h a l f b a k e r y"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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A 12-ft water hose with a 13-ft range and a spray nozzle. The idea is that if you see a smoker light up within 25 feet of a building entrance or bus stop, simply douse his cigarette with a quick spritz. A metered valve allows one half-second squirt every 10 seconds to prevent kids from playing with it
or
transients from trying to shower with it.
[link]
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This could be evolved into some sort of heat-seeking sentry gun, shirley ? |
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Shirley and hopefully, 8th. Shirley and hopefully. |
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and we need tasers for the overly-opinionated too...
imho |
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Are you suggesting that it's none of my business if I'm forced to either breathe in a cloud of carcinogenic smoke or miss my bus because a smoker wants his fix? That debate was settled in court, it is illegal (in my locale, anyway) to smoke within 25 ft of a building entrance or bus stop. You don't get to force your habit on others, and this idea is a way for 'others' to resist a smoker's attempt to do that.
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I'm waiting for the day when, in a state with a stand-your-ground law with no duty to retreat in a public space, a nonsmoker shoots and kills a smoker who refused to leave the bus stop they were sharing because he was genuinely afraid for his life due to the known risk of getting cancer from the smoke. It'll be one hell of a court battle, and I plan on having plenty of fold-up chairs and popcorn ready. |
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Why I would never suggest such a thing my good man.
I would just like to see more decency, and less laws is all.
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Haven't you noticed that the more constrained people get by increasingly nanny-state-ish laws, the less civil they become?
Shirley I'm not the only one to see this...
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You were typing the second half of that while I was hitting [enter] on my anno.
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It sounds reminiscent of a recent South-Park episode I was subjected to. |
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The problem is some folks' idea of what is considered decent. A lot of smokers feel they have an unalienable right to smoke wherever and whenever they want, and the decent thing for a nonsmoker to do is go someplace else and stop bothering them. Smoking in crowded public places is one instance where I have no shred of tolerance. There is undisputed, unarguable evidence that cigarette smoke causes cancer and you don't have a right to force others to breathe it in and risk getting cancer from it. If we were in a decent world, smokers wouldn't light up around nonsmokers at all. If smokers would acknowledge and respect that, 'nanny-state-ish' laws restricting smokers would never get the popular support needed to become law because everybody would agree there's no need for it, the smokers effectively police themselves. Sadly, that has not proven to be the case. |
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// the smokers effectively police themselves.
//
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Not exactly "policing", more a sort of slow-
motion legalised suicide … |
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You are forgetting where the shit came from in the first place.
How the sale of a known addictive substance was blatantly doled to the public along with positive health effect media campaigns and "government", I use the term loosely, endorsement while plying the "boys oversees" with as much nicotine as they could consume so that most of the few who returned were hooked for life.
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You also seem to forget that, in the not too distant past, "every" public establishment allowed smoking and that this pc vilification of smokers is a new attitude with absolutely no mention of recompense for lives ruined from decades of misinformation, and a whole lot of talk about how unfair it is that those born after "this particular" bit of misinformation must pay for the ill health effects and habits of the previously duped.
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2 Fries, none of that excuses the willful disregard of the
information that IS widely available NOW about the harmful
effects of cigarette smoking. It just doesn't. Marriage equality for
homosexuals
and equal opportunities for women in the workforce, not to
mention minimum ages of consent for sex (an 8 year old girl in
Yemen died from internal bleeding on her wedding night very
recently because an entire culture still thinks an age of consent
is a 'new' idea not worth considering), are also
relatively 'new' attitudes, but that doesn't mean they are any less
valid because of that. In the not-so-distant past, differences
between 2 quarrelling men were settled with pistols at 10 paces.
Society (Western society, anyway...) has progressed beyond such
pointless barbarity.
Likewise, society is trying to progress beyond pointlessly infecting
ourselves with cancer.
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All of those societal changes took laws to make happen, and so it
appears to be equally necessary for cigarettes. Just because a
generation of people got used to being allowed (ok, even
encouraged if you insist) to do something doesn't mean they
shouldn't man up and knock it off once they've been educated
about it. Give yourself cancer in your own home if that's your
wish. Don't expect taxpayers to foot the bill for treating your
emphysema (Sp?), don't subject any kids who might live with you
to a life of breathing in your second-hand smoke, and don't
subject me and my kids to it on a public sidewalk. |
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I'll vote for this, and also for roadside radar-triggered
paint guns that put "ASSHOLE" (or, in the UK,
"ARSEHOLE" in dot-matrixed indelible lettering down
the side of any vehicle driving over the speed limit. |
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I don't see anything in this Idea that extinguishes a
smoker. Perhaps a giant arm is prepared, such that
when activated it descends and places a large glass
bell-jar over the smoker, and then a vacuum pump is
turned on.... |
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//I'm forced to either breathe in a cloud of carcinogenic smoke or miss my bus// Yes bus exhausts are a very real danger in urban environments. |
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// In the not-so distant past, differences
between 2 quarrelling men were settled with
pistols at 10 paces. //
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… whereas now such differences are settled
with a submachine gun fired from a moving
vehicle.
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// Society (Western society, anyway... has
progressed beyond such pointless barbarity.
//
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<checks RSS feeds, notes usual daily quota of
shootings, stabbings, fisticuffs, robbery and
rape still occuring> |
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//Don't expect taxpayers to foot the bill for treating your emphysema (Sp?), don't subject any kids who might live with you to a life of breathing in your second-hand smoke, and don't subject me and my kids to it on a public sidewalk.//
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Yes yes, that's where the decency part comes into play. I do not need laws to practice common courtesy, and not one example given in your straw-man argument pertains to an addictive substance foisted on a public by its own government.
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You make a very good point about not expecting the taxpayer, of which I am one, to foot the bill, so forget about income tax. How about the revenue collected by the drug-dealers, I mean government, from the smokers themselves.
If we were to add up every dollar of taxes collected only from the "legal" sale of addictive substances themselves... why, then I'm betting that there would be a coffer with several billion, perhaps trillion dollars to throw at the effort without having to dip into a single cent of teetotal revenue at all.
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My stance comes not from which side of the argument I am on, but from wondering about what is currently being publically foisted by the drug dealers(government), and how little the next generation will be wanting to pay for your ill health effects as a result of whatever current duping you are being unknowingly subjected to as we speak. |
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Man, you are a paranoid mess. How do you get to sleep at night being that terrified that the government is going to kill you in the dead of night? How can you defend the practice of deliberately infecting yourself with cancer while at the same time saying we can't trust anything the government gives us? What can they possibly give us that's worse than a slow, agonizing death by lung cancer? I don't blame the government or the tobacco companies for the second hand smoke I'm forced to ingest. I blame the smoker who makes the choice to light up in my vicinity and, before that, made the choice KNOWING FULL WELL WHAT THAT SHIT DOES TO US to become a smoker in the first place, and you can't tell me anybody 30 years old or younger can say they didn't know. You also can't convince me that a grown man, who can make such difficult but responsible decisions as sticking to a budget or cutting junk food out of his diet can't man up and quit smoking. Enough people have done it by now to give the lie to the myth that such addiction is insurmountable. |
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No matter how true or false that statement may be, I wasn't born paranoid and both that statement and;
// Marriage equality for homosexuals and equal opportunities for women in the workforce, not to mention minimum ages of consent for sex (an 8 year old girl in Yemen died from internal bleeding on her wedding night very recently because an entire culture still thinks an age of consent is a 'new' idea not worth considering), //
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...have absolutely nothing to do with why people smoke, which is the problem to be addressed.
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I sleep at night just fine knowing that much of history, past and present, is chock full of corrupt self-serving bastards.
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We're all in the same boat after all. |
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...Which also has nothing to do with the situation at hand.
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I don't want to see smokers with barcodes on their forearms going off to "work camps", but I also don't want to have to deal with their life decisions, in much the same way as I don't want to deal with other voluntary unpleasantness like public drunkenness, lewd behaviour, violence or drug use, loud music, biological hazards, amateur fire jugglers, incompetent public lumberjacking, or mimes.
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A healthy society is a generous overlap of both tolerance and consideration. I'm happy to be tolerant of things that do not harm me, within certain bounds of reason. I'm happy to be considerate of others feelings or needs, within certain bounds of reason. My fondness of a good cigar is trumped by the fact that most people find the secondary effects to be unpleasant (and in point of fact, harmful) - and so I don't do it in a public area, or at the very least, would keep my activities constrained to areas deemed suitable.
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I would posit that in most cases, consideration should override tolerance, ie the person doing the thing that is disruptive or harmful should do so in a considerate way (or at a minimum, obey the law), rather than society having to bend and flex to accomodate the vast array of obtrusive proclivities being perpetrated on a daily basis.
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If, for instance, [madness]'s "Jim" (or perhaps [Unabubba]'s "Roland") had a penchant for violent public masturbation, brought about by an overly sexualised society and an overabundance of easily obtained pornographic material (most shirley not his fault, in the slightest) - would it be up to us to tolerate his giddy flagelations, or should it be up to him to keep it on the down-low? Why is this so very different? |
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Let's assume that I accept your claim that the government 'duped'
you into smoking. Now that you know how harmful it is, what excuse
do you have to keep smoking in public? You can only say you didn't
know until you know, and then that excuse no longer holds water. If
the government 'dupes' folks into doing some harmful thing in public
again, as you seem so convinced they will, then once that harm
becomes public knowledge I will expect folks to stop doing it. If the
government was telling people that having sex with underage virgin
girls could cure a whole bunch of deadly diseases and as a society
we got used to doing so, would you think it perfectly acceptable to
keep it up if we discovered that it was all a lie and is in fact harmful
to the girls, just because you were duped into it? What nonsense. If
the 'I have a right to keep it up because I was duped into it' defense
works for smoking, then why can't it be applied to anything else you
get duped into doing? Why not slavery? The government told
American citizens that Africans aren't people, that they are
intellectually inferior and incapable of self-governance. African-
Americans were prevented from flying aircraft in WW2 because they
supposedly lacked the manual dexterity. We were 'duped' into
exercising racial discrimination for a long time. Do you think we
should be allowed to keep doing so because of that fact? What
nonsense. |
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//African- Americans were prevented from flying aircraft in WW2// You've got to be kidding : google, better still wikipee, "Tuskegee Airmen". |
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Were prevented from flying UNTIL the Tuskegee Airmen were given
their wings. I saw a documentary about them with interviews with
some of the surviving members. They weren't considered 'ready' for
combat until 1943. |
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I'm going to pass by this one, lest I ingest some
second-hand earsmoke from it all.
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Relax all. Here, have a fag. |
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Hmm, as a smoker <has to wave hand in air to be able to see the screen> it's interesting to be slowly demonised, while other equally life-shortening-to-others activities are ignored.
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Financially, smokers chip in more to the NHS than we cost it.
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//penchant for violent public masturbation,
Funny you should mention it, last Sunday in Tokyo [rest of comment redacted as HB, and rest of the world, is not quite up to it] truly, it was a very weird afternoon.
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Ok, if you can do something about passive bigotry, you get a bun. |
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// African- Americans were prevented from flying aircraft
in WW2 ... weren't considered 'ready' for combat until 1943
//
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A full two years before the end of the war. Technically I
believe that means they flew 'in' the war. Also, there were
black domestic transport and Atlantic
shuttle pilots even before '43, and there were a handful of
black test
pilots at Curtiss and Grumman.
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I don't really know what the argument's about, but I
enjoy contributing. |
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What bigotry are you referring to? Nobody's saying you don't
have the right to smoke in a place where you're the only one
who'll be breathing in the byproduct of your habit. Certainly I've
never said that.
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Alter, that was also a full 3 years after the start of the war. I
never said they were prevented from flying for the full duration
of it. They were also subjected to much more strenuous
selection criteria than white pilots. The argument appears to be
about 2 fries hinting that he thinks that because folks in the past
were 'duped' into smoking by our government, that's an excuse
to keep on doing it despite all the evidence showing how
harmful it is. I suppose he thinks it's a good idea to clear
problematic foliage with Agent Orange and spray our crops with
DDT, or at least that farmers should have the right to use such
chemicals if they choose, even knowing now what they do,
because banning them is 'nanny-state-ish'.
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2 Fries wants less of a government and more of a suggestment. |
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2fries would prefer minarchism actually, but it seems so rare a concept that the spell-checker made me spell the word three times before it stopped trying to change it to 'monarchy' rather that 'min-archy'.
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I am not arguing, merely trying to discuss, but I find this very difficult to do with you because your first reaction is instantly adversarial.
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Our governments 'do' profit from the sale of addictive substances effectively making them drug dealers with the power to call it 'legal' and you reduce, and twist, my words to insisting I be allowed to smoke in public...
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That's not discussing, that's... I don't know what it is, other than bad form. |
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I agree that there's a small army of straw men getting around here. Maybe we could employ them to harvest all of the red herrings.
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I would also add that common decency and consideration of others should mean that whatever taxation or other interest the government has in tobacco is irrelevant to this discussion.
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In that people seeming can't be relied on to act as decent citizens, fed up people like [21] then come up with other means of enforcing basic rules of behaviour. |
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Quite right. What does the government's taxation policy or
history of duplicity with the tobacco industry have to do with
whether it is right to smoke in public? That's what this idea is
about. |
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//What bigotry are you referring to?
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Just bigotry in general. I mean if Hitler had had to go rant in a special bigots ranting area, then history would have been so much different. |
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Closed, more like. On the plus side, if you go into
one that's still in business, you can now properly
smell the stale beer and the loos. |
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//Try a journey on the London Tube. The black substance that you scrape out of your nose later is a big indicator of the sheer quantity of particulates you've inhaled. And then there's the 1000's of diesel taxis and busses belching out smoke.// - I don't think this stuff is actually harmful to breathe in. The fact that you can "scrape out of your nose" suggests that the particle size is large enough to get trapped by the moist walls of your nose and throat rather than getting inhaled into your lungs. It's the really small particles (such as are in cigarette smoke) which do damage to your lungs. |
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Ah I see. My bringing up profit from addiction was the original straw-man though it was not meant as an argument.
My bad.
Seemed like a relevant point. |
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Around here, the smoking bans have been a boon to
most businesses, frankly.
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Something to think about: If it weren't for Hitler,
would Israel exist? |
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If it weren't for Hitler, would Israel exist?
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Like Gondwanaland, it would still exist, but in a non-contiguous way. |
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