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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Welcome to the United States. Federally speaking at least, there are very few protections for hiring/firing. You can be fired for your hair color, unless the hiring manager is as much of an idiot as he is an asshole and says “black people don’t have blonde hair” (happened in a Hooters case I remember reading). The company policy reads “right hair color for your skin tone”, and is actually normally enforceable in the US because it’s implying no “unnaturally dyed hair”. They hypothetically can turn away an Asian redhead with no legal ramifications so long as she dyed her hair that way.

    So yeah, they can 100% not hire you because you’re a Scorpio. More realistically, you’d probably see someone who doesn’t hire Aries, Virgo, or Aquarius because the New York Post had an article claiming those three signs are more likely to get fired.



  • Age discrimination in the US at least is driven by “40 or over”. I think any lawyer would be able to argue that “which day of the year you’re born” is not indicitive of a protected class. Because we’re fucked in the US and you can still formally be passed up on a job for being under 39 years old as long as you it’s not because “you’re almost 40, and we’re not allowed to get rid of you when you turn 40”




  • It’s a “tool for the job” game. I don’t trust a junior developer to write a login system. I’ve found security flaws in login systems written by senior developers who “know what they’re doing TM”. Unless I’m the expert in a given domain, it’s better to trust something written by those experts.

    For the record (since it’s fixed anyway), I discovered a common login timing vulnerability on one of our production systems that had been in place for nearly 15 years. Luckily we didn’t have enough traffic for anyone to notice it before me.




  • It becomes delicious. That’s part of the whole addiction process. Taste/smell is one (or two, however you count it) of the most unique senses in that it is largely driven by links in the brain. Tastes beget memories, and our favorite foods and beverages are the ones tied positively. Drugs tie us positively.

    I used to hate the smell of skunks. I’ve used to have one of those things where smells effect me worse than other people and I cannot handle them. I would actually retch up from the smell of skunk. It got worse after the family dogs were sprayed near their eyes and my memories tied a night of chaos and stressed mother to it all. Fast forward YEARS later; I smoked a little pot when I was younger. I dunno if you’ve ever heard of the term “skunk weed”. Guess why? Well, after that, immediately after that, the smell of skunk was pleasant to me and I didn’t retch at all. And it’s stayed that way. I STILL like the smell of skunk spray.

    The same with whiskey. Distilling is legal where I live. As such, I’ve acquired a taste for high-proofs. Things that would make most other whiskey drinkers spit out their drink saying the it would taste like rocket fuel. Why? Because a distilling run is a nice, mostly chill, 8 hour process where I hang out and have a sip here, a sip there. For a while, I stopped drinking regular-proof whiskeys entirely in favor of barrel-proofs. It may come as no surprise that wanting to drink 120-proof whiskey over 80-proof whiskey has almost nothing to do with the tasting notes.



  • But we know that inhaling PM2.5 is unhealthy and those size particles are present in vape

    This is no more true than saying “we know sunlight is unhealthy”. What we know is that PM2.5 is unhealthy in large quantities for long periods of time. We know the same thing about sunlight for a lot of the same reasons. Occasional 15-minute stretches in the sun is more healthy than consistent long-term exposure.

    You are free to take whatever risks you would like with your body.

    As are you. I’m just talking about what is or is not science vs propaganda, here. From a different branch, I would wager that vaped medications could reach a point of being healthier for us than injected medications.


  • I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said we have a lot more context than people want to pretend about vaping in general.

    And I’m not trying to say “it’s a mini hookah”, nor am I trying to say you should vape.

    Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah

    If they contain toxins, we probably know quite a bit about those toxins right now. But what about pure vaporized solids? In the CBD and Cannabis community, dry herb vaporizing is the hot new thing specifically because 99% of complaints about vaping being unhealthy are irrelevant. All they do is get the herbs hot without burning it, run it through cooling, and inhale it. I laugh, but I used to do that with lavender with an aromatic herb heating unit.

    The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.

    Despite your incredulity, you really haven’t shown that. The consequences are not perfectly understood, but we understand enough to start making educated opinions about vaping. Even your points about hookahs work towards that, with the worst cons being that you still get Carbon Monoxide and the intensity of Nicotine is high. The problem is that we don’t want to tell people that the educated opinion is “probably better for you than that glazed donut”


  • You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower

    And you’re not that stupid. You know that fine particulate matter in the air every breath we take is different from someone vaping sometimes. There’s a reason your linked study doesn’t mention vaping AND why scientists are still saying the risks of vaping are unclear.

    Your second study is more useful, but it really is not intellectually defensible to take it results as saying vaping is unhealthy. Instead, its results are saying that we need to keep regulations to control air quality with regards to vaping.

    I’ll reiterate my original critique.

    “Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations

    …is something I disagree with, like most extreme naive generalities.



  • The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you

    That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.

    And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.

    If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.





  • There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.

    Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.

    We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.

    So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.

    Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag

    As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.

    Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.


  • That’s really not the case. Nicotine is highly physically addictive. “Habits” are involved in the way the mind links itself to the addictive substances and the effect of consuming them. My wife quit smoking 15 years ago, and walking in the woods still gives her near-uncontrollable urges to light a cigarette. Because she and I camped a couple time the first year of our relationship and she smoked a cigarette on a hiking trail. That’s not habit-related. Having a cigarette was a more formative and powerful influencing memory to her than basically anything else in her life.

    Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”

    That’s just anti-smoker bullshit. Honestly, if you work at a job where you need to smoke to get a break, you should be finding another job anyway. Let’s just stick to hating the drug instead of the smokers.