Miserable Brits declare War on Comfort All the year round, but especially during the summer, British newspapers love to serve up stories of American idiocy. These involve US citizens exhibiting strange overreactions, or cult-like behaviour, or generally imposing themselves in an irrational or hysterical way. In a nation as big as the USA - or even a state so rich in …
Look, the Government has gone to some serious effort trying to make you horrible smoking people have to suffer for your evil crimes. Patio Heaters are a disgraceful example of cold evasion, and so it's quite right that they need to be banned.
You might as well go and install a telly on the naughty step, if that's your attitude to being told off.
Being a Brit I'd just like to correct your assertion that we "when faced with incomprehension", repeat "THE SAME THING BUT LOUDER".
We are actually quite a bright bunch over here and personally I'm proud to come from a land that has contributed so much to history and is clearly responsible for some of the worlds best ever wars and most efficient foreign occupations and opressions. We only ever resort to this tactic when trying to communicate with lesser peoples that are not civilised enough to speak the Queens English.
;-)
Prove it, ya paranoid hippie liar.
It's pretty easy to show much smokers contribute to Britians economy. To prove it, in fact. Proving any damage we might cause, that's not easy because mostly, it's just hysterical hair-tearing from the "ew, I don't like what you do!" party.
And the Second-hand smoke studies are without exception as flawed as any company's reporting of "losses" from piracy or data-intrusion.
Hey look, i just brought in an IT angle...
"Setting fire to local politicians might be viewed as a public service in some quarters, the problem is that they are 70% water and difficult to light"
Oh I don't know, with the right amount of accelerant I’m sure they’d be popping away like a Glaswegian "terrorist". Worth a go eh? ;)
What you do or don't do DOES make a difference. Maybe not a big one, but a difference none the less. That said, to all those people who think they need to tell me what I should or should not do, FECK OFF! I am quite intelligent enough to figure most of it out myself.
Shad, wanna know what is *THE* worst offence against the environment?
It's having CHILDREN. The problem in the world today isn't CO2 emissions from patio heaters. The problem is TOO MANY FECKING PEOPLE!
You are part of the cause and undoubtedly wreak more damage on our environment via your offspring than any of us childless people. You are the selfish one and now you want the rest of us to suffer for your selfishness. Well, do your own damned suffering.
What really scares me is that selfish morons like that are the future of the human race.
Except - England is going to be underwater and suffering storms anyway. This is what's wrong with the whole C02 debate; we should be preparing for the consequences of a change world (because if it turns out to be NOT entirely man-made, which will almost certainly be the case, we're screwed), rather than obsessing over trivial crap like patio heaters, because despite our "example" the Chinese and Indians aren't going to give up a car in every garage and a mobile in every hand - as far as their concerned, why should they?
I've been travelling around the world for the last year (7.6 tonnes of C02 - oops) and none of the 25 countries I visited have this hysteria about C02, even Australia and New Zealand (who are at least as "threatened") don't beat the population over the head about it every five seconds like they do here. We sit on our tiny island making ourselves miserable, AND IT WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE,apart from generating tax revenue.
"I'm slavishly addicted to a crap drug, and now that they make us go outside to smoke it I want to send the energy from burning fossil fuels into the stratosphere so I don't have to wear a jumper".
I suggest an Orlowski pledge: "I will never click through an advert on the Reg in an Orlowski article or during a session in which I have come to the Reg through an Orlowski article." He's obviously an effective troll, so all we have to do is turn him into a bandwidth drain for the Reg.
I agree we shouldn't use another country's problems as an excuse for not addressing our own. However I honestly don't think patio heaters are anything more than a symbolic target. Yes they're unnecessary luxury but how many people actually have one and can afford to run it regularly (or would even want to as temperatures keep getting warmer)?
I think railing against them deflects attention away from the bigger picture of energy usage in general and runs the risk of antagonising people for relatively little environmental gain. If half of England goes under the waves it will have less to do with patio heaters and more to do with greenhouse emissions from cars, coal fired power stations and cows.
Patio heaters *don't* work by warming the air: they use radiant heat. The metal mesh surrounding the burner does the same job as a gas mantle, except that it "incandesces" mainly in the infra-red. This is then reflected from the top of the heater onto the people below. (At least, this is how the expensive ones work. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some manufacturers are cutting corners to save a few pence on production costs and selling cheap patio heaters which convect more heat up than they radiate down.)
If you make sure that the heater is "shining" on you, and you turn it off when you leave the table, you can do a lot to minimise gas consumption.
Or ..... you could get a wood-fired chiminea, which is only returning CO2 to the atmosphere that was removed by the trees growing in the first place. And it doesn't look half as ugly!
Anyway, there is a worse waste of gas than outdoor patio heaters -- and that is standing-pilot gas boilers (especially the Glow-Worm Combi, which is so badly-designed that it needs to run the electric fan all the time just to keep the pilot alight!) Electronic ignition-on-demand has been around since the 1970s, and it actually costs less to build a boiler with electronic ignition than one using a permanent pilot; but manufacturers did not introduce EI across the board for "perceived value" reasons. Every one of those pilot burners is wasting enough gas each week to cook two full Christmas dinners.
If we managed to modify every single gas appliance in the country way back in the 1960s with the changeover to North Sea gas, we could do it again now.
"Oh, and spend insane amounts of money on bendy buses which kill (carbon neutral) cyclists."
I read a statistic somewhere that around 90% of fatalities to cyclists involve collision with an HGV or a bus. I would hazard that most of these fatalities follow the same model, the cyclist is killed when the bus or HGV turns left across the cyclist, and runs him/her over which seems to have been the case with the bendy bus/cyclist intersections.
Since I am a cyclist (and regularly ride in combined bus/cycle lanes), I will tell you the awful truth about these accidents.
They are almost all the fault of the cyclist.
Virtually the only way to get seriously squished like this is if you are sat in the drivers blind spot, or be otherwise not visible enough in his mirror. Riding in the blind spot of an HGV is really a terrifically stupid thing to do. Usually fatally so, in fact.
Cyclists need to have excellent anticipation skills, more so than car drivers, to avoid hazards like being stuffed down the side of a bus at a busy junction[*]. Those who fail to develop such skills end up as road jam.
[*] That and the fact that 90% of ~drivers~ on the roads appear to be complete and utter idiots with all the anticipation skills of a distracted goldfish, but that's another rant.
Since you asked...
1. The lost revenue will be offset by reduced medical costs. The government will quite likely come out ahead.
2. Companies should merely subtract the cost of unsold tobacco products from the profits they have already made. Its a risk. That's how business works.
3. Few jobs are entirely reliant upon tobacco. Those whose livelihood was utterly dependent upon sales of smokes could be retrained. For instance they could become patio heater salesmen, bean sprout farmers or family planning advisors.
I see the journalist that wrote this lazy article chooses to berate Ken Livingstone over his lack of qualifications in thermodynamics. Well I would be interested to hear what Andrew Orlowski's expertise is in this area. Anyway, for his information the efficiency of thermodynamic systems is expressed in terms of the percentage of useful work done or useful heat output by a given unit of input energy. In the context of warming up people, then expending the vast majority on heating open air and surroundings is manifestly inefficient. A typical patio heater (looking at a few catalogues) might have an output of 12KW - some are much higher. That's almost as much as some domestic gas boilers peak output designed to heat an entire house and hot-water system (average energy usage by a boiler will be much lower than that as the thermostats kick in).
The word he is struggling with, is effectiveness - yes, patio heaters would be effective at keeping you warm given enough energy output (just as an Oil Refinery fire was fairly effective at warming up a limited area on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead). But there is no way they can be considered thermodynamically efficient if the aim is to keep people warm.
So if you are going to be sarcastic about politicians (and I've no problem about that, when properly targetted), at least try and be familiar with at least the basic principles of what you are writing about.
This is not to mention the even more lazy attitude of not attempting to address the real facts, figures, impacts and options and preferring to just label those whose views he finds inconvenient as "miserablists". Now I'm not one of those that labels all human activity as destructive or goes for the trite simplification (TV's on standby are destroying the world). However, blind faith in the face of objective evidence to the contrary are not traits I am comfrotable with.
And yes, I was trained as a physicist, and if I may use a thermodynamic term in a different context, congratulations on such a high-entropy article...
Your ignorance is showing.
1. White middle class birthrates are in decline. Our children are not the problem.
2. I do not have children either as I happen to agree with you, this world is massively overpopulated. But to fix that you need to talk to the Chinese and Indians who can not seem to keep it in their pants.
3. This thread was about pattio heaters - IE trying to heat the outdoors.
But as you now mention that not only are you greedy, lazy and selfish, you are a smoker too. Whether or not second had smoke causes harm, it causes disgust in the people around you who are inflected with its stench, which ruins their clothes, hurts their eyes and really quite reduces their fun.
Just so you can indulge in a cancer causing substance that you know full well is harmful to you and those around you.
Now, I suppose you would have me believe that if we were in a pub together and I kept farting in your face, you would not be upset. It would not bother you at all would it, because farts have never been shown to cause cancer. They just stink up a place and pollute the shared environment. Right?
BS, you would get pissed off (especially as drunken smokers are not usually the most stable of people to start with). Smoking is actually quite a bit more disgusting to non-smokers (by the way jack off - I SMOKE!, and even I can not stand the smell of other peoples smoke).
So, as a white, middle class smoker who likes to have as much fun as the next guy, I do have enough intelligence, maturity and compassion for my fellow man to try not to have any of my excesses impact any other person but me.
But then again I am talking to Neanderthals of the era past. I have to try to remember as less evolved humans, you Neanderthals are not actually physically capable of understanding advanced concepts like critical thinking (as demonstrated by your child like denial of clearly observable, measurable and falsifiable evidence (what we Sapien Sapian's call "science"... we have a term for your way of thinking too - "wishful").
I would like to have kids one day, but the cost that would be borne by them due to the selfishness and complete denial of any self-responsibility your actions make that a very tough thing to want to do. We would be asking more of them than any of us have a right to ask.
If you are a childless boomer, do not take your failings out on the rest of society because you are incomplete as a man.
If you are the child of a boomer, then I have little to say because you are the single most spoiled and selfish generation this world has ever seen and until you eventually all die off, we will continue to suffer.
If you are a GenXer, then what the hell is wrong with you? You know better. Or are you doing what we GenXers love to do and thats simply playing devils advocate?
If you are the Child of a GenXer (an incredible bunch of kids and the hope of the next generation), then WTF!?!?! You definitely know better.
Cheers
Enjoy your smoke and your brew.
Cheers guys I was starting to think this whole country was infested with envirofags.
I can't wait till this "carbon footprint" bollocks is forgotten - O a comment I heard that I like.
"all these green bastard companies keep telling us to buy organic stuff, buy lcd tv's, buy energy efficient cars.............. but you never hear of any of them telling you to just buy less"
Let's just build the damn nuclear power plants and be done with the problem.
P.S. places built on floodplanes deserve to get flooded - the clue is in the fucking name
P.P.S. people who live down river of flood defended former flood planes should kill the people futher up river and smash down their defences.
P.P.P.S. People should install some decent drains, it's England, it sometimes fucking rains.
Sorry, the government raises approximately 10 times the amount of taxes as cigarette smokers and their victims cost in terms of medical expenses.
It's a well hidden fact. Cigarette users more than pay their way. On the other hand what price do you put on the life of someone working in a pub that allowed smoking?
And before you say it, why should they change their job? If your job introduced something life threatening on a daily basis would it be fair for your boss to just say, "well you don't have to work here"? No, he would be hammered by health and safety.
But for those that insist on saying that smokers cost us money, you're full of crap. And the numbers come from studies done over a decade ago - so the continual increases in taxes have only made it more disproportionate.
Raising taxes on cigarettes has done fuck all to reduce tobacco use, over pays medical costs to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds (and dollars because the same is true in the US).
It was stopping the TV adverts, taking cigarettes out of the hands of movie stars and hammering big tobacco for using cartoons to ensnare children into smoking that has reduced nicotine addicts.
So it's a very salient question to ask where the money will come from if everyone stopped smoking. I'm happy for them to puff away in their millions forever, as long as they're not standing right next to me when they do it.
I can tell you exactly where the lost tax revenue is going to be made up.
The fag tax was ideal for the Government. Smokers are addicted, therefore they have no choice but to keep paying. Assuming the government don't legalise heroin -- which is reasonable given the time and effort they've devoted to demonising it -- then the next sensible place to impose a tax is on another biological necessity.
Food.
The public have already been groomed to accept that there is an obesity epidemic. What else would explain the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa in school-age boys? I can predict that within two years, there will be a tax on "unhealthy" foods. The scope of that tax will widen as more foods are discovered to be unhealthy, or perhaps considered as precursors to unhealthy foods (after all, if you can make chips out of potatoes, then shouldn't potatoes be taxable?) In time, the food tax will be so broad in scope that you won't be able to buy an organic rocket salad with oil-free, egg-free, salt-free, vinegar-free, taste-free dressing without paying tax on it. And nobody will even remember that it was ever meant to have begun as a way of punishing unhealthy eaters. Allotmenteering probably will be regulated if not banned altogether (after all, we can't have those peasants growing their own food and evading taxes into the process ..... expect some sort of spin-driven scare story about plant diseases being communicated to farms from unregulated private vegetable growing. This could also be a way for the agrochemical lobby to clamp down on organic farming, which will do them out of a job if it becomes widespread).
By the way, the answer to the "but you don't *have* to work in a pub where smoking is permitted" situation (except you do in practice, because walking out will prejudice your entitlement to the dole) would have been to give workers free rein to walk out on a job without penalty, if and only if they were unhappy with their employers' smoking policies.
According to some NASA guy, continuing at our present rate of pollution output will cause sea levels to rise by 5m in the next 100 years. The bad news is that 10% of the world's population lives within the 5m above sea level line. The good news is that this will put most of London and New York under water!
Where can I get a couple of those patio heaters?
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