NYC Wants To Scare The Crap Out Of You
– And Not With The Price of a 175-Square-Foot Studio Apartment, Either –
New York City used to be a fun place.
On any given night you could walk through Times Square and watch naked college girls earning their tuition, stroll through Washington Square Park to price-shop for weed and still have time to get jumped on the subway back uptown to your studio apartment that was so small it was done up in wall-to-wall mattress.
Ah, the good old days.
Now, you might as well live in Utah.
Times Square has a Baby Gap for crissakes, you can find families picnicking in Washington Square Park and the only hassle you’ll get on the subway home is from the Transit Police if you put your feet on the seat next to you.
It makes being a Mormon suddenly sound edgy.
The whole point of living in New York is that it’s supposed to be a little wild and a little dangerous. The city has always prided itself on being an urban Galapagos meant to weed out the slow, the uncool and the dim-witted.
Perhaps no one has done more at de-hipping and pussifying New York than Mayor Bloomberg. You can’t smoke in bars anymore, you have to post calorie counts for every calzone and you can call a special hot line if your neighbor is making too much noise killing a hooker.
They shouldn’t call it the Big Apple, they should call it the Big Buzz Kill.
So, I guess it’s not all that surprising that the city is proposing yet another regulation to protect people from themselves. The city is considering a regulation that would require all cigarette retailers to post large signs detailing the dangers of smoking.
As CBS News reports:
The eye-level signs would have information about the harmful effects of smoking, possibly with an image .. to display gruesome health effects such as amputations and throat cancer.
There was a time when, confronted with a PSA showing a black lung, any self respecting New Yorker would’ve scoffed at the scare tactics and said to the deli owner, “F**k that. You wanna see scary? Check out these seventeen knife wounds I got on my way over here. You gotta sewing kit so’s I can stitch these up?”
Who are these signs directed at anyway? At this point, even people in the mountains of Tibet know smoking’s bad for you.
I think any self-respecting social engineer should be able to make the case that, if you made it past the third grade and you still don’t know that cigarettes cause cancer, society needs to thin you out of the gene pool either by letting you smoke, ride a bike without a helmet or operate an industrial table saw after taking Nyquil.
Do you really want to scare smokers? Tell them they have to pay for their own health care.
You’ll cut the rate of smoking in half by the end of this weekend.
And if the city really want’s to invest in large signs with an important public safety function, how about putting up a sign showing what’s going to happen to the dude that waits in line for 10 minutes and then can’t decide what he wants when he gets to the counter at Starbucks.
-
You know what’s really scary? Paying $1800-a-month for a studio that’s not rent-controlled…
-
