While industries in the developed world are entrenched. . . in America with lawyers and in Europe with red tape, you could try to adopt a platform that pushed for a UN resolution where developed nations were encouraged to work with developing ones to improve pollution controls, since almost all of the human contributed air pollution comes from these nations.
Of course, Mount Pinatubo belched out more toxic smog in one day than humans have in a thousand years, and that was only one volcano, but I suppose you can still do something.
Drifting a bit far afield here, but...
Cigarettes are an intense point source of highly toxic gasses. Being in the vicinity of a smoker is a far more concentrated exposure to these substances than the more diffuse "air pollution", whose harmful constituents are mostly fine particulate matter and the creation of ozone.
Even second hand smoke is more akin to sitting a few feet from a tailpipe than ambient exposure of the environment.
Regulating automobile and industrial pollution is of course a vital part of preserving the quality of the air. However, since these sources are intrinsically bound up with our economies and the sources of our prosperity, such regulation is fraught with difficulty and trade-offs.
Cigarettes, on the other hand, are hardly the lynch pin of the industrial era, being an activity entirely without production. Controlling the immediate health consequences of exposure to cigarette smoke is a health win without difficult tradeoffs in the economic sphere. (Yes, I know cigarette taxes fill state coffers, but we're talking about where you smoke, not if you can).
The rhetorical ploy of dismissing one problem because there are others is particularly weak here, since controlling exposure to cigarette smoke is of an entirely different class of undertaking than controlling industrial pollution.
Finally, there is some speculation that Mount Pinatubo may have had some effect on global warming due to the large amounts of dust it spewed into the upper atmosphere. However, there is no consensus on this and its output was certainly not "more toxic smog than humans have produced in 1000 years".
You know this is incorrect. His example of the textile mill is perfect. A company has to make the work environment safe or it's not a legal work environment.
No. You miss the point entirely. I challenge the definition of legal here.
No. You miss the point entirely. I challenge the definition of legal here.
The Constitution doesn't give freedoms to businesses to act in whatever means they need to in order to profit. That means society regulates what is considered fair or not in the work place.
The Constitution doesn't give freedoms to businesses to act in whatever means they need to in order to profit. That means society regulates what is considered fair or not in the work place.
The constitution doesn't define what a work place should consist of either. If the business is up front about the dangers of the job and someone still wants to work there, that is no business of the government or YOURS to tell them not to.
The constitution doesn't define what a work place should consist of either. If the business is up front about the dangers of the job and someone still wants to work there, that is no business of the government or YOURS to tell them not to.
BR, this is just a completely indefensible position. I'll just repeat my earlier post:
Quote:
OK, but what about the people who "don't mind" working in a haze of hydrocarbon vapors? Is there to be a kind of brokering between the ignorant and suicidal and the free market?
I imagine certain industries could save a lot of money if they didn't have to bother with worker safety. And I imagine that there are a certain population of workers that would be glad to forgo safety if it was the only way they could get a job or if it paid a little more. So then we could have an economy that rewarded killing your employees by allowing you to control your costs. American industry could do a better job of competing with third world manufacturing, who have scant worker safety regulation.
Think of it! Slightly cheaper pet toys, and all it takes is letting the mildly retarded and thoroughly desperate inhale PVC fumes all day!
The only reason cigarette smoke don't seem comparable is ubiquity has desensitized (some of) us. A smoke filled restaurant is every bit as dangerous.
The idea that I should be obliged to compete in a job market that allows people to find there own level of lethality is insane. The market pressure would be all towards cheaper, i.e. less safe.
How would you like it if your place of business went bankrupt because they couldn't compete with the places that didn't pay for worker safety? And when you went looking for a job, it turned out that you could either breath toluene vapors or not work at all?
I'm starting to think that "libertarianism" is a philosophy that's every bit as wooly headed as the most extreme notions of socialist utopia, in that neither of them seem to feel any strong need to take into account the real world and it's constraints.
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I have a friend who quit smoking and that's the way he became. Now he's gung ho about getting it banned. I've seen the way he looks at other people smoking. It's not with revulsion. He looks like he wants to bum one from them.
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I have a friend who quit smoking and that's the way he became. Now he's gung ho about getting it banned. I've seen the way he looks at other people smoking. It's not with revulsion. He looks like he wants to bum one from them.
Later,
Kyle
But again, the motives of people who wish to control their exposure to smoke are irrelevant. The health effects are real. It's a medical issue.
Faced with efforts to control mosquito populations to bring down the incidence of malaria, no one says "Well, I think a lot of those anti-mosquito zealots have issues with insects in general, probably because they used to eat moths and have unresolved feelings of shame."
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I was against them banning smoking in bars until relatively recently, after reading studies that show even active smokers prefer it this way. That, and after visiting some friends in New York, the ones I knew that smoked preferred to have to go out of the bars even in the heart of winter.
Since smokers prefer it, I no longer care to stop it. Too many other issues are involved and more important anyway.
BR, a business can't do whatever it wants to make a profit no matter how much you pretend it can.
"The democratic fallacy: the notion that [your] opinion [is] as good as anyone else's."
-Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Well, I don't imagine that my opinion is as good as anyone else's, but I think my ideas about worker safety are better than yours.
Safety costs money. Making safety a deal between the owner and the worker, or the producer and the consumer, is to say that the less affluent will have to make do with more dangerous jobs or less safe products.
Say I can sell pajamas for less than anyone else, the only problem being that my pajamas burst into flame if they come into contact with an open flame. Got money? Get the flame retardant PJs. Poor? Play the odds.
Extend this across every part of your day to day life. Money equals pure drinking water, poor equals lead and arsenic (the cut rate water supplier doesn't want to invest in expensive treatment facilities).
Being part of the investor or executive class means you can earn money without unduly risking your life. Being part of the "I need a job, any job" class means you can be exposed to whatever the market will bear. Under your notion of "freedom", it wouldn't be an informed choice, it would be the lethal trap of your socioeconomic status.
So yes, my opinion is better, because I would extent basic standards of health and safety to as many people as possible, instead of condemning those without funds to an early and painful death.
Because, BR, that's what a person who values human life over some grotesque notion of an internally consistent ideology would always do.
I guess we should ban coal mining and any other inherently dangerous job. Better ban military service too.
Not the point. Some jobs are inherently more dangerous than others.
That doesn't mean that coal miners should have to navigate an industry that permits some mines to produce cheaper coal because they save money by not shoring up the shaft walls or don't provide lights and ventilation.
Should the pentagon get to contract out to private armies of the pathological and suicidal? I suppose shock troops of the insane might put a whole new spin on "shock and awe" but where does that leave the regular army?
I guess we should ban coal mining and any other inherently dangerous job. Better ban military service too.
I couldn't agree with you more. Coal is a 19th century fossile fuel and and is being phased-out in all industrial countires except the US. As for the military, the fewer wars the better. No job is worth losing a life over, no matter what the rewards.
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I was against them banning smoking in bars until relatively recently, after reading studies that show even active smokers prefer it this way. That, and after visiting some friends in New York, the ones I knew that smoked preferred to have to go out of the bars even in the heart of winter.
Since smokers prefer it, I no longer care to stop it. Too many other issues are involved and more important anyway.
i would be very interested to see these "studies". why would a person prefer to go out into the freezing cold, than stay inside? me and every smoker i've encountered since the ban, are against it.
it's just my gut feeling. cigar and cigarrette smoke is so much more penetrating, i can't think of a better word. i mean the smoke lingers and attaches itself to everything. my father smokes cigars in his cars. he gave one car to my sister and even years later the car still smelled like cigars
now when you drive home from work after drving on the freeway for 45 minutes, does your car smell like auto emissions? or do your clothes?
it's just my gut feeling. cigar and cigarrette smoke is so much more penetrating, i can't think of a better word. i mean the smoke lingers and attaches itself to everything. my father smokes cigars in his cars. he gave one car to my sister and even years later the car still smelled like cigars
now when you drive home from work after drving on the freeway for 45 minutes, does your car smell like auto emissions? or do your clothes?
Maybe if the tailpipe was fed directly into the car. That's a silly comparison. Stand behind a bus and stand next to a smoker. The bus is worse.
Comments
Originally posted by Splinemodel
While industries in the developed world are entrenched. . . in America with lawyers and in Europe with red tape, you could try to adopt a platform that pushed for a UN resolution where developed nations were encouraged to work with developing ones to improve pollution controls, since almost all of the human contributed air pollution comes from these nations.
Of course, Mount Pinatubo belched out more toxic smog in one day than humans have in a thousand years, and that was only one volcano, but I suppose you can still do something.
Drifting a bit far afield here, but...
Cigarettes are an intense point source of highly toxic gasses. Being in the vicinity of a smoker is a far more concentrated exposure to these substances than the more diffuse "air pollution", whose harmful constituents are mostly fine particulate matter and the creation of ozone.
Even second hand smoke is more akin to sitting a few feet from a tailpipe than ambient exposure of the environment.
Regulating automobile and industrial pollution is of course a vital part of preserving the quality of the air. However, since these sources are intrinsically bound up with our economies and the sources of our prosperity, such regulation is fraught with difficulty and trade-offs.
Cigarettes, on the other hand, are hardly the lynch pin of the industrial era, being an activity entirely without production. Controlling the immediate health consequences of exposure to cigarette smoke is a health win without difficult tradeoffs in the economic sphere. (Yes, I know cigarette taxes fill state coffers, but we're talking about where you smoke, not if you can).
The rhetorical ploy of dismissing one problem because there are others is particularly weak here, since controlling exposure to cigarette smoke is of an entirely different class of undertaking than controlling industrial pollution.
Finally, there is some speculation that Mount Pinatubo may have had some effect on global warming due to the large amounts of dust it spewed into the upper atmosphere. However, there is no consensus on this and its output was certainly not "more toxic smog than humans have produced in 1000 years".
Originally posted by bunge
You know this is incorrect. His example of the textile mill is perfect. A company has to make the work environment safe or it's not a legal work environment.
No. You miss the point entirely. I challenge the definition of legal here.
Originally posted by BR
No. You miss the point entirely. I challenge the definition of legal here.
The Constitution doesn't give freedoms to businesses to act in whatever means they need to in order to profit. That means society regulates what is considered fair or not in the work place.
Originally posted by bunge
The Constitution doesn't give freedoms to businesses to act in whatever means they need to in order to profit. That means society regulates what is considered fair or not in the work place.
The constitution doesn't define what a work place should consist of either. If the business is up front about the dangers of the job and someone still wants to work there, that is no business of the government or YOURS to tell them not to.
Originally posted by BR
The constitution doesn't define what a work place should consist of either. If the business is up front about the dangers of the job and someone still wants to work there, that is no business of the government or YOURS to tell them not to.
BR, this is just a completely indefensible position. I'll just repeat my earlier post:
OK, but what about the people who "don't mind" working in a haze of hydrocarbon vapors? Is there to be a kind of brokering between the ignorant and suicidal and the free market?
I imagine certain industries could save a lot of money if they didn't have to bother with worker safety. And I imagine that there are a certain population of workers that would be glad to forgo safety if it was the only way they could get a job or if it paid a little more. So then we could have an economy that rewarded killing your employees by allowing you to control your costs. American industry could do a better job of competing with third world manufacturing, who have scant worker safety regulation.
Think of it! Slightly cheaper pet toys, and all it takes is letting the mildly retarded and thoroughly desperate inhale PVC fumes all day!
The only reason cigarette smoke don't seem comparable is ubiquity has desensitized (some of) us. A smoke filled restaurant is every bit as dangerous.
The idea that I should be obliged to compete in a job market that allows people to find there own level of lethality is insane. The market pressure would be all towards cheaper, i.e. less safe.
How would you like it if your place of business went bankrupt because they couldn't compete with the places that didn't pay for worker safety? And when you went looking for a job, it turned out that you could either breath toluene vapors or not work at all?
I'm starting to think that "libertarianism" is a philosophy that's every bit as wooly headed as the most extreme notions of socialist utopia, in that neither of them seem to feel any strong need to take into account the real world and it's constraints.
I have a friend who quit smoking and that's the way he became. Now he's gung ho about getting it banned. I've seen the way he looks at other people smoking. It's not with revulsion. He looks like he wants to bum one from them.
Later,
Kyle
Originally posted by IFdude
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I have a friend who quit smoking and that's the way he became. Now he's gung ho about getting it banned. I've seen the way he looks at other people smoking. It's not with revulsion. He looks like he wants to bum one from them.
Later,
Kyle
But again, the motives of people who wish to control their exposure to smoke are irrelevant. The health effects are real. It's a medical issue.
Faced with efforts to control mosquito populations to bring down the incidence of malaria, no one says "Well, I think a lot of those anti-mosquito zealots have issues with insects in general, probably because they used to eat moths and have unresolved feelings of shame."
Originally posted by addabox
BR, this is just a completely indefensible position.
That's your opinion.
"The democratic fallacy: the notion that [your] opinion [is] as good as anyone else's."
-Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Originally posted by IFdude
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
I was against them banning smoking in bars until relatively recently, after reading studies that show even active smokers prefer it this way. That, and after visiting some friends in New York, the ones I knew that smoked preferred to have to go out of the bars even in the heart of winter.
Since smokers prefer it, I no longer care to stop it. Too many other issues are involved and more important anyway.
BR, a business can't do whatever it wants to make a profit no matter how much you pretend it can.
Originally posted by BR
That's your opinion.
"The democratic fallacy: the notion that [your] opinion [is] as good as anyone else's."
-Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Well, I don't imagine that my opinion is as good as anyone else's, but I think my ideas about worker safety are better than yours.
Safety costs money. Making safety a deal between the owner and the worker, or the producer and the consumer, is to say that the less affluent will have to make do with more dangerous jobs or less safe products.
Say I can sell pajamas for less than anyone else, the only problem being that my pajamas burst into flame if they come into contact with an open flame. Got money? Get the flame retardant PJs. Poor? Play the odds.
Extend this across every part of your day to day life. Money equals pure drinking water, poor equals lead and arsenic (the cut rate water supplier doesn't want to invest in expensive treatment facilities).
Being part of the investor or executive class means you can earn money without unduly risking your life. Being part of the "I need a job, any job" class means you can be exposed to whatever the market will bear. Under your notion of "freedom", it wouldn't be an informed choice, it would be the lethal trap of your socioeconomic status.
So yes, my opinion is better, because I would extent basic standards of health and safety to as many people as possible, instead of condemning those without funds to an early and painful death.
Because, BR, that's what a person who values human life over some grotesque notion of an internally consistent ideology would always do.
Originally posted by BR
I guess we should ban coal mining and any other inherently dangerous job. Better ban military service too.
Not the point. Some jobs are inherently more dangerous than others.
That doesn't mean that coal miners should have to navigate an industry that permits some mines to produce cheaper coal because they save money by not shoring up the shaft walls or don't provide lights and ventilation.
Should the pentagon get to contract out to private armies of the pathological and suicidal? I suppose shock troops of the insane might put a whole new spin on "shock and awe" but where does that leave the regular army?
Originally posted by BR
I guess we should ban coal mining and any other inherently dangerous job. Better ban military service too.
I couldn't agree with you more. Coal is a 19th century fossile fuel and and is being phased-out in all industrial countires except the US. As for the military, the fewer wars the better. No job is worth losing a life over, no matter what the rewards.
Originally posted by IFdude
I'm not saying this is the case with every person that wants smoking banned. But I think a lot of the people who want it banned are ex smokers. They want it banned because seeing others smoke makes them want to smoke.
Exactly.
-Neø
Originally posted by bunge
I was against them banning smoking in bars until relatively recently, after reading studies that show even active smokers prefer it this way. That, and after visiting some friends in New York, the ones I knew that smoked preferred to have to go out of the bars even in the heart of winter.
Since smokers prefer it, I no longer care to stop it. Too many other issues are involved and more important anyway.
i would be very interested to see these "studies". why would a person prefer to go out into the freezing cold, than stay inside? me and every smoker i've encountered since the ban, are against it.
Originally posted by burningwheel
well it's true it's [car pollution] not good for you. but cigar and cigarette smoke is MUCH more harmful
Source?
Originally posted by kneelbeforezod
Source?
it's just my gut feeling. cigar and cigarrette smoke is so much more penetrating, i can't think of a better word. i mean the smoke lingers and attaches itself to everything. my father smokes cigars in his cars. he gave one car to my sister and even years later the car still smelled like cigars
now when you drive home from work after drving on the freeway for 45 minutes, does your car smell like auto emissions? or do your clothes?
Originally posted by burningwheel
it's just my gut feeling. cigar and cigarrette smoke is so much more penetrating, i can't think of a better word. i mean the smoke lingers and attaches itself to everything. my father smokes cigars in his cars. he gave one car to my sister and even years later the car still smelled like cigars
now when you drive home from work after drving on the freeway for 45 minutes, does your car smell like auto emissions? or do your clothes?
Maybe if the tailpipe was fed directly into the car. That's a silly comparison. Stand behind a bus and stand next to a smoker. The bus is worse.