I quit smoking with e-cigs. And then I quit those. And then I quit FÜM. Then I had nothing left to quit, so I’ve started taking a mixture of kratom and cocaine. And a little fentanyl, that’s unavoidable but that’s just doing drugs. IMFINE
I don’t care whether your gay or straight. e-cigs are still not good for you!
He looks like this dude if he had just been caught doing something really bad. Good he was able to get out in some way, hope he can find a place where he’s not forced to obey Pedon Trum and his goons.
US is like a bad b-movie. The villains do everything they can to destroy the people. The companies are all evil.
This is just late-stage capitalism in motion.
You’ve found the plot! The twist is that this is what asymmetric warfare looks like, decades in the making. The US is currently losing the Cold War against the USSR, which began 5 years before Putin was born so it was his entire upbringing. He doesn’t need to maintain tight control of Donny, but merely let him wreak whatever havoc he will. The leopard face-eating will mostly just be sad because everything will be so badly damaged by the time the red team really understands how badly they’ve been had. Corporate greed is a reliable villain to rise to the occasion, that merely needed some unshackling. Billionaires gonna oligarch if you give them half a chance. Helping capitalism to self-destruct is possibly the ultimate communist victory.
I feel like, having read your comment, I should stop feeling so grumpy about Russia fucking with us. We can’t get thru this late-stage capitalist nonsense fast enough.
Nope, the next stages will be worse. Climate change is baked in and being in the 99% is gonna suck.
Is fascism a sub-stage of late-stage capitalism, or a subsequent stage?
One of the subsequent stages is AI-powered robot weapons, which I predict will be used on the domestic populace before too long, but also fits in the bad b-movie theme:
This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
Nah some 15 year old will crack the security on them.
Or fitgirl.
Yo dawg, I heard you like DAWGs.
So I put AI inside a human-killing system so it can simulate killing people while it kills people!
They didn’t tell Ender that the “training missions” were all real battles until after he won the war, so that he wouldn’t have to grapple with ethics in real time. That was the essence of the Game.
Fucking spoilers!
throws book in the trash
That was on my To Read list.
Sorry, it was published over 40 years ago so the Spoilers Statute of Limitations has lapsed. It’s a good book though, put it back on your list.
But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise
That’s funny because it was Trump and his FDA that introduced the PMTA during his first term and the reason why 95% of the industry had to close up shop.
Right, they can exist and succeed but only by his grace and on his (current) terms.
The whole no fruty flavors has always seemed an out of touch rule. Kids using any addictive substances is not good, but a few decades ago it was commonplace for kids to be cought smoking analog cigs. Ecigs are safer and have gotten more people to quit than just about anything, but they are also easier for a non smoker to get into. I think the problem is with how kids are getting access to them (from shady illegal online dealers mostly).
That said before big tobacco got involved the older style nicotine isolate vapes were much better at actually getting people to quit smoking. They don’t give the same level of instant nicotine high you can get from the modern salt nicotine and if you are trying to ween off of nicotine they lessen or remove the cravings. It also helped they weren’t cool, my favorite world I’ve heard people call them was ‘mouth fedora’
“Analog cigs” has me dying. Metaphorically and literally.
Let’s not forget about smirnof flavors like birthday cake or other similar nonsense. That’s not advertising to children yet somehow a mango flavored vape is?
Well, see, birthday cake flavored Smirnoff still tastes like absolute garbage.
The real comparison would be actually good tasting alcoholic drinks like hard lemonades or seltzers. Those do actually draw in a lot of the younger crowd, you see them at a lot of underage parties.
Idk i always thought those clunky vapes were cool. Cyberpunk af to have people modding and fixing up their electronic cigarettes
I’d love sources on “got more people to quit than just about anything.” Do you just mean “move from cigarettes to vaping”?
Everything I’ve ever read has indicated to me that vaping is significantly more addictive than smoking because the nicotine levels are way, way, way higher. This also causes them to be worse for you than regular smoking because nicotine is a major carcinogen.
Just so everyone is aware. This comment isnt completely true, vaping isnt more cancerous. It is true that nicotine solutions can much be much stronger and this can drive addiction، but no evidence shows vapes are more carcinogenic. Please do not take medical advice from the internet.
Ok, take medical advice from biomedical research.
Heating glycerol to nebulize breaks down glycerol into dihydroacetone, a well known carcinogen.
This is a controversy in sunblocks, which use DHA, but are considered safe because sunblock is not ingested.
In the US big tobacco is responsible for funding anti tobacco campaigns look up “Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement MSA” and from what I saw at the time it seemed like they were using their anti tobacco platforms to demonize their biggest competition, nicotine isolate vapes that you can diy with 3 ingredients, taste better, are much less harmful, way cheaper, and are easier to stop using or become addicted too. To be clear to non smokers this is not the modern salt nicotine big tobacco sells (even though even salt nic is still much better than analogs).
I learned what AstroTurfing was first hand around 2014 due to their successful lobbying and AstroTurfing then getting it classified as a tobacco product and now banning flavors. They use the common tactics of “for the children” and fear mongering about popcorn lung (that you couldn’t get from even the worst ejuice of you tried) The UK did a study back in the day so it’s not like people didn’t have access to science https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-less-harmful-than-tobacco-estimates-landmark-review
The public swallows just about every lie they tell about vapes
Yes moving from smoking to vaping is absolutely “quitting smoking”.
I am a former smoker and current vaper and it’s laughable that this is even a talking point. It’s not even close to as bad for you. Night and day the difference in how well I can breathe.
Why gatekeep and look for perfection? What kind of fool argues for that?
But you’re still a nicotine addict paying your money to tobacco companies.
As for real world data on cancer and vaping DHA, even tobacco takes 25+ years to trigger cancer, the vape data is just not in yet.
It really is crazy how many people don’t understand how big of a life saving impact vaping has had on smokers even when people only quit the analog cigs and continue to use the worst of the worst salt nic at max levels it’s nowhere close to as bad for both them and 2and hand.
This depends entirely on the vape. I quit smoking by switching to vaping, but this was before the current craze of nic salts. I switched using PG/VG flavored blends with much less dosage of nicotine than even the lightest cigarettes. It absolutely changed my life, and I will advocate for it being legal because of it. The Juul and other crazy high nicotine devices are very addictive though, and I’m of the opinion those need to be controlled better. Lumping all vaping together is very misleading though. I was able to quit vaping by reducing the nicotine blend amount in the juice I was buying, and that’s not really an option for a lot of these mass-market devices. This is part of the problem though - people legislating with a broad brush on a topic they know little about.
Wine coolers have entered the chat.
This fucking idiot sent her small daughter to school with O’Douls in her lunch.
From a household with a drug addict.
Or how about the birthday cake flavored Smirnoff vodka as if any adult would drink such a thing.
I think it’s hilarious that we keep reinventing wine coolers every so often. Wine coolers, Zima, Smirnoff Ice, hard lemonade, twisted tea, hard seltzer… it’s all just neutral alcohol mixed with fruit juices and sugar, but we’ve got to keep coming up with fun new labels for it every ten to fifteen years so as to market it to the current hip young demographic.
The most recent one followed the anti-soda and anti-sugar trend. Hard Seltzer, as far as the eye can see. I feel like it’s on the way out though. What will they think of next!?
Zima was popular when I was a teenager. I remember a lot of my friends drinking them as an introduction to alcohol because they tasted better than beer.
A few years ago, they did a special manufacturing of Zima (since they no longer make it) and my friend bought a case. I can affirm that Zima tastes like absolute ass. Smirnoff Ice and everything after have been a huge improvement compared to that shit we had in the 90s.
I also remember Zima since they came out just before the time I began to drink underage. I make references to it every now and then and nobody ever seems to know what I’m talking about, so I feel like I’ve finally found my people here.
Straight? No. Mixed? Yes.
Mixed with what? Most people mix vodka with fruit juice or club soda and I dont see that pairing well with birthday cake flavor.
What’s up with fruity e-cigs?!
Makary’s insiders said the former Johns Hopkins University cancer surgeon resigned after Trump forced his hand on authorizing fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. Makary had reportedly been resisting the sign-offs out of concern that the kid-friendly flavors could again entice youth use and addiction—something public health officials and experts have for years worked to combat. But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise—and with the tobacco industry’s interests.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had called Makary over a weekend to scold him for not moving fast enough to authorize flavored vapes, particularly menthol, mango, and blueberry flavors from the Los Angeles manufacturer Glas. The FDA authorized those flavored products days later and issued a new policy that would make it easier to market flavored vapes.
Wow, only complained about one company? How big is that kick back?
It’s surprising how cheap most politicians are, and I wouldn’t think he’s any different.
He’d do it for a BigMac. If you add some fries, he’ll write an executive order hampering a competitor.
My brain first registered that as gay-ish e-cigs
You mean fags?
(ducks and runs)
they’re approving the fruity fags
I’m not in favor of firing this guy.
But what the hell business does the FDA have in regulating which flavors of vapes are sold? That’s like saying you can sell peanut candy bars but not caramel.
Yes I get the logic that some flavors appeal more to kids, but honestly I think it’s crap. Whether they do appeal more to kids or not, it’s restricting the use of a legal product by adults. That’s not how a Free Country is supposed to work. This to me is no different than trying to demand IDs to watch porn online. Protecting kids is honorable, reducing freedom to (supposedly, but not really) protect kids is not what America is supposed to be.
As I see it, if kids are vaping, that’s a parental problem that should be solved by parents. If you don’t teach your kids not to smoke or vape you’re a bad parent.
If you don’t teach your kids not to smoke or vape you’re a bad parent.
This is a comment from someone who does not have children.
I get that what I’m saying sounds absolutist and simplistic. I get that there’s lots of influences on kids and peer pressure and whatnot.
But I’m also going by my own experience as a kid. You were a kid too once, yes?
My parents didn’t yell or scream or threaten. They explained. Even as a child I understood why smoking was bad and what damage it did to lungs. By the time I was old enough to consider smoking or have any opportunity to do so, I understood lung cancer, and addiction, and that it’s much easier to start something addictive than to stop. These things had been explained to me openly, without masking the ugliness of cancer or death or addiction.
So when I say TEACH your kids not to smoke, I mean that literally. Don’t preach at them or threaten them or yell at them, because it doesn’t work and kids tune it out. Don’t wait until they’re in middle school to show them the bad side of the world.
You are making up a story that fits what you believe. The other commenter is right, you dont have kids and its very apparent in how you write. Confidently having an opinion and then making up details to suit that opinion is a childish thing to do.
My parents didn’t yell or scream or threaten. They explained. Even as a child I understood why smoking was bad and what damage it did to lungs. By the time I was old enough to consider smoking or have any opportunity to do so, I understood lung cancer, and addiction, and that it’s much easier to start something addictive than to stop.
I also told all that stuff when I was kid, but don’t underestimate the power of youthful arrogance and the influence of an older girl who smokes and is interested in you… I ended up being a smoker for over ten years before I finally quit. Shared my own experiences with my daughter, educated her on all the reasons not to smoke. She still ended up vaping because of youthful arrogance and the influence of an older girl that was interested in her.
You can teach a horse to water but you can’t force it to not vape. Or something.
This right here. My parents explained in all the ways they could. I still ended up smoking. We’re a society and a society should have some responsibility to its kids. What happened to. The idea that it takes a village to raise a child? Some keep trying to heap all of the responsibility on parents when they’re just being asked to forego fruity flavored cancer.
Have you ever been to europe? I don’t think you have any appreciation for how successful the regulations in the US around nicotine addiction have worked.
Defending addiction in the name of freedom is a silly hill to die on.
How about killing off gerrymandering in the name of freedom?
I would love to kill off gerrymandering, because it’s anti-freedom and is only a tool for those in power to contradict the vote of the people. District lines should be drawn by neighborhood, without regard for the resulting vote mix.
And if you think me a Republican you are quite incorrect. I’m a registered Democrat, politically I consider myself liberal-libertarian- I think the married gay couple should have guns to defend their adopted children and their pot farm, knowing that single payer health care is there if they get hurt.
However this means I don’t fit squarely into either the red or the blue camp. I align with Republicans on issues like personal freedom and gun ownership, I align with Democrats on issues like reducing corruption (they’re not great but better than GOP at least) and environmental protection. And I’m quite unhappy with both of them as I think both separately and together they do a piss poor job of representing the interests of the American people.As for nicotine- I don’t defend addiction, I defend freedom and a person’s right to choose what they put in their own body without excess government interference. If people make bad choices, that is their right and I reject the idea that the government should play ‘nanny state’ and save people from themselves. So for the government to say ‘you can have this flavor vape but not that flavor’ is to me no different than saying ‘you can have vanilla ice cream but not chocolate as it’s too tasty and too likely to make you fat’.
If people are making harmful bad choices, then the solution is to improve education so people grow up with the tools and the practice to make better choices, not to restrict the choices available.
I dunno man. You may be some flavour of libertarian, but not me. I am aware of the libertarian philosophy, and it is particularly an American following.
Freedom has many meanings to many people. But a free society also imposes restrictions on people’s freedom. You just can’t kill someone who annoys you. You need a proper licence in order to drive on public thoroughfares. You can’t take something that doesn’t belong to you, just because you want it. Living in a free society also imposes obligations. Other people must be taken into consideration.
In the case of vapes, and other poisons, it’s not good enough to just yell freedom and allow corporations to to sell dangerous products. Kids consume these products and their health can be affected. In a free society public health considerations will probably impact on people’s freedom. After all, seatbelts continue to save thousands and thousands of lives despite some folks feeling salty about wearing them. At least they are breathing and feeling salty.
None of this will convince you, and that’s ok. I don’t have skin in your game anyway because I don’t live in your country and therefore accept normal restrictions. If I want to live in a society and change the rules, I’ll vote for a person who will do that. Gerrymandering is illegal in my country and fair voting is the norm. I’m also glad that I don’t live in a community where individuals get to decide what rules they should follow on the basis of some nebulous concept of personal freedom.
Thanks for the discussion, by the way.
Thank you! Exactly, this isn’t a problem that should be solved by the government. If parents don’t want their kids vaping, drinking, smoking weed, eating edibles, watching porn, or anything else then parents need to police their own kids. Adults shouldn’t lose access to things just because kids might like them too.
What a self-centered take. Are we all supposed to upvote you for your lack of morality?
“I’m selfish and anything that bothers me or prevents me from doing something is wrong.” Thats what your post reads like. Clearly society needs more people like you?
Adults also get addicted to nicotine. Most developed countries are trying to lower nicotine consumption by prohibiting menthol cigarettes for example. Or by introducing generic design of the packaging, warning labels and so on. The logic is that the substance is harmful and people should not be encouraged to consume it by nice packaging or flavoring. Those are basic public health regulations like limiting where and when alcohol can be sold, how alcohol can be advertised or putting taxes on sugary drinks. I know that people in US believe all regulations infringe on their freedoms but it’s pretty standard thing in civilized countries.
The Nanny State strikes again. Now sponsored by even more Evil Corporations!
Ecigs and vapes are different things. That is a life or death distinction.
They are? Could you explain? Because I was under the impression they were synonymous.
Do you mean like the difference between disposables vs refillables?
I hate Trump and republicans, but good. Let adults do what they want. We shouldn’t lose our rights to police other people’s kids. If adults want fruity e-cigs they should be able to have them.
Trump is the one who killed the industry in the first place. Him and his previous FDA are the ones who implemented all these new rules.
you’re not even able to get healthy food on a daily basis anymore.
so yeah, let’s also reduce the regulation in favor for these big corporations that… for sure… will be totally reasonable and won’t screw up kids with addictive products directly served in schools without parents supervision.
These laws didn’t even ban them, they just lead to the current disposables market which are allowed by loophole:
- Cheaper and easier to obtain, usually sold in gas stations
- Typically cheaper coils, meaning heavy metals
- Cheaper batteries meaning more fires
- So. Much. More. Ewaste.
Going back makes it easier for people with custom mods to obtain ejuice which is like the millennial equivalent to smoking half and half out of a wooden pipe.
Also every weed dispensary I’ve ever been too has had flavored vape carts/pods and disposables, usually flavored w/ natural terpenes taken from weed or other plants.
I mean e-cigs are already legal. Adding flavor to them doesn’t make it worse for you.
It’s like if beer was legal, but fruit-flavored beer wasn’t
We’re not discussing food. Letting adults have flavored vapes doesn’t mean that kids will eat unhealthy foods. That’s another issue entirely.
Both could exist. Letting flavored e cigs exist doesn’t take away the ability to get healthy food.
Also directly served in schools is a lie. No school in USA or abroad is selling this or “serving it directly” to children.
When I was young we drank flavored alcohol doesn’t mean they should take it away from adults who choose to consume it.
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