Quote: Original post by Goober King
A decent line of reasoning on the against side. I came across an interesting link saying that health care cost would see near immediate boost if everyone quit smoking. One thing I read said 48$ million in within the first year. This article however suggest that more people living longer would eventually cost more over a lifetime. So perhaps one could argue that now is the perfect time for everyone to quit, but something would have to be looked at in the future. Though that would be purely based in health care which is hardly the only factor.

$48 million is peanuts. As far as the United States goes, if the cost or the savings doesn't approach billions of dollars, it's not worth arguing over, really. Facts on the Cost of Health Insurance and Health Care: Total spending was $2.4 TRILLION in 2007, or $7900 per person. That's 50,000 times greater than $48 million. $48 million is 0.002% of $2.4 trillion. That's not much of a boost.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450

Quote: Can we please start banning members who have been 0 rated for an extended period of time? Pleeeeease?

Promit. Seriously, I have a 0 rating as well though, but I post meaningful help outside of the Lounge. Problem is, some kid got pissed cuz I was too harsh at criticizing his work and even offered advice. And so he kept rating me down.

Bit offtopic, but that's not how things work. One person can only rate you down one single time. It's not one kid that got pissed. The list of people that rated you (heavily) negatively fill pages after pages. If the rating wasn't clamped at zero, you would be somewhere in the negative thousands. Maybe that should make you think about how people perceive you here on the forums...

Quote: But with all that said, I'll bet there are a lot of people that work there that aren't evil. The folks who took the job purely for the paycheck at the end of the month. It's a massive industry, I can't imagine how many people would lose their jobs if it fell under.

industries are continuously in flux look at another big cancer causing industry from yesteryear, asbestos (years ago practically every building had the stuff in it)

back to the original point, actually the US has low tax
New Zealand $2.76 $4.17 66%
U.S. (Average) $0.66 $1.90 35%
U.S. (lowest) $0.34 $1.60 21%
http://ash.org/cigtaxfacts.html
(old data eg now cigarettes are >$10 a pack I believe)

Quote: Original post by Goober King
I don't personally see it all going belly up over night. There are many companies supported by customers addicted to a product that is distributed across many economies. They have survived strain better than say the US car companies, and my guess would be that they will continue to do so. Could the strain cause losses in some areas, sure. However, tobacco use has a lot of negative indirect cost effects which could easily out weigh the more obvious, immediate effects. I was also looking to see if people smoke more in hard times or not. I've met people with beer distribution ties that say beer sells better in hard times so I wondered if its true for Cigarettes.

I'd say that it's probably true.

I'm sure the decision wasn't made lightly to increase this tax, they probably (hopefully) considered all possible scenarios and results before actually going forward. I think that in this case, the benefits outweigh the potential negative effects of the tax hike.

Off-topic I know.

Quote: Bit offtopic, but that's not how things work. One person can only rate you down one single time. It's not one kid that got pissed. The list of people that rated you (heavily) negatively fill pages after pages. If the rating wasn't clamped at zero, you would be somewhere in the negative thousands. Maybe that should make you think about how people perceive you here on the forums...

The problem with ratings is that, if someone helps you in a small way, they dont really feel obligated to rate up, or they just brush it off. But if you really piss someone off, then they REALLY want to rate you down. I've never seen the list, I'm trying to find it now.

I used to smoke. Mostly I smoked because I was young and stupid and I thought it looked cool. I gave up after a few years, 'cos I it just wasn't worth the money to me.

I'm kind of on the fence regarding taxation of cigarettes. On the one hand, people who engage in an unhealthy activity should obviously fund their treatment through taxes, right? But oddly enough, I rarely hear this argument applied to snowboarding or mountain biking or <insert your favourite injury prone sport here>.

I'm not in favour of banning smoking. I'm not really in favour of banning anything. Much as this pains me to admit, I actually agree with the OP on something. If an informed, consenting adult makes the decision to use alcohol, tobacco, weed or even heroin, as long as they're not hurting anyone else, who am I to stop them? Of course, the problem is that people do hurt others (drink driving, etc), but we already have laws that target these behaviours. I'm quite fond of whiskey, wine and beer. I am even (shock horror!) sometimes inebriated. But I don't go out and start fights, cause trouble or drive drunk so I don't see why I should be punished for the actions of others.

Quote: Original post by owl
Well, following your point of view, all the food that has fat or sugar should warn that it can lead to obesity. That would bump up the consumption of low fat products!

You make it sound like that's a bad thing. [grin]

My point of view was partly to increase the use of sarcasm on the internet, but mainly that I don't think the health of the economy should be an argument against taxes on addictive substances. If you want to argue that in a free society adults should be allowed to take whatever poisons they wish that's one thing, but to then argue that these products are vital to the economy is another.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
but to then argue that these products are vital to the economy is another.

Agreed.

I quit about 17 months ago - but then I've quit before, sometimes for years. What makes it difficult is in part smokeing can become a form of stress relief, and in quiting you have to reprogram yourself into finding better stress relievers. Additionaly I've found that my willpower to quit is strong at first, but as the weeks and months go by the mental walls erected against it start to come down catching me off guard. But so far so good :)

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
I've never seen the list, I'm trying to find it now.

Spare yourself the search. The list is something that only moderators and staff have access to. As a moderator I can check and see who rated a user and how they rated a user. I can not check who rated me and how much. Keeping users blind to how they've been rated is meant to prevent rating wars and the like. The ratings in the list aren't attached to a particular thread, so there's no telling from the list what specific exchange produced a rating, up or down. The list is simply a table with the following column labels: User who rated User, Rating, Change, Date, IP. Rating is expressed as a percentage and Change is expressed as a whole number that is either added or subtracted from a users 1000 starting points.