Guess how many people are killed by tobacco-related illnesses every year?

Roughly 20% of that number. Smoking and tobacco-related diseases cause on the order of 4.2 million premature deaths per year”

The part you’re missing is the people the Nazis killed had no choice in the matter. They were systematically being exterminated like insects.

Smoking on the other hand is (and this is the clincher) COMPLETELY OPTIONAL, not only optional but YOU HAVE TO PAY MONEY TO DO IT.

Some other points I’d like to make are as follows:
1. What business is it of your’s what other people do with their bodies as long as it doesn’t harm you? (and don’t retort with “second hand smoke”, its a bullshit claim to begin with and fairly moot with all the public anti-smoking laws in so many states and countries)
2. This one may take you a while to wrap your head around….NON-SMOKERS DIE EVERYDAY. Fact.

Most initiative will lead us into a monopoly (most likely Facebook) a not very innovative one at that, and —what is worst— a hard to challenge. It is counter-intuitive, but I have enough experiments in the economics of communication services to argue my case. Projects like OpenSocial that lower the cost to have accounts on several services, like Orkut, MySpace and more, will help a monopoly to be set up. Data Portability will do the same, more efficiently. I know Dave Morin is a cool kid — almost as cool as ‘Joe’ (?) Camel’s camel — but unless he argues for DiSo, he might as well be serving the same social-based dependendy mechanism that made smoking not only cool, but a necessary aspect to integration.

Don’t tell me Facebook doesn’t kill: Zuckerberg was the one who introduced that kind of element in the debate, mentionning how his company saved lifes but preventing bully regimes. Actual understanding of how his company can became a monopoly is important too.

Please don’t neglect my comment.

Conversely…

Mr. Messina your strong anti-tobacco stance has seemingly forgotten that most states, especially California, would go bankrupt if they were to lose their “sin tax” revenue.

The trash in San Francisco gets taken away, the street lights work, clean water comes out of the tap in your house – all because of cigarettes.

I am in no way trying to defend the tobacco companies, but they are transparent in at least one way – they just want to make money at the expense ( death ) of their customers.

…Do the “sin tax” states, like California whose budgets are reliant on the revenue from cigarettes, show the same transparency? Do you aim the same amount of vitriol that’s in the post at the state legislators in Sacramento? They are just as guilty as big tobacco companies.

Wouldn’t you prefer that smokers die off anyways? The earth’s population growth crisis is a far more critical issue to worry about. Smokers die, and the earth lives a bit longer.