Last week I was reading some stuff on Tobacco Bonds. Raising money now based on expectations of future smoking. If smoking rate goes down, many Tobacco Bonds will default. Another reason to not actually reign in tobacco. Ouch.
Indeed, tobacco is the devil's weed, Obama is trying to quit, chewing nicotine gum....that will never work. Nicotine is incredibly addictive. Any industry exec who says it is not should just be thrown in jail for crimes against humanity. I quit 8 ? 12 years ago. Long enough ago to not even remember, Long enough to consider it a solid win.
The point?
A plane crash goes down in history, something about 400 human falling to their death from the sky hit's our pysche so hard.
But smoking kill 50 people per hour, 400 killed every 8 hours.
That is like a large plane crash every 8 hours, and yet where is the outrage?
I saw cigarettes in the gas mart selling for $8 per pack, obviously that is not enough to deter someone who is addicted to cigarettes.
Comments? Think about those airplanes. Think of what costs and civil liberties we give up to keep those humans moving through the air, yet turn a blind eye to tobacco.
Short Tobacco Bonds? Don't even know how to research that. Maybe I'll ask my Morgan Stanley rep.
Longest comment for sure, you win! Great comment though, and I was never a 3 cig a day guy...or at least that lasted for a month, then it was back up to a pack a day, maybe with a kicker of Copenhagen to really have an efficient nicotine delivery system going.
ReplyDeletePart of my point though, which perhaps I neglected to make was----think of all the craziness that US has tried to prevent another crash hijacking. And yet there are 100 other ways to accomplish an attack. And think of the price that we paid to prevent the "hijack crash" scenario. And none of our leaders could have foresaw such a thing....and they state this in public. We need to demand better!
I don't want to outlaw smokes, but I do want to stop promoting them, by advertisements, or by Bonds that required continued and growing use.
A little more reflection on things. This is a big one, and it underlies my comment above. Advertising is getting deeper into what it means to be human. THEY, and by that I mean Google and Safeway and anyone who can easily collect data on "What works" will use what works to get the best of us. To sell us stuff we don't need, to offer a hot dog bun on sale and know that people will more likely buy Salsa with that, and jack up the price of Salsa. Everytime you use your Safeway card, you are not saving money, you are giving data to the "Numerati" who is using high tech data mining efforts to "get the best of you". I watch how Google advertises and my consultant tells me their tricks.
ReplyDeleteI see pop up ads on my searches similar to my recent searches for "MC-4 PV connector crimping tool". Even after I have cleared the cache, how is that possible? Something deeper is going on. It is the Numerati that I am warning against. Too much information, too easily collected. Too easy to take advantage of the human species, know how to exploit their weak spots, hit them at their weaknesses, combine a flanking maneuver with a propaganda campaign.
Hi, Steveo, I took the weekend off so I'm catching up. I'm in the ad/marketing game, and have been since '77 (ouch). It is pretty amazing what can be done with the raw data of your searches, purchases, etc. The whole Google approach to advertising really rubs me the wrong way, although they will explain how they're really trying to serve you better by bringing your attention to offers you may genuinely be interested in. Yeah, OK, I guess you can spin it that way. My objection is largely professional--this kind of stuff has ruined advertising to an extent. I mean, doing a funny commercial for some minor product or an elegant headline for a car ad used to be fun. Now, more time is spent counting characters in a 50-character limit line that comes up next to your search. Even the way Google searches are done, the algorithms, are not really fair nor correct, and are a pernicious influence on web site creation. These people have more power than anyone really should.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, sorry if I misunderstood, but it was late and that's why I shouldn't have been rambling in the first place! Pack a day plus Copenhagen...whew, I'm sure glad you kicked that. That is really asking for trouble, all right.
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