I'm worried about what people will think after I die...

[mikej460]

Population increase has not been accounted for in so many ways, the only real winners out of this have been the property developers who mostly build utter shieete and make huge profits but do not contribute to local services such as hospitals, doctors, utilities and local services. It is getting worse because they can continue to build shieete that is not fit for future housing needs because the government has not seen fit to update the building standards to force them to make houses that are ultra insulated that would reduce future energy needs and cost to the owners. Population increase should have resulted in a proportional increase in government funding for many sectors, are there enough fire engines, ambulance and police for example but no, they take the increase in income but waste it elsewhere.

If only the people who make the decisions and run / try to run the country actually thought about what people will remember them as being, or what history will say about them when they are long gone.

The developers pay councils huge Community Infrastructure Levies and they are legally bound to publish what it has even spent on.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/...sh-benefits-them-thanks-to-new-planning-rules
I have read instances where developers apply to reduce this levy as well as subsequently reducing the number of social houses they got planning permission for.

 

[Spectric]

Well it is not working up here, lots more houses whilst local sewers struggle, my dentist is twenty miles away and thats private as no NHS for miles, no well paid jobs but lovely area for retirement, public transport is chaos and in some places just a weekly bus service. As for social housing on these new estates, the developer is doing no one any favours as the social / economy housing is placed in the least desirable location where someone looking to purchase would think twice, ie next to sewage farm, used as sound break next to main road or right next to a Hv substation with pylons as neighbours.

 

[Amateur]

Can anyone give an old fart some idea how to delete Alerts?

 

[MikeK]

Can anyone give an old fart some idea how to delete Alerts?

Are you asking about alerts to this thread, or alerts in general? If the question is about alerts to this thread, go to the upper right corner of the thread window and click on "Unwatch", then click on "Unwatch" in the window that pops up.

If the question is about alerts in general, click on your username in the upper right corner of the page, and then click on "Preferences" in the window that pops up. Scroll down the list of options until you find "Receive a notification when someone..." and unselect any of the alert options you don't want.

 

[D_W]

In our town we have a food bank.
A couple of months ago my wife earwigged two women talking outside as she waited for a friend.
One said," I thought you were down here a few days ago?"
The other woman replied,"I was, but I gave all my allowance to the dog because I had no food for him, so Ive come back to get some food for me"
As they both stood there smoking silk cut at 14 quid a packet.

Another quandary?

That's not exclusive to the UK. Cigarettes are a little cheaper here, but not much. They are priced high under the semi-scam that the extra cost taken from them will help fund the additional public cost care of smokers later (Medicare). It probably wouldn't take long to find that the tax revenue is just going into state and federal general funds.

The problem is it the tax is paid mostly by people of lower means and at a high % of their income. Or put a different way, it's just a demonstration of how people who make poor decisions will continue to make them, and it's deemed OK because it's a "sin tax".

EDIT; looked this up - on the state side here, half of the revenue goes to cHIP (funding for health insurance for low income children - so that's a good thing), and almost half goes to pay for agricultural easements (what?). Not sure if easements are common there, but state and local funding often goes to farmers in the US in areas where development would be gainful as a payment to the farmers for promising not to sell their land to developers.

The page reporting the tax revenue isn't very good about clarifying that's all of the tax revenue from the cig. tax. It probably isn't.

Separate link showed that low income households in NY state (very high state cigarette tax) with smoking residents pay 23.6% of their income for cigarettes. Low income was defined as < 30,000 dollars, so the percent is high, but the income figure would include that and below. It'd be hard for a household with more than one person to live on that (but they probably don't - that's before public benefits).

 

[Keith 66]

Time to give up smoking if you are paying nearly a quarter of your income for it.

 

[sawtooth-9]

Time to give up smoking if you are paying nearly a quarter of your income for it.

What RIGHT does any government have to to impose "legal" stealing on a product which is legally sold.
Whether you smoke or not, THIS IS THEFT !
It's not surprising that the "illegal" tobacco market thrives !
Bit sick and tired of "do-gooders" imposing their will on others - while the governments profit !
Puff or not - you should be angry at the principle.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

and petrol, and alcohol, and ... ?

 

[sawtooth-9]

and petrol, and alcohol, and ... ?

Too true !
People have been "dumbed down" to accept that governments have the RIGHT to steal from us.
Time for a "revolution" ?
Oh, YES

 

[Jameshow]

I ge

Too true !
People have been "dumbed down" to accept that governments have the RIGHT to steal from us.
Time for a "revolution" ?
Oh, YES

I guess the alternative is prohibition.... Or a denial of healthcare to those who smoke??

There again it should apply to road cyclists too and defo motorcyclists!

 

[Keith 66]

What RIGHT does any government have to to impose "legal" stealing on a product which is legally sold.
Whether you smoke or not, THIS IS THEFT !
It's not surprising that the "illegal" tobacco market thrives !
Bit sick and tired of "do-gooders" imposing their will on others - while the governments profit !
Puff or not - you should be angry at the principle.

We pay VAT on virtually everything we buy, we pay duty on fuel, non of us like it but its the price we pay to live in so called civilised societies. Taxing smokers isnt theft any more than paying any other tax, except that smoking kills people & puts ever more of a burden on healthcare services. In that case taxing smoking heavily makes sense to me.
Of course im speaking as a holier than thou smug ex smoker here!

 

[Daniel2]

As already said, a civilised society carries a financial cost which can
only be provided by the populous, and then, ideally, can be
administred by a government.
Where I do take issue, however, is the amount of corruption and
downright mismanagement of resources perpetuated by our
government, it seems to be regardless of political party.
Why does it seem impossible to have an honest, public serving
government ?

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... smoking kills people & puts ever more of a burden on healthcare services...

It's not really an argument as the government take three times more in tobacco taxes than it spends on smoking related diseases. dead people don't claim pensions, either. As an eighteen year ex smoker, I'd be happy to see tobacco banned altogether, although on a personal level people's smoking doesn't worry me - I don't blame people and and I don't get high and mighty about it.

 

[Droogs]

Because the people who are honest, public serving minded generally get off their backsides and work in the charity sector to actually achieve something

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Public expenditure - NHS, education, roads, defence etc etc - needs to be funded through broadly matching taxation. Running a deficit indefinitely is not sustainable.

Taxation all goes into a Treasury "pot" and is doled out to different government departments based on policy, obligations, who makes the best arguments etc etc.

Where and how taxes are raised is a mix of different considerations - ease/cost of collection, fairness (depending how you define fair), changing behaviours (eg: smoking, alcohol, petrol use), etc

Tobacco taxes are not theft. It is taxation to change behaviour and protect the public -a prime responsibility of government. It does not directly fund the additional cost to the NHS - just as fuel and road taxes exceed amounts spent on roads.

Whether taxes are so high as to be an affront to the personal freedom we should all enjoy to do both the very foolish and very sensible is open to debate.

 

[Kittyhawk]

smoking kills people & puts ever more of a burden on healthcare services.

I feel sorry for smokers and I have an intense dislike of tobacco companies for foisting their drugs on the addicted and the impressionable.
Later in life after I qualified as an ambo and got turned loose on the poor unsuspecting public I had one patient that I got dispatched to two or three times every winter. He had smoking induced emphysema which the cold weather would make worse and I'd usually find him collapsed, blue and barely breathing. So I'd put a nebulizer mask on him and pump a dose or two of salbutamol/ibrapropium mix into him and then more oxygen to get his O2 levels up, all the while keeping my IV kit handy in case I had to put a line in and feed him a bit of the hard stuff if he wasn't responding. He would recover though, as much as he was able, and refuse transport to hospital in the back of my little yellow truck and would be reaching for another smoke before I was even out the door. I wanted to smack him one.
He was a tough old bloke until the day he wasn't and there was nothing I could do for him any more.
Every ambo will have a similar tale to tell and its not a very nice story but I don't regret it if it makes just one smoker reconsider.

 

[Amateur]

and petrol, and alcohol, and ... ?

.....Sex and Rock and Roll?

 

[D_W]

Curious as to what the difference in cost of medical care is for smokers vs. non. The mortality rate for smokers is about double that of non-smokers at any given age. I'm sure it varies by age, but it was something like that.

At young ages when the mortality rate is fairly low, it doesn't make that much of a difference.

But I would bet overall, the average smoker has a *lower* cost to society and not great because their shortened life expectancy is anticipated to be in retirement when they are drawing from the economic system, not contributing,

Per capita expenditures for people living through a year often describe higher care costs for smokers, but they are not a realistic picture of the actual impact because they don't account for a smoker's shorter average life expectancy.

This study in the new england journal of medicine discusses this and projects lifetime medical costs to be substantially lower for a smoker than a non-smoker, despite the fact that in some studies when survivorship isn't accounted for, the cost to provide medical services to smokers can be 40% higher per year.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.10...y, lifetime costs,and 18 percent among women.
Just how much shorter life expectancy is depends on who is a "smoker" (how long, and how much), but the typical reduction in life expectancy for lifetime heavy smokers is more than 10 years. Most of that occurring across the population in retirement years.

In simplified terms (it doesn't quite work this way), if the average person lives 22 years after retirement and the average smoker lives 12, it doesn't matter if the smoker is incurring greater costs even at 40% as their relative overall cost of medical care in retirement would be 24% less.

 

[D_W]

What RIGHT does any government have to to impose "legal" stealing on a product which is legally sold.
Whether you smoke or not, THIS IS THEFT !
It's not surprising that the "illegal" tobacco market thrives !
Bit sick and tired of "do-gooders" imposing their will on others - while the governments profit !
Puff or not - you should be angry at the principle.

My comment above addressed this - the idea that taxes would be collected on cigarettes and somehow that would offset the "cost of smokers". The real cost of smokers is that people lose relatives at an earlier age. I doubt the total cost to society is anything as the lifetime lost is mostly in later years (when people are drawing from social programs but not contributing).

The essence of sin taxes in reality isn't to help anyone - it's to find a subset that you can tax without losing votes.

 

[Scarlet Lancer]

It seems to me the USA members have an awful lot to say in a UK workshop.

It all comes down to whether nature has a purpose or an objective, or is it just a pointless merry go round of continous birth offset by death.

The question to ask is why is there a form of inteligent life on our planet and nothing on other planets within light years away, it does seem odd why we are just an isolated group of living beings in this part of the universe. Given we do not know just how big the universe is then you have to accept that there has to be other life out there and maybe other isolated groups but again why, surely everything has a purpose and we cannot just be an accident. Then given the complexity of a human life form are we really saying that just given enough time evolution can produce us from maybe a single celled amoeba! There are really to many coincidences and there has to be something else involved that can glue all the pieces together and make sense and reason to life itself, maybe we began somewhere many light years away on some other planet but got exiled to this corner of the universe like a prison colony of the unwanted, maybe we were the rejects or some experiment that is still being watched to see how things evolve.

I am lost with this to be honest I just can’t see a reason is it a cutting from “Watch tower”?