Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

I think most of these backwards policies come from simplistic “luxury beliefs” of the rich that are disconnected from reality (https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...).

A popular luxury belief is that police brutality and mass incarceration are the biggest problems in the judicial system nationally, so the solution is to virtually stop catching petty thieves who steal from cars and shops.

A popular luxury belief on housing in San Francisco is that allowing developers to add housing supply harms poor people. So they delay and add costs to new housing in the name of helping the poor and ignore the fact that these very restrictions ratchet up the rent.

A popular luxury belief in education is that black and brown people are less prepared for academic tests so it is racist to use tests to make decisions. This ignores all the poor people who benefitted from the incentives to study. Hence the decision to eliminate admissions requirements to the magnet school Lowell.

Another luxury belief not mentioned is that vaping is just as immoral as smoking. So even while we loosened marijuana restrictions, San Francisco increased taxes and restrictions on vaping to match the restrictions on smoking.

By the way, although the decision to make Lowell High School a normal lottery-based school was reversed on procedural problems, the superintendent has vowed to bring back the resolution the first thing in January. So we're still going in the wrong direction there http://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=C9K2...

Totally agree. I still remember some trips to Point Reyes. In Marin County there were BLM signs everywhere. I bet most people in Marin County rarely see a black person and certainly never poor people. They live in this bubble of virtue signaling while profiting from the inequality in the country.

California political leaders also are basically hypocrites. They are for masks but when it comes to their own parties in super luxury restaurants masks are a little too cumbersome to put on.

> I bet most people in Marin County rarely see a black person and certainly never poor people.

By the California Poverty Measure, Marin has fairly similar poverty rate to the state overall: https://www.ppic.org/publication/poverty-in-california/

Even by the FPL, which doesn't take into account for local or even regional CoL, Marin has twice as many poor people as black people (which it has about half as large a share as the state as a whole), so even if no one ever left their home county, you’d have your insults backwards.

I am sure there are lots of poor people because millionaires and billionaires still need cheap gardeners working for them. But they don't want them to live closeby but keep them out of sight.

Are you saying that the bay area isn't full of virtue signallers for whom poor people are more of a theoretical concept they better try not to get too close OT?

I don't think people generally view smokers as 'immoral' (tobacco companies, maybe...), even if they disapprove of smoking. The studies I see on attitudes toward smoking don't mention morality that I see, e.g.[1] As long as they aren't smoking or vaping in my face, my own reaction would be "dumb, but up to you".

1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....

> Another luxury belief not mentioned is that vaping is just as immoral as smoking.

Vaping has reversed 20+ years of anti-smoking efforts in high schools. This is a problem.

Vaping is seems safer than smoking but this is medically unproven.

Vaping is NOT safer than not-Vaping and not-Smoking.

The vaping companies ran the Big Tobacco playbook to exactly the same effect. It is unsurprising that their opponents are running their playbook to stop them.

>Vaping has reversed 20+ years of anti-smoking efforts in high schools. This is a problem.

Citation needed.

>Vaping is seems safer than smoking but this is medically unproven.

The research is robust enough for the UK to encourage vaping over smoking. Perhaps not being lobbied by big tobacco is the only real difference between the state of public health guidance in both countries.

>Vaping is NOT safer than not-Vaping and not-Smoking.

I’ve yet to meet anyone that has suggested such a thing.

>The vaping companies ran the Big Tobacco playbook to exactly the same effect. It is unsurprising that their opponents are running their playbook to stop them.

Juul, backed by a big tobacco corp has ran their playbook. Can you name a major company that isn’t backed a tobacco company? The cynic in me expects it was to force the public to demand the fda create new regs that can allow big tobacco to catch up and capture the market.

This conversation is also pointless without bringing up the perverse incentives that tobacco taxes have on regulators and politicians. Ending tobacco use is bad for politicians because they’ll need to balance the budget by cutting services and raising taxes on everyone instead of offloading the burden to a marginalized group of disproportionately poor people. Fear mongering about children vaping is a recycled to trick to manufacture consent among the public for extortionate and regressive taxes. Alcohol, gambling and similar taxes are just perverse.

I dont know if it's safer, but as a smoker, when I lived in a vaping friendly country and switched to it, I immediately noticed a vast improvement, and when I moved back to cigarets in my current vaping-banned jurisdiction it went back down.

Just the ability to gradually reduce the nicotine dosage while keeping the ritual is liberating (and possible to some extent with low nicotine cigs that I smoke now) and I think it's sad there's no middle ground between "our blond angel children will become addicts in a vapping wild west" and "smokers gotta cancer happily in a vapping-free paradise". And forbidding the cigaret isnt possible, no. Or if we try, I ll he the next Al Capone smuggling them.

> as a smoker

No argument. Vaping replacing cigarettes is almost invariably a good thing.

The problem is that "vaping" was how Big Tobacco got around the fact that cigarettes are "uncool". And the vaping companies explicitly targeted underage teens with the marketing apparatus. And it worked.

> I think it's sad there's no middle ground

This is solely due to the fact that Big Tobacco are malicious actors and will push the boundaries of legality on all fronts to increase their profits.

In addition, the "middle ground" is an unstable point. We know from experience that nothing short of force of law would create "smoke-free" bars, clubs, etc. Any leeway always tipped back into full-on "smoking preferred".

Don't get me wrong. I think that smoking bans have damaged social scenes as well as music scenes. There seems to be something integral between those and smoking. However, I'm also practical enough to realize that externalized costs were always going to be taken advantage of without laws placing restraints on them.

I really dont mind smoking bans in public places. I hate Japanese restaurant when everyone can smoke etc.

But a full ban, which I hear people discussing in some countries (NZ I think) is just too hard: cigarets will remain legal in China and India most likely, with 3bn people able to buy them, so smuggling will be low cost, the death and general damage of cigarets is much slower than even alcohol so smuggling cigarets will be as risky as smuggling dvds, so you ll end up making random people very rich, smokers will smoke maybe a lot less but you ll have to spend the cancer money on enforcement without the current tax revenue...

Best is to move to vaping and study it a lot, and regulate nicotine content. Children are no more at risk of vaping than smoking cigarets (meaning: very at risk) and if we can study it enough to make it a lot less cancerous, well they can smoke it just as much as the binge drinking they already do anyway.

Big Tobacco MUST move to vaping, it seems much better than cigarets already. And the addiction is for me not the worst, it's everything that goes with tar and high nicotine dosage.

Quite strange to attribute those beliefs to "the rich". Being rich is not an ideology. They sound more like typical progressive/woke beliefs to me. Replace "luxury" with "woke" and your comment is spot on.

> Quite strange to attribute those beliefs to "the rich". Being rich is not an ideology. They sound more like typical progressive/woke beliefs to me. Replace "luxury" with "woke" and your comment is spot on.

You are criticizing someone who is pushing the same anti-“woke” propaganda as you are, except they are using the version from a professional propaganda outlet that has decided that it is more effective when mixed with elite resentment.

> the same anti-“woke” propaganda

I don’t think the term “luxury beliefs” maps one-for-one to wokism or hatred for elites. The key is that the speaker is far removed from the consequences of his actions so is able to espouse edgy but incorrect and even hypocritical theories. For example, in San Francisco blogger Tim Redmond and supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin are long-time homeowners who espouse anti-capitalist theories in order to justify their actions to prevent housing, which results in higher rents for ordinary workers. I wouldn’t call these out-of-touch people “woke” or especially elite. But I think the term “luxury beliefs” applies well.

See Noah Smith’s examples of luxury beliefs which are not simply wokism: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1474413184891113478

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