https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145552
The number of people using tobacco continues to decline despite industry attempts to jeopardize progress towards stamping out cigarettes and other such products, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a report published on Tuesday.
I quit in September! Congrats! Quitting smoking was way harder than quitting drinking for me, and I was a daily drunk functional alcoholic for years.
Wow, qutting drinking and smoking, you must be a strong character. I don't know you but I'm pretty proud of you. Wish you the best!
Debatable. Depending on the golf course location and management, there could be an argument for them at least providing some space for biodiversity.
Tobacco doesn't produce as much of use, but also doesn't come with the same methane emissions, or slurry runoff.
Which golf course isn't an artificial mix of sand, roads and monoculture full of pesticides? I would guess they also have traps against wildlife that may damage their perfect loan.
I was definitely thinking of a hypothetical golf course; I'm not under any illusions that the vast majority are biodiversity deserts.
Humans can synthesize all amino acids themselves. Any external source is optional, and outside of extreme scenarios like quickly gaining muscle mass nothing you need to think about.
If you do find yourself in the extreme scenario, you will have no problems picking from the huge range of non-meat protein sources.
Quite the reverse in fact! Livestock produces fewer calories and nutrients per square meter than crops.
No it does not. You cannot eat nor consume what livestock does, period. Their entire diet is shit you cannot eat, it's literally roots, and stalks and basically garbage your body cannot use. They also drink non portable water.
On earth we have a land shortage. If you grow animal feed, that could have also been a foodcrop. In terms of land efficiency, meat is an order of magnitude less efficient.
We do not grow crops for just animal feed, the majority of what they consume is waste byproducts from what you are able to consume. It's around 85% of their diet. So unless you have a way to all of a sudden eat stalks or roots or leaves and grass, it's wasted if not feed to livestock.
And enough pavement that anyone can store their cars close to pretty much any destination they have in mind.
Do we actually need more food crops though?
I thought we already produced enough food to feed the whole planet. Distribution is the real problem.
Smaller more diverse farms would help, but the grocery stores would have to learn how seasonal, regional crops work. Instead of offering pineapples, kiwis, and strawberries 365 days a year.
Instead of offering pineapples, kiwis, and strawberries 365 days a year.
Why can't they? At least in North America refrigerated railcars make year round fresh fruit an option. Plus frozen fruit is an option anywhere
I vote just keeping the fields dormant so we can actually do crop rotation and stave off massive crop failures.
Personally I'd like to see the fields replaced with the forests that were cut down for them in the first place but that's not likely to happen
They'd just be replaced by soft woods to be cut down every 20 or 30 years. Trees are nice, but North America's old growth forests are what they are at this point. They're not a great carbon sink, either.
IMHO, trees got stuck in the mind of the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, and it distracted from a bunch of things that were way more important. I'd almost call it controlled opposition.
Would work if we decentralized the fuck out of everything and people could live in the forests
The industry interference: Here have more of the stinky cancer paper tubes that don't do anything but make you addicted then sooth the addiction.
That's not the only thing they do. They also reduce your capacity for work... and life. I have a reason to believe that people dying from "overwork" are actually because:
Just a hypothesis. No scientific backing.
... other than first hand exp with reducing ability to work after long term exposure in a heavily contaminated environment.
What offices have smoke?
Overwork is still very common despite less people smoking.
Also, nicotine is a simulant and really doesn't make you less productive. Just like coffee won't. Actually there's an argument it should help.
nicotine
I won't act like I know what comes out of people's exhalation after they come into an unventilated room after smoking in the stairway just next to it (with the only door blocking anything, being always kept open), but I can say for sure that:
If it is a stimulant that comes out of that smoke, it's definitely stimulating unwanted attributes of the brain.
I quit cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana. Yay mood swings and anxiety! (Don’t worry, I know it’s for the best)
Worst thing about alcohol imo is that I can never do anything really productive. Like a beer or two and instead of idk, reading or making something or programming I'll just be doing nothing. Takes my focus right out
Voluntary suffering in order to bring about future positive ends is essentially integral to having a good life. That’s like saying to someone who just started exercising and is complaining about being sore, “if you’re feeling worse, is it really for the best?” Yes. It definitively is.
Cigarettes no problem really, but the other stuff was seriously detrimental to my concentration abilities at work.
Tucker Carlson cancelled by big healthcare before he could get the check from Philip Morris.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-nicotine-frees-your-mind
I thought we were over it. But there are so many school teenagers on the way to school in my area, smoking. The stinky normal kind. They must be really stressed out?
If a kid sees their mom and dad smoking all the time, they'll probably start to believe that it's not as dangerous as other people say. "They seem to be fine, so I should be fine too." I legitimately heard this often while growing up, sadly. If you grow up around a bad smell, you might not think of it as "bad" smell, since you're already used to it.
If someone is already depressed and hates life, they might not care about the harm that they're causing themselves 20 years later. I've known way too many people who didn't believe that they would stay alive until adulhood. Some of these people started these bad habits expecting to not have to stick around long enough to deal with the consequences.
Throw in the chaos of the last handful of years, along with the constantly depleting mental health resources, and I can't say that I'm really all that suprised.
Even today, many countries have certain types of people trying to obliterate what's left of mental health resources. Then they wonder why their kids are struggling with mental health.
I can only imagine what it's going to be like for Gen Alpha when they get older, poor kids.
I don't smoke in any regular capacity. Last time I smoked was new years this year. The time before that was October '22.
On new years eve I drank, and I thought I could keep the alcohol high going if I smoked. Bad idea, the next day was shot too. Completely fucked. Never again.
Every time I smoke I'm reminded why I didn't smoke for >1 year prior.
I've been surprised in recent years how much more smoking has subtly popped back up in media. Most times it's also not in a way that applies to the plot or illuminates anything you didn't already know about a character.
Also in sports, things like Nickelodeon getting so involved with the NFL for kids with cartoon recreations of games, etc. They are propping up a new generation of sports hero role models in people like Joe Burrow. For awhile, he'd be celebrating all their victories with trashy cigar parties in the locker room, as like, a kid in his early 20s who just got slimmed by Nickelodeon a few days before?
It's been pretty odd to see the resurgence in media in the last decade plus.
I wanna see a massive dump of them. All of them. If you gonna smoke smoke weed. Fuck tobacco and anyone who thinks it's cool. They have the freedom to choose for sure, but anyone that chooses that is 100% idiot until proven otherwise.
No ifs, ands, or buts. If you like it, you are part of the problem.
Quitters finally saw the light. People who start smoking in the 2020s are just outright stupid. It's not all over TV anymore, it's not the cool teenage rebellion thing. It's not even hidden knowledge about how bad it is to start, and how hard quitting is. Wtf is making people start now?
Smoking weed will bring a lot of the negative health effects of tobacco smoking. Is it so cool that one may underestimate it? That reminds me of something.
There's so much garbage in tobacco cigarettes that the comparison is barely worth making.
Now, yes, burning any plant material will release carcinogens that can increase cancer risk. Incidentally, this includes sitting around a campfire, but most people in developed countries don't do that every day. However, studies on marijuana smoke find that smoking one joint a day for a year gives slightly elevated testicular cancer risk, and inconclusive results for other cancers.
Possibly, marijuana has a protective effect that tends to cancel out the inherent carcinogens.
There's a lot of research disagreeing
The reality is no, cannabis probably doesn't block carcinogens. Nor is it more harmful to your lungs than tobacco. But it's not really clear that it's less harmful than a filtered cigarette. I think it is probably a bit healthier of a habit just in that people usually smoke much lower quantities. But if you take a smoker and stoner each smoking 10 times a day they're both at a higher risk of lung complications than non-smokers. Also importantly, cannabis is not chemically addictive (it definitely can be an addiction though) whereas nicotine very much so is.
It's also just not at all the same thing.
An aircraft mechanic can't just go out on his five minute break and smoke a j and go back to it.
If you're smoking weed like you would smoke tobacco, you've got too much damn money and aren't doing anything in your life anyhow.
Fuck cigarettes. Vaping is the new thing now 😎
Edit: woah, I meant it as a joke. Guess I deserve all the downvotes for not clarifying.
Fuck cigarettes AND fuck vaping. I fucking hate how many people vape at gigs and in line to places. Like fuck off, don't bring me into your bad decisions, keep them to yourself.
I agree with you that inconsiderate vapers need to fuck off, but when used for its intended purpose, helping adults quit smoking, vaping literally saves lives.
I tried every other smoking cessation method including prescription medication for 10 out of the 18 years I smoked but it just didn't work for me.
Then I went from cigarettes to vaping high nicotine to gradually tapering off until I was vaping nicotine free and then not at all. I haven't smoked OR vaped for over 3 years now.
That is the best way for the transition. I clearly wouldn't have an issue with that kind of vaper because they're not ripping fat ones in my face and instead trying to better themselves. Like you did. You should be proud, I can't imagine it's that easy to get off of an addiction.
Thanks, I AM kinda proud of it, heh. Like all addiction, though, you can't do it before you're ready and have the exact kind of help you need.
About a month after I quit smoking with the help of vapes, I quit drinking with the help of a one week anxiety medication regimen my GP prescribed for the mental withdrawals (in spite of being a way too heavy drinker for many years, I was lucky enough to never get physical withdrawals).
With alcohol, I had tried a few different kinds of counseling, trying to force myself not to drink and even being forced to take antabus which can make you really sick if you drink on it, but all of it was either bad timing, a bad method for me or both.
Sorry if that was too much of a tangent lol, I can tend to veer verbose a bit at times 😁
Nah, it wasn't too much. It's where the conversation landed. And I'm glad you're in a better place :)
Vaping is not intended as a smoking cessation product, it is a cigarette alternative. It happens to help people quit cigarettes, but the tobacco industry does not give two shits whether it does or doesn't. Vaping is addictive and still pretty bad for you.
Vaping is not intended as a smoking cessation product
That's just factually inaccurate.
it is a cigarette alternative
It happens to help people quit cigarettes
By better simulating the habit than other methods. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to make the connection. You have to be a special kind of stupid to confidently deny it, though.
the tobacco industry does not give two shits whether it does or doesn't
True, but they're not the ones who invented vapes. In fact, they and organizations sponsored by the sales of "traditional" smoking cessation products were the most ardent advocates for outlawing vapes, for obvious reasons. That some of them have bought Juul and other vape companies is just a cynical way of getting rid of the competition by devouring it.
Vaping is addictive and still pretty bad for you.
Which is why it's meant for adult smokers only. It's still nowhere near as addictive and harmful as tobacco, though, so even if you DO accidentally replace one addiction with another, you're still better off than if you had continued smoking.
There are no studies that have shown yet that vaping is bad for you long term...and don't send over the studies with the popcorn lung or the study of them literally burning a dry wick.
Nobody gives a shit what it was intended for when it helps people kick two pack a day 25 year cigarette habits.
Like me. And a few others in this very post's comment section.
I'm glad they're helping you kick cigarettes. Vapes are an addictive nicotine product, they weren't created to do anything but get nicotine into people of all ages.
Sorry, but your opinion doesn't match reality in this case.
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-vaping-who-invented-e-cigs-2019-10
The inventor of vape juice and the methods for vaping it, was a doctor who was trying to kick his own habit.
And it is not 'helping' me. It helped. I've been off cigs 7 years, and vape for 2.
Yeah at school I see people vaping all the time. Just saw somebody on campus the other day take a huge huff of it the other day. Those things are huge. I keep thinking it might even be more dangerous than regular cigarettes probably because of its gargantuan size and the ease to just suck up a cartridge without a lighter.
I definitely think because of the ease of vaping people use it to a greater detriment than they would if they just smoked cigarettes. No matter how much better a single vape puff is compared to a cigarette puff, for some, one in every ten breaths is around their vape it seems. That, long term is going to fuck shit up, surely.
I definitely think flavored vapes should not exist. The point of e cigs and vapes were to transition tobacco cigarette smokers to quit smoking. Having flavored vapes with shiny packaging appeal to little kids a lot so they're keeping addicts on with nicotine in another form and introducing younger generations to more dangerous habits. These things pop up in middle schools and high schools all the time, sometimes even in elementary. It's a terrible issue for schools around my area.
You know who the VAST majority of people using flavored vapes are? Adults trying to quit smoking.
The flavor makes quitting easier for adults both by making the vape taste good AND by making cigarettes taste much worse in comparison.
When I first started vaping many years ago when the technology was in its infancy, I started with tobacco flavor. The taste being almost the same made it much more tempting to go back to cigarettes since they have additives in addition to nicotine to make them more addictive.
When doing flavored vaping though? Taking a drag on a cigarette tastes absolutely AWFUL. As bad as it tastes to someone who's never smoked before, if not worse.
Without flavors there's a big chance I wouldn't have been able to quit 3 years plus change ago and I'd still be smoking today, shortening my life by decades.
Banning adult smokers from buying flavored vapes WILL kill people by making them unable to quit smoking.
And as for kids, guess what? In every country that has even CONSIDERED banning flavored vapes, it's already illegal to sell vapes to anyone under 18. So in stead of killing a bunch of adults by taking away their best chance of quitting, you could just enforce the laws that already exist!
That's a unique perspective. Thanks for sharing. Really changed my perspective on the flavored vapes. My perspective was that you don't need flavored vapes, only tobacco because that's targeting the cigarette smokers anyways