> Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping.
I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.
Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.
It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.
Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.
Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.
> cigarettes are self-limiting they literally hurt your throat and lungs
Eh ...
I didn't know many smokers who smoke < 1 pack per day. For those < 1 pack per day, it's mostly b/c they just haven't gotten there yet, but that's where they're headed.
Smokers aren't really going to change their smoking rituals either, just b/c their throat is a little sore or they're short of breath. They just switch to lights and/or menthol, or otherwise find a brand that doesn't punch them in the throat like Marlboro Reds do.
Going longer than usual without a smoke, generally means chain smoking 2 or more to catch up
Once addicted, it really takes a lot of hurt to self-limit. That means being literally sick, realistically.
Personally, I found vaping far easier to quit than cigarettes.
We can't manufacture most of those low-end things at competitive prices with developing nations - and we never will be able to (or else we have bigger problems).
So who's going to buy the low-end stuff at high-end prices?
You can try tariffs and the like (as we're foolishly doing right now) - that usually ends up having the opposite intended effect. You make everything more expensive domestically, including manufacturing (b/c your inputs got more expensive), and hurt our ability to export, even the things we did well.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world unencumbered with protectionism reaps the benefits of free trade and out competes us.
All this eventually leads to a loss of manufacturing jobs and output and manufacturers that can only sell to the domestic market (instead of the whole world). The whole sector starts to shrink. So that's no good.
America has lots of natural resources (even more when we're friendly with Canada) cheap electricity, good transportation infrastructure (historically).
China has to import much of their raw materials. Wood from SEA and Russia, oil from the middle east and Russia, even coal, ore and beef cattle from Australia! They don't have the water supply, forests, mines or oil that exist in North America.
There is no good reason for them to be the manufacturing center of the globe and there were rational reasons why the US was the center of manufacturing in the globe in the 20th century.
The reason they became the global center of manufacturing was policy choices in China and the US at the turn of this century, and the reason why they remain the center of manufacturing is they developed a massive amount of capital and know-how in an era where the USA was actively destroying its own.
China has plenty of coal. They import metal refining coal, which they don’t have. And they import thermal coal because it’s easier to boat the stuff in from Indonesia than move it east by rail from western China.
Australia was never very interested in being a manufacturing power house, they simply don’t have the people for it anyways, and it’s easier to ship raw material than finished goods vast distances. Russia has the same problem in population so China is convenient for them. China would have happened even if the USA didn’t help it along in 80s-90s.
Australia in the mid 70s was party to the Lima Declaration [1]
Presently there's a lot of yap how it didn't or wasn't the reason Australia lost its way to retain its manufacturing sector. Indirectly though it was bouncing around the walls of Govt and industry's board rooms and pushed decisions to reduce or discontinue ongoing training in regard to upskilling, or simply improving skill sets that might be needed in the unemployed working class.
However much of the shift way from general manufacturing was the inevitable result of the declaration, the inability for a small manufacturer in places like Australia to compete with cheap imports - I recall a relative back in 1979 - 80 having a long rant about a manufacturing company near him - the whole problem was the small dry cells the company purchased at quantity to install into an electronic device - the exact same branded dry cells were available to their oversea competition for next to nothing and could / did sell their version cheaper than the purchase price the company was paying for the batteries per unit.
The other part of the issue was those industries that opted to hang on - the bogey man here again was the thinking that it would be better / overall cheaper for manufacturing sector to be elsewhere overseas. Thus with this mindset setting fruit in the higher branches of the wealth market, there was not much help from Industry heads or Govt at the time to encourage or provide affordable means for whichever industry still hanging on, to modernise - textile being one that comes to mind. I actually had a strong belief (I knew no better from the propaganda being dribbled out,) 80s / early 90s that the reason the textile and clothing industry was falling off was overseas workers were paid a pittance, which made it hard for textile companies here to stay competitive - that was until someone who'd had travelled and had business interests though Asia and the US dispelled the usual propaganda I'd been suckling on, she corrected me on that it's not all sweat shops, and much of the textile base over in Asia had modernised quickly and been computerised for years.
One other metric the parent didn't mention: The US is #1 in the world in productivity per worker in manufacturing.
We're not the largest in absolute output, but we are literally the best manufacturer in the world, and we are the 2nd largest.
We manufacture lots of stuff, often the most state of the art and difficult things to manufacture. We're very good at it.
And we've sat around close to full employment for so long, the only way to convert more of the economy to manufacturing is to either import workers, cannibalize other sectors of the economy, or automate even more.
Yes, a larger share of the economy is services, but is there some objective optimal ratio of services to manufacturing we should be shooting for? If so, what is it? No one ever says.
Yeah but something something testosterone manliness degeneracy decadence.
Sending emails from an ergonomic chair for eight* hours a day and having to be civil to female coworkers and polite to your boss inherently degrades the male spirit in a way that permanently damaging and poisoning your body with 12-hour factory shifts with a foreman yelling at you doesn't. This is so self-evident and obvious that nobody even bothers to state it, it's just an assumed undercurrent in discussions of "bullshit jobs" etc.
Putin is launching and provoking wars, not the EU.
> you will probably still blame America
No, we would blame Putin, because he's the blameworthy party.
As for Iran, Trump (and Trump voters by extension) is the blameworthy party. I don't even think any other R would have been dumb enough to go at Iran like this.
It was always a bad bet for billionaires like Bezos to become Trump enablers. You weren't buying a seat at the table, or the privilege of being left alone, you were just signing yourself up to be force-fed shit sandwiches over and over (And the shit-to-bread ratio gets worse as time goes on)
You should have used your considerable resources to fight. If only billionaires would oppose aspiring tyrants with the same zeal with which they oppose even minor tax increases.
Well, he did lose some data centers. Those aren't cheap.
The sort of global instability that is being created by all this is bad for everyone. It generally isn't good for business either.
We're so unstable and capricious now, countries are actually trying to decouple from American tech services like AWS and Amazon. That ain't great for Bezos.
Maybe inertia kicks in after Trump and things revert to the mean, but restoring confidence in the US again as a friendly, stable nation is going to be tough if we're always 4 years away from another Trump-type figure running the show.
He had little choice. The Trump tariffs could've been a massive, massive blow to Amazon, so I'm sure he felt he had to get out in front of them and buy some influence with the incoming administration.
See also Tim Cook. Doesn't make it right to suck up to Trump, but it was, and unfortunately still is, a rational move.
Even though its fairly cartoonish, when you see the life size gore of dead bodies with face huggers on them, etc - it hits really different in VR, at least at first.
Now imagine how intense that will become with even more realism. It could be actually seriously traumatic.
I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.
Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.
It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.
Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.
Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.
reply