New Zealand imposes lifetime ban on youth buying cigarettes

[Xbob42]

You can take whatever you want, like I said, but your body does not extend to what stores sell, as much as you seem to want it to. What folks are allowed to sell is absolutely controlled by government. That's why liquor licenses exist. If you make your own bootleg liquor, drink it all you want! But don't start selling it to others, that's not your body. And if you're gonna build some ridiculous hippie commune where everyone makes and drinks their own liquor and you suck the cocks of fairies and dragons or whatever other make-believe bullshit we're talking about, that's a bridge to cross when we come to it. I'm giving my opinion, it's not my responsibility to solve these issues; though I do find offense being taken on restricting what stores can sell as opposed to what you can take to be funny.

[Fizzzzle]

Most people enjoy some kind of vice that doesn't do any objective "good," whatever that means. Some people smoke, some people drink, some people gamble, some people take steroids, some people buy big titty waifu body pillows. Some people develop problems with them to where their vices become an obsession that affects their daily life.

 

It's completely stupid to say that we should just ban all of it because it doesn't do any objective "good" to society. 1) because that's not true, 2) because telling someone they're wrong for enjoying something that you find gross or unappealing, even if it doesn't affect you, comes off as extraordinarily self-centered and frankly zealous.

[TyphoidHater]

5 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

If the smoker smoke’s around others sure

 

Got it in one.  Don't even need to be very close.

 

[TUFKAK]

10 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

You can take whatever you want, like I said, but your body does not extend to what stores sell, as much as you seem to want it to. What folks are allowed to sell is absolutely controlled by government. That's why liquor licenses exist. If you make your own bootleg liquor, drink it all you want! But don't start selling it to others, that's not your body. And if you're gonna build some ridiculous hippie commune where everyone makes and drinks their own liquor and you suck the cocks of fairies and dragons or whatever other make-believe bullshit we're talking about, that's a bridge to cross when we come to it. I'm giving my opinion, it's not my responsibility to solve these issues; though I do find offense being taken on restricting what stores can sell as opposed to what you can take to be funny.

So big brother can dictate what I can access in this market economy we exist in. The smell of weed is gross, I want the govt to restrict its sale due to this. We in Agreement? 

6 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Most people enjoy some kind of vice that doesn't do any objective "good," whatever that means. Some people smoke, some people drink, some people gamble, some people take steroids, some people buy big titty waifu body pillows. Some people develop problems with them to where their vices become an obsession that affects their daily life.

 

It's completely stupid to say that we should just ban all of it because it doesn't do any objective "good" to society. 1) because that's not true, 2) because telling someone they're wrong for enjoying something that you find gross or unappealing, even if it doesn't affect you, comes off as extraordinarily self-centered and frankly zealous.

I’d bottom for you. If I thought men looked good

 

or respected the army 😂

[legend]

53 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Catchphrases convey points we can agree on; I disagree completely with you here.

 

My body my choice conveys the argument that my bodily autonomy is sacrosanct and not open for interpretation from the masses. If we don’t own our bodies, none of this matters.

See above. 

 “My body my choice” isn’t an argument. It’s an overly simplistic declaration with no supporting reason that happens to sound nice aesthetically. Declaring your bodily autonomy is sacrosanct is similarly not an argument. It’s at best an overly broad conclusion lacking the argument that gets you there.

[TUFKAK]

2 minutes ago, legend said:

 “My body my choice” isn’t an argument. It’s an overly simplistic declaration with no supporting reason that happens to sound nice aesthetically. Declaring your bodily autonomy is sacrosanct is similarly not an argument. It’s at best an overly broad conclusion lacking the argument that gets you there.

It’s a reductionist argument those of us with a similar cultural and ethical background understand based upon said shared cultural and ethical backgrounds have.
 

Like your focus on “rational thought” is also cultural derived and limited to this specific context which is based on two historical contexts.

 

i respect you, you have a mind I always have wished I possessed, I’ve had to work to get where I am. but I fundamentally disagree with you here.

Our humanity is more important than a logical proof, and let’s not forget rationalism has been used to forgive the unforgivable. Ethics aren’t just a collection of 1s and 0s

 

i stand by statement, bodily autonomy is sacrosanct and I will take anyone to the mat who denies that.

 

the counter argument is this. If it’s not my body my choice, whose body and whose choice? I’ll gladly have this debate.

[Xbob42]

16 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

So big brother can dictate what I can access in this market economy we exist in. The smell of weed is gross, I want the govt to restrict its sale due to this. We in Agreement? 

That or any other reason. The government has restricted this for over a hundred years for no other reason than it was popular with black people.

 

Now if you're asking what I think the government should be able to restrict, I think all restrictions should be based on as neutral and as thorough data as possible to show that a product coming to market is either beneficial or at least not harmful. Of course, this is also pie-in-the-sky shit as people are people and the government's made of people, so dumb shit will get through that shouldn't, and stuff that should get through won't, often directly due to the influence of lobbying, direct donations, bribes, blackmail, we all know the song and dance.

However, and this is the important part, the government being flawed is no excuse to throw away restrictions entirely or just throw our hands up and say fuck it. More often than not the system slowly moves towards getting rid of harmful, useless bullshit. Going in the opposite direction of this slippery slope you seem intent on, should I be able to sell sarin gas in my patented Easy Shatter™ bottles? Hey man, I ain't telling you to hurt anyone, I'm just selling you a product.

 

To me, while the details might get convoluted, the core is always the same: encourage useful or helpful products (as defined by data and evidence, all able to be freely challenged by contrary data, not by politicians, politicians don't know shit about anything but politics and should always defer to experts unless they happen to be one, and even then as a politician their expert opinion is intrinsically and openly influenced by their political background) and restrict or outright ban useless or dangerous ones. Public outrage or negative sentiment wouldn't qualify as data or evidence of anything, by the way.

Finally, back to your original rebuttal in which you talked about making etoh in your backyard or whatever; simple, you're not authorized to produce etoh. Unless you believe individuals are free to manufacture whatever they want without restriction as well. I mean, we're certainly inching towards that with 3D printing, though watching on Discord... we're inching slowly, people building low quality bullshit that take 50 hours and looks like ass is not exactly indicative of a future of replicators just yet.

[Fizzzzle]

1 minute ago, Xbob42 said:

 

 

To me, while the details might get convoluted, the core is always the same: encourage useful or helpful products (as defined by data and evidence, all able to be freely challenged by contrary data, not by politicians, politicians don't know shit about anything but politics and should always defer to experts unless they happen to be one, and even then as a politician their expert opinion is intrinsically and openly influenced by their political background) and restrict or outright ban useless or dangerous ones. Public outrage or negative sentiment wouldn't qualify as data or evidence of anything, by the way.

 

Here's the point I'll push back on: Let's use big titty anime waifu body pillows as an inocuous example. They don't help society in any way, they don't serve a function other than being tangentially related to loneliness and pedophilia.  Should we ban big titty anime waifu body pillows? Obviously not, because, well.. what's the harm?

 

You can see how you can extrapolate that to anything, and it's not logical, it's not backed by data, but humans are not logical creatures. In fact, we crave the illogical. We are not cogs in a machine.

 

In the end, all of these things, from video games to porn to alcohol to weed to cigarettes to body pillows... they make some people happy. That is their only function. They offer no other benefit to health or society, yet they are absolutely essential to make society function.

[Xbob42]

7 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Here's the point I'll push back on: Let's use big titty anime waifu body pillows as an inocuous example. They don't help society in any way, they don't serve a function other than being tangentially related to loneliness and pedophilia.  Should we ban big titty anime waifu body pillows? Obviously not, because, well.. what's the harm?

It's a pillow. You use it for sleeping or relaxing. Images on the pillow do not change its function or purpose to the average person. And if you use it to spank your monkey, that's a secondary feature, bonus!

 

This is why I said you'd have to use studies, data, etc, to show harm or help. I'm fairly confident no data would indicate that this was in fact not a pillow, although maybe if you were using it to replace social interactions there could be something there, but who knows, that's just a wild guess!

Alcohol, on the other hand, yeah it can elevate your mood, or tank it, or destroy your liver, or get you into an accident, or get you into a fight. Or maybe you'll just have a drink with dinner and be totally fine. But if that was the extent of it no one would care. I think maybe we'd be even more focused on providing better alternatives to elevating someone's mood or helping them develop proper coping mechanisms if it wasn't so easy to just get wasted every time something stressed someone out. How many times has it led to a spiral where it just got worse and worse?

And of course this isn't everyone, of course not. I bet plenty of folks here drink as often as they like and have never had zero issues with it. But I hardly find that compelling at least in the overall terms of the direction I'd like to see society move. Is it gonna happen? Of course not, prohibition was already tried and failed spectacularly. It's just my thoughts on the matter. I wish we did better, I wish we expected more from ourselves.

[TyphoidHater]

1 hour ago, TUFKAK said:

So big brother can dictate what I can access in this market economy we exist in. The smell of weed is gross, I want the govt to restrict its sale due to this. We in Agreement? 

 

Yes.

 

I'm of the mind that cigarettes and marijuana should face the same restrictions as far as who can do it, where they can do it, and what taxes they pay.

[Guest]

45 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Here's the point I'll push back on: Let's use big titty anime waifu body pillows as an inocuous example. They don't help society in any way, they don't serve a function other than being tangentially related to loneliness and pedophilia.  Should we ban big titty anime waifu body pillows? Obviously not, because, well.. what's the harm?

Tobacco products provide no societal benefit and extremely large societal costs, even when used as intended. The BTWBPs are about as neutral an item as you can find.

 

A person enjoying cigarettes saddles everybody else with the costs of caring for their dilapidated health as a result of the intended use of the product.

 

Burden of Tobacco Use in the U.S.

WWW.CDC.GOV

---

Data and statistics on cigarette smoking among adults in the United States. Part of the Tips from Former Smokers campaign, which features real people suffering as a result of smoking.

 

[SimpleG]

I am firmly in the camp of "mind your fucking business". 

If you wanna do rails of powered Clorox off the titties of your waifu pillow in the basement while blowing your paycheck on the latest gatcha game, you do you. 

Dont like smoking , fantastic you never have to

Dont like alcohol, you never have to drink it

Dont like premarital sex, you can wait till your married

Dont like gay marriage, find your hetero life partner 

Dont like Rap/Rock music, the worlds your oyster

Dont like comic books, the Library has you covered

Dont like skydiving, stay in the plane

Dont like motorcycles, drive a car

Tobacco has been in the sights of public outrage for a while now. Society has these swings in perception of whats ok and anything outside of those perceived views needs to be abolished.

 

 

 

[SimpleG]

1 minute ago, sblfilms said:

A person enjoying cigarettes saddles everybody else with the costs of caring for their dilapidated health as a result of the intended use of the product

As does booze, poor diets, poor overall fitness, sports ,contact sports, and the list goes on and on. 

[Guest]

Just now, SimpleG said:

As does booze, poor diets, poor overall fitness, sports ,contact sports, and the list goes on and on. 

There is no singular behavior that has the level of cost of intended cigarette use on society.
 

And we do plenty of things to discourage other poor behaviors, including most on your list there.

[Jason]

2 hours ago, Joe said:

This is a troll and no one with half a brain should fall for it.

 

I in general see no value in interacting with whichever number persona this is.

[Fizzzzle]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

Tobacco products provide no societal benefit and extremely large societal costs, even when used as intended. The BTWBPs are about as neutral an item as you can find.

 

A person enjoying cigarettes saddles everybody else with the costs of caring for their dilapidated health as a result of the intended use of the product.

 

Burden of Tobacco Use in the U.S.

WWW.CDC.GOV

---

Data and statistics on cigarette smoking among adults in the United States. Part of the Tips from Former Smokers campaign, which features real people suffering as a result of smoking.

 

We bear the societal cost of every vice. From sugary food/drinks to eating cookies to driving cars. It's just that most of those things are accepted as normal people things. Cars especially are ridiculously expensive and dangerous, but we treat it like a sunk cost.

 

Yes, I realize it's not a 1:1 comparison, I'm just pointing out that banning things that are a net cost for society is a slippery slope. In a logical world, we would have banned eating cows and sugar a century ago.

[GeneticBlueprint]

I don’t think we need to find more things to toss into the drug war mix at this time. 

[legend]

3 hours ago, TUFKAK said:

It’s a reductionist argument those of us with a similar cultural and ethical background understand based upon said shared cultural and ethical backgrounds have.
 

Like your focus on “rational thought” is also cultural derived and limited to this specific context which is based on two historical contexts.

 

i respect you, you have a mind I always have wished I possessed, I’ve had to work to get where I am. but I fundamentally disagree with you here.

Our humanity is more important than a logical proof, and let’s not forget rationalism has been used to forgive the unforgivable. Ethics aren’t just a collection of 1s and 0s

 

i stand by statement, bodily autonomy is sacrosanct and I will take anyone to the mat who denies that.

 

the counter argument is this. If it’s not my body my choice, whose body and whose choice? I’ll gladly have this debate.

 

In this very thread you have people questioning the validity of the catchphrase and it's not persuading people. I don't think you should expect it to either, because, again, it's not an actual argument.  But if you are expecting people to be swayed by a catchphrase you must not think very highly of them  

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Yes, I realize it's not a 1:1 comparison, I'm just pointing out that banning things that are a net cost for society is a slippery slope.

I don’t think an outright ban for adult use is sensible policy here, though it makes perfect sense for children.

 

I believe many things on your list are underpriced for their externalities and should also be treated more harshly by society.

[CayceG]

Die mad, smokers. lol

 

[Fizzzzle]

40 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

I don’t think an outright ban for adult use is sensible policy here, though it makes perfect sense for children.

 

I believe many things on your list are underpriced for their externalities and should also be treated more harshly by society.

Like I said, though, that's a slippery slope and even if you did want to do it, there's no political will for it.

 

Imagine all government removing subsidies for beef production and going so far as to impose extra taxes on beef production. There is no reason anyone needs to eat beef and it is absolutely something we all pay for in heart disease and the environment. People would fucking riot.

 

But since we just accept eating beef as normal, it's okay.

 

My position isn't to ban beef, it's to say that there has to be an allowance for things that are bad, if for no other reason than because bad things some people happy. 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Like I said, though, that's a slippery slope and even if you did want to do it, there's no political will for it.

 

Imagine all government removing subsidies for beef production and going so far as to impose extra taxes on beef production. There is no reason anyone needs to eat beef and it is absolutely something we all pay for in heart disease and the environment. People would fucking riot.

 

But since we just accept eating beef as normal, it's okay.

 

My position isn't to ban beef, it's to say that there has to be an allowance for things that are bad, if for no other reason than because bad things some people happy. 

 

We SHOULD make beef more expensive, and people always dipping to the "but IT WOULD NEVER FLY" thing when the conversation is purely in the realm of theoretical is super lame  

[TUFKAK]

3 hours ago, legend said:

 

In this very thread you have people questioning the validity of the catchphrase and it's not persuading people. I don't think you should expect it to either, because, again, it's not an actual argument.  But if you are expecting people to be swayed by a catchphrase you must not think very highly of them  

No, I think people are actual people not characters. Need only go to a rally, ya know, where people are, to see ways catchphrases plastered on signs.

 

Those same people have argued for moral relativism lol I think we can safety discount that. 

[legend]

1 hour ago, TUFKAK said:

No, I think people are actual people not characters. Need only go to a rally, ya know, where people are, to see ways catchphrases plastered on signs.

 

Those same people have argued for moral relativism lol I think we can safety discount that. 

 

I don't think rallies or protests are meant to be persuasive. They're meant to be a show of force and express dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that they will oppose and fight against. They are meant to be a force that has to be addressed. The closest they get to persuasion is to be an entry to raise awareness about problems that onlookers may have missed or missed being as being as substantial as they are.

[silentbob]

They should adopt incentives like what some countries or manufactures have done. Give non smokers a few bonus/paid days off work a year. I think in general it’s 4 extra days people get, because smokers tend to need smoke breaks (plus take their scheduled breaks on top of that) during work hours. Study showed they tend to waste a total of 4 days worth of work a year because of it, so no bonus/time off for them. 

[TUFKAK]

1 hour ago, legend said:

 

I don't think rallies or protests are meant to be persuasive. They're meant to be a show of force and express dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that they will oppose and fight against. They are meant to be a force that has to be addressed. The closest they get to persuasion is to be an entry to raise awareness about problems that onlookers may have missed or missed being as being as substantial as they are.

Rallies and protest are democracy my friend. They’re an argument all on to themselves.

[legend]

13 hours ago, TUFKAK said:

Rallies and protest are democracy my friend. They’re an argument all on to themselves.

I’m not sure what aspect of my post that’s responding to? I’m not opposed to rallies and protests. I’m saying their goal and usage of catchphrases is categorically different from persuading someone to some position and consequently not subject to my criticism of replacing arguments with catchphrases. 

[Guest]

Appeals to emotion may not be as strong a basis for changing minds, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was a much more effective way to move the needle than persuasive speech.

 

Which I guess probably backs up @legend’s feelings on the subject!

[TUFKAK]

11 minutes ago, legend said:

I’m not sure what aspect of my post that’s responding to? I’m not opposed to rallies and protests. I’m saying their goal and usage of catchphrases is categorically different from persuading someone to some position and consequently not subject to my criticism of replacing arguments with catchphrases. 

Humans aren’t rational, we’re emotionally driven, it’s innate to our humanity. Catchphrases are absolutely an argument, you can hand-wave away human nature with an appeal to rationalism if you wish, but you’re wrong lol

 

I see this play out daily at work.

[legend]

1 hour ago, TUFKAK said:

Humans aren’t rational, we’re emotionally driven, it’s innate to our humanity. Catchphrases are absolutely an argument, you can hand-wave away human nature with an appeal to rationalism if you wish, but you’re wrong lol

 

I see this play out daily at work.

Repeating that it’s a argument doesn’t make it so  You might say it is if you define the word “argument” very loosely, but I would hope from context that I’m clearly not using the word in that loose way. 

 

But who said anything about hand waving away human nature? My first response is how people’s penchant for catch phrases is a failing of humanity and that if later if you expect a catch phrase to be persuasive to someone you must not think very much of them! That’s a pretty direct statement about my displeasure with the way people operate, not a refusal to believe that some do operate that way!

[Guest]

@legend, I’m curious about your perspective on something I ponder on a fairly regular basis.

 

Is rationality actually superior to emotionality, and how do we measure the difference?

 

Anybody else is also free to answer

[legend]

37 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

@legend, I’m curious about your perspective on something I ponder on a fairly regular basis.

 

Is rationality actually superior to emotionality, and how do we measure the difference?

 

Anybody else is also free to answer

 

To answer that question you would have to formally define what you mean by each of those terms! Although the very act of formalizing it kind of builds in an answer to "yes, rationality is better" because once you define the terms, the "rational" optimization is always what works best, and therefore it cannot be that what is rational is ever worse definitionally!

 

But let's maybe ask a slightly different question that yields more insight than a question doomed to favor "rationality." We'll ask "does emotional and intuitional reason have benefits toward humans acting effectively?" Where "effectively" can mean optimizing any standard set of human values for the world (health, pleasure, social connectedness, societal success, etc.).  The answer to that is yes, absolutely, emotional and intuitional reasoning can be beneficial in many ways. 

 

The crux of the issue here is even if we could perfectly describe the decision problem for maximizing some human's value (which is a big ask in itself), that doesn't mean any person has any hope of perfectly solving it nor any hope of having time to get close to perfectly solving it before they have to make a decision (The world keeps going whether you've reached a decision or not). Ultimately, we have bounded cognitive resources and bounded time to make decisions that are far less than we'd need to perfectly solve the decision problem. Given such constraints, heuristics that tend to work on average, but not all the time, are a necessary evil.

 

Even in modern AI built in simulations where the problem is fully controlled we have to rely on reactive heuristics. These days, modern AI methods typically learn these heuristics over time, but they're reactive heuristics all the same. In game theoretic problems (read: social systems), these heuristics are even more critical because game theory introduces a huge mess in other ways I won't get into here (but I have published some work in collaboration with psychologists on the evolution of decision heuristics around moral dilemmas and it's fun and mind warping).

 

With that in mind, note that many human emotions and intuitions are ones that exist in us because evolution has done the work of finding good heuristics that tend to work quite well on the space of problems evolution tuned humanity for. So yay, our intuitions and emotions can be useful and even necessary!

 

But there is a catch there. The operating environment of humans has changed *far* faster than evolution could tune for. Most of our intuitions are outright bad for reasoning about the world as it is now. Science came into being precisely because our intuitions are so bad in this new extended world in which we live. If our intuitions were always good, no one would have ever bothered with developing science.

 

So as far as as philosophy of life I think the best we can do is be cognizant about where and when we are employing heuristics and be aware of when those are more or less likely to be useful. We'll make mistakes, but being cognizant of it gives us a route to correct them and we can lean on the sheer population of people and time of civilization to help reach better solutions we can adopt.

 

I can probably get a bit deeper than that, but I'll refrain from making this post any longer than it already is