Oh boy, this is going to be a rant. If you're easily offended, you should probably skip this one (though I promise that no ECF guidelines were broken).
Lately, there's been two things nagging at me. I'll get the really trivial one out of the way first, and in doing so can avoid starting one of those 'Am I the only one who hates... [blank]?' threads.
Tootle Puffer. Seriously? This is all you can come up with? That has got to be the lamest, most fake sounding slang term I've ever heard. It just sounds like something that someone came up with while drunk at a party and three people thought it was a riot, and now they use it all the time like it's a thing. It's not a thing. It's a childish, silly and forced phrase that makes me shudder in embarrassment. I don't know who made it up or WHY, but if anyone called me that on the street I'd feel like punching them in the face.
And anyway what is the deal with breaking up people into smaller and smaller groups? What is the point of that ridiculous 'us and them' thing? There is none. We're all just vapers. We don't tootle, or pootle, or spody oh doh, or 23 skidoo. We're vapers. We vape. Period.
The other thing that's been bothering me lately is the term 'sin tax'. One of the most influential and interesting books I read in high school was Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In it, a preacher says 'There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.' I always loved that line, and as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no evidence to the contrary. So when someone says we have to pay a 'sin tax' on vaping, my response is simply, 'There's no such thing as 'sin', so I'm NOT PAYING IT.'
I'm starting to think the whole movement to ban e-cigs is just to soften us for the eventual bargain we're going to be offered at the last second, which is: okay, you can vape, but we're going to tax you to death over it. That is just unacceptable. I will purchase every piece of vape gear I buy from Hong Kong or China if they do that. If that gets blocked I will make my own juice and build my own mods. Because I'm not going down another road like we did with cigarettes.
The reason, supposedly, for those huge taxes on smokes was to fund better public health. First of all, that's not what they spend it on. Secondly, e-cigs are the biggest boon to public health since Penicillin. They should be giving away free mods to everyone who brings in a pack of smokes, like the needle exchange programs, rather than vilifying vapers and charging us extra for our healthier choices. I mean, really, I'm sorry you borrowed a bunch of money against that tobacco company settlement, guys, but that's not my problem. If you had asked me before you did it, and I said yep, let's do that! (i.e. Voted For It) then I could kinda understand why I should suffer too. But no. Just because you mismanaged an entire State's finances, why should I have to give up a harmless and fun alternative to smoking? That makes no sense.
Lately, there's been two things nagging at me. I'll get the really trivial one out of the way first, and in doing so can avoid starting one of those 'Am I the only one who hates... [blank]?' threads.
Tootle Puffer. Seriously? This is all you can come up with? That has got to be the lamest, most fake sounding slang term I've ever heard. It just sounds like something that someone came up with while drunk at a party and three people thought it was a riot, and now they use it all the time like it's a thing. It's not a thing. It's a childish, silly and forced phrase that makes me shudder in embarrassment. I don't know who made it up or WHY, but if anyone called me that on the street I'd feel like punching them in the face.
And anyway what is the deal with breaking up people into smaller and smaller groups? What is the point of that ridiculous 'us and them' thing? There is none. We're all just vapers. We don't tootle, or pootle, or spody oh doh, or 23 skidoo. We're vapers. We vape. Period.
The other thing that's been bothering me lately is the term 'sin tax'. One of the most influential and interesting books I read in high school was Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In it, a preacher says 'There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.' I always loved that line, and as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no evidence to the contrary. So when someone says we have to pay a 'sin tax' on vaping, my response is simply, 'There's no such thing as 'sin', so I'm NOT PAYING IT.'
I'm starting to think the whole movement to ban e-cigs is just to soften us for the eventual bargain we're going to be offered at the last second, which is: okay, you can vape, but we're going to tax you to death over it. That is just unacceptable. I will purchase every piece of vape gear I buy from Hong Kong or China if they do that. If that gets blocked I will make my own juice and build my own mods. Because I'm not going down another road like we did with cigarettes.
The reason, supposedly, for those huge taxes on smokes was to fund better public health. First of all, that's not what they spend it on. Secondly, e-cigs are the biggest boon to public health since Penicillin. They should be giving away free mods to everyone who brings in a pack of smokes, like the needle exchange programs, rather than vilifying vapers and charging us extra for our healthier choices. I mean, really, I'm sorry you borrowed a bunch of money against that tobacco company settlement, guys, but that's not my problem. If you had asked me before you did it, and I said yep, let's do that! (i.e. Voted For It) then I could kinda understand why I should suffer too. But no. Just because you mismanaged an entire State's finances, why should I have to give up a harmless and fun alternative to smoking? That makes no sense.
