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admiralteal

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admiralteal ,

It's more to do with the fact that they're intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren't so much anymore.

admiralteal ,

https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/20/8/954/3926044

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460319305891

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07439156231189181

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X16301598

Just a few examples. I sure hope you don't think Philip Morris is too ethical to use this kind of advertising science.

admiralteal , (edited )

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379716306201

Banning candy and such flavors was provably effective at reducing youth smoking rates in many studies, even knowing that other flavored tobacco/nicotine products were still available to absorb some of that demand. There's no reason to think vaping would be different.

admiralteal , (edited )

What even would meet your standards here? Only an ad that started "Hey, kids!"?

Juul was buying ads on Cartoon Network/Seventeen/Nickelodeon and youth education sites. They got sued for it. They then fired the ad firm that developed an adult-oriented campaign for them in favor of the vaporized campaign which I definitely see plainly targets teens -- and the courts agreed, since they paid over $400 mil in fines because of it.

Companies do what they can to maintain plausible deniability. But it's also an absolute fact that the fruit/candy-flavored vapes are vastly more popular among youths. The FDA has entire teams dedicated to "advising" producers on how not to market these things to kids based on expert advice.

Your position here is one where you default to giving the producers of harmful, addictive products the benefit of the doubt. When I see Puff Bar being ranked among the most popular vape brands for teens, my assumption is that there is actual malice leading to that position.

And to be clear, the youth vaping market did not exist until the era of Juul reinvented it through advertising. These were not particularly new products, just new ways of selling them. Smoking was solidly on the decline among teens. It was new sales strategies that reversed that trend.

admiralteal ,

95% less harmful than pretty much the worst habit you can have for your long-term health is still pretty damn harmful, even granting the ass-pull number. And worse, most vape users go around preaching how harmless it is when it is factually and provably harmful, meaning tons of users (especially among teens/youths) aren't even AWARE the addictive substance they are using is going to damage their long-term health.

admiralteal , (edited )

If this is a medical device for ending addiction, do we really need to have fruit/candy flavors lining the shelf in colorful bottles with cartoon mascots?

People weren't smoking fruit/candy cigarettes. Those were banned and nowadays only barely exist. No reason to have vape flavors beyond cigarette flavors, if they are a medical tool.

Just looking at vape products on a store shelf is proof that the producers do NOT think about their product as a medical device. That entire argument, that it is primarily a tool for breaking a smoking habit, should be categorically dismissed. If it were a BTC or prescription-only product for breaking a smoking habit, no reasonable person would have negative opinions about it.

The reality is, vaping's primary purpose is as a drug. An addictive drug that makes the user feel good to use and has certain provable short- and long-term side-effects.

I think people should be able to buy and use drugs. But only with informed consent. So long as the information is so poor around vaping, the consent isn't informed and we need regulations. And if this is a drug, it should be getting sold in an appropriate dispensary by trained, knowledgeable staff and not from corner stores, bodegas, and sketchy website that don't even properly screen out teen buyers.

admiralteal ,

You've applied an argument I didn't make to what I said.

If these are medical devices used to ween off cigarettes, they don't need to be flavored. The alternative is cigarettes. People aren't grabbing the next cigarette because they love the strawberry daiquiri flavor. The fact that they are basically all flavored is proof that anti-addiction is not their primary purpose.

I didn't say they shouldn't be flavored. I said the flavors are proof of what they are.

Harm reduction should be at the core of any policies around smoking and vaping

What if the outcome of that analysis is that the people being brought off cigarettes are not being outweighed by the people being brought into vaping? Would you still make the same argument that harm reduction is foremost? I have a feeling you won't entertain the thought experiment.

There's a perfectly coherent argument that tobacco trends were heading towards extinction until vaping reignited things. All the trends were heading that way. It was largely dying out as a habit among young people. Vaping completely changed that. It's now a growing sector that has the potential to last for a long time and damage a lot of people. And we are still only in the early days of seeing how harmful it is -- but just like with cigarettes, there's a huge apparatus pushing out an information campaign that they're Good Actually and Not Unsafe At All (TM).

admiralteal ,

Military targets are morally different than civilian targets with or without collateral damage. Hamas are not the heroes.

admiralteal ,

Not to no true scotsman this shit, but does anyone self-identify as "Leninist" who isn't a Stalinist?

Marxist is a pretty tame word, all things considered. Marxism is a pretty broad tent that fits a lot of people. But I don't think I have ever interacted with a self-described "Leninist" that wasn't authoritarian and against civil rights. This coming from a guy who regularly quotes Lenin.

admiralteal ,

When your entire strategy in an argument is to be disingenuous and dishonest as all hell, you ALWAYS feel like you win the arguments.

It can trick a person into thinking they are a good debater.

admiralteal ,

Those modals are themselves a dark pattern.

The law they respond to was one that was intended to simply get website to stop using tracking cookies. Just don't do it unless absolutely necessary. It's just uncalled for bad practice.

But it is so vanishingly rare for ANY company to be well-behaved that now, the modals are ubiquitous. So common that people desensitize to them.

I bet most of them don't even work.

admiralteal ,

There's really little question it was intentional sabotage. Most sensible theories show Russia had means and opportunity. Including a well-equipped vessel detected near the pipelines shortly before the explosions. The motive is a bit strange, though, since it seems like Russia really wanted to be selling that oil... But it's also not hard to believe that Russia would do stupid, self-harmful things that make no sense, given the whole war in Ukraine is such a thing. Especially when there's a compelling chain of events that connect to Putin.

The Russians claim it was the US (or occasionally the UK), but they do so essentially without evidence. At least at the time of the attacks, the talk was that it would hurt NATO allies FAR more than it would hurt Russia, so it is a bit absurd. Also, when it comes to Russia, false flags are the playbook and accusations smell like confession.

There's also theories that it was a Ukrainian sapper mission. There's some evidence for establishing an opportunity, and the 'motive' of 'fuck Russia' is hardly insane. But those theories have never convincingly established means (the vessel accused was simply not capable of doing the thing and no other vessels were ever identified) and it would still not be in Ukraine's interest to hurt European allies / NATO members given their intense need to maintain that relationship. It's a bit far fetched, in my opinion. But maybe there's a logic to "this pipeline is creating an unnecessary relationship and severing it will further isolate Putin." I dunno, if the Ukrainians had wetworks logistics like that I feel like we'd see a lot more shit going wrong deep in Russia right now.

The reality is, we may never know what really happened with those bombings. It's hard to establish fact at the bottom of the sea and all investigations are almost necessary state-led ones, meaning it's easy to dismiss the evidence you don't like and stick with only the evidence that supports you. Which creates an environment full of conspiratorial speculation. And the Russians have a very effective disinformation network that captivates both the extreme left and extreme right that enjoys the chaos and uncertainty.

Woman buying pot from NYC deli maced, dragged by hair, kicked in head by cashier who mistook her for trans (www.nydailynews.com)

A Staten Island woman buying pot from a local deli got into a misunderstanding with the cashier — who ended up macing her, dragging​ her outside by her hair, kicking her in the head and mistakenly calling her trans.

admiralteal ,

Staten Island is where the cops live. That's their turf. They want her to know she isn't welcome or safe there.

admiralteal ,

There are no good guys in that conflict.

Only bad guys and victims.

Hamas being terrorists doesn't make it OK for Israel to be committed to genocide any more than Israel's existence as an ethnofascist apartheid state makes in OK for Hamas to be bombing proms.

Both organizations are making it impossible for Palestinians to live peacefully.

The sooner Android accepts RCS is dead, the sooner we can choose the next messaging platform that matters (www.androidpolice.com)

I’m just sitting here frustrated because I’m wanting my family to move away from messaging me over SMS (they mainly use iOS), but they refuse to download any extra apps. But Google’s RCS really doesn’t look like a solution either since it mainly just seems to be a way of enforcing Android as an ecosystem, and they...

admiralteal ,

The ONLY way to fix the wider world of messaging is mandatory adversarial interoperability.

No matter how clever your new standard is, it will not work.

Adversarial interoperability -- even if it is gated to only be required of sufficiently large businesses/platforms -- will be the end of all this bullshit once implemented. Messaging should be about the people and the messages, not the platforms.

admiralteal ,

Reminds me of RGB's answer to "When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?"

Her answer was "When there are nine". We're a long way away from being able to have 9 women on the court without that being some controversial, remarkable thing. We're not nearly as far away from 9 men on the court being uncontroversial and unremarkable.

It won't be until the end of the universe. It'll be until the stereotype stops ringing true. Which we are a very, very long way away from. Be real dude, it is not in the past even a little.

admiralteal ,

I mean, as far as movement is concerned there's a lot more freedom than in most of the US.

Singapore, you can pretty much get around anywhere you want quickly, safely, and cheaply using any of a variety of transportation modes.

US you're forced to use a car and if you can't afford one you can use someone else's (taxi or rideshare) at a markup. Most people live in places that have no other viable modes, even though 80+% of people live in towns and cities that would have tons of alternatives pretty much anywhere else in the world (and would save money on their municipal budgets in so doing).

Charging people for the social cost of their personal luxuries, especially luxuries that have immense social cost like cars, in order to fund social goods is not something so ridiculously unreasonable. You should probably pick something actually bad if you want to criticize Singapore.

admiralteal ,

If you actually live in a rural area, it shouldn't have "almost zero" traffic congestion. There should be actually none. I suspect you don't actually live in a rural area -- you probably live in a faux-rural suburb of an actual town that you need to regularly go to. And again, nearly everywhere else in the world someone living in such a place would have choices for how to do that. Take a bike ride, hop on a train, jump in your car, whatever you feel like that day.

If you actually live in the country, you're not actually getting in your car to make trips often at all because most of the time, you're staying on your property. You're self-supporting. If your lifestyle requires making long trips on the roads and highways every day, you're relying on massive government infrastructure spending to conduct your business. You have to either pay your fair share for that infrastructure -- which is WAY more than any current vehicle and fuel taxes could even get CLOSE to supporting -- or else you're going to have to accept that your lifestyle is only possible thanks to others subsidizing it.

Others who don't want the same things you want. Others whose idea of freedom is to be able to decide for themselves instead of having someone else pick for them.

admiralteal ,

The other guy is wrong. For people living in the actual countryside, there's no reason to go after their cars. We don't need to provide top-notch public transportation networks to the tiny percent of people that live in the actual countryside. You scale what you offer to the population that exists. Some places are too remote to even get twice-a-day bus and that's fine: the kind of people that live in the actual countryside aren't simpletons and know what the bargain is. No one is charging them congestion taxes or coming for their cars.

But it's also irrelevant. These legitimately rural places... hardly anyone lives there. They're practically a rounding error. It doesn't really matter towards how the future needs to look if we want it to exist at all. Leave them alone. Country people aren't simpletons. They made their choices and understand the bargain. They know that they have to maintain their own roads, water systems, septic fields. Get satellite or cell internet. Generate most of their own power. They know they have to cook their own meals and that their options for shops are limited. They know that country life isn't supposed to be just the same as city life but with more space of your own.

This idea that some huge population of people living in the country is under threat -- or indeed even exists -- is just a bad faith invocation to reject actual sensible town planning policy. Because the reality is, nearly everyone lives in towns and the size and population where a town is "large" enough that it makes no financial sense to build for cars above all else is a lot smaller than you think. My experience is that nearly every American who claims to live in the country is simply mistaken. They actually live in the suburbs of a small town. A small town that is likely facing the barrel of a gun in the form of the financial sustainability of its current, car-first design patterns. A small town that is going to have to contend with either forcing suburban and "exurban" drivers to finally start paying their fair share to maintain roads, sewers, utilities, police, fire, and all these things or else accept that these services are going to increasingly fall apart and go away.

admiralteal ,

Singapore is an island city-state. The rural part of Singapore is Malaysia, a different country -- and one that is also famously pretty damn dense where the people live.

admiralteal ,

Make up your mind, guy. Which is it? Do we need to increase transportation spending for people in the countryside or not?

You can't have it both ways here. Either there are tons of people in the countryside meaning it makes perfect sense to fund transportation projects for them or there aren't and it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.

Policies at country level generally applies to those living on the countryside same as urbanites

Sure, in Singapore they do. Because Singapore is a city state on an island. Its countryside is a different fucking country.

But everywhere else in the world, that's total bullshit and you know it. Just utter tripe. You don't run the same policies and projects for the countryside as you do for the cities.

I'm tired of the wealth transfer from cities to the countryside. I'm tired of the tax dollars of the 85% of people that live in cities being used to build more roads and highways for the <15% of people that live in the fake "exurban" countryside and sprawling suburbs and lack the imagination to see that even there, the car doesn't need to be a religion.

admiralteal ,

It's almost a moot point in his case. The Belgian "countryside" is all towns and small cities. Every bit of it should be served by some kind of transit. It's only about 350km the long way across with a population of almost 12 million. There's hardly a hectare in it where you aren't a bike ride from a town center. Even in the dead center of Hodge Kempen you're still adjacent to small, fairly dense town.

He just falls for the typical false dichotomy that you're either in the "countyside" or you're in a major metropolis. When the reality is, most people live in small towns and small towns are still urban.

He replied to a guy talking about the states and applied just completely wrong standards of what both what good transit and the countryside are because his own experience doesn't map to what the other guy was talking about.

admiralteal ,

She's probably thinking that there is still more abortion to get banned, so that will have to wait.

Actually helping parents and newborns apparently needs to wait. As can policies that are actually effective at reducing abortion rates such as financial support for the pregnant, access to contraception and sex ed, childcare, etc. For some reason, all that couldn't happen before overturning Roe. For some reason.

admiralteal ,

It's amazing the way "pro-lifers" don't actually believe in a right to life. At all.

This right here is what they really care about -- judging and punishing people for having sex. They view pregnancy as a consequence and so abortion is escaping a consequence. It has nothing to do with the rights of the fetus, just persecuting the uterus.

Because, after all, if you truly believed that pregnancy were a consequence, it would mean that you believe abortion should be legal for anyone that didn't take action to "deserve" the pregnancy. It means the right to life is contingent on the choices made or not made by the pregnant person. And a right that can be washed away by the choices made by a stranger is no right at all.

You just know if this guy got someone pregnant, he'd be driving them straight to the abortion clinic even if was across the country.

admiralteal ,

Yet your primary goal in this thread was to focus on the pregnancy as a punishment for bad behavior.

Weird how you think like that.

If not letting someone take of your body to support their life is absolutely and indelibly murder, then ever single person who dies waiting for an organ transplant you did not offer to them is your victim. Neat. On top of being a proud misogynist, you're also a killer.

admiralteal ,

You can be your best self by purchasing a subscription to Brawndo recommended by the AI friend guzzling fossil fuels and water in the middle of whatever desert their hardware resides.

admiralteal ,

This is how I drink all beverages from all cups.

I'm great fun at a tiki bar.

admiralteal ,

A lot of ISPs were already dodging the old, weak rules anyway out of an abundance of caution. Instead of doing any direct pay-for-play, they started doing other policies that sounded pro consumer but lead inevitably to the same non-netural, corporate-controlled world.

For example, T-Mobile favoring huge video streaming platforms over smaller competition by exempting the big boys from data caps. An act of profound, malicious evil that did more to end the idea of neutral networks than ANY lobbying could have, and which most people still think of as totally fine. I'm also pretty sure that predated Ajit Pai.

I think this is whole question is a great example of when the industry genuinely would prefer clear rules and has been quite nervous to act absent clear rules. The unstable nature of neutral network policy at a high level meant the entire zone was a bit of a minefield, so they've been very cautious about dipping toes.

admiralteal ,

That is not what enshitification means.

Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.

It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It's about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.

We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.

admiralteal ,

If you subscribe to other channels via Amazon Prime (e.g., Paramount+ through the Prime app), they already serve you 70-90s unskippable ads. Often ads for the very show you are about to watch. It's infuriating.

If I were paying for it myself it would be totally unacceptable. Since I'm just using someone else's account, it still makes me mad but I'll tolerate it.

admiralteal ,

Why? They were right. The advent of mechanization in textile factories led to a profound weakening of labor and a steep decline in working conditions generally.

They were demanding worker protections both in terms of safety and livability and they didn't get them. They were demanding fair wages and were correctly concerned that the machine operators would be so thoroughly subservient to the machine owners that they would never again have significant power over their own profession.

And again, the were right. That's what happened.

admiralteal ,

Why watch or read anything? Just have your prejudices and stick to them, that's what I say. Trying to learn why other people think the way they do, especially when those people are actively trying to engage you, is a waste of time. Better to shit on their work while having zero knowledge of its content.

admiralteal ,

Yes, that's exactly what I said. Just look at the cover then get to posting online reviews. Reading it is unnecessary so long as you are pretty sure you have an idea what it is maybe about probably I've seen similar stuff elsewhere after all. Because just a glance at the cover is enough to decide not only whether you are interested in reading it but whether you can go online and declare the content to be "worthless drivel".

There is literally no difference between a meme post on a microblog and a 90 minute video essay. It's all exactly the same and definitely worthless.

It's not just that you should glance at the cover/title and decide whether or not you're interested in it. No way. It's that you should declare the quality of the entire work based solely on the title/cover.

admiralteal ,

You don't have to watch every video. No one does. Look at the thumbnail, who's recommending it, and title and decide if it interests you.

But don't review shit you haven't even pretended to attempt to consume. That's fucking philistine shit.

admiralteal ,

I don't want to watch that, same as you neither of us want to watch this video (it's 90 minutes long, goddamn).

Difference is, you're seeking the stuff out just to review it as garbage without even pretending to click on the link. You aren't even adding your own opinion about the topic; literally just saying ANY content ANYONE produces that disagrees with your view is automatically garbage. You're a total partisan on the issue and you see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

admiralteal ,

I replied to you.

admiralteal ,

Almost certainly misclassified employees which is also illegal. But sadly something that is largely just... permitted and ignored.

admiralteal ,

Employees are rated like Uber drivers -- 5 stars is good, 4 stars neutral, anything else is bad.

But the companies forbid giving 5-star reviews.

If they didn't, they'd have to admit their expectations are too high for the pay they are offering. Exceeding expectations is the expectation and therefore you cannot exceed expectations. And since you aren't exceeding expectations, minimum or no raise for you.

admiralteal ,

He’s incapable of understanding that what he purchased is not a toy put there solely for his enjoyment

But that is exactly what it is.

admiralteal ,

And while it will always be controversial, I'll say it over and over again: you MUST support some kind of adversarial interoperability for a messaging client, at least if you want me on your service. In the US, that means having some degree of SMS support since that's what most people can use by default. In many parts of the world (at least pending the new EU directive), you don't even have that since the primary means of messaging most people is proprietary services.

Signal walked back from even bare-bones SMS support in their app. If they had supported it, including forwarding messages to desktop/tablet clients , I am sure it could've given them a high degree of user retention. Maybe even some opportunities to conversion, e.g.,, a user getting a prompt when starting a new SMS that the sender is on Signal. They instead focused on maintaining the walled garden and that creates an INTENSELY high up-front cost. For someone like me, who puts a high priority on juggling as few of these apps as possible to communicate with people, it's an unreasonably high one. I have no more desire to try and fight to convert all my parents to Signal as getting them onto a Discord server or any other random, narrow-field service that they will not be able to ding strangers on.

It's absolutely unintelligible to me that no competitor has seen plainly what makes iMessage so strong: that it works by default with pretty much everyone with nearly zero friction to the user by supporting a nearly universal fallback.

It also is why it makes so much damn sense to me that the EU passed the adversarial interoperability rule. Because the had very close to nothing for a universal fallback.

admiralteal ,

Twitter is not and never has been an ISP or anything resembling an ISP.

admiralteal ,

Easier to to keep them water resistant/dustproof, for one.

On earbuds, there's no much space for a button. Responding to just taps on the bud feels intuitive and works well.

If you have a wire, controller on the wire makes more sense.

admiralteal ,

You're making a conservation vs restoration argument here.

Restoration is what the guy is asking about, I suspect, not conservation.

"Write a Check for $11,000. She Was 26, She Had Limited Value." [Seattle Police] Officer Jokes with Police Union Leader About Killing of Pedestrian by Fellow Cop (publicola.com)

In a conversation with Mike Solan, the head of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, Seattle Police Department officer and SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer minimized the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave and joked that she had “limited value” as a “regular person” who was only...

admiralteal ,

Why do cops have the power to just routinely turn off their body cams?

That should be limited to using the bathroom. If it gets turned off during regular duty, it should be presumed to mean something is being covered up because that is exactly what it means. There should be paperwork triggered every time it is turned off.

admiralteal ,

Really, the only thing you can't do on an electric range that you can do on a typical gas cooker is, for example, directly fire a pepper.

And you really don't need to do that. You can just do it under the broiler, for example. I also don't even insist on induction. A mid-range radiant top is STILL better than gas, in my opinion, though the induction is worth it if you can afford it.

People will bring up woks a lot, but a gas range also can't draw out the real advantages of a wok and you're better off with an outdoor chimney cooker or a dedicated wok burner (induction with a small torch or gas bottle) if that's what you really care about.

Plus, I must again point out how fucking AWFUL it is to clean a gas cooktop compared to how trivially easy it is to clean a glass-top electric cooker. The time saved cleaning more than makes up for the advantages people list with gas even if we grant those advantages exist. Which I clearly don't.

admiralteal ,

Very good induction cooktops are nowhere near $1,000 per hob and can boil water in a fraction the time as gas. Don't buy the Frigidaire crapola and the stating price for a very good full induction convection range with 4-5 hobs is ~$1,250. Spend twice that and you'll have a machine with no downsides.

admiralteal ,

The EFF believes every slope is very, very, very slippery indeed.

Many of them aren't that slippery. Cleaving absolutely to a hard rule is just walking away from the hard work of good governance. I wish they'd focus way more on privacy and competitive goals like adversarial interoperability and a lot less on speech because they often have an approach to speech that makes me a little gag-y.

It's funny, because the first time I heard an academic type seriously talking critically about the idea of free speech being an unfettered and absolute right was on the EFF's own podcast. Pointing out that we as a society have all kinds of very real limits on speech that nearly no one thinks of as at all controversial (e.g., anti-defamation rules, sexual harassment bans, or all kinds of conspiracy/incitement statues). Yet they then come and make statements like they did about the KiwiFarms case where the threat they believe in is just so overstated.

I think it's a lot rarer for the ACLU to have me raising my eyebrows. To me, they feel a lot more steadfast and predictable. The ACLU will defend a LOT of genuine criminals, but they do so because we factually live in a police state propped up by repeated anti-civil rights SCOTUS opinions. They do so because the outcomes of those cases WILL affect innocent people in a straight line -- the police WILL take every opportunity to violate you without a second thought even if it ISN'T allowed, and will do so with gusto when it is. I don't think there is a similar straight line with a Tier 1 ISP killing traffic to a known hate site that regularly threatens and incites violence against specific people.

admiralteal ,

I never really thought about them defending that bullshit, but that's worthy of heavy criticism.

Any time you find yourself on the same side of an issue as the Cato Institute, you should think real long and hard about your position.

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