Hacker News Reader

I'm ambivalent about the actual act of banning tobacco advertising (couldn't happen to a bunch of better guys), but what I'm not ambivalent about is that legislation like this is something that politicians do to pretend like they're working.

View on HN

Which you are wrong about in this case, however, because this was a people’s initiative brought by various health- and youth-related NGOs and actually opposed by the majority of members of parliament and the government.

The particular politicians who pushed it are who I'm talking about; I'm not talking about politicians in general. They might as well be pushing for even earlier childhood education, higher penalties for child abuse, higher sentences for drug sales near a church, or other random fake progress that will always get votes from the public. It's a vaguely benign version of law-and-order politics. Let somebody write a dubious paper insisting that cigarette packs are too easy to tear open, and they'll be pushing for legislation to freeze cigarettes in a block of ice, and to force people to lock their chisels and icepicks in a safe.

The people who work for NGOs make their entire living from pushing initiatives like this of dubious value but that look good on a flier or a picket sign; they're just as guilty. In the US, they're so paycheck- and opportunity-guided that their attacks on vaping have pushed people back into smoking (multiple orders of magnitude more dangerous.) That's not actually a flaw - if smoking rises they can just fundraise off that again.

I like that those two people were saved from drowning but I hate that it was Bob who did it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com