Posts by izogi

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  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,

    But I think the cost of smokers in a country that has superannuation is not what you think. It's quite cost effective, really, because it kills off people mostly after their productive life ends.

    In a very dragged out and expensive way though, is it not? Smoker deaths don't usually occur overnight. They're often long and painful, and even if there were no public healthcare system to take a hit, you could expect many cancer-suffering smokers to remain a drain of the emotional well-being (not to mention economic productivity) of friends and family for a long time.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,

    I’m pretty sure thrill is addictive to some people.

    It’s on a tangent but there’s some interesting research from within New Zealand around the skewed risk-tolerance with people who are into things like mountain climbing and base jumping. His sample of 50 committed and experienced mountain climbers had a 10% death rate after 4 years. Also noteworthy is that of 175 recorded deaths of base jumpers in 30 years, only 123 were actually from base jumping while the others were from other accidents, drug overdoses and suicides.

    I think helicopter piloting is another thing that maybe attracts risk-takers.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to mic weevil,

    tobacco are locked in to their product as well.

    It really isn’t, though, except that now it is because they’ve been stupid morons. If a few people in the tobacco industry had, 50 years ago, realised that the industry wasn’t going to last in the western world and taken a step back and decided they were really in the industry of helping people relax or relieve stress or whatever (hell, just make something up), and tobacco was only one of many supposed ways to do that, the same companies would have much more flexibility now instead of just having their backs pinned against a wall the whole time, with a threat of their only income stream being pulled out from underneath them..

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,

    They'll cling grimly on to current profit models until they have no other choice.

    True as you've said, and I definitely don't want to be an apologist for oil corps. I'm just amazed that the tobacco industry didn't try to broaden its own view of the industry it was in a long time ago and adapt to other things. Maybe it's a consequence of the time when everyone started realising just how bad tobacco was, and the typical management reaction of that time became so entrenched that it's never changed.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,

    Corporations want one thing: profits. Tobacco corporations make their profits from one thing: selling a product that kills people and puts a huge burden on our health system.

    Well yeah, but they shouldn’t have to. It puzzles me that over maybe 60+ years of opportunity, tobacco companies don’t seem to have made any serious effort to change their long term focus away from addicting people to cancerous products. You’d think any smart business leader might have started a shift decades ago.

    Even major oil corporations have been slowly re-branding themselves to more generalised “energy” businesses instead of oil drilling businesses, leaving doors open to bring in new expertise and get into alternative kinds of energy as it’s prudent for them to do so, because that’s what they might need to be if and when excessive use of oil is no longer acceptable. (I’m not meaning to paint the oil industry as angels though.) Meanwhile the tobacco industry’s seemingly stayed narrow-minded the entire time and fenced itself into a corner, trying every kind of dirty gutter-sourced trick imaginable to avoid change and keep addicting and killing people for profit. I might have had sympathy if there hadn’t already been so much time to change as science totally undermined the business ethics, but now I just think the idiot executives of these companies deserve much worse things than I’ll ever write here.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Joshua Arbury,

    There's a kind of glorious irony to situations like this because whatever BAT ask for, it seems like they're increasing the chance of it not happening, simply because BAT asked for it.

    Don't tobacco companies often run shell companies and organisations to make submissions on their behalf for exactly this reason? At least that's what I've been led to believe.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Other People's Wars, in reply to Paul Williams,

    I've only just obtained a copy and started to watch it earlier this week.

    It's the same as the one that's available online from NZ On Screen since about May, right? Because that's the one I watched and I'm assuming I've seen it.


    @Keith: Thanks for pointing out the press conference thing. It makes more sense to me now.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Other People's Wars,

    Thanks, Keith. Could you please indicate the reference for Espiner's interview? Not that I don't believe he said all of that. I'm sure I've seen a commercial with him in Afghanistan on a tiny boat surrounded by journalists wearing funny hats and vests, but being stuck overseas right now doesn't grant me the liberty of being up-to-date with everything coming through the kiwi media as it happens.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Rich of Observationz,

    Can someone explain for a lay person why papers can’t just be put on the university website under creative commons? Why do we need the journals at all – other than them acting as “cricket scorers” for the

    It's anecdotal and won't apply everywhere, but when I was doing post-grad stuff a Vic I remember that nearly anything submitted to a journal was probably freely available in the form of technical papers on the department website and variously in conference proceedings. It's not exactly the same as final journal submissions, of course, but often with similar graphics and text that'd just been re-hashed for any journal submissions. Through this kind of open publication it'd have been fairly easy to find out about what someone was doing and how they were going, albeit not in a guaranteed peer-reviewed way all the time.

    Few people would cite a technical paper if they could cite a journal publication instead.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Russell Brown,

    I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every correction should take up time on the 6pm news, but certainly on the broadcaster's website, and perhaps even in a weekly half-hour programme on Sundays.

    Doing this would make complete sense for a news programme. But when the nightly news is primarily an entertainment-styled ratings machine in a largely polarised TV media world, I suspect TVNZ publishing errors (and thereby encouraging more people to report them) would also create lots of new TV3 opportunities to lead its own nightly news with stories about how useless TVNZ is. It'd probably also look bad at the Qantas Media Awardsat least in producers' eyes.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

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