Interesting Links for 28-06-2012
Jun. 28th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Green transport schemes given £266m
- 7 Highly Influential Games You've Never Heard Of
- Barclays committed fraud on a massive scale. Laying about interest it was paying, along with other banks.
- Physics Homework taken from The Avengers (spoilorz, obvz)
- A Jew-Hating Elmo In Central Park. What? I mean, What????
- I am now very curious about impending MMO "The Secret World"
- 15 Greatest Planks of the 2012 Texas Republican Platform
- New vaccine for nicotine addiction.
And then they suggest giving it to children. I do not approve.
- You can now get my links on Facebook
- 10% of people pushed into forced marriages are men.
- Government unveils plan for Muppet House of Lords
- Deadly Premonition: Twin Peaks as a video game. Sounds both awesome and awful at the same time.
- The great myth of urban Britain - guess what percentage of the UK is actually built on....
Ok, can we pave a little more of it over now, so that we can bring housing costs down?
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New vaccine for nicotine addiction.
Date: 2012-06-28 01:07 pm (UTC)The place for preventing nicotine addiction belongs to improvements on the existing methods of education and legal sanctions to keep tobacco out of the hand of minors and to persuade people not to take it up.
The addiction to smoking is much more than a mere physiological response. Smoking is a habit and even a lifestyle as well and curing the addiction requires a multifaceted approach.
My husband has since quit, but there was a time when he would have continued smoking out of habit even if the physiological response had been removed.
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Date: 2012-06-28 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 01:11 pm (UTC)Sales taxes spread the burden out, but do not address the real inequalities in the tax burden.
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Date: 2012-06-28 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 02:07 pm (UTC)Unless the sales tax itself is 40 percent that means more money in their pockets.
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Date: 2012-06-28 02:34 pm (UTC)I guess I'm used to UK tax which has an amount you can earn tax-free, then a 20% rate for most ordinary earners, then a 40% rate for reasonably high earners, then a 45% (previously 50%) rate for very high earners. (Done in the sensible way where the higher rate only applies on the amount over the threshold, so there's no sudden taxation jump at the boundaries.)
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Date: 2012-06-28 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 11:15 pm (UTC)Of course you can easily skirt this by registering a company and declaring it to be unearned income paid out through dividends which gives the tax rates you list, but largely only richer people can do that.
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Date: 2012-06-28 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 01:52 pm (UTC)Meanwhile the poor currently have about 40 percent of their pay taken out of their paychecks for federal taxes before they even get paid.
A national sales tax would therefore give an immediate 40 percent pay raise to poor people.
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Date: 2012-06-28 01:55 pm (UTC)A sales tax is a very regressive tax, but I suppose it is better than the rich paying nothing at all.
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Date: 2012-06-28 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 01:40 pm (UTC)10%? Is that all?
Date: 2012-06-28 12:12 pm (UTC)It's a bit mean to assume that the bloke involved is always a-ok with having some poor woman forced to marry him.
This just means that 10% of the UK-based people who've contacted the forced marriage unit for assistance have been men.
That could be for all sorts of reasons - not wanting to reveal a sexuality-based reason for the action their family are trying to take; narratives on masculinity that prevent them feeling they can or should ask for help; the fact that nearly all of the publicity etc around forced marriage is aimed at women (and therefore men may assume the help is not available to them)...
My reaction to this would be that it's an alarm bell that means the people operating these units need to look at how they're framing the conversation. It's a red flag that they're probably doing it wrong.
Re: 10%? Is that all?
Date: 2012-06-28 01:49 pm (UTC)Urban Britain
Date: 2012-06-28 01:10 pm (UTC)Whenever I drive through Edinburgh's bungalow land I get frustrated at the amount of space used profligately.
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Date: 2012-06-28 01:37 pm (UTC)http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/06/impressions-from-the-final-secret-world-beta/
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Date: 2012-06-28 05:55 pm (UTC)Seems to be general agreement that as a game it's nothing special, but plotwise it's awesome.
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Date: 2012-06-28 05:42 pm (UTC)Though why do you disapprove? We vaccinate children against all sorts of stuff. We don't want them to start smoking. Doesn't this lessen harm?
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Date: 2012-06-28 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 07:55 pm (UTC)I wouldn't get them vaccinated against cocaine, heroin or skydiving either.
Protection against disease or arsenic, sure.
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Date: 2012-06-28 08:29 pm (UTC)With the vaccine as hyped, it's not that you can't smoke, it's that the nicotine is mopped up fast enough that it's not habit-forming. It's not stopping you doing it (which I would have slightly more of a problem with), it's just stopping it being addictive.
(One concern I'd want tested out before wanting the thing for me or my kids is whether in practice this has the perverse effect of meaning people smoke more because they perceive it as easy to stop.)
Something with the sort of effect as, say, disulfiram would be a different matter. Disulfiram is used - very occasionally - to try to treat alcoholism: it makes you very very sensitive to alcohol, so if you drink the tiniest amount (even the amount you might get in medicine) you become shaky, headachey and really pretty ill. To my mind that's different because it causes harm, rather than simply removing harm.
Protection against disease or arsenic, sure.
But addiction is widely classified as a disease. In terms of harm caused, alcoholism and nicotine addiction are up there in the top lists of avoidable morbidity and mortality. Do you think addiction isn't a disease, or shouldn't be?
And arsenic is a mild stimulant and has been used as such recreationally. Famously it gives one lustrous hair. It's also an antibiotic - discarded in clinical practice in favour of newer drugs with a better therapeutic window, but with drug resistance growing I wouldn't want to put even rubbishy weapons like that beyond use.
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Date: 2012-06-28 08:30 pm (UTC)Value is subjective. I do not get to make choices for other people unless I _have_ to.
If someone likes the affect that nicotine has on their system I might consider that odd, but it's their feeling, not mine.
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Date: 2012-06-29 12:34 pm (UTC)By the same argument, nicotine is addictive, encouraging people to continue to smoke, which encourages others to smoke too (not sure whether you can become addicted by passive smoking, but peer pressure is certainly a factor). Therefore, by reducing the group of people who can be addicted to it, it might stop spreading fast enough to die out.
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Date: 2012-06-28 05:53 pm (UTC)Oolong vs. Buchu
Date: 2012-07-01 03:22 pm (UTC)Re: Oolong vs. Buchu
Date: 2012-07-01 03:23 pm (UTC)Possibly not in the US?