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Comment by chrismat | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a household with two smoking parents, and it sucked. So on a personal level, nothing would be better than the world collectively giving up the nasty habit. However, I would never, ever advocate or vote for forcing people to do that. Why? Because you could make the exact same case for every single vice. Alcohol has zero benefits for your health - don't even try to give me the "but wine has antioxidants" B.S., the math between the negatives and positives is still in the red (ha!). How about caffeine and other stimulants? Foods too high in fat? Red meat? Too much sunshine? XYZ thing that is considered "unhealthy" this week by the "experts"? Don't get me wrong, reasonable limits imposed at a societal level can certainly make sense (banning smoking from restaurants and airplanes, having blood-alcohol driving laws, et cetera). But the fundamental question here is do you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest? And the "experts" they solicit their advice from?

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> do you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest?

Yes.

Read the history of Teddy Roosevelt & the Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history

If you're familiar with the political culture of Australasia, you'll realise it's an overwhelming "nanny state" culture.

Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius.

Why?

Because Australia and New Zealand have a particular cultural value others don't.

They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

> They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

It helps to be small & pragmatic. People (mostly) follow the rules and politicians (mostly) only implement rules with broad support. Police have wide discretion to apply laws and (mostly) do this to benefit public good.

That's not to say we don't have problems, of course, but this particular law is seen as a compromise approach to public health that more-or-less works for everyone.

I find the root cause is not so much size... and more so younger sibling syndrome.

Australia/New Zealand have a... very, very, very deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, comparing themselves to large Anglophile nations.

There's a genetic urge to "impress Mother England."

For Australia, also a deep seated desire to prove they're not an island of criminals.

For New Zealand... a deep seated desire not to be left off maps.

It's not so much size... there's just a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America. To stop people moving away.

Edit: root cause. Not benefit.

Your other statements about AU/NZ culture have been extremely questionable, but this one is just complete nonsense.

The idea that there is a genetic urge to impress England is bizarre, typically about 50% of people support becoming a republic. Some recent data in [0]

Australia's original status as a penal colony seems to be held onto as trivia externally but is entirely irrelevant in modern discussion (as it should be as it stopped 150 years ago). Thinking that this is something Australians think about suggests that you have a very outside perspective.

I don't know what a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America means. I don't think being a good place to live is a culture, I think it's an objective of a society.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/support-for-republic...

As we'd say here: "Yeah, Nah". This is a caricature of parochial English thinking of the colonies from the 50s, and is entirely divorced of what Australia and New Zealand are like today.

As someone from a southern US state who faces similar "caricatures", there's no need to pretend and hide your feelings. Instead, I think we should join together against those who would oppress us and keep us down and uninformed in modern society.

Time for Australia to become a republic? I wonder how people would vote if there were another referendum.

It would already be a republic if the last referendum wasn't nobbled by the government at the time, where the only choice was between the status quo or giving more power to the historically untrusted elected government.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Australian_republic_refer...:

"With republican models of one form or another winning a majority in opinion polls prior to the referendum, it was expected that the republican referendum would pass. However, the question put was for a particular model of republic with a head of state appointed by Parliament. This was opposed by some supporters of a republic, who preferred a directly elected head of state. Some of these, such as Phil Cleary, advocated that republic supporters vote "No" in order that a future referendum could be put on the directly elected model. Some commentators—including the president of the Australian Republican Movement, Malcolm Turnbull—identified this split within the republican camp as a key reason for the referendum's failure."

Completely agree, this bloke has no idea what's he's yapping about.

I'm Australian and I have never really had any interest in going to England.

Australia is culturally downstream from America though, so you're right about that.

Or put another way, they don't take personal responsibility, and hand their decisions over to other people running the state.

Put another, another way, they recognize the limits of their own discipline and choose to remove the temptation by social agreement.

Individual responsibility is tied to economic rationalism.

With 100% devolved individual responsibility, you create market failure.

Nicotine based addition is a pure example of market failure.

To advocate for 100% unhindered individual responsibility, is to advocate against economics.

No rule-free economic market, free of arbitrary constraints, is ever truly rational.

That's because market failure is the default state of nature. The rich take from the poor, the incentive to economically specialize is lost due to theft.

"Personal responsibility" is a gross simplification of the complexities of political and economic science.

I would never simplify the enormous complexities of human computer interaction and UX, fields I know nothing about.

Don't over-simply how difficult a decision regulating nicotine was, and how many decades of academic careers have been sacrificed to come to this consensus.

Cable news slogans can never summarize the efforts of thousands of doctorate wielding technocrats arguing endlessly over the solution to nicotine.

> They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

I think reasonable people could object to Australia's internet censorship laws, COVID response, climate activities, etc.

There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).

There's a margin of error in decision making.

By no means do they always get it right.

Remember, much of the fourth estate innately will be crassly negative, for commercial reasons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars. New Zealand for example has some remarkably shrill national news stories about remarkably petty crime.

> There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).

Yes, and the technocrats don't always get it right, at all.

Democracy works because nobody actually trusts the technocrats. Just like nobody trusts the investment bankers, politicians, real estate developers, police, lawyers.

However, Australasia has had a remarkable run of success via eventually doing what the technocrats tell them to do.

The will of the people supports the technocrats.

I’m a resident of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, which had the longest pandemic lockdown in the world AFAIK. It certainly was at the time the lockdown ended, at least.

Victoria recently had an election wherein the government which was responsible for implementing the lockdown was re-elected. Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible for informing politicians and implementing policy was a medical practitioner and undeniably an expert in public health matters.

During lockdown and even still, there continue to be protests against the government for their pandemic response, despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.

It’s important to note that there are examples within the Victorian government which show the opposite, though. They have aided logging of old-growth forests, despite saying they won’t allow it to continue. They’ve repeatedly and demonstrably used tax dollars to fund infrastructure projects in electorates where the ruling party has a slim majority (so-called marginal seats).

My point is the Victorian government is far from perfect. It’s been a year since the last lockdown ended, yet the lockdown is still the thing people discuss when it comes to policy. It’s the most invasive action a state government has taken, affecting so many people. It’s what people remember. And it mattered at the polling booth last month, when people voted the government back in. They even saw an increase in the seats they hold, from last election.

> despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.

I would heavily challenge this just because the opposition is utterly incompetent in Victoria. I am as against the lockdowns as they come and think they border on criminal as an action taken by the state against citizens. A disgusting violation of human rights I never thought I would see in Australia in my lifetime and honestly changed permanently how I viewed the moral compasses of my fellow citizens.

However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.

So I gritted my teeth and voted Labor. But using that as an endorsement of lockdowns or Victoria covid policy is absurd. I know many who feel the same as me and acted similarly.

There seemed to be avenues open for people to register their displeasure at Labor, via preferential voting. Two minor parties 'Angry Victorians' and 'Sack Dan Andrews' party were obvious targets to put before Labor, along with the usual alternatives such as Green, Reason, Legalize Cannabis (although those risked electing someone instead of a Labor candidate). Yet the Labor vote was overwhelming. It very much seems that there was only a vocal minority against the lockdown policies. The displeasure with Labor seemed more about their environmental policies, with the Greens and Legalize Cannabis taking left wing votes away from Labor.

I don't vote for clowns or lunatics which it is fair to say both "Angry Victorians" and "Sack Dan Andrews" are both.

I'll never vote Greens again until Lidia Thorpe is gone, shagging the heads of outlaw motorbike gangs is disgraceful behaviour for a member of parliament and completely disqualifies Greens as being a serious party from my point of view (at least while she remains a part of the party). And honestly the longer she remains the more I have to question the judgement that the members of the Green party show at all and makes it more likely that even if she eventually leaves I will never vote for them again.

Reason I do like the look of tbh and will consider them going forward. I can't say I am the most hyper-engaged voter so can't pretend I was fully aware of them or what they stood for. But looking them up now I like a lot of what they say and prefer their general policy stances over Labor.

> However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.

Hear hear. The Victoran Liberals are a bunch of muppets. I disagree with a lot of actions of the Andrews government, however there was no functional alternative.

It should go without saying: voter preferences seldomly condense down to a single issue. A party gaining or retaining power doesn't mean broad support or opposition on a single issue.

Again: technology or science experts deal with facts (or implications of setting policy), not setting policy or the will of the people. As an example: COVID can & did kill people, but where to set the threshold for acceptable mortality is a policy issue that is orthogonal. Not dissimilar to actuarial accounting.

>Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible

Dictated by culture. To say that everyone else was dictated by things-that-weren't-empirical is nothing short of a naive reading of how laws and social policy are set. There are values.

> Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius. Why? .... culture

If you want to look into temperature vs productivity you should note these populations overwhelmingly have ancestry from colder weather climates

> I grew up in a household with two smoking parents, and it sucked.

It sounds like you're saying that their freedom to inflict harm on you was more important than your freedom from the harmful health effects of secondhand smoke. Can that be true?

I presume the two smokers did more than just smoke. If they were parents They probably also provided food, education, love and whole lot of other things than just secondary smoke. Life tends to be a complex mix of good and bad.

For sure, and I'm assuming the parents were great in every other respect. Assuming the best — that they didn't understand the harm of secondhand smoke — wouldn't a ban have been helpful to them in the same way that a ban on lead paint is helpful?

Sounds like Prohibition but for cigarettes. We know how that went. We also know what banning marijuana hasn't worked out too well. At the start of Covid pandemic South Africa banned the sales of cigarettes for about three months. Result was lots of unscrupulous people became rich [0][1].

[0]https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/468724/governments-... [1]https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/17/cigarette-smuggling-th...

I didn't know that. It is double ridiculous, because smoking reduces the probability to get COVID19.

Isn't there a big difference between what Australia is doing and those prohibitions? I think one of the main reasons those went so terribly is that people were already used and/or addicted to drinking/smoking, so of course they continued doing those things illegally. But this policy tries to make sure that people never start smoking, by making it not legally available to every who is now young enough to most likely not have started already. Those who smoke currently can (with this policy) continue doing so legally, so there's less demand for black markets etc.

I can't fault the theory and can only share an anecdote. It was illegal for school children to smoke when I was in school, 80s into early 90s. So much so that kids caught smoking were expelled from school. Kids still smoked. Perhaps it was a different time and perhaps this time it is being done right.

I think what it comes down to is who is decided what's harmful and do you trust those institutions.

Is spanking harmful? It seems close to one of those things that get one into trouble with CPS

What about letting a kid walk home from school on their own? We've seen parents get into trouble for that.

How about letting the kid watch tv or eat too much junk food?

What about teaching them certain ideas, ranging from racism to creationism to socialism to Amish-like beliefs?

If you presume that parents love their children and want to do what's best for them and you inform the population of the collective belief on what is good or bad for them, parents will do their best to make careful trade-offs and are in the most informed and most invested position to make those decisions.

Obviously some people are just terrible parents, but if there's any doubt at all I think we should err on parental sovereignty. Likewise, when considering what is beneficial or harmful to one's self, for the same reason, I think we should err on the side of individual sovereignty.

There are cases where individual or parental authority should be overridden, but to my mind those should be chosen very, very carefully.

Involuntarily inflicting second-hand cigarette smoke on a child is unambiguously harmful and there's no credible alternative interpretation or slippery slope involved here.

Ah well sure but when the smoking rates drop low enough, smoking related healthcare costs greatly exceed the cigarette tax receipts. NZ is a small country and needs to contain the costs of its socialised healthcare. Is there a fundamental ‘right to give money to Tobacco companies’? Buying cigarettes is banned, smoking isn’t.

I'm not a utilitarian because I think there are many things that we should do that can't be justified with a straight-forward look at the bottom line. Judging things this way can end with things that are pretty ethically dubious, e.g., forced abortion for fetuses with condition X, where X may be various levels of impairment whereby the resulting human is not profitable.

Agreed, but the OP is obviously unconvinced by the moral observation that Big Tobacco hack people’s brains for profit while externalising the costs to society.

Is one allowed to plant their own tobacco if they're inclined to do so? What about other tobacco products like rolling tobacco? Is that banned from sale as well?

The bill says that sale of smoked tobacco products will be prohibited if the recipient was born after 2009-01-01. Just giving them a smoked tobacco product is also illegal if it occurs in a public place.

You underestimate alcohol. It is a cheap and versatile desinfectant, that can be made relatively easy in remote areas or by people who want to live more independant. Furthermore, hot alcohol, especially beer, is a very strong medicine for respiratory infections.

Red meat: https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...

Saturated fats: Nina Teicholz: A short history of saturated fat: the making and CURRENT unmaking of a scientific consensus

I do not understand why so many adult people favor a nanny state; it means to be treated like a child or an idiot and to promote that all people get forcefully treated like this. One should fight this with all means.

Edt: I forgot, that a moderate amount of alcohol each day (i.e. 1 glas of wine) reduces the probability of dementia when one approaches death.

>>o you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest? And the "experts" they solicit their advice from?

Maybe not every personal decision, but certainly decisions that scale should be handled by actual experts. And yes, actual experts exist who actually know more than you and I, and can make better decisions based on the actual data they have gathered and knowledge they have gained, vs our 5minute Internet search.

And much of what you see as a "personal decision" is actually decided by corporate money. When smoking was completely unregulated, corporations advertised and distributed at will. Smoking rates declined dramatically when advertising and distribution was constrained. Yes, we can make a decision collectively to not make certain kinds of harmful activities readily available and pushed on the people by sophisticated influence campaigns.

From the article: >>"Thousands of people will live longer, healthier lives and the health system will be NZ$5 billion (US$3.2 billion) better off from not needing to treat the illnesses caused by smoking,"

Personally, I'm not thrilled to be paying into the insurance system to support the massive healthcare costs of smokers. If they can be made to pay in their FULL cost, then that is fine.

Otherwise, go make your personal decision - grow and cure some tobacco, and roll your own. Nobody is stopping you. The only thing they are stopping is every corner store selling it.

> Smoking rates declined dramatically when advertising and distribution was constrained.

The tobacco companies agreed to have TV cigarette ads banned because there is no real reason for cigarette preference other than what you started smoking (this is why you see ads that were targeted at youth), and they couldn't not advertise when competing with so many others. They figured that if they were all forced to the same level they would save a lot of money while gaining the benefit of a PR win as well as removal of the mandated 1:1 anti-smoking ads.[1]

You can see the same kind of techniques in play with recycling and fire-retardants in corporations getting together to work to legislate things that people think are pro-public-interest but are really pro-corporate with effects on the public ranging from benign to actively harmful.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/01/congress-bans-airi...

> Alcohol has zero benefits for your health

I would disagree. Multiple studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption lowers HDL cholesterol and reduces strokes. Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.

>Multiple studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption lowers HDL cholesterol and reduces strokes.

Source(s)? And who paid for the studies?

>Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.

Come take a walk through my home town on a Friday and Saturday night at chucking-out time, there's plenty of "human-to-human social interactions", and with a lot less of the "smiling" part.

I think there are levels to it though. Smoking is across the board "fucking awful". Whereas a glass of wine a day isn't going to really stress your liver (presupposing no existing issues), whereas a pack of smokes a day absolutely will do damage to your healthy lungs. Also second hand smoke is a big deal.

Is there such a thing as "a glass of wine"? Usually it is "two" unless you happen to always dine in groups of four.

yes, you can buy a single glass of wine at many bars and restaurants. while somewhat triggering to the oenophiles, you can also buy wine packaged in 12 oz cans, which is close to a standard pour if split between two people.

I get that this was probably a tongue-in-cheek question, but like many other things, drinking follows a power law distribution. there are many more moderate drinkers than heavy ones.

I usually have a glass of wine with dinner :) . I have an actual chalk mark on a measured standard "glass" lol. I do not have more than that. Sometimes I'll have a beer instead if it's fish and chips. I don't drink more than that, except maybe on the weekend during a social "thing". Those aren't very often though, mostly once a month.

I don't think this is a fair comparison, on one side it's a whole pack of cigarettes per day and on the other one glass of wine.

How about we compare two bottles of wine every day with a whole pack of cigarettes. I think that's comparable and both would be terrible for you.

I hate smoking, I had a really hard time quitting 8 years ago and in general I dislike being in a room where people are smoking.

However my grandmother smoked 1 cigarette every day with her morning coffee after breakfast her whole life and it did her no harm whatsoever. I think with most substances moderation is always an important factor.

> However my grandmother smoked 1 cigarette every day with her morning coffee after breakfast her whole life and it did her no harm whatsoever. I think with most substances moderation is always an important factor.

How many cigarette smokers have the willpower to only smoke one a day?

I don't exactly know how this bill works, but I wouldn't consider banning the public sale of something to be the same as forcing someone to do something.

Presumably even if it's illegal to sell tobacco in a store it could still be legal for someone to possess and use tobacco in a private setting.

Can I play devil's advocate and say it's not black and white, and currently a lot of people make really bad decisions and the worst ones are the ones that affect surrounding people. Vaccines are another hot-button issue where making the wrong choice causes you harm and those around you as does smoking. I lived in Japan for a year and never smoked in my life but probably "smoked" a hundred packs after being in some environments. You can argue to avoid such environments but the logical extreme of that is people being forced to stay inside for fear of unvaccinated people. There is clearly some gray area here IMHO.

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