You're thinking too much about laws and not enough about socialization. People make agreements between each other; lying is a violation of such agreements. By recognizing that a person has a certain expectation and then violating that expectation without addressing that it is wrong, you are lying.
No, the nicotine does that. Everything else just causes cancer.
Nicotine in cigarettes is the equivalent of flaying open your skin when you're sitting in raw sewage: there's all kinds of nasty shit in the sewage, but removing your biggest layer of defense is kind of a bad thing.
It's Star Wars. The characters have always been tropes. The epic hero who finds the power within himself versus the evil empire. Hell, the original movies are easily likened to such epics as Final Fantasy 6 (which came later).
Most people are complaining because Jar-Jar is a goof, Anakin has a lot of teenage angst, the Jedi Council is entirely docile, Padme flips between a stiff diplomat and a flappy-mouthed chick, etc. Thing is, Jar-Jar is from an entire race of people who appear mentally retarded and act like overgrown children; Anakin was a slave child whose only social life was family life (with his mother) before he was ripped away from her, put up on a pedestal, manipulated by an evil sociopath, put into huge emotional conflicts, then faced with the death of his mother and the prophetic and eventual death of his girlfriend; the Jedi Council is made of deeply orthodox monks who value emotional stability and deep contemplation above all things; and Padme is exactly what real-life diplomats and politicians are.
People wanted Anakin to be this bland, cookie-cutter hero who magically turns villain at a small trigger, instead of growing through emotional turmoil and coming out evil. "Oh no, my wife died! Time to be Darth Vader!" is preferred over "Oh man, my childhood was so hard, there were all these people, saying all these things, I'm so confused, I've lost everything, I'm now just pissed at everything, fuck it all!" How do you complain about a teenager acting like a teenager?
If you ever look at interviews or post-war writings by historical figures when their diaries are also available, you'll find a huge disconnect in perception. During the war, you get "nobody saw this happening" and "it's all winding down now, and will be blown over in a few days"; after the war, you get "everyone was on-edge with the thickening tensions in the air" and "the end was nowhere in sight, and we were desperately afraid it would go on forever." People remember a completely different narrative.
Actually, all the money spent on welfare, plus about $100bn (not very much), amounts to $7,125 per person per year in 2012. The rough growth is 3.5% per year or something crazy (total amount of personal income increases by roughly 3.5% per year), so estimate $7900 in 2015, or $658/mo in 2015 for each natural-born, resident, American citizen over the age of 18.
Even at over $1/sqft (I paid less than $1/sqft to rent an apartment), a livable, 224sqft apartment can sell for $300/mo, leaving $358/mo for food, utilities (heating 224sqft isn't hard--I heated my living space for $60/mo for 4 years), soap, toothpaste, clothing, and the like.
By using a dedicated flat tax replacing OASDI, we tie it to total income: regardless of wages, operating costs, or price dynamics, we get the same money. If businesses automate and don't lower prices, they make a bigger profit (not paying labor), and the dividend increases by that proportion (10% more profit means 10% more in the dividend); if wages increase, profits slim down, and the rich come closer to the income of the middle class, we're taxing the middle class same as the rich to fund the dividend. No matter what the shape of the economic situation, we get the same amount of money.
$1.28 trillion comes out of the federal budget, and an extra $0.34 trillion imagined from the state's welfare budget. I actually leave that up to the states: there will be less need, therefor they can slim their welfare programs, possibly even eliminate them; but I'm against mandating anything in that regard. $1.62 trillion total in 2012, $1.72 trillion was what I estimated as a minimum; and the current situation probably changes the numbers a bit, such that we can implement a somewhat smaller tax and reach the same market situation (I haven't examined this yet, but it's a distinct possibility).
The total tax difference is some 3% in the worst case, and that's unbalanced; I can get it down to 1% by adjusting the base income tax brackets (which are slashed in half, mostly), and the worst case falls on the high-income earners. The current public disposition is a 50% or greater tax, rather than a 39.6% tax, on this class; I propose a 40%-42% tax, only if necessary to meet my end goals, which is vastly smaller.
It works. It makes the poor and unemployed a continuous profit source, creating a market opportunity to support them and become very rich in the process. It has a 15-year transition plan for social security (after which current retirees are grandfathered), and a risk control in that it doesn't decree the dissolution of state welfare (which largely drops state welfare costs, but leaves states room to catch my miscalculations and implement some sort of food security for large, unemployed families--a thing that shouldn't exist, but the world is a shit hole). It encourages work by continuing to pay out the same monthly dollar amount whether you sit at home watching TV or go CEO for a major oil company making billions of dollars.
Of all the UBI plans out there, mine is the only viable one. The idea is not new, but it's so newly integrated into the political mindset that people treat it like a secret sauce you can pour on top to make everything better. It's a very dangerous and volatile concept, and *will* destroy the economy if implemented incorrectly. I need people to catch up so they can suggest improvements, instead of "hey let's give everyone $20k/year and pay them $5k/year for each kid they have!" stupidity that will only lead to hyperinflation and a Reichmark economy.
Yeah uh, the Jedi lived on ceremony, so didn't do shit like any rational human being. Obi-Wan let Anakin burn because it would be "of the dark side" for him to kill Anakin and put him out of his misery. This is the same reason Ben Carson talks about the world being 6000 years old and Homosexuality being a form of bestiality.
People aren't rational when given emotional conflicts. In your perception, the moment you backhand a woman, she realizes you are abusive and leaves; in reality, if you beat your woman regularly, she will be convinced you are a great guy and just things sometimes get a little out of hand, and maybe it's her fault, and she should defend you when people talk bad about you because they just don't understand. That's how people work.
Normal human beings are very broken.
It obviously won't really be Star Wars; it won't be the story Lucas wants to tell, and will instead be some sort of mass Hollywood shoveled shit designed to appeal to the modal average and draw in dollars.
Lucas did an okay job with the prequels. Arguably, he did too good of a job: the players are all too human, and Jar-Jar is too fluid and well-executed for the movie. It clashes with expectations: people want textbook epic heroes and villains played the way modern, bland actors portray them, not complex human characters thrust into an epic fantasy.
Nicotine is one of the most toxic substances available to the average person. It makes you much more susceptible to various cancers, organ damage, neurological damage, and so on. Alcohol does the same when consumed in high quantities, but has almost no negative effects in moderate consumption.
Cigarettes also make you stink like shit.
That's the problem with becoming dependant on a behavior that you want to prevent.
I keep arguing for a flat tax to fund a Citizen's Dividend; while the Universal Basic Income guys largely want carbon taxes or wealth taxes, so as to not tax the poor. I tell them, what do you do when there is no longer an enormous gap between rich and poor? Tax the rich even more? What do you do when we switch to nuclear solar power? Let the poor starve? My system fails if and only if the entire economy fails: it skims a bit off the top of all income, and it doesn't matter who is receiving that income or for what.
What do you do about all the lost ticket revenue when you stop having traffic violations? How do police react when they lose the ability to use a traffic stop as an excuse to find drugs in cars?
You stop doing those things and start being honest. I just went to a hearing to argue for the elimination of fines for wrong-way parking on one-lane, two-way, residential side streets. These are those roads with parking on both sides, where you pull off the road if another car approaches from the opposite direction. You do not cross oncoming traffic to park on the left; you are always driving in the lane which carries oncoming traffic. I outlined all of the safety issues caused by right-side parking, all of the legal-but-unsafe maneuvers encouraged by right-side-only parking, and all of the reasons why the safety issue of parking on the left side of the street does not apply to one-lane street; but, most of all, I pointed out that many families in these areas cannot afford a $32 fine (literally: I've had people indebted to me for $20 because they could not survive without it, scraping for months to get it back to me), and that this just gives imperative to learn to shoplift, deal drugs, or engage in prostitution.
Fines terrify poor people. Fines create poverty. Fines encourage crime. You instill fines in poor neighborhoods where you want to control severely-detrimental behaviors; imprisonment works on the upper classes, since fines are cheap. I still advocate beatings for petty crime, because I don't believe someone shoplifting a few cans of Campbell's Soup warrants 30-90 days in jail--which is practically a death sentence, since they come out thousands of dollars behind, fired from their job, evicted from their home, and with no hope of getting back on their feet. Cane them a few times and send them home. If they're desperately hungry, they're going to steal food no matter what you do, so lowering or raising the punishment bar isn't going to change anything; most college frat jackasses, however, will quickly realize they dislike ass whoopings more than they dislike not having DVDs, so there's no reason to go straight to destroying their lives over a $15 copy of Avengers and two cans of Pringles.
How do you fund roads with a gas tax when cars become more fuel efficient and eventually switch to electricity (often generated at home with solar panels)?
The electricity needed to power your car is nearly your home's entire electricity usage. You'd spend more on the charging array than you would on the car itself. I estimated $3.16 to charge a full 300 miles (my car runs 300 miles on a tank and gets filled 2-3 times per month), but some old man with a Tesla told me he pays about $4-$4.15 per full charge. (I use about 300-500kWh of electricity, and usually pay more in customer fees and transmission fees than I do for actual usage: $15/mo each for Electricity and Gas customer fee, plus as much for transmission as the cost of the actual electricity.)
It makes much more sense to take transit tax as income tax, really.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
