I do understand your point, I don't agree with it. There is a difference. We can argue about the practical uses and pros/cons about cars, but it really doesn't matter. The point is there are cleaner and healthier options for most people.
Nope, you don't. People need cars, but sometimes they don't make the best decisions in terms of environmental impact. People never need cigarettes, so the environmental and health related impacts are always net-negatives. Cars actually provide a function even if they're improperly sized for the application, which is what invalidates the foundation of this comparison. This isn't an opinion about smokers, cars, smokers who have cars, rabbits, the moon, or anything else. It's a fact.
There are cars that exist for no practical reason other than there are people who will buy it.
Yes, people buy cars as toys, but it's completely disingenuous to try to use this as a practical example against cars, which is precisely what you're doing. I think toy cars are stupid, but that still has zero impact on this discussion because 99.99% of cars are used for a valid purpose (even if oversized) while 100% of cigarettes are unnecessary. You're getting confused by the gradient among car choices versus the binary distinction between functional versus non-functional.
There are cleaner and healthier options compared to smoking.
There are two choices: smoking and not smoking. You've now effectively suggested that people NEED a vice and smoking isn't the worst one. I don't have any vices. None. There aren't healthier options than smoking for me. There's the option to smoke or not smoke.
Like you say about yourself, I really don't care what people do. If the affect on other people is minimal, I really don't care what someone else does when making choices for their body.
I care 0% what effect it has on you and 100% what effect it has on other people, including me. Minimal isn't the right word because it sets the wrong tone. It's hard to have zero impact on other people and it's hard to quantify the impact of certain things, but smoking isn't in a gray area here... at all. With that said, smokers have less of an impact on other people than fatties do, and, speaking as a former fatty who realized the error of my ways, that should be far worse on the social stigma scale than smoking (it probably is, but I mean it should be a lot worse). I'd rather drink a gallon of a smoker's spit than hire a morbidly obese person due to all the associated issues. Thankfully my line of work requires a level of flexibility that a huge stomach simply will not allow. If you can't fit under a person's house, you can't do the job, and some of the spaces are pretty tight.
So from what I've read in this thread, if a smoker sees this question on a job application, they should simply lie.
I smoked a bit when I was in college and a bit after. Haven't smoked in a few years. Do still enjoy a good cigar every once in a while. I would answer "No" to the original question and would never tell you about my "smoking" past.
If you smoke in any significant capacity, people know. If you do it during the workday, people definitely know. As a matter of fact, I just had this conversation with another business owner. He hired a woman who said no to that question, covered the smell with perfume during the interview, and then took a smoke break on the first day like he wouldn't notice or something. Fired with no unemployment benefits.
No, I don't feel slighted. As I said before none of this affects me. I'll happily lay bare my biases for the world to see: as a general rule I dislike corporations and their reams of policies, and I dislike the people who generate those policies: the directors, the managers, the legions of the useless. I think the average HR person is a massive waste of carbon that could have been fashioned into an implement of some kind. When I see corporations trying to enforce personal behavior through hiring policies I have two reactions: 1) Good for you, you can do what you want; and 2) what a bunch of anal-retentive assholes.
I don't think I'm anal-retentive. I know most people don't want to smell cigarette smoke when they're paying for professional services, so I make sure not to subject them to it. Also, I don't want to smell it in my office. It has nothing to do with the personal decision to smoke.