[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
So people should be allowed to smoke on airplanes, in buses, in malls, etc.? That’s what you’re saying, right?
Yes, of course. If the owner permits it.
I may not think that would be a wise business move on the owners part but its not my business whether he drives all of his customers away or not.
I certainly would not do business with such a person, as a nonsmoker.
Except that it is likely that you wouldn’t have a choice, because when things are legal, very, very few ban them.
So you, as a non-smoker, would be effectively forced to deal with cigarette smoke, even in places where allowing it makes absolutely no sense, such as in a plane. And it would have an adverse affect on the health of others, especially people forced to deal with it like waiters and bartenders who might not smoke themselves.
Sounds like a hell of a plan Brownie.[/quote]
Christ, a guy posts then goes to work for a day and look what happens. You bastards have jobs?
Irish, I used to work at a Casino as a card dealer. I did this before the ban was emplaced in Washington and afterwards. I have to admit as a non-smoker it was a lot nicer dealing cards without smoke in your face. That said, it still was an act of majoritarian tyranny.
No one made me work there. No one made someone come into the casino. Hell, in fact wouldn’t you be doing a better public service by discouraging people from gambling by allowing smoking than by saving the health of the non-gamblers from second hand smoke?
We had two rooms in the casino. The room with the table games tended to have the serious gamblers. These tended to be older people with all sorts of other fun nasty habits. They smoked and drank lots of hard liqour. The other room was the poker room. It tended to be inhabited by the younger college crowd. They drank beer and did not smoke.
Both the table games and the poker tables started out in the same room. The college kids bitched and would sit out several hands every hour because of the smoke. The result: a second room was put up and smoking was no longer allowed in the poker room. More college kids came. It was the damndest thing.
About two years later state thuggery revealed its ugly head. Washington passed their statewide smoking ban. The result was the players at my table left several times an hour to go smoke outside. This kept them off of my table and had them returning pissed because it’s cold out there in winter. It made a very noticeable impact on my tips.
I boycott places all the time. I don’t go to WalMart, one of our local chain grocers or one of the local sporting goods stores because they banned the open carry of firearms, a practice legal here. I still went to the bars, and loved the smell of smoke. It may have been gross, but to me it smelled like freedom. Now we are no longer free to choose whether or not to boycott the bars based on our prefences. This also hurts the current bars in town that are non-smoking because they just lost their appeal to a large section of the kids here.
The point of all this is that yes, people do make decisions based on market forces despite the legality of things. Hell, why do you think so many restaurants went smoke-free?
mike
