SHOW NOTES
- Lung Cancer, Celebrities and the Media
- Certain diseases only get attention when celebrities are afflicted
- Why should the public be any more upset over a celebrity dying from disease as opposed to a regular non-famous person?
- Smoking, Disease and Folks Who Smoke
- How did you get started?
- Stop now for heavens sake!
- Celebrity Screw Ups of the Week
- Courtney Love
- Eminem
- Madonna
- Dwight Gooden
- Victoria Gotti
- Google Shakes It Up Again
- They've added Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Video and Google Desktop in recent months
- Yahoo, AOL and MSN are probably having fits
- Can an Operating System be too far off?
- Get Your Iraq War Info Here
- Sign Off
5 comments:
Hi Robert, I'm just listening now to your rant on smoking. I'm a smoker who doesn't want to smoke and I wish it would be made illegal. I'm glad you were able to visit my fair city, (Toronto) and I don't go out much but I'm glad smokers have to take it outside. I started when I was 19 starting my new career as a postal worker, and it seemed most everyone smoked in the cafeteria during breaks. I'm conscious of smoking everyday and of each cigarette. I average about 10-12 a day. I hope I can kick the habit within 2 years when I hit 40.
Best of luck to you on kicking that habit. It seems to be a very addictive habit. I've been very lucky to stay away from it. I've heard a lot of different methods of breaking it like cold turkey, the patch, hypnosis, cutting down gradually. It seems that everyone who's successful has their own story. My Grandmother was literally scared straight by the doctor who told her she'd be dead in a year. She quit and lived another ten years.
Robert
Love listening to you from here in Australia. I don't agree with everything you say but I love people who are passionate in their beliefs and who are prepared to stand up and be heard.
But on the smoking thing from rant 33 (yes I am a bit behind - I took a little holiday with no podcasts) I have to have my whinge. Firstly...my bias as some might perceive it is that I am an ex smoker. I quit cold turkey earlier this year after 17 years. I chose to start and I chose to stop. Simple. Life is about personal choices. People choose to smoke. People choose to eat foods that are bad for them. People choose to have affairs outside their marriages. People choose to rob the local convenience store. And each personal choice has its own consequences.
What annoyed me about your comments (and the wish of keith fox in an earlier comment to make smoking illegal) was not the rant about smoking being stupid (it is) but that it is a good idea to make it illegal to smoke in public places.
I think we should make the least possible amount of things illegal. Essentially, if it harms someone else then make it illegal (i.e. murder, rape, burglary etc). Otherwise, get the hell out of people's personal choices.
And before you start thinking "but what about passive smoking" let me suggest that if governments got out of the "regulations" business a free market economy would evolve quickly into smoking-friendly and non-smoking venues. A smart bar owner or restaurant owner would say "hmmmmm 80% of people don't smoke and hate people smoking around them...I'll make my place smoke-free to give myself a competitive edge over the place next door/down the street".
When we get the government involved in legislating yet another aspect of our lives it cannot end well. The business owners have yet another regulation they have to understand, report on, be inspected for. The business owner also has one less choice about how to run their business.
And when has making something illegal has ever stopped a single person from doing something they wanted to do badly enough?
I say we should get government out of as much as we can. We don't need to be legislated and regulated to death. And we certainly don't need to pay the hefty taxes which are required to fund all the legislating and regulating.
If a person wants to smoke, it's their choice. If they get lung cancer it's the consequence of their choice.
If a bar owner opens a smoker-friendly bar and only 3 people ever go there and he goes out of business and has to live in a fridge box under a bridge it is the consequence of his choice.
If a man has an affair with another man's wife and the woman's husband shoots him in a murderous rage of revenge that is the consequence of his choice.
No amount of legislation or regulation will stop people from doing what they want to do.
No government edict will prevent people from doing things that are bad for them.
OK, that's my rant over with
I still love the show
...oh and Keith
Why do you wish "they" would make it illegal? Would that suddenly make it easier for you to quit? If you know it is bad for you and you want to stop but you are too addicted to do so then what on earth makes you think that making it illegal will stop you? Don't you think there will be a black market that simply means you pay more for lesser quality? Did making alcohol illegal in the 20's stop people drinking? Do you really want to give all control over your own life choices to your government?
C'mon...you can stop if you want to badly enough. I know because I did it myself. Quit cold turkey after 17 years of smoking up to 20 cigarettes a day.
A genuine suggestion is to go to www.quitnet.com - it's a great quitting support site with lots of information, forums etc. It was the key to my success in quitting (but I chose to quit, I did not wait for some government official to tell me I had to quit).
B,
Thanks for the comments and thanks for listening. I tend to think that Keith was speaking from a point of frustration when suggesting that he wished smoking would be made illegal. After all, we know that there's no way that's going to happen.
I agree that we can't have the government ruling every aspect of our lives. In this case, folks have some choices to make with regards to smoking.
On the business side I also agree with the free market approach. I've always been a big advocate of open competition with little government intervention. I think that every person's view on this issue will be colored by what's more important to them. In this case, avoiding second hand smoke in bars and restaurants is more important to me than worrying about the problems that causes for businesses.
I used to run a bar and restaurant. Smoking was allowed in the bar section and I hated stinking of smoke after each night. I also hated to breathe in all that smoke. But as a business person I know that I simply could not compete if I didn't allow smoking in the bar. Now that the new regulations are in effect in NYC, small business owners don't have to make that choice. Some people like that and some people don't. I don't think that businesses are being hurt by the move because the vast majority of people are not so crippled by smoking that they won't go out if they can't smoke in a place. And remember, they still have the option of stepping outside of the establishment if they really need to have a smoke.
The link to QuitNet is a good one, thanks for that. I should have put a link to that site in my show notes.
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