Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking; the best thing you can about vaping is that it's a better alternative. Calling it "healthy" is just wrong. Look at the ingredients, look at the contaminants, and look at how the vaping companies are trying to _increase_ addiction.
"Health"-probably the single most wrong-headed thing I've read here, and that's saying a lot.
My impression is that there's a tradeoff between ability-to-help-quit-smoking and unhealthiness, going from cold turkey -> patch / gum -> vaping -> tobacco. Each is a step up in terms of easiness-to-go-from-tobacco-to-that , in the sense that a lot of people who can't quit cold turkey can do it with a patch, a lot of people who can't quit with a patch can do it with vaping, etc. In terms of the health effects of all of these, by far the most important point is that there is a GIANT GAP between tobacco and everything else, including vaping. I think the health differences within the non-tobacco things (cold turkey, patch, vaping) are so small compared to the any-of-those-things/tobacco difference that you can almost round them off to zero if there's any chance they can make people quit tobacco. Since making vapes harder to get / less attractive makes people less likely to abandon tobacco for them (source: have had this discussion with a lot of nicotine addiction patients), I think on net it's probably worse for health.
In order to convince me otherwise, you'd have to show that the health risks of vaping are closer to those of tobacco than to zero, multiplied by something representing the number of people who use vapes as a tobacco substitute vs. on their own even though they would never use tobacco otherwise - not just say "look at the ingredients!"
Thinking about it more - I'm not sure where exactly our point of disagreement is, but I think it's important that people understand almost all of the health risks in cigarettes - which have killed literally millions of Americans and are by far the most deadly drug in the world - are in other tobacco components, not nicotine. Nicotine is probably not *great* for you, but it doesn't cause lung cancer or any of the other giant killers from smoking.
If vaping has contaminants or whatever, it's probably unhealthy in the same way as other sketchy supplements or processed foods or something, which is like a factor of 1000x less bad than smoking, which is basically every poisonous chemical in the world put in a convenient little package. We should not be devoting a single brain cell to the "risks" of vaping while there are still smokers in the world, except insofar as the discussion revolves around whether vaping is a complement vs. substitute to smoking.
I think the best metaphor is those anti-environmentalists who obsess over how wind turbines might be bad for birds, while coal plants are killing hundreds of thousands of people. It's not that the bird problem s a completely fake zero risk, it's just that you're insane if you're thinking about it when there's the vastly more important question of whether it substitutes for this infinitely worse thing.
Agreed, that's part of what I was trying to get across by "except insofar as the discussion revolves around whether vaping is a complement vs. substitute to smoking"
Although I worry this suffers from the spice problem I mentioned at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement , where the fact that supplements are known to have some contaminant is treated as a Giant Health Crisis, because supplements are in a category of Potentially Scary, whereas when you learn that common spices have even more of those contaminants, you don't care because they're not in a category like that. I'm guessing vaping has also been inducted in that kind of category and so people are likely to freak out over risks they would happily tolerate with anything else.
Well, I definitely don't remember a wave of scaremongering news stories about Perfectly Healthy People going to the ER/dying from eating black-market spices contaminated with vitamin E*. Something like that has probably happened, and the microdeaths from all that trace heavy metal probably add up - but concerted fear campaigns have an outsize effect on public perception and category-drawing.
*EDIT: and one would expect black-market vape juice to proliferate under various sorts of bans/decrease when legalized, since that already seems to have happened.
> don't remember a wave of scaremongering news stories about Perfectly Healthy People going to the ER/dying from eating black-market spices contaminated with vitamin E
I did some digging on this one, because I had switched to vaping from tobacco, and was having endless discussions with people who didn’t believe I would be better off. This story was their trump card.
It was one basement lab making THC vapes run by a couple of guys ignorant enough to use vitamin E oil as the base, clearly not having a clue what vitamin E oil would do to someone’s lungs.
We routinely end up with people seriously ill and/or dying as a result of eg. E. coli in lettuce somewhere. The solution isn't to ban lettuce, it's to figure out the minimal extra changes required to get rid of that particular risk.
I agree with you entirely here, but I thought as a warning sign that there's the potential for as yet unforeseen complications (and because it's a fascinating story) I'd note that heroin was aggressively marketed by Bayer (who invented it) in the 1890s as a non-addictive replacement for morphine, and for the most part the medical community went along with this. It took a while before people realized the mistake.
I think there's a certain kind of person who just always does whatever the heath authorities say is best for their health, regardless of how much it might personally inconvenience them or take away something they enjoy. Oh, the CDC says I need to put SPF 15+ on every time I go outside in the sun? No problem, I totally don't mind having greasy skin that smells funny if it means I reduce my risk of getting skin cancer! Oh, red meat is bad for you? That's okay, I know steaks are delicious but my health is just so much more important than enjoying what I eat. Oh, I need to wear an uncomfortable mask everywh....never mind, too soon.
Anyway, this kind of person, like all of us under the age of, say, 70, has spent all of their lives hearing from Official Authorities about how bad smoking is for you, and they just fundamentally can't understand why anybody would ignore that messaging and choose to smoke anyway. And in their minds, vaping is still smoking. And maybe if we ban vaping, or make it harder for people to vape, we can finally convince them to be Good People who Listen to Public Health Authorities.
> Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking;
Technically speaking, the word you are looking for seems to be "healthier", not "healthy".
Not consuming nicotine in any form is probably the best health choice with regard to that substance. Inhaling the smoke of nicotine-containing plants is probably the unhealthiest (widely used) way to consume nicotine. Patches, gums and vaping are in the middle ground: worse than not consuming nicotine, better than smoking.
I think calling it a "middle ground" is misleading. Like, yes, it's technically in-between, but it is much much more like [not-consuming nicotine] than it is like [half as bad as smoking].
Gum and patches don't work, to a first approximation, and vaping does, to get my brother off cigarettes.
If those anti smoking crusaders and their nicotine jihad actually shut down vaping so my little brother goes back on coffin nails, I am going to be seriously pissed off.
I will not use this space to make threats, but I would not stand by on this.
"Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking"
Wrong. They are a medicine that you can take to help with the nicotine withdrawal symptoms when quitting smoking either cigarettes or vapes. They are not a substitute for smoking. They don't provide the ritual and/or social benefits to having a reason to stop whatever you're doing for five-ten minutes and go burn one with your other friends/family/coworkers who smoke. Vaping does, and thus they are a useful tool in the tobacco-smoking harm reduction kit.
> but if there is extra space on your ballot please also write in that Bonta is annoying person and it pains you to have to do this
Huh. In German elections, scribbling extra stuff on your ballot makes it invalid. Is this not the case in the US?
Some detail for our situation, from https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/service/glossar/u/ungueltiger-stimmzettel.html : "Ein Stimmzettel ist ungültig, wenn er den Willen des Wählers nicht zweifelsfrei erkennen lässt oder einen Zusatz oder Vorbehalt enthält.", roughly translates to "A ballot is invalid if it does not unambiguously reflect the will of the voter, or if it contains extra remarks or reservations."
Banning reservations makes sense - how are you supposed to unambiguously interpret a ballot with an X next to candidate, but with a reservation of "I hate that guy, but the other guy is worse"? I'm less sure about the logic of banning extra remarks in general. I guess banning extra remarks is maybe a strategy to preserve the secrecy and impartiality of elections, because you can't add extra details like "count my vote as 10x and I'll reward you, here's my contact info" or something.
Hmm. Many countries try instead to do their best to validate any vote where possible, and putting an X beside someone and then remarking that you don’t really like him doesn’t add much, or any, ambiguity.
I wonder if it would be more ambiguous if you gave a reason that was obviously wrong, like writing in on the Dahle vote to praise his generated art. Now there's some ambiguity as to whether you even know who this is.
One feature of in person votes is that you can not prove to a third party which way you voted.
If the counting of the paper ballots is public (as it generally is in Germany). and you allowed people to write stuff on their ballots, that could easily be used to verify who cast a particular vote.
If you discard any ballots which contain distinguishable markings, the most a voter could do would be to prove that they did, in fact, cast an invalid vote.
It's not like anyone is going to tabulate all the remarks on the ballot anyways so really there is zero signal conveyed. In Germany the non-voters are often told to instead submit an invalid ballot - but I always thought that's just counted under "to dumb to fill out a ballot" rather than "none of the above".
That's essentially the reasoning. California instead says extraneous marks invalidate a ballot only if they make the ballot identifiable (e.g. names or initials). The upside is you get fewer spoiled ballots. The downside is a voter could, in theory, try to convey a coded message (but this would be quite difficult/unlikely).
The entire debate is so politicised that I have no idea which side is correct. The only thing I could find out is that there is big money in dialysis treatment:
The unions are spending money putting out "vote yes", the two big companies which run the clinics are spending money putting out "vote no" messages. Each accuses the other of bad faith. Maybe this union is indeed terrible and is just trying to extort money, but I don't think big business saying "We'll close down and people will die, rather than comply if this is passed" is any better.
And the only neutral-ish opinion I can find is this piece from 2002:
"Thousands of kidney patients each year die too soon in U.S. for-profit dialysis centers, Canadian and U.S. researchers find. Pooled data from eight studies show that patients in for-profit centers have an 8% higher yearly risk of death than patients in non-profit facilities.
Why? For-profit centers cut corners on patient care to make money, according a controversial report in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association."
Fuck the SIEU? Okay! But fuck Fresenius and DeVita as well, for their threats of "well we'll just have to walk away and content ourselves with profits from other states" posturing.
Why do you think it's "posturing" for the dialysis companies to say they might have to close clinics? It seems undisputed that Prop 29 would increase their costs, and closing clinics is a logical response to increased costs.
IIRC, being on permanent renal-replacement dialysis is one of the weird corner-case ways to get covered by Medicare. So the payment is already set by a different level of the government.
Sounds like a typical "market bad" non sequitur. If anything, being for-profit would give you an incentive to perform better, because otherwise you would lose out to competitors.
It seems valid for them to call the communists' bluff and just threaten to leave, because if they are really that bad, I guess they aren't really needed at all.
Okay, looks like both DaVita and Fresenius are having slower growth and reduced earnings due to the "challenging environment" in North America. So if they want to say "We can't afford to pay union rates" let them come out and say that, not "if we get unions, patients will die as we will have to close down clinics".
DaVita (American) and Fresenius (German) are not very likely to lose out to competitors, since they are the majority share of dialysis clinics in the USA and have bought out smaller competitors. So for many clinics, your choice is "one of these, or nobody" which doesn't incentivise them to prioritise patient care over the bottom line.
When one of the strong selling points for home dialysis is "I can be sure it's cleaner and more comfortable" than going to a clinic, I submit that a dirty clinic, when infection is one of the major reasons kidney patients die, is not really a good at all.
As unions go, the SEIU is one of the worst. This is not the CNA we're talking about. They don't appear to have much in the way of scruples, and this is by no means the first time they have used dubious tactics to increase their membership. You might check out the section in their Wikipedia entry on the Sodexo lawsuit.
On west oakland neighborhood meeting Seneca tends to go to maximal yelling without warning when given the bully pulpit. I have trouble imagining he’d be an effective executive because he plays pretty loose with the truth on his twitter feed, oaklandside has tried to fact check him a couple times when he spreads rumors about bodies found in encampments that are somehow hidden by the FBI. He’s amplified the coal terminal lobby-sponsored hit piece on Thao. I think hes not a serious player but as right as fife is left. I really wanted to support the local upstart but he’s just to conspiracy minded.
California does not have a housing problem. It has immigration and building code/requirement problems on top of ludicrous inefficiencies in industry standards. Quasi-Gerrymandering under the guise of “affordable housing” is rather reprehensible. Soon enough(?) the boomers will be dead and outmigration will continue to gain pace. Californians pretending to care about supply issues will be without yet another made-up or self-inflicted battle to fight. Stop building stick-frame homes in chaparral and then clutching pearls when they burn down every 10-20 years on cue with the bio-cycle and shifting blame to the ever nebulous climate change feedback loops.
This is wrong. When Santa Monica's zoning code was essentially repealed for a few weeks, keeping the building code in place, developers rushed to entitle thousands of new units. The building code may have problems, but the zoning code is the bottleneck.
This is also why we're building in the woods; zoning rules make it impossible to densify in the city, so we force people into the fire.
Outmigration is due to displacement; the state has failed to keep up with demand, prices have risen, and so people are priced out. People leaving is a consequence of the housing problem. If prices were in free-fall and people were still leaving, that would indicate that the state was no longer desirable, but that's not the case.
(I don't follow the connection between subsidized housing and gerrymandering you're trying to make, so I can't speak to that.)
U is endorsed by YIMBY Action, SPUR, and (IIRC) Alfred Twu, as ~1/3 of it goes to affordable housing, and another chunk of funding would support bus and bike lanes on e.g. Telegraph. I don't think that funding would materialize without the proposition passing. Are you just worried that there's going to be a lot of money misspent, or something else?
Secondly, W (give everybody four $25 vouchers for local campaign contributions, in order to counter the bias of the small slice of people who normally donate to local races) seems like a cool idea that someone should experiment with, and Oakland is as good a place as any to run the experiment. Is it just the price tag on that one that pushes you to No, or the additional ads it would push on you, or something else?
"the health establishment is so focused on banning healthier alternatives to smoking"
Not mentioned, but a prominent concern for state governments: alternatives to tobacco threaten tobacco sales, which could threaten their "tobacco settlement" revenue streams.
"so much is at stake, the govt now is the biggest player in almost every facet of society and the economy."
I would be interested in that as well. I stopped using it (for personal reasons) before it was bought by match.com. From what I remember, I found okcupid rather non-horrible compared to other dating sites.
Slightly off-topic, what dating sites/apps do the cool middle-aged adults use these days?
I was previously unaware that OKC's change in format followed them being bought by match.com, but that was indeed terrible and if it was Match's fault then yeah, fuck those guys.
OKC used to have detailed questions and detailed matching with percentages and the ability to look at what questions you disagreed on (and why, if you got that far). Then they did a redesign, and now you can't; it's a glorified swipe-right app like all the rest.
I can't imagine these are the problems Scott has with them though. I mean data collection isn't great but in the US it's sort of a foregone conclusion with any and all social media, and the 'human experimentation' seems minimally problematic to me (I admit to never having used okcupid, though, so perhaps it's more invasive than it sounds).
Just nicotine is more in the ballpark of caffeine, frankly, but mostly people don’t do straight nicotine. Vaping does cause some issues in the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, not that we know if it’s more the process or the ingredients yet. Yes, the tar and such is worse. What also deserves mention is mass manufactured cigarettes contain a lot of additional problems: cyanide, arsenic, etc.
It’s insane that’s we drive people back to real combustion instead, but I can’t say it’s surprising.
Yes but how is that a good thing? Vaping is hooking millions and millions of children to nicotine and hundreds of other chemicals in the fluids. That is not a positive thing in anyway.
> If anything it is worse because it pulls in even more children to consume nicotine.
Also, seat belts are giving people too much confidence into the safety of cars, which can cause speeding and thus accidents. If cars did not contain seat belts or brakes, people would be very careful when driving.
I am kind of skeptical about such forms of argumentation and instead like to focus on the first order effects, where going from cigarettes to vaping seems to improve health outcomes (just like using seat belts does).
Well I understand where you are coming from. Vaping means less tar is breathed. But the issue is that kids around the world were turning away from cigarettes on mass.
Vaping has made it cool again. So there is now more kids and younger kids consuming cancer causing products. Look at how vape liquids are flavoured and advertised - directly targeting children.
The only case where vaping is a positive is in the cannabis world. It allows people to get high with much less tar. Not for kids though.
This was our thought process too. If there was some strong reason to hate a judge we would be willing to kick them out, but in the absence of wanting to do very much work or having heard of anything going on, we support keeping them.
(this was a yes/no question, there were no challenger candidates)
Absolutely. If you want independence, the more layers of indirection the better.
Better appointed by the governor for short terms than directly elected.
Better appointed by a committee the governor appoints than by the governor.
Better appointed by a long-serving committee who outlast governors than by political appointees.
Better nominated by career bureaucrats and approved by political appointees than be appointed by committee.
Better selected according to rules set by bureaucracy than nominated by bureaucrats directly.
It's not the only thing. Longer terms are independently good. (Though a difficult process for impeachment/recall is desirable; democratic means of kicking them out is safer than democratic means of kicking them *in*.) Restricting the potential pool of appointees/nominees/etc. to a qualified class - in this case, presumably lawyers in good standing with the bar - is independently good. Multiple independent interest groups which have a role in selection (e.g. an appointing committee which is mandated to be party-balanced, or approval needed from both a government bureaucracy and also the state Bar Association) are generally independently good.
But the more layers of indirection you can place between direct democracy and the selection of judges, the harder it is for the tyranny of the majority to ensure that things they dislike are ruled illegal.
I don't think judges should be elected at all. Therefore if I vote to retain all of them, it helps effect my intended result of the election not mattering.
>"I’m more interested in speculation about why you can’t have a candidate statement on the ballot if you spend too much money."
Seems pretty obvious to me. California wants to reduce money in politics. This is a way to incentivize candidates to spend less and/or to give candidates who don't have the money a compensatory advantage in getting their message out.
Apparently Newsom thought that it would be better to spend much and not have a candidate statement, so the effect is probably limited.
It would perhaps be helpful and more effective if they printed the money spent by each candidate with their statement, and an explicit text for the over-spenders explaining why they do not get a statement.
Match.com bought OKCupid back in ~2014, and made the site much much worse at helping people find romantic partners (but presumably more profitable :/ )
Isn't making the site profitable their job? I don't know, I can sort of get the anger at capitalists wrecking things, but when it comes to not-profitable internet services I have a hard time caring. If old OKCupid was so much better why didn't a replacement rise in its place?
No one has come up with a good business model, e.g. one where the customers only pay if they find a partner, get laid, get a date etc. which would better align the incentives. One immediate problem with this would be keeping the customers honest.
Also a lot of good (and bad) business ideas start with "why has no one ever thought of this?".
Such a service that is really, really good at its job is bad at getting customers to stick around. Unlike dentistry where people with good teeth still return for checkups (and there's endless 'people with bad teeth'), a successful dating site that leads to a majority of people being matched with perfectly compatible partners gets rid of its own paying customers over time. The problem is that a successful 'sale' leads directly to a cessation in a 'subscription', and they want to keep the subscribers on the hook as long as possible.
Classic matchmakers (such as in cultures where arranged marriages are still popular) do good business even so, but they don't operate with the same volume, aren't a subscription service, & don't need to worry about being too successful.
I suppose what Match could do is offer combination matchmaking/wedding planning/couples therapy service. Get involved in the full vertical integration of relationships.
> Classic matchmakers (such as in cultures where arranged marriages are still popular) do good business even so, but they don't operate with the same volume, aren't a subscription service, & don't need to worry about being too successful.
Is this true? I read a (translation of a) novel from the Ming dynasty [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Sui_Quash_the_Demons%27_Revolt ] in which one plot element is a rich merchant's efforts to get his daughter married. His interactions with the matchmakers are detailed, and it specifies that he gives them silver every time he speaks to them.
This would make them a subscription service, but you're not *expected* to use their service more than two or three times.
Dating services don't deserve to earn a cent. They are more scam than a service.
Many dating sites spam with %femaleName% wants to message you where this %femaleName% is fake or, if real, never did anything close to "want to message you".
Dating sites say 'we have NNN people registered' but they don't say breakdown by gender. If they weren't trying to scam men and said 'we have 100 million men and 15 million women', then men would be less likely to start using and pay for it.
All I know is I met my wife (of six years) on OK cupid, and it’s a great thing. There is no way in 1 million years I ever would’ve met her other than an online dating service. I had to wade through some chaff to get there, but it was worth it.  dating sites are like many other things, they’re only as good as what you bring to it. If you are a man and you go to Ashley Madison, then that’s what you’re bringing to it.
"I think if you hate the Jews and get your divine messages at a ziggurat, you should at least consider that it’s not the Judeo-Christian God you’re talking to."
I think it's fairly clear the gods actually followed by most of our political class are Mammon the god of money and Moloch-Baal the god of violence and untrammeled power.
Scott: "There is also a study purporting to show that flavored cigarette bans do decrease smoking"
Then Limelihood:
"…it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on *menthol cigarettes.*
However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares."
The lack of comparison to other cities isn't the only reason that study would be worthless when looking at flavoured tobacco products in general:
Menthol slows nicotine metabolism and thereby increases the half-life of nicotine, so it actually has a pharmacological effect on the primary mechanism of addiction to tobacco.
(Why did people think menthol cigarettes were so widespread when other flavourings weren't at all, despite being possible?)
Afaik, that's not the case with other flavourings.
"Why did people think menthol cigarettes were so widespread when other flavourings weren't at all, despite being possible?"
I would have guessed same reason mint toothpaste is almost universal - mint makes your mouth feel unusually clean, which is probably good if you've just put a gross thing in your mouth.
Fair, that bit wasn't entirely serious, it does make enough sense to not cause noticeable confusion, and I knew that would probably be most people's answer.
It might even only be hindsight when I say that I would have expected a larger share of non-menthol flavouring in pre-vape, smoked tobacco products - I don't think I actually gave it more than cursory thought before I knew that menthol increased nicotine half-life.
But points in favour of "the dominance of menthol is confusing if it's only the flavour":
- Contrary to tooth paste (I think?), tobacco is supposed to be, to some extent, something people use & enjoy for the flavour; at least the "more cultivated" versions, less so cigarettes. Cigar (and pipe?) smoke is generally not inhaled (which is less efficient for nicotine take-in), but only talen into the mouth and tasted.
Also, there's clearly a lot of effort being put into making the best-tasting cigars etc. I don't think I ever came across adult toothpaste that tried to market itself as tasting better than the competition.
- As someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments, mint flavour is superior to menthol. "Mint" is the very fresh, clean, actual flavour of, well, mint, which is quite nice, as with the toothpaste.
"Menthol" is just the sharp, almost biting and cold component of what eg peppermint tastes like, which is less complex than mint flavour, and in excess can actually feel very uncomfortable when inhaled. Imagine peppermint, and subtract mint tea.
Why would anybody choose to smoke - or sell - menthol tabacco if mint tobacco was available?
(Shisha/hookah is often smoked with flavoured tobacco, and mint is a popular one - I've never seen menthol. Yes, the mint tobacco smoke tastes kinda like mint tea, with *just a little bit more* of the menthol sharpness.)
The reason seems to be pharmacological, and to a significant degree driven by tobacco companies.
The house members who watched the mayoral debate were very impressed with Thao and called her smart and well-spoken. But she is apparently involved in a scandal where she (allegedly) tried to bully a subordinate in the city government into working for her campaign (illegal) and then fired him when he refused to comply.
The smear campaign against Thao seems to have originated from a blog taking money from the Coal Terminal lobby (seriously). Because they targeted Thao I put her as my #1 choice as i don’t want to breathe coal dust or make it easier and cheaper for other countries to burn it.
It also looks like Seneca Scott, another candidate not connected to coal, brought it up first. So I think the Ignacio connection, while real, is kind of a distraction on this issue (though of course don't vote for Ignacio!)
Great point, the earlier date is fairly damning. I don’t know if Seneca has a connection to coal or not - there is enough coal terminal money sloshing around in Oakland right now that every public official is getting approached (according to great reporting by East Bay Express). I asked Seneca directly on twitter if he supports the terminal project. If he spent more of his time trying to talk up his own vision rather than trying to smear mud on the frontrunner i’d be able to take him more seriously as a candidate.
Sorry to start a top level thread over a technical issue, but I am no longer getting any notifications when people respond to a thread I am following or to a comment I have made. When I go into the Substack app, I see a list of the posts, but they do not link back to the right place. Apologies to anyone who either feels or cares that I might be ignoring them. 
He can also give money to other candidates, who will remember the favor later.
Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking; the best thing you can about vaping is that it's a better alternative. Calling it "healthy" is just wrong. Look at the ingredients, look at the contaminants, and look at how the vaping companies are trying to _increase_ addiction.
"Health"-probably the single most wrong-headed thing I've read here, and that's saying a lot.
You'll have to do a better job of convincing me here - "look at the ingredients" and "contaminants" are classic distractions that people use to avoid actually going into the science of health risks - I think amply parodied by the banana poster ( https://www.flinnsci.com/globalassets/flinn-scientific/all-product-images-rgb-jpegs/ap9759.jpg ) - in terms of contaminants, see my point 4 on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement
My impression is that there's a tradeoff between ability-to-help-quit-smoking and unhealthiness, going from cold turkey -> patch / gum -> vaping -> tobacco. Each is a step up in terms of easiness-to-go-from-tobacco-to-that , in the sense that a lot of people who can't quit cold turkey can do it with a patch, a lot of people who can't quit with a patch can do it with vaping, etc. In terms of the health effects of all of these, by far the most important point is that there is a GIANT GAP between tobacco and everything else, including vaping. I think the health differences within the non-tobacco things (cold turkey, patch, vaping) are so small compared to the any-of-those-things/tobacco difference that you can almost round them off to zero if there's any chance they can make people quit tobacco. Since making vapes harder to get / less attractive makes people less likely to abandon tobacco for them (source: have had this discussion with a lot of nicotine addiction patients), I think on net it's probably worse for health.
In order to convince me otherwise, you'd have to show that the health risks of vaping are closer to those of tobacco than to zero, multiplied by something representing the number of people who use vapes as a tobacco substitute vs. on their own even though they would never use tobacco otherwise - not just say "look at the ingredients!"
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/28/thank-you-for-doing-something-ambiguously-between-smoking-and-not-smoking/
Thinking about it more - I'm not sure where exactly our point of disagreement is, but I think it's important that people understand almost all of the health risks in cigarettes - which have killed literally millions of Americans and are by far the most deadly drug in the world - are in other tobacco components, not nicotine. Nicotine is probably not *great* for you, but it doesn't cause lung cancer or any of the other giant killers from smoking.
If vaping has contaminants or whatever, it's probably unhealthy in the same way as other sketchy supplements or processed foods or something, which is like a factor of 1000x less bad than smoking, which is basically every poisonous chemical in the world put in a convenient little package. We should not be devoting a single brain cell to the "risks" of vaping while there are still smokers in the world, except insofar as the discussion revolves around whether vaping is a complement vs. substitute to smoking.
I think the best metaphor is those anti-environmentalists who obsess over how wind turbines might be bad for birds, while coal plants are killing hundreds of thousands of people. It's not that the bird problem s a completely fake zero risk, it's just that you're insane if you're thinking about it when there's the vastly more important question of whether it substitutes for this infinitely worse thing.
Agreed, that's part of what I was trying to get across by "except insofar as the discussion revolves around whether vaping is a complement vs. substitute to smoking"
Although I worry this suffers from the spice problem I mentioned at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement , where the fact that supplements are known to have some contaminant is treated as a Giant Health Crisis, because supplements are in a category of Potentially Scary, whereas when you learn that common spices have even more of those contaminants, you don't care because they're not in a category like that. I'm guessing vaping has also been inducted in that kind of category and so people are likely to freak out over risks they would happily tolerate with anything else.
Well, I definitely don't remember a wave of scaremongering news stories about Perfectly Healthy People going to the ER/dying from eating black-market spices contaminated with vitamin E*. Something like that has probably happened, and the microdeaths from all that trace heavy metal probably add up - but concerted fear campaigns have an outsize effect on public perception and category-drawing.
*EDIT: and one would expect black-market vape juice to proliferate under various sorts of bans/decrease when legalized, since that already seems to have happened.
People using lead to give Tumeric a better color is a pretty well know problem.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/turmeric-poisoned-their-kids-four-seattle-area-cases-show-gaps-in-lead-testing
> don't remember a wave of scaremongering news stories about Perfectly Healthy People going to the ER/dying from eating black-market spices contaminated with vitamin E
I did some digging on this one, because I had switched to vaping from tobacco, and was having endless discussions with people who didn’t believe I would be better off. This story was their trump card.
It was one basement lab making THC vapes run by a couple of guys ignorant enough to use vitamin E oil as the base, clearly not having a clue what vitamin E oil would do to someone’s lungs.
It’s really a classic red herring.
We routinely end up with people seriously ill and/or dying as a result of eg. E. coli in lettuce somewhere. The solution isn't to ban lettuce, it's to figure out the minimal extra changes required to get rid of that particular risk.
I agree with you entirely here, but I thought as a warning sign that there's the potential for as yet unforeseen complications (and because it's a fascinating story) I'd note that heroin was aggressively marketed by Bayer (who invented it) in the 1890s as a non-addictive replacement for morphine, and for the most part the medical community went along with this. It took a while before people realized the mistake.
It doesn't look like vaping is ever possibly could reach prevalence than smoking had historically.
I think there's a certain kind of person who just always does whatever the heath authorities say is best for their health, regardless of how much it might personally inconvenience them or take away something they enjoy. Oh, the CDC says I need to put SPF 15+ on every time I go outside in the sun? No problem, I totally don't mind having greasy skin that smells funny if it means I reduce my risk of getting skin cancer! Oh, red meat is bad for you? That's okay, I know steaks are delicious but my health is just so much more important than enjoying what I eat. Oh, I need to wear an uncomfortable mask everywh....never mind, too soon.
Anyway, this kind of person, like all of us under the age of, say, 70, has spent all of their lives hearing from Official Authorities about how bad smoking is for you, and they just fundamentally can't understand why anybody would ignore that messaging and choose to smoke anyway. And in their minds, vaping is still smoking. And maybe if we ban vaping, or make it harder for people to vape, we can finally convince them to be Good People who Listen to Public Health Authorities.
> Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking;
Technically speaking, the word you are looking for seems to be "healthier", not "healthy".
Not consuming nicotine in any form is probably the best health choice with regard to that substance. Inhaling the smoke of nicotine-containing plants is probably the unhealthiest (widely used) way to consume nicotine. Patches, gums and vaping are in the middle ground: worse than not consuming nicotine, better than smoking.
Nicotine seems to protect the brain from Parkinson's. That seems pretty useful to me, if you have a family history.
An even better phrase than "healthier" would be "less harmful".
I think calling it a "middle ground" is misleading. Like, yes, it's technically in-between, but it is much much more like [not-consuming nicotine] than it is like [half as bad as smoking].
Gum and patches don't work, to a first approximation, and vaping does, to get my brother off cigarettes.
If those anti smoking crusaders and their nicotine jihad actually shut down vaping so my little brother goes back on coffin nails, I am going to be seriously pissed off.
I will not use this space to make threats, but I would not stand by on this.
At a remote, you might have him try the lozenges, which for some reason worked much better in my case than either the patch or the gum.
Thank you for the suggestion, I appreciate it.
"Nicotine gum and patches are a healthy alternative to smoking"
Wrong. They are a medicine that you can take to help with the nicotine withdrawal symptoms when quitting smoking either cigarettes or vapes. They are not a substitute for smoking. They don't provide the ritual and/or social benefits to having a reason to stop whatever you're doing for five-ten minutes and go burn one with your other friends/family/coworkers who smoke. Vaping does, and thus they are a useful tool in the tobacco-smoking harm reduction kit.
As a member of another SEIU branch, they are absolutely terrible. Anyone represented by them would be better served by another national.
Tell us some stories.
> but if there is extra space on your ballot please also write in that Bonta is annoying person and it pains you to have to do this
Huh. In German elections, scribbling extra stuff on your ballot makes it invalid. Is this not the case in the US?
Some detail for our situation, from https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/service/glossar/u/ungueltiger-stimmzettel.html : "Ein Stimmzettel ist ungültig, wenn er den Willen des Wählers nicht zweifelsfrei erkennen lässt oder einen Zusatz oder Vorbehalt enthält.", roughly translates to "A ballot is invalid if it does not unambiguously reflect the will of the voter, or if it contains extra remarks or reservations."
Banning reservations makes sense - how are you supposed to unambiguously interpret a ballot with an X next to candidate, but with a reservation of "I hate that guy, but the other guy is worse"? I'm less sure about the logic of banning extra remarks in general. I guess banning extra remarks is maybe a strategy to preserve the secrecy and impartiality of elections, because you can't add extra details like "count my vote as 10x and I'll reward you, here's my contact info" or something.
Hmm. Many countries try instead to do their best to validate any vote where possible, and putting an X beside someone and then remarking that you don’t really like him doesn’t add much, or any, ambiguity.
The X is still there.
I wonder if it would be more ambiguous if you gave a reason that was obviously wrong, like writing in on the Dahle vote to praise his generated art. Now there's some ambiguity as to whether you even know who this is.
One feature of in person votes is that you can not prove to a third party which way you voted.
If the counting of the paper ballots is public (as it generally is in Germany). and you allowed people to write stuff on their ballots, that could easily be used to verify who cast a particular vote.
If you discard any ballots which contain distinguishable markings, the most a voter could do would be to prove that they did, in fact, cast an invalid vote.
I was joking but I've edited it to make this clearer.
It's not like anyone is going to tabulate all the remarks on the ballot anyways so really there is zero signal conveyed. In Germany the non-voters are often told to instead submit an invalid ballot - but I always thought that's just counted under "to dumb to fill out a ballot" rather than "none of the above".
That's essentially the reasoning. California instead says extraneous marks invalidate a ballot only if they make the ballot identifiable (e.g. names or initials). The upside is you get fewer spoiled ballots. The downside is a voter could, in theory, try to convey a coded message (but this would be quite difficult/unlikely).
Now I want to see someone manually draw a QR code on their ballot. Bonus points if it points to a particular Rick Astley video.
That would be counted by the state as an identifying mark, revealing the identity of the vote caster as the hacker, 4chan.
The entire debate is so politicised that I have no idea which side is correct. The only thing I could find out is that there is big money in dialysis treatment:
https://californiahealthline.org/news/number-of-dialysis-patients-in-california-surges/
The unions are spending money putting out "vote yes", the two big companies which run the clinics are spending money putting out "vote no" messages. Each accuses the other of bad faith. Maybe this union is indeed terrible and is just trying to extort money, but I don't think big business saying "We'll close down and people will die, rather than comply if this is passed" is any better.
And the only neutral-ish opinion I can find is this piece from 2002:
https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20021119/more-deaths-in-for-profit-dialysis-centers
"Thousands of kidney patients each year die too soon in U.S. for-profit dialysis centers, Canadian and U.S. researchers find. Pooled data from eight studies show that patients in for-profit centers have an 8% higher yearly risk of death than patients in non-profit facilities.
Why? For-profit centers cut corners on patient care to make money, according a controversial report in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association."
Fuck the SIEU? Okay! But fuck Fresenius and DeVita as well, for their threats of "well we'll just have to walk away and content ourselves with profits from other states" posturing.
That was funny.
Why do you think it's "posturing" for the dialysis companies to say they might have to close clinics? It seems undisputed that Prop 29 would increase their costs, and closing clinics is a logical response to increased costs.
Isn't it far more likely that they will just raise prices? To be really nasty they could put it under "Prop 29 surcharge" on the bill.
Prices might already be as high as their clients can bear.
IIRC, being on permanent renal-replacement dialysis is one of the weird corner-case ways to get covered by Medicare. So the payment is already set by a different level of the government.
Sounds like a typical "market bad" non sequitur. If anything, being for-profit would give you an incentive to perform better, because otherwise you would lose out to competitors.
It seems valid for them to call the communists' bluff and just threaten to leave, because if they are really that bad, I guess they aren't really needed at all.
TIL I am a communist because I am pro-unions 😁
Okay, looks like both DaVita and Fresenius are having slower growth and reduced earnings due to the "challenging environment" in North America. So if they want to say "We can't afford to pay union rates" let them come out and say that, not "if we get unions, patients will die as we will have to close down clinics".
https://www.freseniusmedicalcare.com/en/news/q3-2022
https://investors.davita.com/2022-10-28-DaVita-Inc-3rd-Quarter-2022-Results
DaVita (American) and Fresenius (German) are not very likely to lose out to competitors, since they are the majority share of dialysis clinics in the USA and have bought out smaller competitors. So for many clinics, your choice is "one of these, or nobody" which doesn't incentivise them to prioritise patient care over the bottom line.
When one of the strong selling points for home dialysis is "I can be sure it's cleaner and more comfortable" than going to a clinic, I submit that a dirty clinic, when infection is one of the major reasons kidney patients die, is not really a good at all.
Being for-profit also gives you incentives to perform worse, depending on which metrics you consider...
As unions go, the SEIU is one of the worst. This is not the CNA we're talking about. They don't appear to have much in the way of scruples, and this is by no means the first time they have used dubious tactics to increase their membership. You might check out the section in their Wikipedia entry on the Sodexo lawsuit.
Does anyone have arguments for or against Seneca Scott?
On west oakland neighborhood meeting Seneca tends to go to maximal yelling without warning when given the bully pulpit. I have trouble imagining he’d be an effective executive because he plays pretty loose with the truth on his twitter feed, oaklandside has tried to fact check him a couple times when he spreads rumors about bodies found in encampments that are somehow hidden by the FBI. He’s amplified the coal terminal lobby-sponsored hit piece on Thao. I think hes not a serious player but as right as fife is left. I really wanted to support the local upstart but he’s just to conspiracy minded.
California does not have a housing problem. It has immigration and building code/requirement problems on top of ludicrous inefficiencies in industry standards. Quasi-Gerrymandering under the guise of “affordable housing” is rather reprehensible. Soon enough(?) the boomers will be dead and outmigration will continue to gain pace. Californians pretending to care about supply issues will be without yet another made-up or self-inflicted battle to fight. Stop building stick-frame homes in chaparral and then clutching pearls when they burn down every 10-20 years on cue with the bio-cycle and shifting blame to the ever nebulous climate change feedback loops.
Sorry, who (or which proposition) are you thinking of that's doing this?
This is wrong. When Santa Monica's zoning code was essentially repealed for a few weeks, keeping the building code in place, developers rushed to entitle thousands of new units. The building code may have problems, but the zoning code is the bottleneck.
https://smdp.com/2022/10/27/city-leaders-still-hope-to-block-15-of-16-builders-remedy-projects/
This is also why we're building in the woods; zoning rules make it impossible to densify in the city, so we force people into the fire.
Outmigration is due to displacement; the state has failed to keep up with demand, prices have risen, and so people are priced out. People leaving is a consequence of the housing problem. If prices were in free-fall and people were still leaving, that would indicate that the state was no longer desirable, but that's not the case.
(I don't follow the connection between subsidized housing and gerrymandering you're trying to make, so I can't speak to that.)
U is endorsed by YIMBY Action, SPUR, and (IIRC) Alfred Twu, as ~1/3 of it goes to affordable housing, and another chunk of funding would support bus and bike lanes on e.g. Telegraph. I don't think that funding would materialize without the proposition passing. Are you just worried that there's going to be a lot of money misspent, or something else?
Secondly, W (give everybody four $25 vouchers for local campaign contributions, in order to counter the bias of the small slice of people who normally donate to local races) seems like a cool idea that someone should experiment with, and Oakland is as good a place as any to run the experiment. Is it just the price tag on that one that pushes you to No, or the additional ads it would push on you, or something else?
"the health establishment is so focused on banning healthier alternatives to smoking"
Not mentioned, but a prominent concern for state governments: alternatives to tobacco threaten tobacco sales, which could threaten their "tobacco settlement" revenue streams.
"so much is at stake, the govt now is the biggest player in almost every facet of society and the economy."
Amen!
>These people should be utterly ashamed of themselves and I hope there’s some way to make them cease to exist as an institution*.
*in Minecraft
"As an institution!"
What happened to okcupid? Is there a link I can read?
I would be interested in that as well. I stopped using it (for personal reasons) before it was bought by match.com. From what I remember, I found okcupid rather non-horrible compared to other dating sites.
Slightly off-topic, what dating sites/apps do the cool middle-aged adults use these days?
I heard good things about repurposing LinkedIn.
I dunno. If all those thought leaders married all those thought leaders the universe might explode.
Now imagining OKCupid had a public posting function..
Would also be interested in the backstory here.
Would also be interested in what this is about. Commenting to get notified about replies.
I was previously unaware that OKC's change in format followed them being bought by match.com, but that was indeed terrible and if it was Match's fault then yeah, fuck those guys.
OKC used to have detailed questions and detailed matching with percentages and the ability to look at what questions you disagreed on (and why, if you got that far). Then they did a redesign, and now you can't; it's a glorified swipe-right app like all the rest.
I wasn't sure either, but the two possibly relevant events I found were:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/technology/grindr-apps-dating-data-tracking.html
And
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/okcupid-experiment-human-beings-dating
I can't imagine these are the problems Scott has with them though. I mean data collection isn't great but in the US it's sort of a foregone conclusion with any and all social media, and the 'human experimentation' seems minimally problematic to me (I admit to never having used okcupid, though, so perhaps it's more invasive than it sounds).
Umm WHAT?
Vaping is not a more healthy version of smoking. If anything it is worse because it pulls in even more children to consume nicotine.
Nicotine is addictive but not remotely as damaging as tar and other stuff in smoking.
Addictive / nonharmful describes many things you consume daily.
> that creates a compulsion to keep using a substance regardless of the consequences.
I think that is an internal variable in addition, not a definitive. Addiction can be bound by consequences.
Just nicotine is more in the ballpark of caffeine, frankly, but mostly people don’t do straight nicotine. Vaping does cause some issues in the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, not that we know if it’s more the process or the ingredients yet. Yes, the tar and such is worse. What also deserves mention is mass manufactured cigarettes contain a lot of additional problems: cyanide, arsenic, etc.
It’s insane that’s we drive people back to real combustion instead, but I can’t say it’s surprising.
I agree we should not be pushing people back to smoking. But we should not be pushing them to vaping either.
Yes but how is that a good thing? Vaping is hooking millions and millions of children to nicotine and hundreds of other chemicals in the fluids. That is not a positive thing in anyway.
Please provide data link for this number.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/children-vape-smoking-uk-b2160812.html
https://www.massivemagazine.org.nz/articles/youth-vaping-on-the-rise
Ok, I will grant that it is a link...but the cite is an Instagram poll.
Could not care where it comes from mate.
There are hundreds of links if you actually took the time to google something before asking.
If you had spent even a small amount of time on social media you would have already seen the extent of the problem.
https://www.massivemagazine.org.nz/articles/youth-vaping-on-the-rise
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/children-exposed-to-increasing-number-of-tiktok-vaping-videos/news-story/d49fc2a149ce22e426045acadd9ed9bb
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/23/child-vaping-epidemic-risks-becoming-public-health-catastrophe-in-uk-experts-warn
https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2019/02/vaping-rises-among-teens
Maybe let's just agree that these shouldn't be sold to children?
So long as we define children as minors under 18 yo, I am ok with that rule.
I am not interested in using a lot of energy to manage vaping, though - I think there are much more important issues of concern to concentrate on.
> If anything it is worse because it pulls in even more children to consume nicotine.
Also, seat belts are giving people too much confidence into the safety of cars, which can cause speeding and thus accidents. If cars did not contain seat belts or brakes, people would be very careful when driving.
I am kind of skeptical about such forms of argumentation and instead like to focus on the first order effects, where going from cigarettes to vaping seems to improve health outcomes (just like using seat belts does).
Well I understand where you are coming from. Vaping means less tar is breathed. But the issue is that kids around the world were turning away from cigarettes on mass.
Vaping has made it cool again. So there is now more kids and younger kids consuming cancer causing products. Look at how vape liquids are flavoured and advertised - directly targeting children.
The only case where vaping is a positive is in the cannabis world. It allows people to get high with much less tar. Not for kids though.
>> If anything it is worse because it pulls in even more children to consume nicotine.
> Also, seat belts are giving people too much confidence into the safety of cars, which can cause speeding and thus accidents.
There's a pretty obvious difference here; cars have upsides and cigarettes are, notionally, pure downside.
See discussion starting at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my/comment/10253938
Why the heck yes to all judges? Kick the bums out.
This was our thought process too. If there was some strong reason to hate a judge we would be willing to kick them out, but in the absence of wanting to do very much work or having heard of anything going on, we support keeping them.
(this was a yes/no question, there were no challenger candidates)
I always write in "WHY THE FUCK ARE WE ELECTING JUDGES"
Is a judge picked by the government (so indirectly elected) more independent?
That entirely depends on how often the government changes. If all judges are replaced every time a new political party comes into power, then yeah. 
Absolutely. If you want independence, the more layers of indirection the better.
Better appointed by the governor for short terms than directly elected.
Better appointed by a committee the governor appoints than by the governor.
Better appointed by a long-serving committee who outlast governors than by political appointees.
Better nominated by career bureaucrats and approved by political appointees than be appointed by committee.
Better selected according to rules set by bureaucracy than nominated by bureaucrats directly.
It's not the only thing. Longer terms are independently good. (Though a difficult process for impeachment/recall is desirable; democratic means of kicking them out is safer than democratic means of kicking them *in*.) Restricting the potential pool of appointees/nominees/etc. to a qualified class - in this case, presumably lawyers in good standing with the bar - is independently good. Multiple independent interest groups which have a role in selection (e.g. an appointing committee which is mandated to be party-balanced, or approval needed from both a government bureaucracy and also the state Bar Association) are generally independently good.
But the more layers of indirection you can place between direct democracy and the selection of judges, the harder it is for the tyranny of the majority to ensure that things they dislike are ruled illegal.
I don't think judges should be elected at all. Therefore if I vote to retain all of them, it helps effect my intended result of the election not mattering.
>"I’m more interested in speculation about why you can’t have a candidate statement on the ballot if you spend too much money."
Seems pretty obvious to me. California wants to reduce money in politics. This is a way to incentivize candidates to spend less and/or to give candidates who don't have the money a compensatory advantage in getting their message out.
Apparently Newsom thought that it would be better to spend much and not have a candidate statement, so the effect is probably limited.
It would perhaps be helpful and more effective if they printed the money spent by each candidate with their statement, and an explicit text for the over-spenders explaining why they do not get a statement.
Which OKCupid scandal are you referring to? What happened?
Match.com bought OKCupid back in ~2014, and made the site much much worse at helping people find romantic partners (but presumably more profitable :/ )
Isn't making the site profitable their job? I don't know, I can sort of get the anger at capitalists wrecking things, but when it comes to not-profitable internet services I have a hard time caring. If old OKCupid was so much better why didn't a replacement rise in its place?
No one has come up with a good business model, e.g. one where the customers only pay if they find a partner, get laid, get a date etc. which would better align the incentives. One immediate problem with this would be keeping the customers honest.
Also a lot of good (and bad) business ideas start with "why has no one ever thought of this?".
> No one has come up with a good business model, e.g. one where the customers only pay if they [...] get laid
People came up with that business model several thousand years ago. It's still around.
Hah, fair point. Although I don't think most men have that sort of thing in mind when signing up and paying for Tinder.
It's also generally illegal.
I mean, it's illegal in the sense that hundreds of companies providing no other service operate openly.
It's not illegal in the sense that there's any effort to stamp it out.
Such a service that is really, really good at its job is bad at getting customers to stick around. Unlike dentistry where people with good teeth still return for checkups (and there's endless 'people with bad teeth'), a successful dating site that leads to a majority of people being matched with perfectly compatible partners gets rid of its own paying customers over time. The problem is that a successful 'sale' leads directly to a cessation in a 'subscription', and they want to keep the subscribers on the hook as long as possible.
Classic matchmakers (such as in cultures where arranged marriages are still popular) do good business even so, but they don't operate with the same volume, aren't a subscription service, & don't need to worry about being too successful.
I suppose what Match could do is offer combination matchmaking/wedding planning/couples therapy service. Get involved in the full vertical integration of relationships.
> Classic matchmakers (such as in cultures where arranged marriages are still popular) do good business even so, but they don't operate with the same volume, aren't a subscription service, & don't need to worry about being too successful.
Is this true? I read a (translation of a) novel from the Ming dynasty [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Sui_Quash_the_Demons%27_Revolt ] in which one plot element is a rich merchant's efforts to get his daughter married. His interactions with the matchmakers are detailed, and it specifies that he gives them silver every time he speaks to them.
This would make them a subscription service, but you're not *expected* to use their service more than two or three times.
Dating services don't deserve to earn a cent. They are more scam than a service.
Many dating sites spam with %femaleName% wants to message you where this %femaleName% is fake or, if real, never did anything close to "want to message you".
Dating sites say 'we have NNN people registered' but they don't say breakdown by gender. If they weren't trying to scam men and said 'we have 100 million men and 15 million women', then men would be less likely to start using and pay for it.
False advertising.
All I know is I met my wife (of six years) on OK cupid, and it’s a great thing. There is no way in 1 million years I ever would’ve met her other than an online dating service. I had to wade through some chaff to get there, but it was worth it.  dating sites are like many other things, they’re only as good as what you bring to it. If you are a man and you go to Ashley Madison, then that’s what you’re bringing to it.
"I think if you hate the Jews and get your divine messages at a ziggurat, you should at least consider that it’s not the Judeo-Christian God you’re talking to."
I think it's fairly clear the gods actually followed by most of our political class are Mammon the god of money and Moloch-Baal the god of violence and untrammeled power.
The Ziggurat of Ur was specifically sacred to Sīn, the moon god.
Doesn't Oakland have a measure Y?
I don't know why I can't find it on the list I was given, but IIRC Valinor was against that too.
Lesson: Never name your ballot measure after a rhetorical question.
Scott: "There is also a study purporting to show that flavored cigarette bans do decrease smoking"
Then Limelihood:
"…it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on *menthol cigarettes.*
However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares."
The lack of comparison to other cities isn't the only reason that study would be worthless when looking at flavoured tobacco products in general:
Menthol slows nicotine metabolism and thereby increases the half-life of nicotine, so it actually has a pharmacological effect on the primary mechanism of addiction to tobacco.
(Why did people think menthol cigarettes were so widespread when other flavourings weren't at all, despite being possible?)
Afaik, that's not the case with other flavourings.
Interesting. Thanks for that.
"Why did people think menthol cigarettes were so widespread when other flavourings weren't at all, despite being possible?"
I would have guessed same reason mint toothpaste is almost universal - mint makes your mouth feel unusually clean, which is probably good if you've just put a gross thing in your mouth.
Fair, that bit wasn't entirely serious, it does make enough sense to not cause noticeable confusion, and I knew that would probably be most people's answer.
It might even only be hindsight when I say that I would have expected a larger share of non-menthol flavouring in pre-vape, smoked tobacco products - I don't think I actually gave it more than cursory thought before I knew that menthol increased nicotine half-life.
But points in favour of "the dominance of menthol is confusing if it's only the flavour":
- Contrary to tooth paste (I think?), tobacco is supposed to be, to some extent, something people use & enjoy for the flavour; at least the "more cultivated" versions, less so cigarettes. Cigar (and pipe?) smoke is generally not inhaled (which is less efficient for nicotine take-in), but only talen into the mouth and tasted.
Also, there's clearly a lot of effort being put into making the best-tasting cigars etc. I don't think I ever came across adult toothpaste that tried to market itself as tasting better than the competition.
- As someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments, mint flavour is superior to menthol. "Mint" is the very fresh, clean, actual flavour of, well, mint, which is quite nice, as with the toothpaste.
"Menthol" is just the sharp, almost biting and cold component of what eg peppermint tastes like, which is less complex than mint flavour, and in excess can actually feel very uncomfortable when inhaled. Imagine peppermint, and subtract mint tea.
Why would anybody choose to smoke - or sell - menthol tabacco if mint tobacco was available?
(Shisha/hookah is often smoked with flavoured tobacco, and mint is a popular one - I've never seen menthol. Yes, the mint tobacco smoke tastes kinda like mint tea, with *just a little bit more* of the menthol sharpness.)
The reason seems to be pharmacological, and to a significant degree driven by tobacco companies.
The house members who watched the mayoral debate were very impressed with Thao and called her smart and well-spoken. But she is apparently involved in a scandal where she (allegedly) tried to bully a subordinate in the city government into working for her campaign (illegal) and then fired him when he refused to comply.
The smear campaign against Thao seems to have originated from a blog taking money from the Coal Terminal lobby (seriously). Because they targeted Thao I put her as my #1 choice as i don’t want to breathe coal dust or make it easier and cheaper for other countries to burn it.
https://oaklandside.org/2022/11/01/sheng-thao-ethics-violations-zennie-abraham-leanna-powell-coal-mayor-2022/
I did see that angle, but it looks from https://oaklandside.org/2022/11/02/investigation-alleged-misconduct-sheng-thao-leana-powell-public-ethics-commission-timeline/ like the complaint is real and was being investigated before any of her opponents got involved. So although I agree the person bringing it up probably doesn't have the best of motives, I think the information is still accurate.
It also looks like Seneca Scott, another candidate not connected to coal, brought it up first. So I think the Ignacio connection, while real, is kind of a distraction on this issue (though of course don't vote for Ignacio!)
Great point, the earlier date is fairly damning. I don’t know if Seneca has a connection to coal or not - there is enough coal terminal money sloshing around in Oakland right now that every public official is getting approached (according to great reporting by East Bay Express). I asked Seneca directly on twitter if he supports the terminal project. If he spent more of his time trying to talk up his own vision rather than trying to smear mud on the frontrunner i’d be able to take him more seriously as a candidate.
My list of votes for San Francisco ballot props, in case anyone wants a single data point from an ACX reader in SF.
A: No - poison pill is poisonous.
B: Yes - incremental progress on garbage
C: Yes - audits might help, but probably not much
D: YES - the good housing-streamline one
E: No - the fake housing-streamline one
F: Yes - I like libraries
G: Yes - people in education outside of teachers unions think it's a good idea and well-structured
H: Yes - more voters on local issues.
I: No - pointless spending to ignore erosion
J: No - JFK Drive is good to drive on sometimes.
K: removed
L: No - renew it when it's over, maybe, not now
M: No - devil is ALL OVER these details.
N: Yes - no reason not to
O: No - don't give them more money they won't spend well.
Sorry to start a top level thread over a technical issue, but I am no longer getting any notifications when people respond to a thread I am following or to a comment I have made. When I go into the Substack app, I see a list of the posts, but they do not link back to the right place. Apologies to anyone who either feels or cares that I might be ignoring them. 
How did you vote on Oakland measure Y (the zoo one)?