Possibly controversial but prostitution. Allows for regulation and workplace safety. Would probably calm a lot of men down as well and help them focus on the more important aspects of getting into a relationship.
there is in fact only regulation as long as it is legal. how do you regulate if it is illegal? it only gets hidden then. and literally everywhere it went bad when it became illegal. everything you claim to want to achieve (regulation and workplace security) is completely lost and things get worse, more victims, less control, violence cannot be prosecuted cause none would go to police when anything happens, etc etc. , that is until it becomes legal again, but until then making it illegal even short time would cause way more damage than is possible to “fix” in a decade or two. just read about what happened where govs already took that path. if you want it to get out of control and destroy health and lifes, and create ground for forced prostitution (aka slavery), then yes, making it illegal is the way you get exactly that result.
and for the relationship thing… as far as i know (which is not much) the mayority of such customers already are in a relationship (mostly the one called marriage) while singles way less do such.
Smoking. Millions of euros of taxpayer money spent every year on those lung cancer patients which could be well spent elsewhere. It’s also an activity that negatively affects not just the smoker but everyone around them.
What I find amusing is that the cigarettes packages where I live have disgusting images with the potential sickness it comes from its usage, and yet people still buy them 'hey man, this will literally kill you someday" warning does not work.
I thought this was a well known measure but it seems that my USA cousin did not know about this kind of marketing.
They ought to increase it by 2 years every time. That way people have to get clean. Also, we ( US citizens) should take control of all tobacco companies, and wind them down, putting all profits and assets towards addiction recovery services, and cancer treatments.
They’ve been making billions off of slowly killing people for the last 100+ years, they don’t need one more fucking day.
At least here in Germany this is apparently still not true as smokers in particular add a huge cost to the healthcare system due to the long-term and repeated damage. For example, once they get parts of their feet amputated from clogged arteries, most actually continue to smoke (“Ah well now it’s too late anyways”), and hence will get half a dozen such amputations over time.
Obesity is the issue these days not tobacco. Tobacco use is a fraction of what it once was. Now a huge portion of the EU and USA is obese, which causes way more strain on the healthcare system.
A report commissioned by the tobacco company Philip Morris, when the Czech government proposed raising cigarettes taxes in 1999, concluded that the effect of smoking on the public finance balance in the Czech Republic in 1999 was positive, an estimated net benefit of 5,815 million CZK (Czech koruny), or about US$298 million. 77 The analysis included taxes on tobacco, and health care and pension savings because of smokers’ premature death, as economic benefits of smoking, and these benefits exceeded the negative financial effects of smoking, such as increased health care costs. The report created a furore; public health advocates found the explicit assumption that premature death is beneficial morally repugnant. The controversy was described by the journalist Chana Joffe-Walt on the radio program This American Life,78 and was reported in the British Medical Journal.79 According to This American Life, Philip Morris distanced itself from the report in response to the controversy, banning its employees from citing the findings. In fact, the report’s claim that smoking was beneficial relies on its inclusion of taxes as a benefit, not any savings due to smokers’ premature deaths80 Costs associated with smoking while the smoker was still alive totalled 15,647 million CZK, 13 times more than the ‘benefits’ associated with early death. The net benefit reported in the analysis arose because the tobacco tax revenue of 20,269 million CZK was regarded as a benefit. As detailed in Section 17.1.1, taxes are not an economic cost (or benefit); they are a transfer payment. The recipient (the government) gets richer, while the taxpayer gets poorer.
So darkly amusingly it has actually been reported before, but in the Czech Republic.
Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.
People need help getting off their addiction to give them a better life. Money isn’t really an issue. Turns out raising taxes for addicts, you can make a lot of money as a government!
I’m 100% for abolishing smoking. I particularly like the cut-off point approach, just stop people who turn 18 after a certain point from buying tabacco. This will slowly weed out the smoking habit, and in a couple of decades smoking will be seen as something old people and maybe foreigners do.
I know the tobacco industry has pushed the “smokers make the government money” narrative for decades, but since a few years it’s actually true. Mostly because the healthcare system is collapsing under high demand and retiring boomers and gen X will leave the country with a disproportionate amount of people needing care versus people working to provide/pay for care. Important surgeries can already take years to be scheduled and that’s only going to get worse the coming years.
This isn’t the “thank the tax payer for paying for themselves”, it’s yet another symptom of decades of terrible decisions and putting off necessary reforms to deal with the demographic changes.
Also, in general, “at least they don’t cost us money” isn’t a good defence in general for maintaining a system getting people addicted to huffing cancerous fumes. Even if taxes brought in double the money it costs to care for a cancered up smoker, we should still strive for a smoke-free society. That includes huffing other cancerous fumes, such as vapes and weed smoke.
While it seems rather obvious that inhaling carcinogenic fumes is bad for your health, I’ve never really found a study that shows harm by second hand smoke as serious as the harm of smoking itself, to be honest. I don’t think the damage second hand smoking does to the general population’s health is quite as bad as direct smoking is.
Second hand smoking is bad, but it’s orders of magnitude less dangerous than sucking the carcinogens straight out of a burning cigarette according to the papers I’ve scanned through. It’ll increase the healthcare cost a few percent, but it’s not as significant across the entire population as you’d think looking at the individual risks.
If we can end smoking, we’ll end secondhand smoking for free. Plus, places and people just smell nicer in general.
Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.
You just trade out legal distributors for illegal distributors while ruining the lives of smokers by cycling them in and out of prison, feeding their need to smoke even more. Bad idea.
Yeah, I’m surprised at how many people here would simply like to add tobacco to the list of controlled substances and add more fuel to the shit firestorm that is the Drug War.
Do I believe the tobacco industry should be far more heavily regulated than it currently is? Absolutely. I actually feel that way about most legal drugs.
But imprisoning people for doing what they want with their own bodies in their own homes has already proven to be ineffective at curtailing drug use and abuse.
Additionally, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and former prisoners is a whole separate topic, but related in that the Drug War is just a corrupt mechanism to feed the prison-industrial complex. Why add another drug (tobacco) to the list of drugs cops can plant on your person and send you off to jail for?
Yeah, and unlike what people commonly think, it doesn’t just directly affect the user (first hand smoke) and the people around it (second hand smoke), but also the furniture and nature around it (third hand smoke).
I despise those cigarettes laying around everywhere in nature. You can even smell them on remotes if someone was a hardcore smoker.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I have less problems with the “luxury” items, such as cigars.
They’re usually hand-crafted expensive stuff that’s made to enjoy once and a while, compared to cigarettes which are mass produced with the sole purpose to get you addicted.
I think the same is true with alcohol. There’s the cheap, mass produced stuff vs the more expensive “hand”-crafted stuff.
I wish we could just enjoy these things without corporations trying to get us addicted to them at every opportunity, disregarding any of the dangers associated with consuming them.
Private cars in cities.
They’re noisy, unhealthy, cause massive damage to infrastructure, transport one person at a time while taking up enough space for ~10 in the road, fill open spaces for parking, sometimes while being completely unusable, endanger everyone else on the roads…
A throwaway reference to another thread on here …. Someone tried to sue a restaurant when he choked on a bone in his boneless chicken wings. The court ruled he can’t sue because “boneless” is just a style of cooking and doesn’t make any claim about whether that meal has bones. …. That kind of misrepresentation, and dodging responsibility should be illegal. All sorts of scamming the customer should be illegal and isn’t
If I can go on a bit of a rant, I do believe in the power of the market to shape our lives, our economy, our society. Conservatives got that part right. But a market is only “free” when everyone plays by the same rules and has same facts and knowledge, free choice. A market is only beneficial when it is shaped by regulators to benefit society. A market is only sustainable when it incorporates externalities. If Conservatives are gung ho about free markets, they need to step up and do their part. While there’s a nice theory about the usefulness of Marketting, the primary use is to lie, subvert, fool, distort the market, and THAT should be illegal
while I generally agree with you, lots of things that are legal could be called predatory and people don’t seem to have a problem with them, but somehow MLM crosses the line.
Everyone has a different definition of what is acceptable and I don’t think there is enough of a majority consensus one way or the other to do something about it.
Honestly? Alcohol. I used to work security at a rehab, and it was always the worst addiction. The withdrawls are horrible, up to and including death. Yes, even worse than heroin.
I am in my late 30s. Drank in college with friends at parties. I dont anymore just not into it. I like things that make me faster, smarter, or stronger. I dont understand why all TV shows and movies seem to be centered around drinking when its a social scene. (I live in north america). Nothing good comes from drinking alcohol. They make it seem like if you’re relaxing or want to have fun you need alcohol. I just need a good brisket for both those.
Read up on US prohibition and how it funded the Mafia. It just changes the form of the societal disease.
The answer to addiction is having support and care on place for those that fall to it so society helps pick them up again. You can’t stop the abuse of substances unless you fix why people are crawling into a hole to avoid the world. Lack of mental health is a disease of society as well as the individual.
Its so mad that we have such a literal example of exactly what happens, due to prohibition, yet society refuses to see like for like. The mafia simply used the exact same routes to smuggle heroin. They didn’t disappear or die out, due to alcohol prohibition ending. They got into bed with the CIA, under operation gladio. What they did with crack wasn’t the first or the biggest example.
Like you said, you can’t people abusing substances. They remain illegal because somewhere some very powerful people are making too much money from them remaining so.
Why? Simply because this was actually tried in America? All I’m doing is answering the question. Just because this country failed at making it illegal does not mean it still shouldn’t be illegal.
People are allowed to make their own decisions, even if they’re bad decisions. And it shouldn’t be illegal because it has been proven that making it illegal only makes everything worse.
I want to live in a world where “stop cutting bits of babies dicks off” doesn’t require any further explanation.
“No, actually, its you who needs to justify cutting bits of babies dicks off. Not the other way round. Unless its hair, nails or connected to the mum, the default position is actually not to cut bits of the baby off.”
vocabulary.com: “When a person or an object has been altered or damaged in a permanent way, that’s a mutilation.”
it can desensitize the penis and cause health issues and/or sexual dysfunction (arguably its intended consequence). forced body alteration is mutilation
Because it serves a genuine function, because the process poses an unnecessary risk, because there is no way to know how big the penis is going to get when the kid grows up, and that is part of the reason for the foreskin, to have a ton of give so it doesn’t happen like it did to my ex. He got circumcised as a newborn, and by the time he finished puberty, his penis grew far more than the leftover foreskin, so he wasn’t even able to have full erections without a tremendous amount of pain and sometimes, even tearing.
If you chop someone’s leg off without consent for no good reason, that’s mutilation. If you amputate it with consent for legitimate medical reasons that’s a medical procedure.
This 100% reads to me as an anti-trans post. Maybe that’s not your intent, but that’s the way it reads. Esp. since anyone under 18 con not legally give consent to anything.