About 10 years ago, a cyber friend of mine used the emboldened part of this quote as a footer:

I've posted it here in earlier discussions, but it fits part of this thread particularly well.

OK, you've all convinced me, I'm gonna go drink a bottle of Scotch, smoke a nice cigar, eat a whole bag of potato chips and a burger. I will be so low stress I should live forever!

Did you even read my original post? Did you not check the sites?

Look, my whole point was that we are getting carried away by conjecture and made up statistics. This cannot be a useful debate if it simply takes the form of fear mongering. NovaScotian was quite clear about this in his initial post.

My contention is, and continues to be, that there is value in our having separate opinions. But we have to either back ourselves with facts, or with logical arguments that we are willing to accept may be incorrect when faced with either a) a better logical argument or b) contradicting facts.

As I stated before, and will state again, I have nothing against you or your argument cwtnospam, you aren't the only one doing this. I'm trying to make an appeal for a reasonable discussion that will foster learning in both parties rather than a divisive argument that will leave both sides far more polarized than when they entered the discussion. That was the point of my original post, I wish we could just do that...

Nicely put, Z!

If you really want to live to be very old, simply move to Hawaii and quit taking generic drugs. Study proves it:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004405.html

Either that or select parents and grandparents that lived a long time.

Yes, you completely forgot that the costs need to be financed, and that easily wipes out all of your $536,550 and begs for much, much more.

If you want to argue that medical inflation is lower than 20%, I'm fine with that, even though the rapidly increasing cost of health care is blamed for contributing to the economic melt down. My point was and is that using 5% was being very generous to opposing positions! That's barely higher than the rate of inflation for all consumer items and it is an undeniable fact that medical cost rise much faster.

You've claimed that $30 to $40 is highly exaggerated. I've shown that it is not. If you want to prove me or my methods wrong, come up with an estimate of the total (smoker and third party) health costs of smoking, use some interest rate greater than 5% and show what it would cost to finance those expenses over any reasonable life time.

I should point out that even a small increase in the interest rate has a large impact on costs, with 6% taking the monthly cost of my example to $1199.10 from $1073.64, or an increase of $4.18 per day. If we assume that smoking only costs $100,000 in health care (an unreasonably low estimate) and a rate of increase in medical costs of 10% (also much lower than reality) then the financing monthly costs rise to $1755.14, which take the daily costs to $58.50. Honestly, I think a reasonable estimate would probably be in the quarter million dollar range, with medical inflation around 15%, but I'm trying to estimate the numbers on the low side.

Fixed it for you! :D

I'm not sure about mountain climbing, but, in the US, the government does regulate motorcycle riding (typically at the state level) and skydiving (at the federal level).

For example, as a US citizen I cannot make a skydive without being equipped with two parachutes. One of those parachutes, my reserve, must be TSO'd. My harness and container must also be TSO'd. My reserve must have been packed within the past 180 days by an FAA certified senior or master rigger. I cannot jump through clouds, and must maintain certain clearances from clouds. That's just a few of the FAA regulations. Most of them have been written in the blood of skydivers who came before me.

Banning these activities would be the equivalent of banning you from driving, not requiring you to wear a seatbelt while you're in a car. Requiring you to wear a seatbelt is like requiring me to take along a reserve parachute.

It has also been shown to cause heart disease. Are you suggesting that tobacco offers more health benefits than detriments to smokers' hearts? Clearly, evidence does not support such an assertion.

Regulation is always necessary when people try to assert their rights over those of others. If smokers didn't force non smokers to breathe their smoke there wouldn't be a need for regulation. As an example, smokers create their own problems when they stand by the door of a building with lit cigarettes, forcing nonsmokers to have to run a gauntlet. It's silly to think that doing something like that isn't going to cause people to want more laws against smoking.
I was assuming he was being deliberately obtuse.

Frankly, I don't care if second hand smoke is dangerous or not. It smells disgusting. When smokers cause my clothes to smell like smoke because they're too inconsiderate to take their nasty habit elsewhere, it's no better or less disgusting than if they were picking their nose and wiping it on my shirt. Heck, it's no better than if they tried to make me eat their snot.

They brought the legislation on themselves by being so inconsiderate to begin with. They demonstrated that, as a group, tobacco smokers could not indulge responsibly in public without being forced to do so via government regulation. Let 'em wheeze and whine all they want, outside, away from people smart enough not to partake in an activity known to kill one in three participants.

As this thread turns into an anti-smoking rant completely off the original junk science topic, I guess it's time for ArcticStones to close the thread. We've beaten it to death and it's getting repetitious.

I don't care if people smoke or not. But when smokers complain about government overstepping their bounds by passing legislation to stop public smoking, I hope the smokers don't believe that I'm dumb enough to believe their lies and rhetoric. One of the purposes of government is to control public nuisances. A very large portion of smokers are exactly that.

Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution authorizes Congress (but does not reserve the power exclusively for Congress) to define and punish offenses against The Law of Nations. That particular treatise, which was a primary reference for drafting the Constitution, proclaims that people do not have an inherent right to infringe on the rights of others (paraphrasing). If those complaining the loudest would take the time to actually learn what the Constitution's framers empowered government to do, they would realize that their argument is baseless rhetoric, and that even the Founding Fathers would tell them that they don't have a legal leg to stand on.

Off-topic is basically acceptable in the Coat Room. Let's just make very sure that there are no personal attacks in this thread, or it will be closed.

Trevor

I've unsubscribed. Ciao.

But it is not off topic! The topic is the use of junk science, which is exactly what the smoking industry (and smokers) have been using for at least the last 50 years. First, they claimed smoking was good for you, then they claimed it wasn't harmful or addictive, now they're claiming that second/third hand smoke doesn't harm anyone, yet they've never had proof of any of these claims.

Instead of proving their claims, they've been very good at framing the argument so that it is up to nonsmokers to prove damage. That's an insidious tactic that should never be allowed. It should instead be up to the smoking industry to prove that their product does no harm to nonsmokers. If they can't prove that, then it shouldn't be allowed in any public area or even around family members. Actually, that's being too generous: it shouldn't be allowed at all because smoker health problems affect everyone.

Would you be so kind as to point out the article that claims third hand smoke is expected to kill 100% of those who encounter it? Or are you sensationalizing, setting up a strawman so you can make a claim of junk science?

Generally, that is the fault of the media and corporate interests. If a study finds that Symptom A appeared in 70% of a sample of 43 people who partook in Activity B, and concludes that there is a positive correlation between Activity B and symptom A, it's likely that some media outlet will report that scientists have declared that Activity B causes Symptom A.

The only thing I see that I consider junk science is when "scientists" skip publishing studies in respected, peer reviewed academic journals in favor of going straight to the editorial page of a newspaper. This is a very common tactic of those parties with a vested interest in attempting to fool the public into believing that anthropogenic global warming is not widely accepted among climatologists. (Not surprisingly, some of those professional deniers formerly did paid research for the Tobacco Institute in attempt to show that there was not a consensus among doctors w/r/t tobacco use being hazardous to users' health.)

Just recently I read a FOXNews article which rightly claimed that claims of 90% of guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico came from the US. The were quite correct in claiming that the data do not support that figure. Unfortunately, they did some mathematical gymnastics, completely ignoring basic fundamentals of arithmetic and statistical methods, and themselves claimed 17% to be the actual figure, which also is not supported by the data in any way. Looking at the primary data and the original source of the 90% claim reveals that the claim was accurate, but qualified, and that qualification was not repeated by those repeating the claim. That's junk science; the media attempts to explain or disprove something about which they don't have a good understanding themselves.

See, if you'd just check your facts:

That comes from this site. I apologize, it's some quick and dirty research.

Still, that's far more less the half million that was proposed before.

I'm just asking for a reasonable argument, I'm under the impression I can't have one. I think I'm done...