever it wants.

It always amazes me how ATS is full of all these perfect people.

reply to post by keenasbro


Obama, Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Boehner, Mark Twain, FDR, seriously it would take years.

reply to post by Dispo


You're not sure of the answer? Sure you are .....

(I'm not arguing that fact with anyone, according to the government , cigarettes are bad...)

According to the government there are too many people. Wanna volunteer for that too?

reply to post by Dispo


Convinced of what answer.

I started the thread to point out over reaching, ridiculous bans that accomplish little to nothing except make some holier than thou greenies feel good. In the US specifically.

It's my opinion, you are entitled to yours.

reply to post by frazzle


Logical fallacy: quoting out of context.

You cannot have any sort of debate if you don't accept any axioms at all. Every argument has to start somewhere. If I made the same post without that disclaimer, my entire point would be completely irrelevant based on that one line.

Someone would come along and pick one thing out of the post, in this case that cigarette smoking costs the taxpayer money, and make a post on that.

Someone else would come along and pick something out of that post, possibly to do with the agenda of the scientists involved.

And on and on and on and on and on and on.

At the end of the day, for the purposes of that post, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, it's what the government believes. They base their policies on it as fact.

reply to post by timetothink


It was a joke. Chill.

reply to post by Dispo


I have a very simple answer to the question of whether car exhaust is dangerous or not. Nothing scientific here, just good old common sense with some womanly intuition thrown in.

Lets do a hypothetical experiment:

For example, I smoke in my garage....sometimes it is cold so I keep the doors closed. I am out there doing chores, watching TV, reading sometimes for an hour or two. No ventilation, just smokin away. I am fine, so is anyone who stays out there with me. (Can you see where I am going with this?).

Now take that same example and replace say 10 or 20 packs of cigs (let's pretend its a party in my little unventilated garage) with a running car, sit out there about and hour or two......what condition would you be in when someone found you? If you were out there with the car? If you were out there with the cigs?


Now think about all the vehicles on the road at any given time. It doesn't take a genius to know which is more dangerous, I don't care what kind if filters they attach to them.

Now, the point of my thread was fireplace bans and the point that the danger of fireplaces is worse than cigs, less than a car in the open air.

And that nature puts 90% of pollution and smog creating particles into the air.

So, even though for now the ban may only be a day or a few, it is negligible as far as helping anything. Also, once bans or laws are enacted they usually grow, spread and are rarely if ever repealed.

Originally posted by Dispo
reply to post by frazzle

 

Logical fallacy: quoting out of context.

You cannot have any sort of debate if you don't accept any axioms at all. Every argument has to start somewhere. If I made the same post without that disclaimer, my entire point would be completely irrelevant based on that one line.

Someone would come along and pick one thing out of the post, in this case that cigarette smoking costs the taxpayer money, and make a post on that.

Someone else would come along and pick something out of that post, possibly to do with the agenda of the scientists involved.

And on and on and on and on and on and on.

At the end of the day, for the purposes of that post, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, it's what the government believes. They base their policies on it as fact.

I'm not having a debate with you, or arguing with you, thanks anyway. Anyone who accepts what the government says at face value has their head planted firmly in the sand and debating the other end is silly.

The enormous increases in the tax on each pack of cigarettes was supposed to pay healthcare costs for smoking related illnesses. The government said so. See how that worked out? They also said the increased taxes on tobacco products would reduce insurance costs.Did your insurance rates go down?

Speaking of logical fallacies

reply to post by frazzle


Funny how that works right?

Insurance goes up anyway, so we get obamacare to save us all from healthcare costs and bam, rates go up, taxes go up and more people loose their jobs because healthcare rates went up......genius!!!

reply to post by frazzle


It's not about whether what the government says is true, it doesn't matter whether it is or not, it makes no difference to the point of my post, at all, in any way.

The government believes that it's true.

They then base their policies on the fact that it's true.

Therefore the debate on policies, which I am having, though apparently not with you, is based on their own axioms.

To challenge accepted data is a completely different argument than to challenge the interpretation of accepted data.

Edit:
>implying the UK government has any influence on private health insurance

reply to post by frazzle


I had to laugh, finally here in NY the politards actually started saying "if we raise taxes really high, people won't be to afford to smoke."

So far the Indians and the border states are really making out on that!

reply to post by Dispo


I have a question. I am guessing you are in the UK?

How are your policies inacted?

Here, we are supposed to vote, now it is quickly being taken out of our hands.

reply to post by timetothink


Experiment is flawed, toxicity by volume is more important, catalytic converters are wonderful things, they matter a lot.

Spare the air has been in place for many years.

Please source 90% claim.

Negligible still exists. Think averages.

Natural pollution is not the issue in this case, the issue is unusual weather conditions taking fumes coming from area a and forcing them to stagnate in area b. The natural sources you talk about are not in area a, therefore are not affected by unusual weather and will not stagnate in area b.