By the way, my Mum had the best antidote to smoking – apart from insisting that it was gross and made you smell gross and made kissing you gross, she also agreed to give each of us $1000 if she found no evidence that we were smokers by the time we turned 18. She’d read that if you don’t smoke by the time you’re 18, you’re far less likely to take it up. Simple.

Right, I’m nominating Miss Chelsea’s mum for the Economics Nobel… a nuanced understanding of incentives, I think!

A teacher friend said that she had to teach “zero tolerance” to smoking, whereas other drugs were supposed to be approached with “harm minimisation” in mind. Slight lack of moral consistency?

Nonetheless, I’m very pleased that smoking has been banned in most public places in Australia. I don’t mind what other people choose to do to their own bodies, but when they make my lungs ill with their smoke, I get grumpy.

(And if anyone wants to see my thoughts on patents, my submission to the gene patents inquiry is a good start. I’d place maths in the discovery rather than the invention category.

And on reverse engineering good technology and patents? You cannot go past Australian Innovation Patent for a Circular Transportation Facilitation Device (something that might give DEM inspiration).

And we subject children to (relatively ineffective) scare campaigns to reduce the (relatively small) risk of drug use, and provide them with perfect conditions for mental health problems like severe anxiety.

A young relative of mine was recently in tears because her parents were “going to die” because they “drink and smoke and do drugs”. It’s just inhumane, I’m going to be objecting if anyone tries that on my kids. F*ck life education, it’s just evil.

By the way, my Mum had the best antidote to smoking – apart from insisting that it was gross and made you smell gross and made kissing you gross, she also agreed to give each of us $1000 if she found no evidence that we were smokers by the time we turned 18. She’d read that if you don’t smoke by the time you’re 18, you’re far less likely to take it up. Simple.

yes, we’re probably going to go back to the days of companies and govts spying on each other or trying to reverse engineer good technology

Uh, we never actually left those days behind. The beef is now that with a bit of research and a $1000/£500 home computer individuals can do it too and that’s just PATENTLY unacceptable!

The various internet filesharing laws are classic examples of the type. If you’re really interested, hop on the relevant French government website and see if you can find them admitting to how many prosecutions they’ve brought. Then express that as a percentage of the French population, controlling for those unlikely to be filesharing (the elderly, for example).

I don’t like these laws either, but only partly because I think that the heyday of intellectual property protection may well be over (yes, we’re probably going to go back to the days of companies and govts spying on each other or trying to reverse engineer good technology). I mainly dislike them because they are attempts to use the law in ways for which it is ill-suited.

Also, most people do not know that detail about smokers and are flummoxed when told (one of my tutors for the BCL helped produce the original research showing that smokers cark it young, thereby saving us money). He has been consistently amazed by this lack of awareness.

And, as I pointed out by tagging the post ‘media’, the moral panic in this case may start with the state, but it grows no legs unless the media pick it up and run with it. Dave’s example of the strong desire among corporates (in this case) to produce a moral panic about downloaders and file sharers is a good one. It’s gone nowhere, fast, because they haven’t been able to get anyone outside their own charmed circle on board.