A few years ago the area behind the register at my local Walgreens had a bunch of semi-unhealthy vaping options, with multiple flavors, and a shrinking selection of mega-unhealthy cigarettes. Seemed like a fairly decent move toward harm reduction.
Now: the entire area is pretty much all back to mega-unhealthy cigarettes. Just an overwhelming quantity of smokable tobacco. There might be one vape in there somewhere.
This is in health-conscious California. Good job, team, we did it, we saved everyone's health.
Smokable tobacco is not seen as cool to nearly the same degree as it once was. Vapes and zyns meanwhile are all the rage with young people where they are available.
I do think that getting rid of the vapes and Zyns is an improvement for people’s health. The idea that vapes can be used to switch of tobacco is basically pro-vape propaganda at this point; we know that far more people are using nicotine thanks to these products, people who would otherwise not use it at all.
> The idea that vapes can be used to switch of tobacco is basically pro-vape propaganda at this point
It worked for me, and it's in large part because while vapes contain nicotine, they don't contain the MAOIs that cigarettes do. MAOIs make the nicotine significantly more addictive. Subjectively, cigarettes were night and day different in how habit-forming they were. The vapes are a step down and much easier to quit.
In terms of health, it's ridiculous: we know for a fact that tobacco smoke contains freaking Polonium-210 and Lead-210, extremely nasty radioactive isotopes. These aren't in vapes. These alone should be the end of the argument for whether smokable tobacco should be sold on an industrial scale for human consumption.
Nicotine by itself isn't the four alarm fire for public health that smoking tobacco is. If we're going to go full nanny state and ban non-smoked nicotine, then we may as well ban caffeine and alcohol. Realistically, however, the authoritarian move on this isn't justified by the risk level.
Around here the end result of the flavored juul pod ban was a proliferation of cheap chinese disposable vapes with all the fruity flavors, while juul was relegated to virginia tobacco and menthol flavors only, so now everyone just gets the disposable ones. Big win. Makes no sense to me, if juul ran an ad they didn't like then just fine them and pull the ad- don't pull the product while allowing others to sell a shittier version of it.
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious: yes obviously the US and Israel will exploit the information system of their enemy if they can, and it’s absolutely rational to deny them the opportunity to do so.
The government of Lebanon is cooperating with Israel - it's only the southerners/Hezbollah in conflict, at least for now. The people of Gaza are cut off for the most part. The strict censorship inside Israel is what you should compare to - not as strict as a total access ban, but if you say the wrong things or take pictures of the wrong stuff you're going to prison.
If they could credibly threaten your infrastructure then it makes sense. If they have no real organized hacking capabilities then no. But the US has already attacked Iran through computers before with Stuxnet and is the world leader in software and networking knowledge so it does make perfect sense for Iran to disconnect its networks from outside.
You might also have to consider the propaganda campaigns the US could run against an Iranian population with web access. If the population isn't more discontent now than it already was, "secretly" replacing commercial ad placements on western websites with US propaganda when the requests come from Iranian sources could make them discontent or inflame them further, which is bad for the Iranian government.
> consider the propaganda campaigns the US could run against an Iranian population with web access.
I’m amazed at people who have access to freely express their opinions online, prescribe that 90m people should not have the right to freely access information because they somehow can’t be trusted to not fall for propaganda. What a patronizing and self righteous take.
Just because I can see things from the view of the current Iranian government doesn't mean I support them or their actions. And its not like the US does nothing to suppress foreign propaganda already, they just more often try to drown it out with our own. Hell we just recently were talking about banning tiktok because just shaping what user-made videos was considered too strong of an ability to push Chinese propaganda and influence US citizens.
And yes, we already know large masses of people will readily fall for propaganda, just look at the US political landscape, look at the entire field of marketing which is just propaganda for profit. Everybody across the entire world is vulnerable to propaganda, marketing and propaganda didn't become less common going into the 21st century, it just got better and harder to identify.
My point is that the people of Iran aren’t the target of the disruption.
Remember when Ukraine used the Russian cellular internet to operate drones that destroyed numerous Russian heavy bomber aircraft? That’s what the US/Israel would logically be expected to do if there were wide open internet access in Iran.
This is obvious game theory playing out militarily, people only see political suppression but warfare is a totally different ballgame.
If China were waging large scale war on the US I’d expect the exact same countermeasures to happen.
Everything shut down for 6 months and somehow miraculously the economy just sort of chugged along without much shock until about 2 years later when all the consequences of the COVID aid/stimulus came home to roost.
This isn't a pandemic, this is an energy crisis (and everything didn't 'shut down for six months' during the pandemic anyway). The historical events you'll want to look back on are the 1973, 1979, and 2022 energy shocks.
Combine them all: this is worse.
This isn't my hot take either, it's the opinion of the International Energy Agency[1].
Even if peace breaks out right now, the world economy is going to take years to recover.
Which is to say, it's a speculative bubble and it will burst on its own schedule and for essentially arbitrary reasons and not due to the economic fundamentals of the industries involved.
Which... is something we all basically knew even before the Iran boondoggle. The market is as the market does.
The typical investor algorithm is timing the market or analysing stocks doesn't work so keep buying index funds. That can go on and on unless people run out of money to buy with.
decidedly off topic but since i've stumbled across you again, i'm still over here wondering what the hell you meant a couple months ago by arguing that doing bare syscalls on linux from a forth is an emulator.
it was quite perplexing to be called a sovcit who was imagining some software i've written just because it was rhetorically inconvenient for you that said software existed
Why bother with a thousand cuts when you can just pack the court and do it with one, as was accomplished today when the court effectively struck down the voting rights act?
Nitpick: the court isn’t “packed”; it’s has 9 members since 1869.
The VRA wasn’t struck down either. The court just ruled that race based gerrymandering isn’t legal if it results in partisan advantage in such a district.
> Nitpick: the court isn’t “packed”; it’s has 9 members since 1869.
I'm sorry but this is an unserious, bad faith nitpick. The court is absolutely packed by carefully manipulating the membership. The confirmation process for most of my lifetime has been an intensely partisan operation to ensure only the most hardened political operatives land on the court, with the intention of turning it into the 'super legislature' that it is. This argument does a disservice to the people who worked so hard to pack it.
> The VRA wasn’t struck down either
I mean, that's your opinion. but you're not on the SC and someone who is says that this decision's effect is to "eviscerate the law."
You're welcome to cite whatever modern piece that rewrites to whatever definitions you like. I actively encourage you to stick your head in the sand and scream at the top of your lungs.
The literal public education textbook I was required to learn from explained court packing decades ago as increasing the number of justices to imbalance an existing court, which is explicitly what FDR was trying to do. If the English language has changed that much in my short lifetime, I'm pretty sure I grew up on mars.
You don't need to be upset, the mature thing to do is to retract your claim about it having 'always' referred to increasing the court size. That's just facially incorrect, as I demonstrated. Furthermore, what does your 'well ackshually' in this situation do to address the obvious problem of a dysfunctional branch of government suffering from capture by partisans? Let's not pretend that you'd be okay with this if the court was packed with card-carrying democratic socialists.
Pedantry is serving nobody any good here. It distracts from the core debate which is far more serious than the evolution of a dictionary word. It meant one thing. Now it means more. Let's move on and stay on topic.
For the poorest in the world, people with no social safety net, children are your 401k, pension, and social security system. Can't have children? Enjoy starving to death in your golden years. Conversely, many children means a cushy retirement. In ancient times your children were your literal property for your whole life, and that's still generally the idea in poor countries.
Civilized countries decided that forcing poor/elderly childless people to starve wasn't acceptable, so we have these support systems which make childrearing optional. Furthermore, everyone decided to trade single income families for doubling national productivity.
To stop overthinking it and make things simple, all you need to do is get rid of social security and pensions. This immediately changes the math for everyone considering children. Firmly gripping the third rail of politics is super straightforward!
The point of this loss leading is to properly hoover up the money in the pockets of enterprise customers, get them locked into the idea that they need the latest and greatest cloud-based model, while simultaneously starving everyone of the memory they'd need in order to run competent models locally.
In not-too-distant future we're going to be running better models on our phones than we can buy access to today in the cloud. Skate where the puck is going: soak the customers until that day comes.
I think your first paragraph is spot on, while the second is fairly incorrect. Hardware isn’t getting cheaper at a reasonable pace, and datacenters will keep depleting the market. State-of-the-art models are very, very far from being run on your own hardware.
I could accept that the end result might be what you propose, but training models is getting tricky, running them more so, now that hardware is becoming pricier. The future might simply be a few feudal lords permitting you to run the best models on their equipment, and a few good open models that most will struggle to run.
> The Chinese government’s intervention in the transaction drew alarm among tech founders and venture capitalists in the country who were hoping to take advantage of the so-called Singapore-washing model, where companies relocate from China to the city-state to avoid scrutiny from Beijing and Washington.
If the US is going to treat AI technology as a strategic issue upon which it's going to play the national security card, it's not really valid to start the pearl-clutching when China does the same.
Seems like Manus and Meta thought they were going to be clever, and that China wasn't going to play any any of the cards they were holding. Even GPT-2 could've told them that was a dumb idea.
As a subscriber for something like two decades I respect them for being sober businesspeople and keeping the platform alive for paying customers, rather than dumping losses for growth hacks and then ending up a smoking crater.
Now: the entire area is pretty much all back to mega-unhealthy cigarettes. Just an overwhelming quantity of smokable tobacco. There might be one vape in there somewhere.
This is in health-conscious California. Good job, team, we did it, we saved everyone's health.
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