Stofsk wrote:I think I understand what you're on about. I got confused before, and I haven't had much sleep so... You're right, for addiction to be a direct factor everyone who holds up a store would have to be an addict. This isn't totally true, as you pointed out - not every robber will be an addict.
Yup, that's it.
This doesn't change the fact that the opportunism stems from the addiction, and that the monetary value of cigarettes wouldn't become a factor without the addiction
True enough, but what with all the arguments about cannabis being psychologically rather than physiologically addictive, I guess someone could make a case that we're "addicted" to all manner of items.
Darth Wong even points out that nations have been said to be addicted to petrol. Frankly, I don't know what he's babbling on about, because by this dubious line of reasoning you'd expect one petrol-addicted nation to go out and wreak a violent attack on another nation to rob it's stash of oil and that's hardly... Um.
This isn't the slightest bit surprising to me. Since I'm not in the morally and logically untenable position of defending hard drug prohibition while at the same time defending the legality of tobacco, it doesn't bother me, either (in the sense I don't have to rethink my ideology--obviously, it's horrible someone got stabbed to death over a pack of smokes).
Really, people should have seen this coming. There's already a brisk business in smuggling untaxed cigarettes in states with high tobacco taxes. It's only a matter of time before the business becomes so profitable people start dying.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
kojikun wrote:Addiction, demand, it doesn't matter which it is. It's all the same: A large desire for a produce at the lowest price possible.
No. An addiction is a physical need to consume a certain amount of a substance over a given amount of time. Demand is merely a desire to have something--you may not be willing to give up ANYTHING in order to demand something. Demand has very little to do with prices, and addiction has even less.
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Master of Ossus wrote:Demand has very little to do with prices, and addiction has even less.
Demand has very little to do with prices? Last I checked, we still have a free market economy unless the Communists came to power while I was sleeping...
Crime and cigarettes have been associated for decades, no one's ever heard of "contraband" cigarettes being hijacked off trucks to be sold by the mafia before?
And of course cigarettes are comparable to hard drugs due to their addictiveness. Addicts sometimes do insanely stupid things.
Weakling scumfucks will always opt for the violently stupid choice of theft and assault when confronted with difficulty in obtaining what they want.
If they had two functioning braincells to rub together, they'd realise that you can buy tobacco, papers, and hand operated cigarette machines to make your own at home for 1/10th the price (or less) of name brands, and they are practically indistinguishable from those brands, as well.
I don't understand why this may come as a surprise to the Canadian gov't.
Europe has to deal with cigarette related crime because of high prices over there. If a product is wanted by the populace and you make it too expensive a black market will develop and black markets often involve crime.
Thats fucking sad the shop owner was killed. I'd never want to work in a convienience store. It is not a question of if you will be robbed but when.
Master of Ossus wrote:Demand has very little to do with prices, and addiction has even less.
Demand has very little to do with prices? Last I checked, we still have a free market economy unless the Communists came to power while I was sleeping...
Demand is unaffected by prices.
"Sometimes I think you WANT us to fail." "Shut up, just shut up!" -Two Guys from Kabul
Latinum Star Recipient; Hacker's Cross Award Winner
"one soler flar can vapririze the planit or malt the nickl in lass than millasacit" -Bagara1000
TrailerParkJawa wrote:I don't understand why this may come as a surprise to the Canadian gov't.
Europe has to deal with cigarette related crime because of high prices over there. If a product is wanted by the populace and you make it too expensive a black market will develop and black markets often involve crime.
You don't even have to look to Europe, in fact we had a nice surge in smuggling and black market activity about 10 years ago I think when cigarette prices in Canada (or was it only Ontario) got raised. When the government dropped the prices to help stop the smuggling they were criticized for "promoting smoking" and "being soft on smokers". History is just repeating itself, just with a bit more violence.
aerius: I'll vote for you if you sleep with me. Lusankya: Deal!
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Master of Ossus wrote:Demand has very little to do with prices, and addiction has even less.
Demand has very little to do with prices? Last I checked, we still have a free market economy unless the Communists came to power while I was sleeping...
Welcome to Economics, where today we discover the concept of "quantity demanded" vs. "demand".
remember kiddies, a demand curve is negative and a supply curve is positive. where the two intersect is market equlibrium and this defines the price of the good on the market. dont let your fixed costs get above this line, otherwise you have to go bye bye.
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The Kernel wrote:Demand has very little to do with prices? Last I checked, we still have a free market economy unless the Communists came to power while I was sleeping...
In Canada, the prices are set by the government. They'll set the price wherever they feel like.
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The Kernel wrote:Demand has very little to do with prices? Last I checked, we still have a free market economy unless the Communists came to power while I was sleeping...
In Canada, the prices are set by the government. They'll set the price wherever they feel like.
Oh the wonders of socialist nations. For all the Americans here who wonder why you pay so much for drugs it's because our wonderful neighbors force the drug companies to sell their pharmacuiticals at a state set price. Those governments have decided that if the drug companies don't sell at those prices then they have the right to violate international laws and produce the drugs on their own, stealing what the American companies have spent billions of dollars and sometimes decades of research on developing. This forces the American companies to put the financial burden on us.
Son of the Suns wrote:
Those governments have decided that if the drug companies don't sell at those prices then they have the right to violate international laws and produce the drugs on their own, stealing what the American companies have spent billions of dollars and sometimes decades of research on developing. This forces the American companies to put the financial burden on us.
I assume you can show evidence, as right now it looks like you are just spouting bullshit.
Son of the Suns wrote:
Those governments have decided that if the drug companies don't sell at those prices then they have the right to violate international laws and produce the drugs on their own, stealing what the American companies have spent billions of dollars and sometimes decades of research on developing. This forces the American companies to put the financial burden on us.
I assume you can show evidence, as right now it looks like you are just spouting bullshit.
To someone who isn't in the drug industry maybe, but it's common knowledge. Here's one link to an article about intellectual piracy in other nations. The most amusing thing is that these countries that have been taking advantage of American ingenuity are now paying the price for their crimes. Their own economies which increasingly involve research intensive areas such as computer technology are suffering because people don't want to risk their money on something that can be immediately pirated.
I don't know how close the cigarettes=hard drugs connection can be taken. For instance, ciggarettes aren't a mind altering substance. A cigarette won't make you put you 6 month old in a microwave, or cut your entire face off.
In the convenience store I worked at for 8 months, people ran out of the store with beer. Those that couldn't afford cigarettes in a carton or even a pack raided the 10 cent per (generic) cig jar. I don't think violent hold ups are a direct result of higher cig prices. People rob stores to rob stores. Cigarettes are icing on the cake (money) to leave the store with.
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A friend of mine's uncle owned a convenience store, he was nearly killed a few weeks ago when someone broke into the store looking for stupid shit. I think it's one of the most dangerous jobs someone can have.
I saw a report about a man that has killed several robbers who had tried robbing his store, he was a local hero to the other small business owners, but he was derided by people for valuing his merchandise over the robber's lives. The problem is that when you are held at gunpoint they're just as likely to shoot first as to ask you for the money. The way to help stop the problem I would think is to make sure that people know the owner is armed and willing to shoot ( not that that would stop all people), but I don't know if that's a choice for Canadians.
Darth Wong wrote:Remember how a lot of people say that the distinction between hard drugs and cigarettes is that hard drugs incite violent crime while cigarettes don't? I have just presented Exhibit A for the prosecution. Cigarette addiction is just as bad as hard drug addiction. If the prices go up, the blood starts to flow.
What exactly is the debate here? There are only three numbers at work in this equation:
X = The legal market price of that product
Y = Maximum the consumer is willing to pay for the product
Z = Enough money to get the attention of criminals
If X > Y > Z, then you get robbery. Period. Doesn't matter if it's cigarettes, PC components, booze, Air Jordans, red meat, or cocaine. (Just fill in "prison term" as the "legal market price" of cocaine.) Addiction doesn't have any magical property, it just raises the value of Y.
I don't know who said cigarettes can't cause violent crime. I must have missed that thread. Whoever did was being pretty damned stupid. Anything of economic value can be the cause of violence.
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Sam Or I wrote:It boils down to was he primarly robbing the store for the money, or because he needed a fix.
Why can't he have been robbing for both reasons? Maybe he was going in for cigarettes and a quick bit of cash if he happened to get lucky. It's not like there's any way to tell what someone was initially after without some type of statement confirming it.
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GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:What exactly is the debate here? There are only three numbers at work in this equation:
X = The legal market price of that product
Y = Maximum the consumer is willing to pay for the product
Z = Enough money to get the attention of criminals
If X > Y > Z, then you get robbery. Period. Doesn't matter if it's cigarettes, PC components, booze, Air Jordans, red meat, or cocaine. (Just fill in "prison term" as the "legal market price" of cocaine.) Addiction doesn't have any magical property, it just raises the value of Y.
Y is limited by the user's income. Beyond that point, addiction causes another factor to come into play, which is a willingness to engage in criminal acts (even if you are not normally a criminal) in order to obtain the product.
Price increases in automobiles, for example, are not correlated with crime the way price increases in cigarettes are.
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Darth Wong wrote:Price increases in automobiles, for example, are not correlated with crime the way price increases in cigarettes are.
Yet there's a big black market on the damn things....oh look, that
BMW got swiped off the streets of NYC, hey, it's being loaded into
a shipping container and covered under tons of assorted crap.....
[3 months later]
The same BMW is being sold in Russia by the mafyia.
Where there's government taxtation, there will always be a black market.
I blame the governments for making the prices of the cigarettes
so damned high that the blackmarket is going crazy over them.
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Darth Wong wrote:Y is limited by the user's income. Beyond that point, addiction causes another factor to come into play, which is a willingness to engage in criminal acts (even if you are not normally a criminal) in order to obtain the product.
Is that what is happening here, though? In order to prove the above, we would need evidence of a rise in the number of cigarette thefts committed for personal use by people without a previous criminal record. A simple increase in cigarette thefts, period, just shows that thieves prefer to steal things worth more money.
Price increases in automobiles, for example, are not correlated with crime the way price increases in cigarettes are.
Two things:
#1 - Autmobile ownership is heavily regulated by the government, making it more difficult to pass a stolen vehicle off as your own. Even so, huge numbers of cars are still stolen everyday.
#2 - The automobile market has experienced nothing comparable to the huge across-the-board price hikes the cigarette market has. If the government did mandate massive increases in the price of automobiles, I definitely think we'd see an increase in theft. X > Y > Z.
If Religion and Politics were characters on a soap opera, Religion would be the one that goes insane with jealousy over Politics' intimate relationship with Reality, and secretly murder Politics in the night, skin the corpse, and run around its apartment wearing the skin like a cape shouting "My votes now! All votes for me! Wheeee!" -- Lagmonster
Meanwhile, I must be off to Virginia to fill the boot of my car with
lots of cheap low virginia taxed cigarettes to take over into MD
"If scientists and inventors who develop disease cures and useful technologies don't get lifetime royalties, I'd like to know what fucking rationale you have for some guy getting lifetime royalties for writing an episode of Full House." - Mike Wong
"The present air situation in the Pacific is entirely the result of fighting a fifth rate air power." - U.S. Navy Memo - 24 July 1944
MKSheppard wrote:Meanwhile, I must be off to Virginia to fill the boot of my car with
lots of cheap low virginia taxed cigarettes to take over into MD
You joke, but this is becoming an industry in the Northeast. I have no dobut in my mind as we speak there are cars with trunkloads of untaxed Delaware cigarettes on their way up the Jersey Turnpike.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
For all the Americans here who wonder why you pay so much for drugs it's because our wonderful neighbors force the drug companies to sell their pharmacuiticals at a state set price. Those governments have decided that if the drug companies don't sell at those prices then they have the right to violate international laws and produce the drugs on their own, stealing what the American companies have spent billions of dollars and sometimes decades of research on developing. This forces the American companies to put the financial burden on us.
