BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
We need to combat heart disease

In 2007, cardiovascular disease (CVD) caused 34% of deaths in the UK, and killed just over 193,000 people. [[http://www.heartstats.org/topic.asp?id=17]] This is a startling statistic and it an easily circumvented disease. The prevention is in exercise. If we gave people free urban transport, people would begin cutting down on the little exercise they do!! Instead of walking for 5 minutes people would take the free transport. This is not something we should encourage.
Money Saved

Although the idea of riding the bus every day to work is not very appealing, saving money every week on gas is. At an average of 3.10 a gallon, filling an average sized SUV can cost anywhere from 50-65 dollars. The cost of gas has become so high that some workers are unable to pay for their commute without significantly reducing their take home pay. Free public transportation is the answer for hard working people to have more money in their pockets, clean air in their lungs and a better future for their children. Some governments have considered paying for public transport out of taxpayers' money, making it free. This would take cars, along with congestion, off our roads, and help the environment, so many people think it's a great idea and everyone would be able to see its advantage. However, like nearly all policies, it does have its cons. In Belgium the government made public transport free, and it was a huge success. Lots of money was saved by all parties; the transport companies, the government and particularly the customers. They saved on everything, even printing tickets. It is still free.
Cheap airlines invest money into the environment

Ryanair, the most popular provider of budget flights, is not opposed to the environment. In fact they invest in the environment. Ryanair wants to use less fuel, and using less fuel helps the environment. It is for this reason they invest their money into the latest technology. In the last 10years Ryanair has reduced its fuel emissions by 55%. The average age of an aircraft with Ryanair is 2.5 (1). When the average age of aircraft across more expensive airlines, such as British Airways, is 11years, it is easy to see that the relation between cheap flights and environmental damage is not necessarily as strong as organizations such as Plane Stupid make out. (1) http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/about.php?page=About&sec=environment
Noise pollution

The World Health Organisation has shown concern for the noise pollution that planes cause. Long term exposure to such noise, 5-30 years, of 65-75 decibels increases the blood pressure of the individual and also increases the risk of hypertension. (1) This level of noise is found near airports and along flight paths. If we were to increase the price of flying, put up the taxes, less people would fly. If people flew less, there would be less noise, and less people suffering from the above inflictions and so less of a burden on our NHS sorting such problems out. (1) http://www.planestupid.com/?q=noise
They take money away from the local economy.

Cheap flights encourage tourists to take foreign holidays, weakening domestic tourism. Domestic tourism will be a way this countries economy gets through this recession. Ok lets democritise flying abroad by having flights numbers capped and allocated by lottery or first come first served, but just allowing air travel to burgeon unchecked isn't a good or sustainable strategy for our country right, or our planet right now. A global green tax on air fuel would be a good start.
Travel to other countries cultures us.

Airplanes/Aeroplanes are the worst polluters and the media(internet,T.Vs etc) is very effective and wonderful cultural connoisseur in today's world. Accompanying the (also largely American)media is globalization: hegemonic American imperialistic colonization/ MacDonaldization, mass immigration of people from the east into the west(centuries) preceded by a series of wars/invasions also serving the same purpose of shrinking boundaries all over the world without travel.
At certain distances, planes are faster.

I think people forget that beyond certain distances (probably around 600 km or 372 miles), flying will become way more convenient. I mean, let us consider traveling from London to Madrid in Europe. Even after the Spanish AVE high-speed rail system is integrated so it can interchange with the French TGV system, it will take may 8-9 hours to travel from London to Madrid by train travel (London to Paris by Eurostar, Paris to southern France by TGV, southern France to Madrid by AVE). Meanwhile, from any London airport you'll be in Madrid in less time than it takes for a Eurostar train ride from London to Paris alone!
Other transportation should be used instead.

It is all very well replacing short haul flights with trains, but this can be no substitute for traveling abroad. We cannot develop underground trains to other countries! So yes, seen as there is another mode of transport, which is just as effective, short hail flights should be taxed heavily. However, the case with long haul flights is totally different. There is no viable option. Possibly trips to the Isle of White and Ireland could be made by boat, but further a field is too much of a strain on modern day time constraints. So get money for trains via long haul flight taxation. There is no benefit in taxing people to cater for more trains when trains are not a viable option for the journey.
Travel to other countries cultures us.

Travel cultures us. We can go to another country, find out how they live their lives. We begin to appreciate how lucky as a nation Britain is. We begin to realise how different world cultures are. This culturing of Britons is very important, travel breeds tolerance. In a multicultural nation such tolerance is necessary. By artificially raising the prices of flights you are preventing the lower classes from experiencing different cultures and in effect increasing the chances of them being racist.
Cheap flights are for the privileged

It is only the rich who benefit from the low cost of flying. A study was done on Stansted, an airport known for cheap flights and it was found that the average salary of people using the airport was £47,000. Low skilled people, and people on benefits make up a quarter of Britain’s population but they only make up 6% of Stansted users. (1) This shows us that if we hired the cost of flying, it would not affect the low paid, they rarely fly. It would just mean that the middle class earners would have to pay more and hopefully in turn they will fly less. (1) http://www.planestupid.com/?q=content/%26%23039%3Bcheap%26%23039%3B-flights-are-priviliged
Other transportation should be used instead.

People should not rely on airplanes to get them everywhere. Instead of offering tax breaks to the aviation industry, we should reinvest money into our trains and other transportation systems. These systems release fewer co2 emissions and can be just as effective, but first of all we need to invest money into such systems. If people stopped flying and started using trains, the government would have more incentive to invest money into these transport modes. This can only be a win win.
Unemployment levels would rise even further

Would it? Would unemployment rise if cheap flights were discouraged by policymakers? I thought people flying from this country usually took some spending money with them? Migrant workers using cheap flights to enter the country send a good proportion of their wages home often, decreasing the capital base for business investment in this country as well as directly competing with indigenous population for jobs. Local tourism would prosper if less cheap flights were available. Alternative means of transport and their auxilliary workforces would gain business. When you pay £20 for a flight how can £20 be contributing more to the economy in terms of jobs, than £80 spent on a ticket? We don't pay cleaners in airports 20p and hour yet do we?
Cheap airlines invest money into the environment

The problem with cut price airlines is that they have no real committment to any of their services. They will dive in and snatch a profit where they can. If the profit is not there, they will close the service again, without a qualm. They accept no responsibility for connections or any thing much else really. They are adept at hiding the true cost of a flight amongst a myriad of extra charges. The fact that Ryanair has a young aircraft fleet right now is a product of their rapid growth in recent years. It does not prove that they have any principled committment to operating efficient aircraft in the long run. The other point is that for Ryanair to claim to be saving the environment is a bit like somebody claiming to have saved lots of money by going to the sales. The best way to reduce aircraft emissions is to fly less. No airline will want to help the environment the real aim is to reduce operating costs .If an alternative to petroleum is found and is more damaging to the environment but is significantly cheaper airlines will not even think of the environment.
Save time, money. New Opportunities.

Imagine if you need to go to Africa or Asia from America or Europe by not using airplane. How long it would take you to arrive at Shanghai or Tokyo from London or New York? Time is money. Without affordable flight, one would find it hard to travel, to work in our world now. Cheap-flights make the aviation industry more competitive, therefore more affordable to a wider range of customers. Wouldn't you like to save some money to take your children out for a dinner together instead of paying high priced flight? Wouldn't you like to see you family go abroad to learn about other cultures? Wouldn't you like to go abroad for new opportunities or even pleasure?
Aviation takes money away from public services

This concept that the aviation industry pays not tax is a myth! Train users pay on average 8.5p in tax, plane users pay £10 tax in Air Passenger Duty. There was controversy when APD was doubled suddenly from £5 to £10 in February 2007. It is a well known fact that airplane users are already taxed, how the government manage this money is a concern entirely up to them. If the money is not being put towards carbon dioxide emissions or the necessary services then it is a mismanagement of money on the government’s behalf. The management of funds needs to be sorted out before more tax is piled on. More money will not solve the problems of mismanagement.
They take money away from the local economy.

According to Plane Stupid it is the middle class who make the most use of the aviation industry. Therefore, by increasing the prices, all it will do is lower the chances of the poorer, working classes being able to go abroad. But the lower working classes would not then spend their money on the local economy. People save up for holidays abroad, it is a great incentive. But if they knew all they had to look forward to was a British summer for the umpteenth time, they would lose the incentive to save and instead spend their holidays on the sofa infront of the TV instead.
Unemployment levels would rise even further

Britain now has an unemployment level of 1.79million, this is set to rise to 2 million by Christmas(1). This is all due to the credit crunch. Imagine what the figure would be if cheap airlines were to lose trade. Yes, pollution would be lowered by them sending out less flights per day, but in turn it would reduce the amount of staff needed. It would result in large scale sacking. It would not only be pilots and air hostesses. There would the cleaners of the plane and airports, the engineers, the admin staff in offices and then the financial jobs in big firms. In the current financial climate, Britain could not afford to lose this many jobs that range from low skilled to high skilled. (1) as of 15th October 2008 --I fear the counter point here is dreadfully poor. Increased costs equals less people flying, equals less demand for plane companies, equals fewer flights per day, equals less employment vacancies in the aviation industry. This is all too obvious! It is not just cleaners, as has already been made quite apparent. This debate is not about migrant workers, nor spening money. And the average cost of a long haul plane journey is far more than £20. These figures have merely been pulled out of the air and have no informative content.
Emergency contraception is a form of abortion. It works by preventing a fertilised egg - fertilisat...

Emergency contraception is a form of abortion. It works by preventing a fertilised egg - fertilisation can occur as soon as 15 minutes after intercourse - from being implanted in the uterus. A fertilised egg is, in effect, a human being, because it contains within itself all that is necessary for a child to develop. Emergency contraception differs from forms of contraception which prevent conception from happening in the first place, and which therefore do not kill conceived human beings.
There are significant harms arising from selling the morning-after pill through pharmacies. Doctors...

There are significant harms arising from selling the morning-after pill through pharmacies. Doctors are not informed of their patients’ over-the-counter purchases, but a patient’s previous use of a drug as powerful as the morning-after pill may be something they need to know about to make good future medical decisions. Pharmacists cannot check medical records to find out whether there is anything in the customer’s medical history which might make taking the pill dangerous. They have no way of telling whether their customer is over 16.
UK-specific argument: Even though abortion is legal, emergency contraception is not covered by the t...

UK-specific argument: Even though abortion is legal, emergency contraception is not covered by the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act. Abortion is regulated by the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act; the 1967 Act creates a defence for doctors against the criminality of abortion, by deeming it lawful for them to authorise an abortion on certain grounds. The 1861 Act prohibits the supply of 'any poison or other noxious thing' with the intent to cause miscarriage; the circumstances under which emergency contraception is supplied to women - over the counter, without a pregnancy test and without consulting a doctor - do not meet the exception criteria of the 1967 Act.
Emergency contraception is a form of abortion. It works by preventing a fertilised egg - fertilisat...

Describing emergency contraception as abortion is highly misleading. Precisely how such contraceptives work depends on the stage of the menstrual cycle at which they are taken, but they can delay ovulation, inhibit the tubal transport of egg and sperm, interfere with fertilisation or alter the lining of the uterus to prevent the implantation of a fertilised egg. At the stage when the contraceptive is effective, there is no viable pregnancy so there can be no abortion. If a woman is already pregnant, a morning-after pill will not induce an abortion. In any case, if abortion is legal then arguing that emergency contraception is a form of abortion is not a compelling argument against it.
Emergency contraceptive pills can have serious, harmful side-effects including nausea, vomiting, inf...

The most serious of these side effects are extremely rare. Nausea and vomiting, while unpleasant, do no long-term damage and would be considered by women who choose to use emergency contraception to be a price worth paying for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. Citing a lack of investigation-based evidence for long-term damage is not a good argument that there may be long-term damage.
There are significant harms arising from selling the morning-after pill through pharmacies. Doctors...

There are good reasons for making the morning-after pill a non-prescription drug. It can take time to get a prescription from a doctor, and in cases of emergency contraception speed is very important. Some patients may be embarrassed to tell their doctor about their sexual behaviour, and consequently be put off seeking a prescription. The restriction of emergency contraception to over-16s makes no sense in any case; a girl under 16 who has had unprotected sex may well need emergency contraception.
UK-specific argument: Even though abortion is legal, emergency contraception is not covered by the t...

UK-specific argument: This argument is irrelevant because emergency contraception does not cause miscarriage. Miscarriage can only occur after the implantation of the fertilised egg into the uterus - and once this has happened, emergency contraception does not work anyway. This interpretation was upheld in 2002 following a case brought by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and opposed by the Department of Health. The possibility of making the argument at all, however, does expose the inadequacy of the 1967 Abortion Act, which does not enshrine a woman’s right to abortion but creates certain exceptions to the state’s basic, continued right to control her fertility.
Nobody at Wikipedia has ever claimed that it is a definitive account of human knowledge or a replace...

Wikipedia has become a standard source of reference because it is free and easy to access, not because it is good. It is frightening that some US judges are beginning to cite its articles in support of their judgements. Many of its users are students, with too little experience to weigh up the quality of an article. Overdependence on Wikipedia means that they never develop proper research skills and come to believe that an approximately right answer is good enough. Wikipedia should be banned for student research papers and other serious uses.
Patchiness of coverage has been a recognised shortcoming of Wikipedia, but it is one which the onlin...

One of the major problems with Wikipedia is that it has very patchy coverage. Traditional reference sources provide consistent coverage over the whole field of knowledge, with priority given to the most important topics in terms of space and thoroughness of treatment. By contrast, Wikipedia has very detailed coverage of topics in which its main contributors are interested, but weak material on other, much more important issues. Thus there is much more on the imaginary language of Klingon than there is on the life and philosophy of John Locke.
It is the nature of any encyclopedia to present known facts, and to emphasise these over expressions...

A notable shortcoming of Wikipedia is its obsession with recording facts and difficulty in presenting rival arguments or hypotheses. For many topics this is not a major problem, but in many more the nature of truth is hotly disputed and any entry which seeks to document the issue should present both (or more) strands of opinion. Yet attempts by contributors to express academic arguments, e.g. over different historical interpretations, are often edited out as being insufficiently factual. What remains is then either unhelpfully bland or worryingly one-sided.
Wikipedia is not threatened by variants and rivals that also seek to promote freedom of knowledge. ...

Wikipedia can also be criticised for its inbuilt bias, intolerant of dissenting views. Religious conservatives object to the secular liberal approach its editors consistently take, and have found that their attempts to add balance to entries are swiftly rejected. This even extends to the censorship of facts which raise questions about the theory of evolution. Some conservatives are so worried about the widespread use of Wikipedia to promote a liberal agenda in education that they have set up Conservapedia as a rival source of information.
Wikipedia’s goal is to make all human knowledge freely available to everyone in the world with an in...

Wikipedia’s goal is to make all human knowledge freely available to everyone in the world with an internet connection. It already has over 1.5 million articles in English alone. This is more than ten times those of Encyclopedia Britannica, its nearest printed rival. Traditional reference works were incredibly expensive, which meant that knowledge was restricted to the wealthy, or those with access to well-funded public libraries. Wikipedia liberates that knowledge.
Wikipedia seeks to achieve its democratic goal by democratic means. As an open-source project it re...

Wikipedia seeks to achieve its democratic goal by democratic means. As an open-source project it relies upon the collaboration of tens of thousands of people who constantly add, check and edit articles. This “socialisation of expertise” ensures that errors and omissions are rapidly identified and corrected, and that the site is constantly updated. No traditional encyclopedia can match this scrutiny, which has also been used successfully to develop and improve open-source software such as Firefox and Linux.
Wikipedia harnesses the best qualities of humanity – trust and cooperation in pursuit of an unselfis...

Wikipedia harnesses the best qualities of humanity – trust and cooperation in pursuit of an unselfish goal. Sceptics essentially take a negative view of society, unable to understand why people would club together to produce something so valuable without any financial incentive. Wikipedia is not naïvely trusting – the majority of entries are written by a close on-line community of a few hundred people who value their reputations. Examples of abuse have led Wikipedia to tighten up its rules, so that cyber vandals can easily be detected and editing of controversial topics restricted to the most trusted editors. But overall Wikipedia is a tremendous human success story, which should be celebrated rather than criticised.
Wikipedia emerged very well from the only systematic comparison of its quality against its leading t...

Wikipedia emerged very well from the only systematic comparison of its quality against its leading traditional rival, the Encyclopedia Britannica. A survey in the leading journal “Nature” compared 42 pairs of articles on a wide range of subjects. Experts in each topic found that Wikipedia’s user-contributed articles had only 30% more errors and omissions than Britannica, despite the latter’s much vaunted pride in its expert authors and editors. And as Wikipedia is a constant work-in-progress, these faults were very quickly corrected, whereas a traditional publication will only revise articles at intervals of years, if not decades.
Nobody at Wikipedia has ever claimed that it is a definitive account of human knowledge or a replace...

Nobody at Wikipedia has ever claimed that it is a definitive account of human knowledge or a replacement for in depth research. But it is an excellent starting point for an enquiry, giving a quick guide to an unknown subject and pointing the enquirer on to more specialist sources. It is used to good effect by students, teachers, journalists and even judges, among many others – showing it is a valued reference source. Experienced users can quickly assess the quality of an article from its written quality and the thoroughness of its references. Nothing on the internet should ever be accepted uncritically, but Wikipedia has earned its reputation and never tried to oversell itself.
Patchiness of coverage has been a recognised shortcoming of Wikipedia, but it is one which the onlin...

Patchiness of coverage has been a recognised shortcoming of Wikipedia, but it is one which the online community of Wikipedians has been debating vigorously, and which is being rapidly addressed. Critics often use out-of-date examples to berate the site, failing to recognise that Wikipedia’s key strength is that it constantly changes and improves through the contributions of its users. Perhaps those who note that a particular topic is unsatisfactory should sit down and write something to improve it!