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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • There is in most countries. Unless you mean shortfills you are meant to add nic to? In the US those still firmly fall under the laws restricting sale of vapes. Don’t know about the UK or Europe, I know those products exist there though.

    Otherwise you can’t legally sell bulk nicotine to underage people, obviously the other ingredients are used for such a wide variety of things they can’t really be restricted like that.



  • As a long time e-cig user and enthusiast I agree. I thought we got away from that garbage a decade ago, but then it came back. I don’t get it, it’s expensive, it sucks, and it’s mind bogglingly awful for the environment.

    I don’t even love the idea of pre built coils but I compromised for the convenience now that they are actually good. Feels a lot less bad to toss a little bit of steel and kanthal every few weeks.

    I can’t really get behind banning flavors, but less attractive packaging and only allowing open refillable systems would be a huge step to slowing adolescent use, they pretty much all use disposables because they can be bought at gas stations and you have to go to a smoke shop to get the refillables. Not to mention dropping $60 on a mod+tank isn’t as easy to start as $10 for a disposable.

    I think the flavors are a big part of why they can be effective as cessation aids you start to no longer associate tobacco with it which helps a lot. I no longer smell someone smoking and get cravings.



  • Israel definitely is well within their rights to retaliate against Hamas, it would be foolish to claim otherwise. It’s the exact way they are doing it that is the issue, they are behaving nearly as poorly as their enemy. You can’t just tell the world “look at the barbarity of Hamas slaughtering innocent civilians just out there kibbutzing” and then turn around and bomb civilian hospitals, completely disregard rules of engagement around medical aid killing humanitarian volunteers you were aware of, shutting off all power, water and closing food supply to the Gaza strip, and then act like it’s somehow better than that.

    Hamas absolutely sucks and Israel has every right to defend themselves from terrorism, but the Palestinian children buried under rubble didn’t deserve any of this. (Neither did the Israeli citizens who were slaughtered and kidnapped for that matter.)

    Israel has the technology, the troops, and the tactics to be far more precise and surgical in their retaliation, but their response has been punitive and brutal, and seems to almost maximize collateral damage. Of course that’s what Netanyahu and his thugs will all but directly say they want given the opportunity to speak. I do not believe that properly represents the citizens of Israel who are generally much more sympathetic to the people of Palestine.

    Both the citizens of Israel and Palestine have been failed by their leadership. Agree or disagree, at this point, I just had to write that down somewhere. I know people from both Palestine and Israel, wonderful people, all this is heartbreaking.

    War is hell, even if you play by the rules, why make it even worse?





  • Immediate red flag to me, when one of the sponsors of the research is someone who directly benefits from its findings.

    Literally the most common reason anything ever has received funding, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. They don’t really benefit unless it actually works in this case, unlike a sugary drink manufacturer looking to show that sugar is healthy on paper. This is too technical to be helpful to them optically rather it’s helpful in that it actually reduces the impact of their products on the environment in a provable way if implemented allowing them to avoid tighter regulation or outright bans of them. (for better or worse)

    That or their motives are less self serving, which is rare in the corporate world but does happen. Sometimes enough people at a company care to make things better.

    Also I’m sure they’d love to be able to take those plastics and turn them back into feedstock hydrocarbons to get nice virgin plastic on the cheap as oil prices inevitably rise in the coming decades.










  • I thought it was a given that Russia also can’t win but I suppose you can look at it this way, Russia could end the war right now if they wanted. It’s a whole can of worms but I think it’s vital for global security and stability that Russia does not take over Ukraine. Long term a win for Russia will cause more pain and suffering for everyone including Russian civilians.


  • Also I’d like to add it’s a massive shit sandwich for Biden to eat, it’s gone over about as well as you’d expect with his party. I doubt there was anything approaching a viable alternative.

    Also I will note that while these are still bad in no uncertain terms, the dud rate is under 2.5% versus the old school cluster munitions which had dud rates exceeding 40% (like the kind Russia is using now) if dropping ten of these prevents the Russians from dropping one of theirs you are coming out ahead in terms of UXO, not to mention any shortening of the conflict reducing the number of mines deployed by the Russian military who are a particular fan of the extremely problematic PFM-1 butterfly mines which are basically a way of dropping highly volatile UXO all over an area.

    War is hell.