You're making a lot of assumptions and putting a lot of words in my mouth. You made some massive logical leaps there. I did not say at any point that it's a God given right to smoke in a shared housing unit, kid's playground, or any public setting available. I'm glad that not every restaurant, airplane, public space is filled with smoke. I'm glad that it's culturally kinda frowned upon to smoke in public places now. I also said absolutely nothing of cancer research except that I do not support a massive tax added onto the consumption of cigarettes in the name of cancer research. You're pretty correct that I have zero clue how cancer research works. I didn't claim to. Any facts about cancer research are immaterial to being against the principle of forcing people to donate to a tangentially related cause due to their consumption habit.

I also totally understand my own mortality and that I could have cancer right now and not know it. Those cigarette smokers could buy enough cigarettes to fund enough research to heal me. I still don't think they should be forced to because they choose to consume cigarettes. You're acting as if I came out as being pro-cancer and anti-research? It's a real weird stance. Even if I was pro-cancer, I wouldn't be dumb enough to tell anyone.

Cancer rates have increased tremendously and there are two huge factors that are not even related to the direct causes of cancer themselves: People are living longer (at least until the last few years) + Detection has gotten a lot better. Access to healthcare has expanded globally to run more people through better detection processes. OFC incidence rates are higher.

Now I've made a claim about cancer research without doing any actual research aside from thinking for a moment. I'm not a medical-ologist but I do have a rudimentary idea of how statistics work. Can you tell me, with any degree of accuracy, what the cancer rate of 25-50 year old males was in 1930? How likely was a 70 year old to get cancer in year 500? Why don't we have those stats?

On the motorsports thing, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. It's a luxury, we get it. Nobody who is genuinely worried about where their next meal is coming from is going to be at the track. I'm happy and thankful that I'm a pleb that got to spend my weekend doing it too. I'd be happy if more people got to experience it. And to the original post's point - I don't think that if you banned every single person who has ever intentionally modified their intake, exhaust, or tune from ever owning a vehicle again that it would make any measurable impact on global emissions or global temperatures. It's such a small subset of the population that has ever done that and adding some crazy tax is nothing but a moral victory for busy bodies who want to feel virtuous.

 

U.S. Sues eBay For Selling Defeat Devices And Violating Clean Air Act

So, despite the statement that these cases are not going to be actively pursued, they're still going after Ebay. If I'm interpreting things correctly here and reading between the lines, it sounds that the EPA did not have the funding to directly pursue these cases. Instead, the DOJ is going after them on behalf of the EPA. I may be wrong in that assessment but that's what it sounds like to me.

 

Looks similar to the approach that the IRS takes. They don't have enough money to audit rich people and fight those battles.

The IRS Continues To Focus Its Audits On Poor People, Not Millionaires