Lobbying.
I get what you mean, but that would backfire increadibly quickly.
Civil rights organizations would no longer be able to talk with politicians directly, possibly never, as demonstrations and manifestations could be classified as lobbying depending on how strict it would be enforced.
Environmental groups could no longer invite politicians to important conferences.
Lobbying isn’t just something that monolithic companies do, take it away, and it will only be something the bad guys does.
You’d accept possibly loosing the right to demonstrate or to hold a manifestation or protest?
That is not the world I want to live in.
Keep in mind that the person you reply to isn’t wrong: Big corpos would still be lobbying, as they got the resources to hide it effectively and keep everyone trying to sue them over suspicions of lobbying stuck in litigation hell.
Anybody less affluent would however find it impossible to do any lobby work. Environmental agencies etc.
This is one of those situations where just outlawing something does the least affect the very party you would want to hit most.
Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.
ITT: people so used to lobbying that they got convinced it’s a necessary evil so that minorities and common folks can lobby as well.
It’s clearly absurd. Many places call lobbying with its real name: corruption. And there are laws in place to fight it. Are they perfect? No. Is it then more effective to legalyze corruption? OF COURSE NOT ARE YOU INSANE?!?
Lobbying isn’t the same as corruption.
Lobbying is informing politicians about an issue while pushing your agenda.
Corruption is giving a politician an incentive to vote as you want.
In what universe a politician does not have, nevermind intrinsecally in its raise to popularity, but explicitly active tools and relationships that keeps him up to date with the issues and needs of his community?
I guess in a monarchy.
Guns
They shouldn’t be illegal, but heavily regulated.
I mean, hunting and harvesting meat is far more ethical to the normal meat industry.
Yes. Every hunter is ethical and will absolutely nail every shot to make sure the animal doesn’t suffer and die a slow death. A hunter missing the killshot and instead wounding the animal? Never happens.
/s
Most people in countries where guns are regulated would not get access to a gun for hunting, mind you. Unless your job is to be a forester, which over here includes selectively shooting animations to balance populations if something goes out of balance.
“I want to get my own deer meat from the forest” is not a valid reason to get a gun. Or even a bow!
I like the theory of gun laws in Sweden.
You can only get a gun if you are actively in need of one, there are only two legal way to be in need of one, hunting and competition.
You need to get a hunting license from a school, join a hunting society and be an active member to get a permit for gun, or you need to actively compete in a shooting club to get a competition permit. You also need to demonstrate competence and skill before you get a permit regardless of if you are a hunter or a competitor.
Getting a gun for personal safety is not permitted, and to be frank, it isn’t really needed here, we have few dangerous animals, and despite the rise of gang violence, Sweden is still a safe country.
Smoking. Millions of euros of taxpayer money spent every year on those lung cancer patients which could be well spent elsewhere. It’s also an activity that negatively affects not just the smoker but everyone around them.
Smoking is something I truly despise, we all know that it is bad, really bad for you, we teach kids about it, yet people still start smoking.
Do as New Zealand did, set a cut off year, if you are born after 2015, you will not be permitted to buy tobacco at all.
then have a right leaning government win the next election and roll it back https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/510439/smokefree-generation-law-scrapped-by-coalition-government
Great. You’ve just made another illegal narcotic, a black market and a way of financing illegal activity.
I’d agree with you on that if tobacco was completely banned, but banning from a specific age, seems like a fairly low impact.
What I find amusing is that the cigarettes packages where I live have disgusting images with the potential sickness it comes from its usage, and yet people still buy them 'hey man, this will literally kill you someday" warning does not work.
I thought this was a well known measure but it seems that my USA cousin did not know about this kind of marketing.
They ought to increase it by 2 years every time. That way people have to get clean. Also, we ( US citizens) should take control of all tobacco companies, and wind them down, putting all profits and assets towards addiction recovery services, and cancer treatments.
They’ve been making billions off of slowly killing people for the last 100+ years, they don’t need one more fucking day.
The tax on cigarettes is so high, it’s been claimed they pay more into the system than they claim out, as they die too soon. 🫣 (In Australia)
Australian here, in Finland. Holy shit it seems everyone smokes like chimneys here.
Never really thought about how much smoking has declined in Aus over the last 20-40 years, but yeah coming over here has been an eye opener.
Seems to be a Europe thing, or really a rest of the world thing. It’s very rare to smell cigarettes, particularly after vaping took off.
At least here in Germany this is apparently still not true as smokers in particular add a huge cost to the healthcare system due to the long-term and repeated damage. For example, once they get parts of their feet amputated from clogged arteries, most actually continue to smoke (“Ah well now it’s too late anyways”), and hence will get half a dozen such amputations over time.
Haha I had to go digging.
So it is mentioned in an Australian page about the costs of Tobacco in Australia:
https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/17-2-the-costs-of-smoking#17.2.6
A report commissioned by the tobacco company Philip Morris, when the Czech government proposed raising cigarettes taxes in 1999, concluded that the effect of smoking on the public finance balance in the Czech Republic in 1999 was positive, an estimated net benefit of 5,815 million CZK (Czech koruny), or about US$298 million. 77 The analysis included taxes on tobacco, and health care and pension savings because of smokers’ premature death, as economic benefits of smoking, and these benefits exceeded the negative financial effects of smoking, such as increased health care costs. The report created a furore; public health advocates found the explicit assumption that premature death is beneficial morally repugnant. The controversy was described by the journalist Chana Joffe-Walt on the radio program This American Life,78 and was reported in the British Medical Journal.79 According to This American Life, Philip Morris distanced itself from the report in response to the controversy, banning its employees from citing the findings. In fact, the report’s claim that smoking was beneficial relies on its inclusion of taxes as a benefit, not any savings due to smokers’ premature deaths80 Costs associated with smoking while the smoker was still alive totalled 15,647 million CZK, 13 times more than the ‘benefits’ associated with early death. The net benefit reported in the analysis arose because the tobacco tax revenue of 20,269 million CZK was regarded as a benefit. As detailed in Section 17.1.1, taxes are not an economic cost (or benefit); they are a transfer payment. The recipient (the government) gets richer, while the taxpayer gets poorer.
So darkly amusingly it has actually been reported before, but in the Czech Republic.
Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.
You been hanging out with Sir Humphrey? ;-)
You just trade out legal distributors for illegal distributors while ruining the lives of smokers by cycling them in and out of prison, feeding their need to smoke even more. Bad idea.
Yeah, I’m surprised at how many people here would simply like to add tobacco to the list of controlled substances and add more fuel to the shit firestorm that is the Drug War.
Do I believe the tobacco industry should be far more heavily regulated than it currently is? Absolutely. I actually feel that way about most legal drugs.
But imprisoning people for doing what they want with their own bodies in their own homes has already proven to be ineffective at curtailing drug use and abuse.
Additionally, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and former prisoners is a whole separate topic, but related in that the Drug War is just a corrupt mechanism to feed the prison-industrial complex. Why add another drug (tobacco) to the list of drugs cops can plant on your person and send you off to jail for?
Yeah, and unlike what people commonly think, it doesn’t just directly affect the user (first hand smoke) and the people around it (second hand smoke), but also the furniture and nature around it (third hand smoke).
I despise those cigarettes laying around everywhere in nature. You can even smell them on remotes if someone was a hardcore smoker.
They need help in kicking off from it.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I have less problems with the “luxury” items, such as cigars.
They’re usually hand-crafted expensive stuff that’s made to enjoy once and a while, compared to cigarettes which are mass produced with the sole purpose to get you addicted.
I think the same is true with alcohol. There’s the cheap, mass produced stuff vs the more expensive “hand”-crafted stuff.
I wish we could just enjoy these things without corporations trying to get us addicted to them at every opportunity, disregarding any of the dangers associated with consuming them.
Everyone not having access to a 1-bedroom apartment or living space that is all theirs and affordable. So much crime is because people are forced to live with others they shouldn’t be around and can’t get along with in a shared living space.
Additionally, so many people are driven by the fear of homelessness so they just suck it up to their detriment until they snap and go really nuts and end up with shelter either way
Copyrights
Nope, copyrights isn’t the issue, they enable people to earn money from their creativity, the issue is rather that they are way too long.
Back in the 1780s copyright lasted 14 years after the work was created.
This is fine, the current obscene legnth of copyright is terrible.
I’d be fine with copyright being like 20 years or so, that’s plenty of time to make a good amount of money from your work IMO. But yeah the current system where some corporation gets to keep cashing in on something half a century after the author is dead is pretty ridiculous.
people have always been able to earn money from their creativity. copyright is just corporate greed.
Copyright provides the legal framework to ensure the copyright holder has their rights protected.
We only really run into trouble when we start treating corporations like people and copyright as a commodity in it’s own right.
Non-transferable copyright for the life of the author would be perfectly acceptable.
the statute of Anne was the first copyright law and it was written to stop printers in London from breaking each others’ knees over who was allowed to print the world of Shakespeare who was already long dead.
copyright is a bill of goods when packaged as a protection for creatives.
