These are illegal Chinese imports which directly compete with Big Tobacco’s established brands (Blu, NJOY, etc.) Only Juul out of these has American Tobacco industry ties with 35% owned by Altria aka Philip Morris. I wish they had tested Blu and NJOY.
Anyway, Big Tobacco would benefit if customs and ATF ramped up enforcement against these Chinese imports.
Ah, but here’s the twist, most of them are already officially “illegal” but are still sold mail order and in corner stores none the less. It is an enforcement problem, not a regulation one.
Also of note, the big tobacco manufactured brands like NJOY and BLU actually have pretty substantial testing done on them. I met one of the analytical chemists who does the testing. What is there tolerance level for metals? I dont know, but probably better than the Chinese import all-in-ones. Based on this data though, seems like D Pods are the best pick all around if you have to pick one, so big brand D Pods are probably best overall, but then they dont have the flavors the kids all clamor over due to actually following regulation.
Elf Bar is manufactured by Shenzhen iMiracle Technology part of Heaven Gifts family of companies.
Esco Bar, the worst of them is made by Shenzhen Innokin Technology Co. Ltd.
Flum is manufactured by Flumigo Technology Limited, self held company.
Juul Labs spun of from Pax, 35% of it is owned by Altria aka Philip Morris who make NJOY.
All different parent companies and hardware manufacturing plants as far as I can tell.
The juice itself is… of moderate known negative impact. The nicotine itself isn’t actually very bad for you. Some of the flavoring though is pretty questionable. Compared to combustion it is likely still quite a bit less negative for your health in most cases.
The exception is the hardware, it seems quite likely there is mass lead and other heavy metal poisoning happening due to poor quality metal and ceramic components in vape hardware. I work in a related industry, and this conversation is being had internally by the big players who are afraid of potential class action lawsuits coming down the pipeline while pure export companies from China and elsewhere sell bulk wholesale of low quality hardware. Vapor composition certifications are coming soon, but the damage may well be done for a generation.
Yeah or “Feed”, if anything needs regulation it’s this tech.
Think Clockwork Orange scenario. Hard not to think words when you are shown those things in images, and especially if you’re drugged.
Now here’s a real gateway drug.
yeeeaaaah, I didn’t click the link before commenting. Some of my questions still stand. In a funny way the users/orders of this app might have equal though opposite insight into the aimbot phenomenon. If you’re dedicated to aim training, aimbots must make you feel some kind of way.
Not a bad training function. I suppose the service is to individual enjoyment of recreational activities. Also could have some benefits to creative interfaces like 3d modeling.
lol, it would be an interesting AI indeed to write that.
sigh… I’m guilty of commenting without clicking through the link, it’s true. My thoughts still stand though, and in some ways as this project is the diametrically opposite of an aimbot, I’m even more interested in your thoughts on the impact and creep of aimbots as they make trained aim ever less relevant in open online FPS play.
What is the psychological impact of winning a purely recreational social competition by cheating, of knowing that the machine is winning when you are incapable of doing so by skill? What is the brain being trained for by poisoning the dopamine hit of winning with the knowledge of deception that can never reflect to the self? Does the angst of being one among many taking the poison pill and distorting the field of play away from skill and towards the selection of the better mechanism of cheating undermine the identification of the player with the real conditions of struggle for survival in the world? At what point does the act of cheating bleed over into the fundamental world view of the cheater, and of their self identification with the will to strive in the social world? Is the aimbot a symbol of schitzoid disidentification with the self as agent of value in the capitalist system, an attempt to break out of the demand for labor extraction and automate the pleasure of success? Where is the line at which the participation of the player ceases to function in the emotional loop of play? If the bot not only aims but also moves and selects and eliminates all need for player input, what is the effect on their reward centers, on their sense of agency, on their conception of what it is to play with other humans? Would the player enjoy a game where they act as a passive rider inhabiting the perspective of a finely tuned automated killing machine if that was explicitly the game being played, or is the transgression against the rules, the act of inflicting an unfair advantage against those who play the game by skill under the original framework of the social compact of the games design fundamental to the sense of self reward that the player seeks when installing the aim bot?
What if the game masquerades as a normal FPS but then poses as fellow players and messages the user links to scripts that slowly but surely fully automate the game loop until the user becomes a software technician, tweaking a thousand fine tuning parameters to try and eek out an advantage over all those other bot riders grinding to a never quite reached ceiling of possible dominance via automation of the kill sequence, playing out a seemingly endless series of rock-paper-scissors priority adjustments in real time between move, jump, crouch, slide, aim, shoot, equipment?
Are all FPS slowly converging on the endpoint of drone warfare, currently ascendant in the real killing fields of Ukrain? Is the true social function of the aimbot to finally undermine the fetishization of a rapidly outdated field of infantry combat in favor of competition in the field of automated battle at a distance, of the hunter-seeker, the fiber drone, and the mobile sentry?
When will this bot land it’s first kill IRL, and has the integration with a 6 axis gimbal already been vibe coded?
When do you feel you will have accomplished your hopes by contributing to this project?
What service does this provide to society?
"In 1789, rumours spread like a virus across France: gangs of bandits were attacking villages, destroying crops and terrorizing peasants, mobilized by nobles trying to suppress political unrest. None of it was true. But the resulting panic and upheaval, called the Great Fear, helped to fuel the French Revolution — and provoked a debate that still divides historians.
Did a deliberate effort to advance revolution drive the rumours? Or did they emerge spontaneously, driven by genuine terror? Now, scientists have used the methods of epidemiology to solve the mystery. Drawing on historical records and models developed to trace epidemics, researchers conclude that the fearmongering had rational, not emotional, roots1. “We managed to identify the logic behind the dissemination of the Great Fear,” says Antoine Parent, an economist at University Paris 8 and a co-author of the study, published today in Nature."