... I hope you realise that if you try and sell stuff with a 500% profit margin or stop stocking it altogether, people will just bulk buy online? I'm all in favour of supporting my local businesses, but this goes both ways.
From The Metro:
SMOKING a packet of cigarettes a day is no worse for the health than air pollution that city dwellers are exposed to, a shock report warns.
Breathing in fumes from traffic, planes, power plants and industry on a long-term, regular basis is causing growing numbers of urban non-smokers to develop chronic lung disease, experts say.
29 years of puffing on 20 cigarettes daily was found to do no more damage than just a decade of city living...
A government spokesperson said last night: ‘We might have been exaggerating the dangers of smoking a bit recently, which is why we will be easing off on the smokers and meddling elsewhere instead.’
From Sky News:
People in the UK are drinking less alcohol, despite an increase in worldwide consumption.
Using World Health Organisation data researchers found UK consumption fell from 12.6 litres of pure alcohol a year per adult in 1990 to 11.4 litres in 2017.
The study, published in the Lancet, predicted the downward trend would continue, falling to 11 litres by 2030.
From the BBC:
British people are having less sex now than in recent years, according to a large national survey.
The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggest nearly a third of men and women have not had sex in the past month. That's up from around a quarter in 2001, according to the data from 34,000 people.
Less than half of men and women aged 16 to 44 have sex at least once a week, responses show. Over-25s and couples who are married or living together account for the biggest falls in sexual activity across the 21-year period.
From the ONS:
Main points
* There were 696,271 live births in England and Wales in 2016, a decrease of 0.2% from 2015.
* In 2016, the total fertility rate (TFR) decreased to 1.81 children per woman, from 1.82 in 2015.
* The average age of mothers in 2016 increased to 30.4 years, compared with 30.3 years in 2015.
* Women aged 40 and over had a higher fertility rate than women aged under 20 for the second time since 1947.
* Over a quarter (28.2%) of live births in 2016 were to mothers born outside the UK, the highest level on record.
(My mother was born abroad, as was my wife, and we have two children, so that last figure does not particularly bother me, here for the record only)
From The Guardian:
Nearly a million more young adults are living with their parents than was the case two decades ago, a study has found.
The figures, in a report by the right-leaning thinktank Civitas, will fuel concerns that too little is being done to protect young people from Britain’s housing crisis.
The proportion of people aged 20 to 34 who live with their parents has risen from 19.48% in 1997, equating to 2.4 million people, to 25.91% in 2017, equating to 3.4 million.
From Public Health England:
The adult smoking rate in England is continuing to decline year on year and is now at a record low. In 2017, 14.9% of people in England aged 18 years and above smoked, accounting for 6.1 million people.
If this trend continues it will reduce to between 8.5% and 11.7% by 2023. PHE is calling for the NHS long-term plan to commit to achieving a smokefree society by 2030 with an adult prevalence of 5% or less.
I'm sure that shifting taxes from production/consumption in the real economy to taxes on land values will help reverse these worrying trends, quite by how much remains to be seen...
From the BBC:
What's in the no-deal Brexit plans?
In the 24 documents, which cover industries including medicine, finance and farming, it says...
* New picture warnings will be needed for cigarette packets as the EU owns the copyright to the current ones
FFS.
From the BBC:
The NHS in England is to get an extra £20bn a year by 2023 as a 70th "birthday present", Theresa May says. It means the £114bn budget will rise by an average of 3.4% annually - but that is still less than the 3.7% average rise the NHS has had since 1948...
The five-year funding settlement covers just front-line budgets overseen by NHS England. About a 10th of the overall health budget is held by other bodies for things such as training and healthy lifestyle programmes, including stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. The BBC understands these will be protected, but beyond that it is unclear what will happen to them.
?!? One-tenth of £114 bn is £11.4 bn, which is approx equal to our net contributions to the EU budget.
Would anybody like to chip in for a battle bus, with "We spend £220 million a week on stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. Let's fund the NHS instead." written on the sides?
From yesterday's Evening Standard:
So began the conversation — me stretching out my German, him rallying back in perfect English, in a Berlin bar last week at midnight, with the windows steamed up and people inside smoking like it was coming back into fashion.
From The Evening Standard:
The influential Institute For Public Policy Research said Mr Khan and other mayors should be put in charge of chairing health and care management bodies and be given tax-raising powers, as in New York, that could include “sin taxes” on sugar, fats and cigarettes.
Ahem, won't Londoners just do "booze cruises" out to the Home Counties?
From the BBC:
Stamp duty should be a tax on property sellers, rather than buyers, to help those trying to buy their first home, a major UK building society has said.
As OnTheOtherHand said when emailed me the link...
... imagine the simultaneous conversation that couples A, B, and C all bidding for the same house in London have after the law is changed:
"Now that the seller is paying £13,171 stamp duty, let's take that money we deposited with the conveyancing solicitor to pay the duty on our behalf, and bid £13,171 more for the property to beat the other couples..."
From The Guardian:
So when Bill Gates pitched into the debate last week with a proposal that robots should be taxed, just like human workers are, you can imagine the splutters of outrage from the neoliberal fortresses of Silicon Valley.*
“Right now,” he said, “the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
And the money raised should be used to retrain people the robots have replaced, with “communities where this has a particularly big impact” first in line for support. I never thought I’d write this, but here goes: good for you, Mr Gates.
* Wanker. People working for the "neo-liberal fortresses in Silicon Valley" are already paying a super-tax i.e. the very high rents they have to pay to be able to live within commuting distance of a well-paying job.
To be fair, the rest of that article was a bit more nuanced that the knee-jerk Luddite "tax robots" meme that has been doing the rounds recently and which I intended to take the piss out of.
Gates actually said "you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level [to the worker]", which is nothing more than saying that corporate profits (from the automation) and wages (from not automating) should be taxed at the same level, rather than taxing wages at double the rate of corporate profits, which is of course a good idea for many other reasons.
No idea what the "retraining" nonsense is all about, pay people welfare while they're unemployed and pray that new businesses grow and develop and take them on is all you can do.
I was a bit disappointed with the plain packaging, a misnomer if there ever was one. I was vaguely expecting something sleek and stylish, like Apple packaging but no, they have just made the warnings and pictures bigger and reduced the brand name to a single line of 6 point type.
I got two good ones this week (paraphrasing slightly).
1. Smokers' children are more likely to start smoking. (than what is not specified)
2. Smoking reduces your fertility.
So, assuming those even to be measurably true, doesn't the problem cancel out? Children of smokers have are more likely to smoke, but there are fewer of them etc.
In any event, reason 2 is nonsensical. Most people spend most of their lives trying not to get themselves or their partner pregnant. A couple of years 'trying for a baby' after you get married, have a couple of babies, job done, back on the tabs.
Anyway, free market capitalism being what it is, no doubt sooner or later somebody will start making natty pouches into which you can tuck your stupid packaging out of sight. The old tins were nice but too big, so your tobacco dried out unless you mucked about with slices of lemon etc.
From Kent Online:
A stunned van driver was slapped with a hefty £200 fine – for not displaying a No Smoking sticker in his vehicle.
Trevor Emery was fined four times more than if he had actually been caught puffing at the wheel when he was booked by a city council warden in Watling Street, Canterbury.
The washing machine repairer, who does not smoke, was left bewildered by the little known law, which makes it compulsory to display a No Smoking sticker in a work van...
Head of safer neighbourhoods Doug Rattray said:
"It is an offence to not display a No Smoking sign in a vehicle that is used for commercial purposes. This is the case regardless of whether someone is self-employed, the only person to use the vehicle or if nobody smokes in it. We enforce this but the level of fine is set nationally in law. Mr Emery received a fine, which he paid, for this offence. He was advised on the legislation and given the correct sign.”
Council spokesman Rob Davies confirmed that around 50 fines have been issued since the law came into force.
Does anybody know, does the 'work van' rule apply to salesmen's cars too? And if so, what about cars which people use for normal commuting?
From The Guardian:
Smoking should be banned in all parks and playgrounds to reduce the chances of children growing up thinking that using cigarettes is normal, environmental health officers have told ministers.
Zoos, theme parks and anywhere else children play should also become no-smoking zones, in a significant proposed expansion of the outdoor areas in which smokers cannot light up.
Smoking has been illegal in enclosed public places such as bars, nightclubs and restaurants, as well as public transport and work vehicles, across the UK since 2007...
Ignoring the fact that children aren't supposed to be in bars, nightclubs or work vehicles in the first place, what about smoking behind the bike sheds, a noble British tradition? Will there be an exception for that?
From the Daily Mail:
They are the go-to device for anyone trying to quit smoking - or seeking a lesser evil than cigarettes.
But e-cigarettes could trigger problem drinking, a new study has warned.
People who use the devices are significantly more likely to consume more alcohol than those who don't use them, researchers claim.
Moreover, those using e-cigarettes and alcohol together report drinking more. Usually, when people quit smoking they also quit drinking, the researchers said. Therefore, those who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking may miss out on this added benefit of quitting, they said.
The researchers concluded by urging people not to ignore the 'knock on' effects of e-cigarette use.
Not even Dick Puddlecote or Christopher Snowdon in their bitterest full-on satire mode could have dreamed up this level of bullshit.
I was in a bar in eastern Europe recently (large glass of white wine, 70 cents, seeing as you ask) in which smoking was clearly permitted.
But the reflex urge to take my glass outside before lighting up was too strong, so I did.
Hmm.
Proglodyte in the comments to If you're going to make up statistics, at least make up laudable ones:
Comparing Greece, Finland and UK -
Similar life expectancy: c.81
Cigarettes smoked/adult/pa
Greece: 2,995
UK: 750
Finland 671
Alzheimer's/Dementia death rates
Greece: 1.8/100,000
UK: 17.1/100,000
Finland 34.9/100,000
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigarette_consumption_per_capita
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimers-dementia/by-country/
From The Guardian:
From 2003-13 – a decade which saw the introduction of a ban on smoking in public places and a rise in cigarette prices – the proportion of all deaths in the 35+ age group estimated to be caused by smoking fell from 19% to 17%...
Fewer than one in five people over 16 smoked in 2013, the lowest proportion since recording started in the 1940s. More than a quarter smoked in 2003...
So if just under a fifth of all adults smoke, and just under a fifth die from smoking, that means that all smokers die from smoking, yes?
Nope:
The British Heart Foundation said tobacco products still killed about half the people who used them and doubled a person’s chance of having a heart attack or stroke.
Unlike non-smokers, who live forever, presumably, placing absolutely zero cost on the social security system or the NHS or anything whatsoever.
Moving on:
The number of prescriptions for treating smoking dependency dropped from a peak of 2.6m in 2010-11 to 1.8m in 2013-14. Cheeseman [policy director at Ash] recognised rising use of e-cigarettes might be a factor, but said people who found quitting smoking most difficult would benefit from properly structured, evidence-based support from the NHS.
When a lot (i.e. all) of the evidence shows that smokers who start vaping tend to smoke a lot less - which is the whole bloody point of vaping - and very, very few non-smokers start vaping.
Mike Hobday [The British Heart Foundation's] director of policy, said: “These figures show current strategies to help people quit smoking aren’t going far enough... The government urgently needs a new strategy to help people stop smoking. With tobacco companies continually raising their prices...
Cigarette prices are dictated largely by the amount of duty on them; the cost net of taxes is around 50p wherever you go in Europe.
... this needs to include an annual levy on these companies to fund tobacco control and stop smoking services to help support people to quit.”
Actual tobacco company profits are a few per cent of the total tax already imposed on a packet of cigarettes.
Chris Woodhall, senior policy adviser at Cancer Research UK, said: “We want to see a tobacco-free country within the next 20 years – where fewer than five per cent of adults smoke. Falling smoking rates among adults and children show that we’re moving in the right direction, but we must do more to realise this ambitious public health goal.”
Tobacco free = fewer than five per cent smoke?
FFS.
In case you missed it, see reasonably fair write up in The Telegraph.
The revealing bit was when RB was in a cafe interviewing two women who were full-on Category B drug users i.e. whose lives had been ruined by drugs and/or whose lives were ruined so they turned to drugs. Chicken and egg.
The first merrily admitted to still regularly using drugs, despite having been in prison and put on some mandatory, then RB chatted to the other one.
You could see the first one in the background of the shot, smoking a cigarette... outside the cafe.
There's this weird thing with smokers, me included, we are so terribly law-abiding and subservient when it comes to the smoking ban. For example, cheerfully admitting, on public TV that you take drugs, despite being known to The Authorities, but popping outside when you want a fag.
From the BBC
The government has been defeated in a Commons vote on the control that parent companies can exercise over pubs.
MPs voted 284 to 259 in favour of an amendment allowing landlords an independent rent review and to buy their beer on the open market.
So-called "tied pubs" are required to buy supplies - often at high prices - from the companies that own the pubs.
Campaigners said the "historic" vote would help "secure the future of the Great British pub".
Of course it won't. We had beer ties for longer than I can remember, in a time when pubs were thriving. You can argue against beer ties on other grounds, like public choice, but it didn't historically close pubs.
But it's splendid news because at least it's a way of proving that high rents made sod all difference to pub closures, and maybe some of those CAMRA numpties might start supporting a reversal of the smoking ban.
I had my upper wisdom teeth removed on Friday under 'sedation' which is, AFAICS, no different to a general anaesthetic. I can clearly remember him sticking the needle into the back of my hand at the start, at which stage I averted my gaze... and I can vaguely remember them turning off the drip, hoisting me out of The Chair and hoisting me onto a bed in the recovery room, but nothing in between.
You do appear to come round quicker though. I climbed into The Chair at about 9.55 and the first thing I did when I came round was to check the time, it was 10.15. A recovery room nurse once told me that smokers always come round quicker, their systems are used to getting rid of poison.
Her Indoors drove me home and I retired to bed. A couple of hours later, the anaesthetic had worn off and it hurt quite a bit, but no head splitting pain or anything, so I decided to do without the Aspirin I'd bought just in case. Saturday in bed as well, to be on the safe side, this Sunday morning I was right as rain, to be honest.
So far so good.
Problem with all this is, they hand you leaflets telling you not to smoke for at least one day (but preferably two days, but preferably five days) after the operation. They don't say that drinking coffee or booze is discouraged for that long but IMHO drinking coffee or booze without smoking at the same time is just not the same.
Which is all well and good, but I do not function properly without at least six cups of coffee and twenty cigarettes a day. I just remained in a sort of drowsy state all Friday and Saturday with no particular urge to do anything or say anything. Or even complain about anything.
Hence and I why I haven't posted anything since Thursday.
From today's Evening Standard:
Samuel Thompson's claim (Fri) that the smoking ban has improved pubs and bars is only true if you think they should be dreary places no one would want to stay in for long.
Steve Lustig.
From the BBC:
Smoking could be banned in Trafalgar and Parliament squares as well as the city's parks if a report by London's Health Commission is implemented.
Other measures put forward include Oyster card discounts for commuters who walk part of the way to work, and a ban on junk food shops near schools…
Simon Clark, director of Forest, said: "A ban on smoking in parks and squares would be outrageous.
"There's no health risk to anyone other than the smoker. If you don't like the smell, walk away.
"Tobacco is a legal product… The next thing you know we'll be banned from smoking in our own gardens in case a whiff of smoke travels over the fence."
