Your Fucking Meter Killed My God Damn Dog!!!
Tom, my line of reasoning is thus: If it harms no one, but is beneficial to some, that makes it beneficial.
By your logic, I may or may not have been born, since only one person signed my birth certificate.
Besides, this isn’t something that we can prove, since it’s all a matter of perspective.
And to defend myself: My earlier post (the one insulting biblio) was intended as a joke. Since this thread didn’t contain any flames yet, and was therefore not pit-worthy, I flamed the only oppositional opinion provided to make it pit-worthy. That was the only intention of the post.
And Satan, don’t you ever talk shit about my handle again, y’hear me?
I don’t suppose that thread had the Daily News and NY Post from when the Yanks won the world series last year, did it?
Yer pal,
Satan
[sub]I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Four months, two weeks, one day, 21 hours, 54 minutes and 52 seconds.
5516 cigarettes not smoked, saving $689.56.
Extra life with Drain Bead: 2 weeks, 5 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes.[/sub]
"Satan is not an unattractive person."-Drain Bead
[sub]Thanks for the ringing endorsement, honey![/sub]
Oops, I didn’t see Satan’s post until after I had already posted. Which is too bad because I pretty much just repeated what he said. Sigh. Oh well.
Satan, if I had to think of a problem, I would say that it’s a bit long. But that doesn’t bother me, so long as you only attach it to posts that are somewhat long. But it is a bit annoying when 90% of your post is a sig. But that’s not usually a problem, since you tend to be a bit long-winded.
Satan,
Clearly somebody has been “somehow upset”, since somebody started this thread, but that’s beside the point.
I have no quarrel with the number of smoke-free days or with the account of money saved, but one thing the meter does do is present a misleading account of the relationship between cigarettes smoked and life saved.
Although the health effects of smoking are highly dose-dependent, it is simply not the case that one cigarette foregone = 10 minutes of life saved.
There is some immediate health benefit, on day one, to stopping smoking; reduced risk of infection, etc. After that the risk of contracting a smoking-related disease falls geometrically for about ten years, until it is not much greater than that of somebody who never smoked.
In other words, your risk of contracting a smoking-related disease is still much, much closer to that of a smoker than that of a non-smoker (as is mine) and it probably will be for the next five years or so. You have to stop and stay stopped forever in order to get any real health benefit at all, so you haven’t, as yet, gained or lost any days of life at all.
They way you are presenting it might encourage some people to juggle the risk by smoking one or two fewer cigarettes a day, or by giving up for short periods, rather than stopping entirely.
No. The whole point is not that these things are proven not to work, but that they are not proven to work. The former indicates that the “treatment” is useless and possibly harmful, the latter that more evidence is required.
That is not what you said at all. What you actually said was, “my meter has encouraged no less than half a dozen people to quit smoking, which even the happiest current smoker would say is a good thing.” i.e. Nobody would disagree that it was a good thing, since a few people said it helped. There is a world of difference between something which is undeniably good (e.g. antibiotics for tuberculosis) and something which a few people said was helpful (e.g. copper bracelets for rheumatism).
The bottom line is that “a few people said it worked so it must be good” (the standard line of the diet pill, vitamin supplement, cure for cancer, snake-oil merchants) is at best a totally lame argument and at worst dangerous.
Freak,
Agreed. In fact, pretty much a tautology. My point is that both those points remain to be proven in this case.
No, since proof of your existence is not dependent on your birth certificate. A better example would be that the Loch Ness Monster may or my not exist since only a few people claim to have seen it (but rather more, I’ll bet, than claim to have been helped by Satan’s meter).
Actually, it is something we can prove. It’s not practicable for us to do so, but in theory the proof is there to be had by comparing a group of people who are giving up smoking who have seen Satan’s meter with a matched group (i.e. a group of people with similar characteristics) who haven’t seen the meter.
I’m just curious as to how Satan updates the meter…
Do you even read the posts?
Gee, obviously humor is lost on you…go read the OP again, twit.
And in case you’re wondering, there’s * no way * to prove that something does not hurt. All you can do is say that “as of yet, there is no evidence that it hurts”. Heck, you can’t even prove that water is harmless to drink, the best you can do is say that all evidence points to it being necessary for life and without side-effects. Might turn out sometime in the future that we were all backwards, and there’s something better we should have been drinking all along (like beer). Not very likely, but possible. You just have to go by what the evidence to date shows.
So far, there’s evidence that Satan’s meter helps and none that it hurts. Simple fact. Or is that too hard to understand?
Note to self:
Do not try to be funny, ironic, or clever. Any idiot with a double digit IQ would realize that the O.P. I wrote is in fact a not so veiled compliment to Satan’s continued smokelessness.
I would also think that the meter is a public and personal affirmation of this. One is probably less likely to revert to smoking if one has widely publicized their quitting.
I feel quite sure that the meter and Satan’s example has probably inspired several folk to give up the butts. Even if that is not true it has CLEARLY helped Satan. Therefor its net effect must be positive.
The exact nature of the “life saved” portion of the meter is clearly not a warranty, but more in the nature of an actuarial average with the proviso of continued smokelessness.
This should be obvious to anybody who thinks about for ten seconds and has at least half their neurons firing. Therefor within its context, it is accurate.
My peccadillo was in merely preferring a more tangible measure of the quality of life achieved by continued smokelessness than a simple quantity of “life” i.e. orgasms.
In that same spirit, if one now notices Satan’s modifed sig, one can also see a flaw. It’s been modified to “extra life with Brain dead.” This of course is predicated on Brain dead surviving Satan rather than predeceasing him. If Brain gets stepped on by an elephant at age 96, it may not be a positive that Satan gets to hang around without his love for an extra couple of years.
I’m still trying to figure out why the major hissy fit over a sig line. Other than lengthy prose poems longer than most posts, I don’t care a whoop in hell about sig lines, metered or unmetered.
The debate over the accuracy and efficacy of Satan’s sig reduced to me to hoots of laughter after taking a gander at other sigs. If we’re gonna start requiring documentable justification for most of ‘em, gonna be a lot of hurtin’ campers around.
Wandering away,
Veb
I guess Sgt. Veb of the Thought police doesn’t get it either.
You just keeping walking you Franco Amish Bastard!
Scylla, just cheese it, okay? I mistook you for a female, for which I apologize, but the knee-jerk attacks are getting stale. If you can’t handle disagreement better than this maybe the Pit ain’t for you.
If you’d bother to read what I posted, I was laughing over the convoluted debate over Satan’s sig. Yeah, I got the tongue in cheek nature of your post.
Now try to restrain your Inner Pit Bull, look at the dizzying (not to mention insane) variety of sigs and try, just try to apply reasonable debates to them.
Whooosh!
Gee, wonder why more people don’t associate your posts with a whimsical, droll sense of humor.
Veb
I don’t care what anyone says, Satan’s sig cured my gout. Hallelujah!
Its time to defend Satan. His ability to stop smoking is to be commended. His use of the words " I,Me,My, and Mine in almost every sentence he writes is whats deplorable. But Some people just need the attention, I guess.
OK, OK, I have seen the light. Hallelujah!
It is clear that Satan’s sig is proven to help smoking cessation.
It causes the lame to walk and the blind to see, it aids weight loss as part of a calorie-controlled diet, it could help reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke and it contains all the vitamins and minerals you need for a balanced diet. As an additive to gasoline, it improves mileage by up to 20 per cent and it washes whiter than Persil.
It is kind to animals and small children, it helps old ladies across the road and does a lot of work for charity (though it doesn’t like to talk about it). Is says “no” to drugs, it gets good grades in school and it always says “please” and “thankyou”.
Is everybody happy now?
You know Veb, I would have thought it would be impossible for anybody to take my last post too seriously.
You think “Franco Amish bastard is a real insult?”
Check the air over thine own head before you cast the woosh unto your neighbor. Or something.
Let’s talk about you then, MadSam…
This is the third time out of nowhere you took a shot at me with no provacation, and you don’t have a ton of posts - this is not a sin, but your percentages in this regard are stunning.
It is quite saddening that you would, instead of getting to know someone and trying to comminucate with them, are content to let petty emotions such as jealousy (maybe, what else could it be?) get in the way of you getting to know people.
As far as needing attention, you could gets people’s attention by being a cool person. By trying to communicate with people. Instead, you go after someone by suddenly appearing in threads and taking shots like a tiny dog yapping at the heels of the mailman.
Well, all that can be said is how sorry a situation it is when you complain about someone, and meanwhile, you are doing nothing constructive with criticisms at all. Just bitching for the sake of bitching.
Some people, if they have something to say, do so in a much better manner than you do, MadSam.
Now, to steer the conversation to myself again (since I need the attention), I think that the people who know me off of the boards in chat, e-mail and through messenger programs, will tell you that I am a good listener and tend to not talk about “me, I, myself” that often. I usually am talking about other people’s things and trying to be a friend.
You might want to try it sometime…
Yer pal,
Satan
[sub]I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Four months, two weeks, two days, 14 hours, 32 minutes and 27 seconds.
5544 cigarettes not smoked, saving $693.03.
Extra life with Drain Bead: 2 weeks, 5 days, 6 hours, 0 minutes.[/sub]
"Satan is not an unattractive person."-Drain Bead
[sub]Thanks for the ringing endorsement, honey![/sub]
Is it okay if I talk about Satan?
Hey Satan,
I see you’ve saved over $690 since you stopped smoking. Of course, you’re going to spend that money on Drain Bead, right?
Because we all know, that although you like to call yourself Satan, you are full of sweetness and light. We are blinded, always, by your presence, especially here in the Pit, where all the best threads have at least one post from you. We who admire you wish to attain the great heights you yourself have reached. Truly we are humbled that you would deign to spend time with us.
But if you don’t spend that money on Drain Bead, we’re not talking to you anymore.
This message brought to you by Admirers of Satan. With a name like Satan, it has to be good.
Myrr21:
I would just like to be the first to offer whatever funding I am able to the brave pioneers who undertake the study to discover that beer is more beneficial than water. Oh, what the hell, I also hereby offer my services as a test subject. In for a penny, and all like that.
And while quitting has not been something that I’ve been very succesful at, I think that it’s great that Satan has managed to do so.
Waste
Flick Lives!
I Told You It Killed My God Damn Dog!!!
Thats Not Kind To Animals!!!
An ass-kissing bandwagon? I am so there!
(insert obligatory Satan’s ass joke here)
Actually, to be utterly serious, I’ve met the guy in person, and I have to say he’s an extremely nice guy with an infectious smile. I’ve even suggested to him several times that he really doesn’t deserve the name “Satan”. I haven’t met anyone with as much concern for other people’s lives. And while his opinion of me may not be that high, the feeling is by no means mutual.
Personally, I think MadSam probably has some weird vendetta with Satan, which is odd considering the low post count. Perhaps he lurks quite a bit. Or maybe he’s just a sock-puppet?
Yeah, good “D”. :rolleyes: With friends like you, who needs enemas?
(Please notice that this post is 100% flame-free, and probably 100% irrelevant as well)
Yours Bluely,
'Da Freaker
“Grasping the handle with all his might.”