America’s new tobacco crisis: The rich stopped smoking, the poor didn’t

> This also describes how a lot of people are poor.

I suppose we should be cheered by your qualification "a lot of," since it seems to indicate that you at least have to acknowledge your growing awareness that some, if not the majority nor vast majority, of the poor are there for structural reasons, rather than shortsightedness.

What of those who are there for reasons other than shortsightedness? What of those for whom shortsightedness is a result of mental health issues? What of those who can see ahead, but see no bright future and are making rational choices in the face of that?

Fortunately, having qualified your remarks in the way you have, you have opened yourself up to a responsibility to think critically about those whom you have dismissed. I wish you the best in that.

I don't smoke cigarettes. I've probably smoked less than 100. I've smoked less than 40 cigars. I've spent maybe $100 on pipe tobacco total in my life, and most of it has gone stale. I've used a Hookah 5 times, just to round out my experience.

I'm not a smoker, but something about tobacco smoke just smells good to me, cigars and pipes mostly, but there are some good smelling brands of cigarettes.

>I've yet to find anything as enjoyable as a cigarette.

I've yet to find anything as a better trigger for happy, emotional memories of my departed grand mother as cigarettes that smell like her brand.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess I'm just saying there can be some appreciation of tobacco even if I don't think people should be smoking regularly at all, and that I possibly have very mixed up signals from 2nd hand exposure to nicotine as a child.

I guess it's one of those things that's so obvious no one actually says it. If you think about it, that benefit is never mentioned in debates about smoking and the appropriate government response. I know because I aggressively scour for such upsides, being the "hipster contrarian". Had I known about the pleasure and stimulation of smoking[3], you can bet I would bring it up every time!

Reminds me of "What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?" [2]

Now you might ask, "Did it never seem strange to you that people would suck this disgusting tar into their lungs if it didn't at least feel good or something?"

Well, no. IME, people indulge in a lot of BS without obvious explanation. For example, people claim to like the taste of alcohol[ic drinks], and that is outright ridiculous -- or so I thought, but it was another case of [2]. Also, modern art.

My model of smokers was roughly that, they start doing it to look cool, and then get hooked, so that they have to smoke to fend off the pain of withdrawal. I didn't think the act could feel good itself!

Now that I think about it, people don't mention the good feeling of other drugs in debates about them either. For alcohol, I had a good explanation: those benefits are taboo, and people use the purported taste and refinement of their "fave bev" as "intellectual covering fire" for what they really want, the alcohol high.

In conclusion, the phenomenon in [2] is serious business!

[1] See, for example, the responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14569775

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...

[3] Incidentally, I read Bostrom's Superintelligence, where he mentions writing the book while being powered by caffeine and nicotine, but I wrote that off (like most purported benefits of smoking) as psychosomatic.