Was public smoking decreased by market forces or ordinances?

Yeah, smoking is awful, but let the market decide
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in
Reader Weekly
May 11, 2000

The recent debate about an ordinance banning smoking in restaurants raises three issues that aren’t discussed enough in any law-making: how widespread will conformance to the ordinance be; how and at what cost will enforcement be; and how might the same result be obtained by other means?

I am in sympathy with Greg Gilbert’s and others desire to have smoke free restaurants.  Second hand smoke does not make for a pleasant dining or drinking experience.  Many no-smoking areas in restaurants are a joke.  How can you have a no-smoking table next to a smoking table or even in the same room?

I’ve been at Hacienda del Sol where one smoker three tables away contaminated the whole room.  I always asked to be seated in the back room at Louis’ on London road because the smoke from half of the front room contaminates the whole room.  During a long wait for a table at Blackwoods I didn’t bother to get drinks from the smoke-filled bar.  And I only stop at Hugo’s in Brimson if I’m sure I’ll be the only one at the bar.

I’ve talked to servers who detest working in the smoking areas.  They say they have to wash their hair when they get home so they can stand themselves.  And I’ve talked to owners who would rather operate as non-smoking but think they will see less business if they do.

With a no-smoking ordinance, many restaurant owners and employees will be very pleased.  It will level the playing field for them.  On the other hand, some restaurant owners who feel strongly that a no-smoking ordinance is an intrusion into the operation of their businesses will wink at patrons who smoke in their establishments.  And smokers who feel strongly about their “right” to smoke will gravitate towards those establishments.

How much effort and money will the city be willing to expend to ensure the ordinance is obeyed uniformly?  Even if the city were willing to make a big effort to expend the effort, could not those resources be better used elsewhere, say on sidewalks and alleys?  Also enforcement would work in some quarters to further increase disrespect and distrust of government.  This in turn further erodes our ability to have a civil society.

It may take a bit longer, but a private anti-smoking campaign may be more successful and far cheaper than a city ordinance.  A good start is the full page ad sponsored by the Twin Ports Youth and Tobacco Coalition on the back cover of the previous issue of the Northland Reader.

Other headlines for ads besides “Secondhand Smoke is Poisoning Our Children” could be “If Restaurants Take Pride in Their Food, Why Do They Let Smokers Contaminate It?” or “The Wine’s Bouquet Was Magnificient But the Air Was Foul Indeed ”.

Anti-smoking organizations could publish lists of smoke-free restaurants or even ratings on how truly “smoke-free” no-smoking sections are.  They could also provide window signs for no-smoking restaurants that are a bit more inviting than “No Smoking” such as “We Value Our Food, Please Don’t Smoke.”

And we can all let management know what we think of their environment.  If you are unhappy with the smoke in a restaurant, tell the manager.  If you are pleased that a restaurant has a no smoking policy, tell the manager.  And be sure to go back as often as you can.

If you don’t think it will work, consider all the fast food restaurants that are now smoke free.  It was customers that got them to change, not ordinances.  Now let’s work on the better restaurants.

If you think about it, market forces can provide solutions to some other problems that currently are going through courts or legislatures.  Market action could provide solutions more quickly and cheaply than litigation and laws.

Postscript: 2017-11-02
Well, it seems we’ve had a combination of market forces and ordinances.  It is really nice to not even worry about smoke, except possibly on a patio.  And it’s great to walk into buildings without passing a phalanx of smokers.

Now if we can only get smokers to pay attention to the no smoking signs at bus stops.  I’ve never had the nerve to ask smokers if I didn’t make them smoke why are they making me smoke!

Perché maggiore interesse da l'Italia?

Cosa c'è di così interessante su questo blog? Sei davvero hacker russi?

Ralph Nader stealing votes

Blaming Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s defeat by George W. Bush is an issue that will probably never go away.  It came up again a few weeks ago in the Letters section.

The figures below for the 2000 election are from www.electproject.org/2000g and Wikipedia “Spoiler Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

In 2000, Florida had a voting-eligible population of 10,666,193.  5,963.110 ballots were cast for a Presidential candidate.  Ralph Nader received 97,421 of those votes.  That was only 2.07% of the no-shows, not much above those who didn’t even vote for a Presidential candidate, 1.6%!!!

We can only guess how the no-shows would have voted.

I would say that we had something similar with the 2016 election.  Turnout for the Presidential vote was 59.3%.  How would the 40.7% who didn’t show up have voted?  We really didn’t know.

It is too true for election after election:

The only way
To throw your vote away
Is to stay away.

Remember to vote for local offices on November 7.  The local results often affect us more directly than the national elections.

Published in Reader Weekly, 2017-10-23 (as far as I can tell, letters are not published online).

For a deeper analysis, see https://www.truthdig.com/articles/dont-fall-for-it-the-nader-myth-and-your-2016-vote/.

JFK assassination: a hypothesis

I've long believed that Lee Harvey Oswald intended to assassinate John Connally, former Secretary of the Navy, because the Navy would not revoke his dishonorable discharge because of his defection to the Soviet Union.  Was his aim bad or did he think the man in the back seat was Connally?

Consider that when apprehended he denied shooting the president.  Was he lying or did he believe that he had killed Connally.  Jack Ruby cut short any investigation by assassinating Oswald.  That action also has a long swirl of speculation.

Given all the possible interpretations of events, is it any wonder that there is so much speculation about what really happened.  It sure makes the day for conspiracy hypotheses.  (I won't bless these hypotheses with the term "theory"; a theory has to have basis in proven facts,  not speculation.)

See “Op-Ed Lee Harvey Oswald’s little green book show JFK wasn’t the real target”, James Reston Jr., Los Angeles Times, 2016-11-22 for many more details

The No Party

I have been mulling over party names for those who don’t want to get locked into “factions”.  Factions give strong incentives to think and vote as a bloc.  I thought I had a name for a faction free party but I didn’t write it down.

I looked up “No Party” and found “The No Party Political Movement”.  I think it is an offshoot of the British movement to vote no for staying in the EU.  But it has a long list of things it wants to change.  If it was truly a non-faction movement, it would put up questions rather than demands.

“Independent” is an appealing name, but it has been co-opted by political descendants of George Wallace.  The “American Independence Party” claims it is the fast growing party in the U.S.  This is because of the way California voter registration forms are designed.  See “Are you an independent voter? You aren’t if you checked this box”.

Content of character over party

Many commenters are calling for a change in or a replacement for the Democratic Party.  Isn't partisanship one of our problems?  You're either conservative or liberal, right or left.  And then there are degrees of conservative and liberal or right and left.

Maybe we should have people without labels who run for office.  Taking advice from George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., we should avoid factions and judge candidates on the content of their character.  We need candidates who consider the common good above special interests.  And we definitely need candidates who can change their minds with new information.

Posted at http://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/sunday/trump-resistance-radicals.html?comments#permid=24540138.

Real Christians exist, they just rarely make the news

I don’t consider myself a Christian, just a person who tries to be considerate of others.

However, I find it hard to be considerate of those who claim to be Christian but ignore much of the generosity preached by Jesus.

What is a real Christian?  One who

Doesn’t throw the first stone,
Doesn’t pray in public to be seen by man,
Forgives others as he or she wants to be forgiven,
Helps someone not like him or her.

If there are any Christians in Congress as defined in the Bible, they rarely make the news.

See also "Quote of the day: Misuse of the Bible".

Let’s have facts, not factions

Every year the Senate reads George Washington’s Farewell Address, and every year they ignore it.  This also leads to the break-down of the deliberate designation of three INDEPENDENT branches of government.

The quiescent Republicans seem to have ignored Washington’s warning agains factions more than any Congress in decades.

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency.

They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphsof different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves theeins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Please send this to your Senators and Representatives, regardless of party.  Your letters may give them some backbone to take action on George Washington's warning.

One Representative’s take on “terrorism”

”Now we're obsessing over whether the (Nevada) carnage was 'terrorism'," he wrote in a tweet. "If we decide it is, we'll mobilize untold resources. If not, nothing.”’
Jim Times, Rep. Connecticut

“Terrorism, Race, Religion: Defining the Las Vegas Shooting”, Associated Press, reprinted in New York Times, 2017-10-02, https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/10/02/us/ap-defining-terrorism.html.

Jim Himes has also stayed away for the “prayers” for the victims of Orlando shootings.  “There would be, for the umpteenth time, a moment of silence. To ‘honor’ the victims.”
“Why I walked out of the House’s moment of silence for Orlando”, Washington Post, 2016-06-14, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/14/why-i-walked-out-of-the-houses-moment-of-silence-for-orlando/?utm_term=.0511e903c97b.

Wisdom about war from "The Lord of the Rings"

I am rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings many years after my last reading.  At the front of the copy, on 11 Jan 2002 I wrote:

“Do we Orc-hestrate our wars?  We are the Fellowship and our enemies are the Orcs.  We slaughter hundreds of them without qualm and bury with great honor the few of us who suffer more than scratches.  See p. 58.”

On p.  58 I bracketed:
‘Deserves it!  I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death.  And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends...'

Gandolf gave this response to Frodo’s condemnation of Gollum who is “as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy.  He deserves death.”

Staying home changes nothing, you must vote for change

“The real change will come when those who felt compelled to stand on principle and not participate in an election in which they felt they were being forced to choose between “the lesser of two evils” realize the staggering magnitude of the gap between those ‘two evils.’”
“Soul Survival in Trump’s Hell”, Charles Blow, New York Times, 2017-09-11.

Ignoring important papers while praising a piece of cloth

“It amazes me that those who are so adamant about the public standing for the national anthem seem to ignore the Constitution and Washington's Farewell Address, the latter just after having it read as a ritual.”

My comment to “A Rebel, a Warrior and a Race Fiend”, Charles M. Blow, New York Times, 2017-09-25, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/columnists/trump-race-nfl-nba.html?comments#permid=24189583.

The Lord giveth and the Corp taketh away

The New York Times had an article on Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, the work the board does, and some of the opposition to the this work.  See “U.S. Climate Change Policy: Made in California”, Hiroko Tabuchi, 2017-09-27

It is amazing the corporate and “conservative” opposition to this work.  On the other hand, the comments were overwhelming in favor of clean air and the necessary regulation to obtain it.  And the profits to be made by leading the world in providing a clean environment instead of making matters worse.

Thus my title.  You would think that “conservatives” would be all in favor or preserving the clean air and water that “God gave us”.  Instead, they seem hell-bent on destroying them, bringing us back to days of heavy smog and burning rivers.

My own little comment was to a contributor who had been in China recently where pollution is endemic but the government is taking steps to improve the air quality.  I pointed out that “we the people” had enough of the pollution from backyard burning barrels.

Simple solution for a vexing problem

The Logitech Solar Keyboard for my iPad stopped working.  No matter how long I pushed either of the two switches on the right, the keyboard did not work.

My only choice was to type with one finger on the screen.

I looked on the web for a solution, but none seemed to work.

I looked at the situation again a few minutes ago and one suggestion had about having Bluetooth connected.  I checked the Bluetooth settings on my iPad and they were all off!!!  I had turned them off to avoid a Bluetooth connection from my iPhone.

i reset the Bluetooth setting on my iPad, and voila, the keyboard works.

I figure that I saved myself $600-800 dollars.  I was getting closer to replacing the iPad with a new one including several add-ons.

Donald Trump has worn me down

When I read the reports of Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations, I could not get over the feeling that it was George Washington’s worst nightmare.

Washington warned against factions.  Donald Trump is creating them faster than I can even type “faction”.

In his Farewell Address, which the Senate reads every year and then ignores, George Washington warned against factions:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Donald Trump railed against North Korea and Iran.  George Washington warned against being too close to other nations and against being too hostile to foreign nations:

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp
the applause and confidence of the people to surrender
their interests.”

I plan to send this reminder to my Senators: Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar.  If you are a U.S. reader, I hope you will send something similar to your Senators, regardless of their party.

But I have no idea how many real, live U.S. readers I have.  Every so often I get a big wave of Russian readers.  My feed is generally United Kingdom readers.  I get a lot of French readers, but I only have three correspondents in France.  Are these other readers really French, or are they Russian trolls?  I do know that at least one U.S. troll site is really a Russian front.

These trolls and Donald Trump have worn me down.  I don’t really know when I will be inspired to post more here.

Partisanship: quote of the day

“It’s not a partisan issue.  We are working for our republic, and not for Republicans."
- Charles Fried, solicitor general under Ronald Reagan






See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/us/politics/prominent-republicans-urge-supreme-court-to-end-gerrymandering.html

Political sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander

The Republicans are up in arms because Sen. Al Franken, MN-Dem has put a hold on the nomination of Judge David Stras to the Eighth Circuit Court because he considers him "too conservative".  See Star Tribune, 2017-09-06 for more details.

I don't know what the beef the Republicans have with Franken.  After all, they held up Obama's nominee for months in the hope of a Republican president appointing a Justice of the Supreme Court more to their liking.  They held up Judge Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court from March until Donald Trump was inaugurated.

The Macintosh Has Lost Its Way

After some of the problems that I’ve had with the Apple, I reread Guy Kawasaki’s The Macintosh Way.  I remembered it as being about how to design user-friendly software, but it is about all the ways to make a great software company from product design to user groups to interaction with other companies.

What I was looking for is on pages 55-56:

“Great products are elegant.  They may have many features, but the features are tastefully and transparently implemented.”  P. 52

However, "elegant" and “transparently implemented” have gone by the wayside.  See “Computers Under the Control of Magicians”, “Don’t get caught on Sierra”, and “More Update Craziness”.

A counterpoint is “Now Apple’s really ‘for the rest os us’” by Michael Gartenberg, Macworld, 2010-06-23.  But I think things have gone quite a bit downhill since 2010.

Disposable employees, not investments in people

"Middle managers are next..."  reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano".  Even middle managers and secretaries had to have Ph.D.s and were subject to layoff.

I posted the above to https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html?comments#permid=23959553:23960540.

I think an indicator of this problem was renaming personnel departments as human resources.  I’ve also seen the thought that evil is treating people as things.

Sci-Fi with many twists and turns

I just finished ALIVE by Scott Sigler.  I picked it up randomly yesterday at the library just to pass some time.  I finished it this afternoon, partly to avoid other tasks, partly because I wanted to get to its end.

At the end he has a note “AN OH-SO-POLITE REQUEST FROM THE AUTHOR”.  His request is “no spoilers.”  Among other justifications he cites, “A reader only gets one chance to be surprised.”

So, if you want quite a few surprises, I recommend ALIVE by Scott Sigler.  You might find it so intriguing that you don’t go to bed until you finish it.