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Comment by pech0rin | Hacker News Reader

This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?

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I, a non-smoker, would like to not walk through clouds of smoke.

That's what I say when I breathe car exhaust. Why cannot all combustion engines be removed from society for my health preference?

That's one of the reasons they are banned from selling new ones starting in 2035.

I don't want to inhale microplastics from tire wear. When will this be addressed?

Sounds a like next century problem to me.

Some cities have streets where internal combustion engines are banned.

Some have bans on just diesel engines. Others ban combustion engines during some hours. Some inner-city congestion taxes have been introduced for health reasons.

While I appreciate those efforts, and do not mind tobacco-free streets, I'll also note that some cities have unfiltered power plant exhaust falling on them, carried by the jet stream from other cities vast distances away, which care less about the problem. The local solution may not be the optimal solution.

When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.

There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.

> So [...] who cares.

I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.

I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.

i this context, "who cares" means "whose business". and the answer by the western society is that no ones but person in question.

bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.

> i this context, "who cares" means "whose business".

I don't think so, but if the original poster is around...

Anyway, it's the government's business to keep their population out of trouble.

> bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.

Contrary to popular opinion, discrimination isn't illegal or even undesirable per se. In this case, it has a health benefit.

It's insanely dumb in the same way prohibition was insanely dumb in the US during the twenties.

Heroin is bad as well and it's forbidden on account of that.

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