I’ve been surprised in recent years how much more smoking has subtly popped back up in media. Most times it’s also not in a way that applies to the plot or illuminates anything you didn’t already know about a character.
Also in sports, things like Nickelodeon getting so involved with the NFL for kids with cartoon recreations of games, etc. They are propping up a new generation of sports hero role models in people like Joe Burrow. For awhile, he’d be celebrating all their victories with trashy cigar parties in the locker room, as like, a kid in his early 20s who just got slimmed by Nickelodeon a few days before?
It’s been pretty odd to see the resurgence in media in the last decade plus.
I don’t smoke in any regular capacity. Last time I smoked was new years this year. The time before that was October '22.
On new years eve I drank, and I thought I could keep the alcohol high going if I smoked. Bad idea, the next day was shot too. Completely fucked. Never again.
Every time I smoke I’m reminded why I didn’t smoke for >1 year prior.
That’s not the only thing they do. They also reduce your capacity for work… and life. I have a reason to believe that people dying from “overwork” are actually because:
People work (and play) more when they are young and in school etc.
Get used to their ability to work as much and subconsciously set a mental bar.
Get into office space full of secondary smoke / start smoking
Smoke reduces their ability
They don’t realise their reduced ability and keep on working as much as previously set bar.
dedz
Just a hypothesis. No scientific backing.
… other than first hand exp with reducing ability to work after long term exposure in a heavily contaminated environment.
I won’t act like I know what comes out of people’s exhalation after they come into an unventilated room after smoking in the stairway just next to it (with the only door blocking anything, being always kept open), but I can say for sure that:
Cigarettes give out much more than just nicotine vapour.
The smokers in question have proven to be neither more competent, nor more productive. On the contrary, they sit around, asking other ppl to do their work (in the name of help) and as the other people waste their own time explaining their work as they do it, the smokers don’t even learn from what is being taught to them.
If it is a stimulant that comes out of that smoke, it’s definitely stimulating unwanted attributes of the brain.
I wanna see a massive dump of them. All of them. If you gonna smoke smoke weed. Fuck tobacco and anyone who thinks it’s cool. They have the freedom to choose for sure, but anyone that chooses that is 100% idiot until proven otherwise.
No ifs, ands, or buts. If you like it, you are part of the problem.
Quitters finally saw the light. People who start smoking in the 2020s are just outright stupid. It’s not all over TV anymore, it’s not the cool teenage rebellion thing. It’s not even hidden knowledge about how bad it is to start, and how hard quitting is. Wtf is making people start now?
Smoking weed will bring a lot of the negative health effects of tobacco smoking. Is it so cool that one may underestimate it? That reminds me of something.
Now, yes, burning any plant material will release carcinogens that can increase cancer risk. Incidentally, this includes sitting around a campfire, but most people in developed countries don’t do that every day. However, studies on marijuana smoke find that smoking one joint a day for a year gives slightly elevated testicular cancer risk, and inconclusive results for other cancers.
Possibly, marijuana has a protective effect that tends to cancel out the inherent carcinogens.
The reality is no, cannabis probably doesn’t block carcinogens. Nor is it more harmful to your lungs than tobacco. But it’s not really clear that it’s less harmful than a filtered cigarette. I think it is probably a bit healthier of a habit just in that people usually smoke much lower quantities. But if you take a smoker and stoner each smoking 10 times a day they’re both at a higher risk of lung complications than non-smokers. Also importantly, cannabis is not chemically addictive (it definitely can be an addiction though) whereas nicotine very much so is.
Voluntary suffering in order to bring about future positive ends is essentially integral to having a good life. That’s like saying to someone who just started exercising and is complaining about being sore, “if you’re feeling worse, is it really for the best?” Yes. It definitively is.
Worst thing about alcohol imo is that I can never do anything really productive. Like a beer or two and instead of idk, reading or making something or programming I’ll just be doing nothing. Takes my focus right out
Humans can synthesize all amino acids themselves. Any external source is optional, and outside of extreme scenarios like quickly gaining muscle mass nothing you need to think about.
If you do find yourself in the extreme scenario, you will have no problems picking from the huge range of non-meat protein sources.
No they can’t synthesize them all, thats sort of the problem. Those that can’t be synthesized are the essential amino acids. Most, but not all of these essential acids are easily available in a vegan diet. Those that aren’t as available, well, better find a good strategy to get enough of those.
Hm, it seems you are right. Not sure how I didn’t know that.
So is my understanding correct in that there are 3 groups of substances: vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids; that you would have a bad time without? Bringing the total to calories, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and water?
In that case I suppose a minimum number of Livestock products are helpful in fulfilling that, though as the increase of supplemented products probably reduces the need, the amino acids can still be chemically synthesized, right?. The main criticism is also the amount, we are consuming (way) more livestock products than needed to fulfill nutritional requirements. Especially meat would still be optional, right?
I don’t actually have experience with vegan diets, I’ve always figured eating little meat would get me most of the way with least of the effort.
Which golf course isn’t an artificial mix of sand, roads and monoculture full of pesticides? I would guess they also have traps against wildlife that may damage their perfect loan.
No it does not. You cannot eat nor consume what livestock does, period. Their entire diet is shit you cannot eat, it’s literally roots, and stalks and basically garbage your body cannot use. They also drink non portable water.
On earth we have a land shortage. If you grow animal feed, that could have also been a foodcrop. In terms of land efficiency, meat is an order of magnitude less efficient.
We do not grow crops for just animal feed, the majority of what they consume is waste byproducts from what you are able to consume. It’s around 85% of their diet. So unless you have a way to all of a sudden eat stalks or roots or leaves and grass, it’s wasted if not feed to livestock.
I’ll try to take a more nuanced and in depth look.
As a start, I’m relatively sure the main use of a large chunk of agricultural land is solely food production. A cursory search gives data like this image global land use
from this page.
It’s reasonable to assume some of the plant waste of food crops feeds some of the livestock, but if that much land is exclusively used for animals it would seem reasonable we could at least double the human plant food production with a reduced animal portion in that land use.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective animals are around 10%, so if you take half of produced plant calories and use them for animals, that will result in 10x fewer calories of animal products than the other half of the plants. This lines up with the energy spread by end human food product, which seems to be something like this: this is a shitty image link, that will probably break in the future. sry
By the raw numbers and that coarse approach we expect 75% ⸱ 10% : 25% ≈ 1:3.3, the actual data seems to be slightly worse at 1:4.
So it seems to me we are using something like 25% of the land area to produce 80% of the food, just by not passing it through animals. And if you are right then some of the animal calories are even supplemented with the plant waste of those 25%.
The raw energy approach is actually quite a good approach by now, because we can use technology to transition most things into each other. You can pass plant waste into animals and loose 90% of the energy, or convert cellulose into (digestible) sugar and get the full energy. Or use it for other things that take energy like drug production. Using the plant waste on animals still brings that opportunity cost that means more land is used in other places to get the cellulose for those alternative uses, or to produce sugar the old fashioned way from more dedicated crops.
Traditionally you had land that you could not use for agriculture but could use to graze goats, you had plant material you could not use for anything but feeding animals. Animals were our bioreactors to transform that material or land into usable products. Now we have better chains of use.
The energy approach will finally be complete when we can turn plant material straight into animal products, with methods like lab grown meat or artificial milk, but we are not there yet. When we are, the energy balance of those should be close to that of plants and this entire problem simplifies greatly.
much of the waste that is fed to animals does not have a better use, as you are suggesting. for instance, soycake. no one wants to eat that, but it’s high protein. giving it to animals conserves resources.
Smaller more diverse farms would help, but the grocery stores would have to learn how seasonal, regional crops work. Instead of offering pineapples, kiwis, and strawberries 365 days a year.
They’d just be replaced by soft woods to be cut down every 20 or 30 years. Trees are nice, but North America’s old growth forests are what they are at this point. They’re not a great carbon sink, either.
IMHO, trees got stuck in the mind of the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, and it distracted from a bunch of things that were way more important. I’d almost call it controlled opposition.
I thought we were over it. But there are so many school teenagers on the way to school in my area, smoking. The stinky normal kind. They must be really stressed out?
If a kid sees their mom and dad smoking all the time, they’ll probably start to believe that it’s not as dangerous as other people say. “They seem to be fine, so I should be fine too.” I legitimately heard this often while growing up, sadly. If you grow up around a bad smell, you might not think of it as “bad” smell, since you’re already used to it.
If someone is already depressed and hates life, they might not care about the harm that they’re causing themselves 20 years later. I’ve known way too many people who didn’t believe that they would stay alive until adulhood. Some of these people started these bad habits expecting to not have to stick around long enough to deal with the consequences.
Throw in the chaos of the last handful of years, along with the constantly depleting mental health resources, and I can’t say that I’m really all that suprised.
Even today, many countries have certain types of people trying to obliterate what’s left of mental health resources. Then they wonder why their kids are struggling with mental health.
I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for Gen Alpha when they get older, poor kids.
Fuck cigarettes AND fuck vaping. I fucking hate how many people vape at gigs and in line to places. Like fuck off, don’t bring me into your bad decisions, keep them to yourself.
Yeah at school I see people vaping all the time. Just saw somebody on campus the other day take a huge huff of it the other day. Those things are huge. I keep thinking it might even be more dangerous than regular cigarettes probably because of its gargantuan size and the ease to just suck up a cartridge without a lighter.
I definitely think because of the ease of vaping people use it to a greater detriment than they would if they just smoked cigarettes. No matter how much better a single vape puff is compared to a cigarette puff, for some, one in every ten breaths is around their vape it seems. That, long term is going to fuck shit up, surely.
I definitely think flavored vapes should not exist. The point of e cigs and vapes were to transition tobacco cigarette smokers to quit smoking. Having flavored vapes with shiny packaging appeal to little kids a lot so they’re keeping addicts on with nicotine in another form and introducing younger generations to more dangerous habits. These things pop up in middle schools and high schools all the time, sometimes even in elementary. It’s a terrible issue for schools around my area.
You know who the VAST majority of people using flavored vapes are? Adults trying to quit smoking.
The flavor makes quitting easier for adults both by making the vape taste good AND by making cigarettes taste much worse in comparison.
When I first started vaping many years ago when the technology was in its infancy, I started with tobacco flavor. The taste being almost the same made it much more tempting to go back to cigarettes since they have additives in addition to nicotine to make them more addictive.
When doing flavored vaping though? Taking a drag on a cigarette tastes absolutely AWFUL. As bad as it tastes to someone who’s never smoked before, if not worse.
Without flavors there’s a big chance I wouldn’t have been able to quit 3 years plus change ago and I’d still be smoking today, shortening my life by decades.
Banning adult smokers from buying flavored vapes WILL kill people by making them unable to quit smoking.
And as for kids, guess what? In every country that has even CONSIDERED banning flavored vapes, it’s already illegal to sell vapes to anyone under 18. So in stead of killing a bunch of adults by taking away their best chance of quitting, you could just enforce the laws that already exist!
That’s a unique perspective. Thanks for sharing. Really changed my perspective on the flavored vapes. My perspective was that you don’t need flavored vapes, only tobacco because that’s targeting the cigarette smokers anyways
I agree with you that inconsiderate vapers need to fuck off, but when used for its intended purpose, helping adults quit smoking, vaping literally saves lives.
I tried every other smoking cessation method including prescription medication for 10 out of the 18 years I smoked but it just didn’t work for me.
Then I went from cigarettes to vaping high nicotine to gradually tapering off until I was vaping nicotine free and then not at all. I haven’t smoked OR vaped for over 3 years now.
Vaping is not intended as a smoking cessation product, it is a cigarette alternative. It happens to help people quit cigarettes, but the tobacco industry does not give two shits whether it does or doesn’t. Vaping is addictive and still pretty bad for you.
There are no studies that have shown yet that vaping is bad for you long term…and don’t send over the studies with the popcorn lung or the study of them literally burning a dry wick.
I’m glad they’re helping you kick cigarettes. Vapes are an addictive nicotine product, they weren’t created to do anything but get nicotine into people of all ages.
Vaping is not intended as a smoking cessation product
That’s just factually inaccurate.
it is a cigarette alternative
It happens to help people quit cigarettes
By better simulating the habit than other methods. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make the connection. You have to be a special kind of stupid to confidently deny it, though.
the tobacco industry does not give two shits whether it does or doesn’t
True, but they’re not the ones who invented vapes. In fact, they and organizations sponsored by the sales of “traditional” smoking cessation products were the most ardent advocates for outlawing vapes, for obvious reasons. That some of them have bought Juul and other vape companies is just a cynical way of getting rid of the competition by devouring it.
Vaping is addictive and still pretty bad for you.
Which is why it’s meant for adult smokers only. It’s still nowhere near as addictive and harmful as tobacco, though, so even if you DO accidentally replace one addiction with another, you’re still better off than if you had continued smoking.
That is the best way for the transition. I clearly wouldn’t have an issue with that kind of vaper because they’re not ripping fat ones in my face and instead trying to better themselves. Like you did. You should be proud, I can’t imagine it’s that easy to get off of an addiction.
Thanks, I AM kinda proud of it, heh. Like all addiction, though, you can’t do it before you’re ready and have the exact kind of help you need.
About a month after I quit smoking with the help of vapes, I quit drinking with the help of a one week anxiety medication regimen my GP prescribed for the mental withdrawals (in spite of being a way too heavy drinker for many years, I was lucky enough to never get physical withdrawals).
With alcohol, I had tried a few different kinds of counseling, trying to force myself not to drink and even being forced to take antabus which can make you really sick if you drink on it, but all of it was either bad timing, a bad method for me or both.
Sorry if that was too much of a tangent lol, I can tend to veer verbose a bit at times 😁
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