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.
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.
Expiration dates on packaged food are almost always about how enjoyable the food is to eat, not safety. Donating expired packaged food with legal protection from liability would be good for the world.
I get what you mean, but that would backfire increadibly quickly.
Civil rights organizations would no longer be able to talk with politicians directly, possibly never, as demonstrations and manifestations could be classified as lobbying depending on how strict it would be enforced.
Environmental groups could no longer invite politicians to important conferences.
Lobbying isn’t just something that monolithic companies do, take it away, and it will only be something the bad guys does.
Wut? It is supremely American to think you can only talk to politicians if you have money… and only because so many other people are willing to purchase a slice of their time.
I can just walk to Peter Julian’s office and, assuming I’m not rude, talk to him about something that matters to me. I’ve had conversations with Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders - I used to board game with a state senator. It it might be hard to get a lunch date with Joe Biden but politicians spend the majority of their time just talking to folks… it’s only when the rich can use their money to monopolize time that shit breaks down.
Those meetings you have had with politicians could absolutely be classified as lobbying, and would be made illegal if lobbying was outlawed.
A company have the resources to make a smokescreen around meetings like that, making it harder to prove lobbyism, the lobbyist just happened to stay at the same hotel as the politician did, they even arrived a week before, and left two days after the politician arrived, it’s not like a meeting was set up on the one overlapping day, that would be crazy…
Those meetings you have had with politicians could absolutely be classified as lobbying, and would be made illegal if lobbying was outlawed.
It’s not just classified as lobbying, it’s litterally what Lobbying is about. Meeting politician to tell them that the environmental law reforms means that the factory will close or that the consumer need better protection regarding toxic chemical in their food is what Lobbyist do. It’s sometimes get even funnier when they change employer and therefore political side
Keep in mind that the person you reply to isn’t wrong: Big corpos would still be lobbying, as they got the resources to hide it effectively and keep everyone trying to sue them over suspicions of lobbying stuck in litigation hell.
Anybody less affluent would however find it impossible to do any lobby work. Environmental agencies etc.
This is one of those situations where just outlawing something does the least affect the very party you would want to hit most.
That’s a better approach I think, yes. It’ll be difficult to prevent collusion but effectivey capping the size of most companies and maybe their across-border reach would be a good way to keep a tighter leash on them.
Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.
ITT: people so used to lobbying that they got convinced it’s a necessary evil so that minorities and common folks can lobby as well.
It’s clearly absurd. Many places call lobbying with its real name: corruption. And there are laws in place to fight it. Are they perfect? No. Is it then more effective to legalyze corruption? OF COURSE NOT ARE YOU INSANE?!?
In what universe a politician does not have, nevermind intrinsecally in its raise to popularity, but explicitly active tools and relationships that keeps him up to date with the issues and needs of his community?
Very few politicians have the time get down and understand the issues enough to make an informed decision, which they have aids and use lobbyists to learn about the subject.
A decision about deciding about subsidiaries for specific crops for instance, lets say that a farmer used to farm wheat, but then realized that he could get more money by farming tobacco, ok, so he switches to tobacco, but the nation still needs a stable supply of wheat, so wheat needs to be subsidized by the government to make it worth it for farmer to farm wheat, most politicians won’t know if there is a need for this or how large it needs to be.
This is where lobbyists come in, they inform politicians about what they believe is needed, show reports and other data, to influence the politician about how to vote and what to argue for. Wheat farmers and baker advocacy groups will argue for high subsidies, tobacco farmers and cigarette companies will argue against it.
No dude there’s experts, specialists, entire departments within any (?) human government that knows shit, talks with experts, calculate and runs stuff.
They don’t just wait for farmers to walk up and explain what vegetables are.
And why would you think it’s normal that cigarette companies are at this whymsical table? Why put cancer inducing products in a debate with food with baby politicians that knows nothing and wait for the “debate” to play out?
No dude there’s experts, specialists, entire departments within any (?) human government that knows shit, talks with experts, calculate and runs stuff.
Yes there are departments for healthcare, having reports full of stats, that no politician will ever read, lobbying can bring attention to demetia and bring some context to the data.
They don’t just wait for farmers to walk up and explain what vegetables are.
Correct, but they want farmers to come up and talk to them about problems that they see that might be missed, for example, how young people can be encouraged to go into farming, or if there is something killing the crops that they can see faster than the governments experts can write a report about.
And why would you think it’s normal that cigarette companies are at this whymsical table?
Because they are a huge industry.
Why put cancer inducing products in a debate with food with baby politicians that knows nothing and wait for the “debate” to play out
Because farmers need money, and if tobacco pays more than wheat, then the farmer will farm tobacco.
They ignore the reports? So why would they not ignore the “people”? Because money? Then it’s just corruption and the policy won’t reflect any genuine need.
Why being a “huge industry” has any political weight? Drugs cartel move tons of money, do they get a say in the matter too?
I personally think the “how good is it” part of “advertising” should literally just be a percentage value of “how many existing customers say it was worth it”.
But even that would get gamed the way 5/5 amazon reviews can be bought today already.
So maybe it should really just be “it’s a insert thing made out of insert material produced in insert country by insert labour conditions and it costs insert price”.
I get where you’re coming from, but I think you’d just see companies divide into tiers where one tier would subcontract to the tier below. Think “cleaning services companies” all the way down.
Campaign financing in general. If you get enough signatures you’ll get a fixed amount of money from tax payers for your campaign. If you accept money from anyone else you’re barred from public office for life. End of corruption right there.
Qualified immunity for police officers. Prosecutors and judges basically get qualified immunity, too-- in that they can be caught engaging in all sorts of inappropriate and illegal activity without facing punishment because like police, it usually doesn’t even get to the extent of being charged.
Requiring agreement to some unspecified ever-changing terms of service in order to use the product you just bought, especially when use of such products is required in the modern world. Google and Apple in particular are more or less able to trivially deny any non-technical person access to smartphones and many things associated with them like access to mobile banking. Microsoft is heading that way with Windows requiring MS accounts, too, though they're not completely there yet.
But less people work on weekends than on weekdays.
There is no universal day for everyone to make it, which is why Sweden offers pre-election voting and voting by mail, plenty of other countries does as well.
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.