I’m a UK vaper (former smoker) and while I’m sure I’m going to find this annoying (disposables are helpful in a pinch when your proper vape has run out of battery or liquid), it’s clearly the right thing to do.
The e-waste involved in that sub-industry must be absolutely horrifying. Tens of millions of tiny little batteries, surrounded in plastic, lingering quantities of nicotine-rich liquids…
I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but in the USA it's also next to impossible to find a disposable vape that doesn't have an insanely high amount of nicotine. If anyone is unfortunate enough to try a disposable as their introduction to nicotine, they'll be as hooked as a pack a day smoker in no time. I switched to vaping after the pandemic and saw in realtime vapes come out with higher and higher nicotine levels, replacing the lower nic vapes on the shelves.
The only reason I had to use disposables was that I couldn't get replacement coils & nicotine juice for several months. They can't use traditional shippers, and the services they use vary wildly in quality; I probably still have a shipment gathering dust in a storage warehouse after several failed delivery attempts. For anyone trying to quit smoking, my best advice would be to go to a vape store that has a lot of custom vape equipment and not just peddling disposables. They should be able to tell how much nicotine salt / freebase liquid you should use given your current smoking habits and goals for quitting.
I was an occasional nicotine vaper, usually when taking a T break. The flavor was alright, and I couldn't feel much if anything from the hits in the 3-5% concentration range for e-juice. I never had problems just putting the device away for weeks at a time while enjoying other vices. I picked up some disposables while traveling and the experience was completely different. The flavor profile was much more rich. Things actually tasted fruity. More like a juice than the hint of a flavor I was used to from the freebase liquids I had tried. It hits far smoother. In addition I got a buzz from nicotine in a way I had never experienced before. I was literally high off my first few strong puffs. I don't get high anymore. But I also can't put it away anymore. After a day without, I'm almost constantly thinking about it. Freebase liquids do absolutely nothing to help divert my attention. Supposedly the nicotine salt vape is also only 5%. But holy shit does it feel different.
My pet theory is that nicotine itself isn't particularly addictive to adults.
I think the combination of additives in cigs is what makes them so hard to quit. I have quit various forms of pure nicotine with no withdrawals over the years, and treat it a bit like caffeine -- a stimulant that I use for a few months at a time before cycling off.
The only time I've _ever_ desperately craved a nicotine product was after 2-3 days of smoking cigarettes. When getting on a near-day-long flight, the whole time back I was thinking "wow, it would be great to have a cigarette right now" every 5-10 minutes.
But agreed on lung health with vaping. Also, my whole upper respiratory tract was in shambles. My throat was so dry, and it made me get sick constantly.
That’s a pretty well established theory: MAO inhibiters in cigarettes (or produced as a metabolic byproduct of smoking or combustion) cause the nicotine to be more addictive [1].
You’re right that it’s not ethanol alone. In a similar (semantic, not physiological) manner to the MAOI hypothesis for cigarettes shared in a sibling comment, the compound responsible for most of the negative health effects (not necessarily intoxication although it is involved IIRC) is acetaldehyde, the primary metabolite of ethanol.
As to additives, I’m sure certain ones contribute their own negative effects, sodium benzoate and tartrazine for example, but in that regard it’s the same situation as the food industry.
One of the things that stuck with me about that book was the author instructing you not to give it to someone else once you'd quit and to get them to buy their own copy so he may well mind it being pirated from the the grave.
Yeah at this point, nicotine pouches might be the best smoking alternative. But I'm seeing the same thing happen there. Zyns start at 3mg which is already higher than the usual 2mg for tobacco pouches. Off brands are going as high as 8mg+, and I imagine it'll keep rising as their consumers raise their tolerance.
edit: This discussion is really bumming me out; quitting feels hopeless when we're preyed upon like this.
I was able to successfully use Psilocybin mushrooms as a shortcut to quit vaping, all I did was say out loud to myself that I was done using and when I woke up the next day I just didn’t have that deep need to use it anymore. I still had the thought from time to time, but instead of the next thought being “maybe just a little bit” driven by an immobile subconscious need, I was able to refuse myself with relatively little effort. So if you get too fed up, don’t discount the more “magic” solutions (neuroplasticity seems pretty darn powerful). That being said those types of solutions do produce more or less irreversible change, and that change can and does go in either direction.
This is a bit of a US problem. The UK and many other countries limit the strength and amount of vape juice, so they are weaker and give fewer puffs. There's a lot of evidence that this reduces the addictiveness.
I also noticed that the flavors I'd get in disposables taste a lot more "chemical" than the ones you can find for a vape mod. I suspect that people buying them in a pinch makes them a lot less discerning about what ends up in them.
It's also possibly to do with the fact that disposables are almost universally nic salts, where as mod juices are usually freebase nic, and that can affect the flavor.
(Of course, I might be wrong, since it's been nearly a decade since I paid attention to the vape scene)
It might work if nicotine wasn't addictive. And because it is, the rational actor hypothesis goes out of the window, and taxing it is just going to hurt poor people who are addicted to nicotine.
How would an additional tax address this? Paying more would hardly reduce usage, and definitely won't incentivize users to dispose of vape pens more responsibly.
I would rather the government outright bans things rather than pseudo-banning them via the back door via taxes. At least then they have to expend an appropriate amount of political capital, and there is a proper amount of debate over it.
We had in the UK the sugar tax which was an effective ban on added sugar in soft drinks - you can hardly buy any drink without artificial sweeteners now, all of the old formulations were taken off the market because they were uneconomical. However, it never prior received attention as a ban, it was always described as just a "tax".
The UK taxed tobacco to high heaven and I don't think it did much to actually curb use. It's subject to the usual 20% VAT, plus an extra 16.5%, plus a flat £6.33 on 20 packs, so well over half of the sale price of tobacco is just tax.
Tobacco smoking has been on a downward trend since at least the 70s, from 50 to 13%, and taxes have steadily gone up since then in real terms, but I'm surprised to see that the period when the government raised taxes the most is about the only flat part of the curve.
The people I know that would be affected by this just get duty free from corner shops under the table now. Last I heard it's around 8 quid for 50g of rolling tobacco instead of £38 buying legit.
Wouldn't be surprised to find out they smoke more than they used to with it being less scarce.
It would encourage usage of reusable vapes, but still give people the option of a disposable vape of they for example forgot their reusable vape when traveling.
Simply, we should charge for negative externalities (not only for vapes) and let people decide what's valuable to them.
Do bottle deposits (a few cents that you get back for returning empty soda or whatever bottles to the right place) actually work? If they do, maybe the same model would work for this.
Tax is one big pool of money and I doubt the money will be used to fix the issues created.
A similar idea, carbon taxes and carbon credits trading seemed politically dead at least in my country even though it is a fantastic idea.
Edit: what might work is a 5-10 British pound ransom, released on return of the disposible to a recycling centre. Give the used devices free to a reclaiming merchant that operates out of the same country.
IMO the point of charging for negative externalities isn't necessarily to fund remediation of the negative externality but to internalize the cost and force the actor to make a decision about value to them and cost based on the real cost.
If batteries are a waste issue they should be more expensive till we as society feel we are adequately compensated for the externality created. We shouldn't pick and choose what use cases are valid for others. Everyone has different circumstances and preferences.
Yeah, same. I'm all up for a "free country", and all that. But this was just absurd. I wonder if 30+ years don't the line, if maybe resources are scarcer, we'll think about these and say: "we were fucking crazy"
The earth is pretty big, and vape batteries are tiny, and we keep finding substitutes.
I'm all for reducing waste, but it seems unlikely we'll run out of metals in our lifetimes.
Keep in mind, things keep getting more efficient, and rich nations are finally tending toward using LESS per capita.
Sure, the poor nations might eventually become rich and the global population has not yet peeked, but there's no reason to assume our materials usage will grow exponentially forever.
And, even if you assumed we were going to run out of whatever is in these tiny vape pens - the percentage of all usage going to tiny applications like this is a rounding error. It's not what you would attack if you really wanted to move the needle.
You'd probably try to reduce the number of people buying new cars, for example.
Is the key here. We need to think beyond our lifetimes. We should be treating the earth like we're going to live on it for (tens or hundreds of) thousands of years, because I sure as shit hope we (meaning humans) are going to.
Yes, reducing creation of cars would certainly have a much bigger impact, and should be done. But it's also a lot harder than dealing with vapes.
Anyway, as far as I understand it, the main reason this is happening isn't happening to reduce waste, it's happening to stop a rise in nicotine consumption in children. Preventing waste is more of a nice side effect.
The UK isn't a 'free country' in the way American's use the term. It took me a few years of living in America to understand the nuance. I think the 'freedoms' Americans have raises it's own problems for society (eg guns) and there isn't a right or wrong, just different.
The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't, in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can. :D
As an American, I'm still often baffled by American Exceptionalism. Often people who say stuff like this have zero actual clue about how things are done in other countries. And it's laughable to call out the right to bear arms when just being suspected of having a weapon is enough to justify an execution by the police.
I recall the time the Japanese imprisoned the CEO of Nissan on trumped up charges and he had to smuggle himself out of the country to escape. Of course the US has Gitmo, but in general the justice system is remarkably fair compared to other countries, since its much harder to get a guilty verdict, which is why so many criminal court cases end with plea deals instead.
Especially considering the fifth amendment was specifically intended to allow for a militia to defend against the government, not to enable students to carry an automatic rifle into school—but here we are
2nd amendment, 5th is the "right to remain silent" etc.
Still, the issue with school shootings is mostly that it targets the wrong people. After school programs, community support for troubled youth, options for local service or a job placement program for kids would all be solutions, but the youth only sees other kids at school as the problem. If the system is so screwed up that a kid feels the need to take up arms to fight against it, then they should, but school shootings are unnecessarily cruel and generally fail to lead to progressive changes; more often than not they become justification for increases in the very authoritarian measures that promote the violence in the first place.
> The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't, in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can.
That's pretty good. It's a succinct contrast of the difference between a citizen and a subject.
I have a different thought about that kind of stuff in that in 100 years or so landfills will probably be literal gold mines (or whatever else you're looking for).
What, you've never heard of star-lifting? Or just getting it from Saturn? Commercial/economic quantities are all about the necessity versus scarcity, and helium has unique properties that can't be synthesized in sufficient quantities even if you ran all of Earth off fusion of hydrogen into helium.
I'm as much a fan of sci-fi as anybody, and the last 5 years of space x should make anybody optimistic about the future of space exploration, but strip mining Saturn is a long way away from providing for the needs of MRI machines and other essential modern technology. what will happen first is that the prices will rise and we will stop using it in party balloons, and then it'll be too expensive for the lower 95% of the population for any use at all for decades/centuries - and that's even if we do manage to escape the local gravity well for good. even that's doubtful - space is just unbelievably hostile.
The cells themselves are pretty good - pretty much only every come across Lipo's even in "non-rechargeable" disposables. mAh basically depends on the size of the vape / the puff count, but yeah I normally find them to br between 500 and 1500 mAh (give or take).
I figured any disposable vape would have its batteries glued in. How straightforward a task is it to remove the battery? What do the batteries generally look like?
The cells are generally just "push fit", maybe with some kapton tape or foam to give them a snug fit. As for taking the vapes apart, A pair of pliers and some brute force is typically all that is needed to get them apart.
Cell shape is either cylindrical or rectangular, depends on the vapes shape really. You get the knack of remembering/guessing what the shape will be just by looking at the vape.
Came here to mention Big Clive's salvaging. Haven't tried it myself yet - the feral youth around here tend to be more whippet oriented than vaping, sadly.
My town is more a "active nightlife" town, so while I do see a far number of Whippets cartridges (though, thankfully, a lot less recently), you mainly find more discarded disposable vapes on Saturday and Sunday mornings/afternoons then you will whipped cream cartridges.
They're cheap but rechargable lithium-ion batteries, as well as a blob of electronics to make it heat an element when a button or microphone sensor activates to vape, and a lot of times, also a fancy screen with animations.
Some disposable vapes even include a USB port to recharge that battery, which is why it's certain that they're rechargable.
Personal preference. Perks include consistency and hackability. Mutt for instance hasn't changed a whole lot in decades. The relative simplicity and stability also means I'm not running into a whole lot of bugs. GUI email clients on the other hand...
Resource usage is also about as low as you can get.
Your are indeed! Many people like myself prefer the lightning fast interaction of keyboard navigation, the mastery of the bindings to improve workflows, and the customization of bindings to create new ones.
This has to be a pretty backwards argument, to be honest.
You may not have to learn "new shortcuts" (they're pretty standard), but you're perfectly willing to learn an entire text-based configuration scheme?
VIM has its merits for _editing_ code, but that's not what you're doing with e-mails. You're usually just writing them and sending them off. It doesn't matter if you can save a few keystrokes to, say, change a word a few paragraphs back, and you're not producing structured text in any meaningful way.
It's perfectly fine to like the terminal, but you _have_ to admit it is a preference that has nothing to do with "efficiency".
I must respectfully disagree. It's far from just about writing an email; it's about managing hundreds of emails. With Vim keybindings, I can switch between email accounts, folders, and individual emails in Aerc at lightning speed. I can select emails using the same keybindings as I would to select lines of text in Vim. Then, I can use those same keybindings to delete, move, copy, or mark emails. The efficiency? It's many times better once you understand the Vim mindset. Plus, I can use the same keybinding system in other programs too. Take a look at [oil.nvim](https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim), NNN, or [yazi](https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi), or mpv or surfingkeys in your browser.
For Yazi, I even created a hardcore Vim configuration that makes it even easier and more efficient for any user familiar with Vim keybindings.
Just one example: look at your email program. Perhaps you have a folder open with 100 emails. Now, imagine that each email is nothing more than a line of text. So, you have a document with 100 lines of text. In Aerc, I can simply jump to the first line (the first email) with `gg`. And with `G`, I can jump to the last email. With `ff`, I filter all emails that have the same sender. With `fs`, all that have the same subject. With `V`, I mark an email, and with `X` or `dd`, I can delete the email. Before that, I can mark all the emails I filtered with `G`. If I don't want to delete them but move them instead, I just press `pf` and enter the first letters of the desired folder where I want to move my emails. I can also set certain folders where I often move emails as shortcuts. For example, `pb` to move emails to the "Brain" folder. Have a look at my simple config: https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim/blob/main/binds.conf
Once understood, everything becomes incredibly fast.
There is a different social contract between GUI and CLI project maintainers and their users. A menu item can be renamed or moved around and the only thing that breaks is the mental model of users who knew precisely where that menu item was; a CLI option, for example, cannot be renamed or removed without breaking someone's automated script.
Given that difference, some people prefer the stability of their tools not changing on them and prefer CLI/terminal work in general. The difference in social contract may not apply specifically to an email client but a given user might be more comfortable in a terminal than in a GUI.
Really short answer: Because the GUIs for mail SW are just not that great. It's been a long time since I used something like Thunderbird, but for the webmails I use, as well as Outlook at work - both tend to have inferior UIs than a good TUI.[1]
Another short answer: A lot of people prefer to use the keyboard. While it's true you can do a lot of keyboard navigation in some GUIs, but they still tend to be inferior to what you can do in a GUI.
Another answer: Performance. GUIs in general are laggy.
Another answer: What are my choices for GUIs for local mail? I always store mail locally on my PC and use a mail SW to interact with them.
Fundamentally, GUI developers optimize for different things compared to TUI developers.
Finally:
> but why would you want to use a terminal interface when a GUI is so much easier?
I think you'll find that the HN crowd values a few things higher than "ease". Yes, GUIs tend to be easier. Just like using IFTT is easier than writing code. Yet, many people prefer to write code.
[1] I mean OK, perhaps for a thing or two they're better, but not overall.
Personally I use a hybrid, or Emacs under X11, witch is arguably a GUI but also text-based and why for me is because of:
- integration :: I can create in a single keypress (bind to org-store-link) a link to be inserted in a note (another single keypress, org-insert-link) to pretty anything, a specific place in a file, a whole file to be open with a specific app, a mail message, ...
- end-user-programming :: meaning I can easily have a function (or a script, outside Emacs, maybe) that when a new electricity bill email arrive to my inbox it add relevant information in the relevant contract note, an agenda info, a "special timer" [1] that check my BeanCount transaction for a relevant entry after a certain date etc. With LITTLE coding an user can get a personal BI without a BI monster and issues of feeding it all the time.
GUIs suffer from not being textual enough, TUIs due to the lack of full graphics abilities.
Desktop computing in a network is the most powerful form of computing we have, and unfortunately it's long lost for a modern mainframe model (cloud+mobile) witch is terribly limited and limiting and most not knowing anything else do not even understand the limit.
[1] a function that run at a date, and get re-created when a session restart to avoid loosing the timer after a reboot
A constrained environment forces developers to distill to the essence of the problem, thereby possibly understanding it better. It's the old "simple can be harder than complex" attributed to Steve Jobs.
Operation via single-character keyboard commands is really fast in TUI emails clients. In principle a GUI client could offer the same, but I haven’t seen one that does to the same degree. A GUI might be “easier”, but is less efficient for the power user.
Another reason that is more idiosyncratic: If you operate your own email server, you can SSH in from everywhere and use a TUI client locally on the server. This saves the transferring/syncing of emails between client-side local storage and the server; everything is just immediately available.
Gmail is actually really good with this. Yeah, not every possible action has a keyboard shortcut, but all the important ones do (the ones you will realistically use in day to day email handling).
I find neomutt much easier* than a GUI, especially since I can write my emails using vim. But also, since I get a lot of notifications via email, I can do things like bulk-delete by just typing D + [pattern]
I'm guessing that the text interface is nicer if your use case is reading mostly text-based emails from newsletters or forums. But yeah, for general email use I don't see this as a plus unless you really like TUIs.
Besides the other reasons already posted, one big one if one runs one's own email server (have done so since circa 1999) is that remote access to email is just an ssh session.
I used to love using RSS readers to get my news, but at this point so few of the papers/websites I read actually offer non-truncated RSS feeds that I don't see the viability of RSS readers anymore. I guess they did that to prevent people getting around paywalls.
The e-waste involved in that sub-industry must be absolutely horrifying. Tens of millions of tiny little batteries, surrounded in plastic, lingering quantities of nicotine-rich liquids…
Glad this is happening.
I’ll take the inconvenience on the chin lol