Stuff you hear on the radio

I was listening to the radio on the way in today, and was incredulous to hear an ad put up by the tobacco industry criticising the push towards plain packaging for tobacco products.  The gist of their argument was that nobody knew if it would work, so why bother trying it?  They then try to stigmatise the concept by the several times repetition of the point that the legislation hasn’t been properly thought through by Canberra.

This is as complete a load of horseshit as you would ever hear in your life.  I’m tempted to say that if that’s the best argument the tobacco industry can mount then it’s pretty pitiful, but the reality is that their position is completely indefensible.  The reason nobody knows how well it will work is that nobody has tried it before, you cretins.  It also doesn’t matter how well it works, any improvement is worth having.  Yes, it will damage your brand.  That’s precisely what we are trying to achieve.  The tobacco industry is an outdated, morally bankrupt industry that pushes a reprehensible, dangerous and vile product onto society, and anything that can be done to expunge the weeping sore it represents should be pursued to the utmost extent possible.

Ideally, the tobacco industry would fold its tent, sneak into the night and perish forbid find something to do that makes a contribution to society, but since it’s clearly not going to do that itself, we’re happy to beat it to death one stroke at a time.  While forcing the industry to pay for the bat to do it.

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I was also listening to an ad for a new office building in the Melbourne CBD.  Apart from the normal and expected blurb about location, amenities, pricing, good natural lighting etc, they then began wibbling total crap about how the site was “sustainable” and “ecologically sound”.  So we ask, what the hell does that mean?  Apparently the thing has got a solar panel on the roof, and they bunged a rainwater tank in somewhere.

Guess what, guys?  Big, fat, hairy deal.  Nobody cares.  Businesses care about location, visibility, carparking spaces, access to public transport, whether the site does what you want in terms of size and layout, and how much it costs.  Rainwater tanks are approximately item 1,483 on the list of things they care about.

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I filled the car up on the way home yesterday, paid $1.47 a litre.  Fark.  And then what do I find in the paper this morning?  A report saying that investigators in the USA are trying to subpoena personal e-mails between a man and his wife because they both worked for BP at the time of the Deepwater Horizon problem, the bloke had something to do with the failed blowout preventer, and so they have decided they want to invade the pair’s personal privacy just on the speculative chance they might find something to have a witch hunt over.  Hey guys, a suggestion – go screw yourselves.  If you go ripping oil out of the ground, sooner or later someone will screw up, or something will break, and you need to deal with the fact that shit happens.  Persecuting the industry is hardly a rational action with oil prices through the roof, and I presume nobody is making too many arguments in favour of nuclear lately?

Speaking of nuclear, I’m amazed the coverage of the Japan TEPCO plant problem has faded so quickly, and personally I think it’s because fundamentally nobody like the Japs.  As soon as everyone had had their fill of images of destruction, the media moved on.  It also doesn’t help that while you can take a picture of a boat parked upside down on top of a house, you can’t take a interesting image of 1000 millisieverts of radiation or particles of plutonium soil contamination – especially not from 30km away.