I’ve never thought anything over 10 years was appropriate to a once-in-a-lifetime type of crime of passion. It’s enough time for a decent remediation process to prevent a repeat offense OR prove a certainty that the person cannot be trusted free due to mental issues and put them in a permanent non-punitive form of imprisonment.

In his case, if he didn’t have access to firearms, he wouldn’t be able to kill anyone. Sounds like he needs specialized assisted living, like the old guy who held himself hostage with a shotgun the next town over from me

Nobody can mistake that the 100 years isn’t for the good of society, but to punish him for taking a life.

Okay? I mean we live in two entirely separate worlds. $550k in my area gets you 850 sq ft with added condo fees.

There’s not many “worlds” with those price points, so you’re probably in Boston, NYC, SF, or somewhere similar. I, too, live in one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the US, so I get it more than you think.

But rent in those areas… 1 Bedroom apartments in Boston $4000/mo for 800sqft. Same thing, actually a bit more expensive to rent than to buy.

you’re locked in (trapped?) at 3% you’re not going anywhere. You can’t go anywhere even if you wanted

How so? If I actually were willing to rent, I could pocket a couple hundred grand and just pay apartment prices.

If that’s worth the advantage of doing your own landscape maintenance on the weekend, and having to drive everywhere for the simplest of errands, then head on.

In fairness, on the price difference I can afford a landscaper and use delivery services for errands. But I don’t mind mowing my lawn or driving, so I don’t do those things. But I don’t grok your point here. Are you suggesting nobody would actually want to live outside of big cities “because lawns and driving”? I understand some people love cities, and I respect that. I had a starry-eyed coworker who GUSHED about his visits to Boston. I like leaning back and chillin in my yard, swimming in my private pool, without anyone bothering me.

Renting and ownership can be fairly similar in larger cities (but costs more than owning a house in my state), but when you’re in the rural America, there tends to be a fairly sharp decrease in quality of life despite the fact that rental prices adjust up with housing prices anyway.

I mean, I can still get a half-acre of land and private house for a mortgage payment that’s about the same as the rent on a 2 bedroom apartment. Without having to worry about a landlord, an upstairs neighbor with toddlers. I can do what I want with my yard, even have any pet without an additional “pet fee”.

And rental houses (the happy medium?) in my area are going for exactly what the mortgage would be to buy one today. We’re talking $3000, even $4000/mo. Yeah, current rates are shitty, but that still gets you a $550,000 mortgage (used to get you closer to $700,000). And rent isn’t going down any time soon, but one can likely refinance to a lower rate in 5-10 years

What it means to me is that I’m not selling my house, with my 3% APR mortgage any time soon despite the $200,000 in equity I have from the price skyrocket.

Fair point. That is free. I guess it would boil down to what the mail categorization would look like in this guy’s service. I will say I thought it was odd that it isn’t just mail middleware with the guy struggling with having to build his IMAP in node.js.

Last I saw, Google charges for this. More than this guy’s service.

Also, it seems like his service is about automatically having username-category email addresses. Definitely not hard to replicate, but it circumvents the common blocking of plus-signs in email addresses you see nowadays. And while not hard, it’s a bit less trivial to catch any old email with a dash in it and “magically” convert it to a category in the main inbox.

We got the Startup Overflow from San Fran. I interviewed a guy in a t-shirt before and hired him.

But now I work remote, which is why the “since 2016 or so”

Northeast here. Unless it’s gone dramatically backwards in time since 2016 or so, suits are no longer mandatory for IT applicants in most Boston companies. Sometimes they’re frowned upon.

Youtube’s margins are 38%, much lower than most of its competitors (that are in the 80% range). The primary reason for the margin being so low is that they give a far higher percent of their revenue to the content creators.

Just a reminder… 38% margins are kinda low for the type of product Youtube is.

It becomes delicious. That’s part of the whole addiction process. Taste/smell is one (or two, however you count it) of the most unique senses in that it is largely driven by links in the brain. Tastes beget memories, and our favorite foods and beverages are the ones tied positively. Drugs tie us positively.

I used to hate the smell of skunks. I’ve used to have one of those things where smells effect me worse than other people and I cannot handle them. I would actually retch up from the smell of skunk. It got worse after the family dogs were sprayed near their eyes and my memories tied a night of chaos and stressed mother to it all. Fast forward YEARS later; I smoked a little pot when I was younger. I dunno if you’ve ever heard of the term “skunk weed”. Guess why? Well, after that, immediately after that, the smell of skunk was pleasant to me and I didn’t retch at all. And it’s stayed that way. I STILL like the smell of skunk spray.

The same with whiskey. Distilling is legal where I live. As such, I’ve acquired a taste for high-proofs. Things that would make most other whiskey drinkers spit out their drink saying the it would taste like rocket fuel. Why? Because a distilling run is a nice, mostly chill, 8 hour process where I hang out and have a sip here, a sip there. For a while, I stopped drinking regular-proof whiskeys entirely in favor of barrel-proofs. It may come as no surprise that wanting to drink 120-proof whiskey over 80-proof whiskey has almost nothing to do with the tasting notes.

Not at all. I don’t suggest any bans. I said elsewhere I would not oppose pre-rolled cigarette bans because they are especially dangerous and would not reduce access to the product itself. But I also don’t suggest pre-rolled cigarette bans.

But we know that inhaling PM2.5 is unhealthy and those size particles are present in vape

This is no more true than saying “we know sunlight is unhealthy”. What we know is that PM2.5 is unhealthy in large quantities for long periods of time. We know the same thing about sunlight for a lot of the same reasons. Occasional 15-minute stretches in the sun is more healthy than consistent long-term exposure.

You are free to take whatever risks you would like with your body.

As are you. I’m just talking about what is or is not science vs propaganda, here. From a different branch, I would wager that vaped medications could reach a point of being healthier for us than injected medications.

I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said we have a lot more context than people want to pretend about vaping in general.

And I’m not trying to say “it’s a mini hookah”, nor am I trying to say you should vape.

Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah

If they contain toxins, we probably know quite a bit about those toxins right now. But what about pure vaporized solids? In the CBD and Cannabis community, dry herb vaporizing is the hot new thing specifically because 99% of complaints about vaping being unhealthy are irrelevant. All they do is get the herbs hot without burning it, run it through cooling, and inhale it. I laugh, but I used to do that with lavender with an aromatic herb heating unit.

The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.

Despite your incredulity, you really haven’t shown that. The consequences are not perfectly understood, but we understand enough to start making educated opinions about vaping. Even your points about hookahs work towards that, with the worst cons being that you still get Carbon Monoxide and the intensity of Nicotine is high. The problem is that we don’t want to tell people that the educated opinion is “probably better for you than that glazed donut”

You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower

And you’re not that stupid. You know that fine particulate matter in the air every breath we take is different from someone vaping sometimes. There’s a reason your linked study doesn’t mention vaping AND why scientists are still saying the risks of vaping are unclear.

Your second study is more useful, but it really is not intellectually defensible to take it results as saying vaping is unhealthy. Instead, its results are saying that we need to keep regulations to control air quality with regards to vaping.

I’ll reiterate my original critique.

“Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations

…is something I disagree with, like most extreme naive generalities.

So you’re against smelling flowers, too? And scented candles?

The problem is that we “inhale particulate matter” all the time. Every day of our lives.

The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you

That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.

And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.

If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.

Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.

I do think it’s ok to ban sale of “prepared smokables” like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that’s on them.

Of course, I don’t think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.

…because there isn’t a pill that instantly cures all addiction. Addiction is a complicated thing that combines a lot of factors between physical dependence, pleasure-seeking, memory formation, and a lot more.

The problem with addiction is that it’s safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.

I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20’s. I’m still addicted, but I’ve learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I’m not exactly great at it.

If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.

There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.

Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.

We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.

So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.

Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag

As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.

Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.

That’s really not the case. Nicotine is highly physically addictive. “Habits” are involved in the way the mind links itself to the addictive substances and the effect of consuming them. My wife quit smoking 15 years ago, and walking in the woods still gives her near-uncontrollable urges to light a cigarette. Because she and I camped a couple time the first year of our relationship and she smoked a cigarette on a hiking trail. That’s not habit-related. Having a cigarette was a more formative and powerful influencing memory to her than basically anything else in her life.

Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”

That’s just anti-smoker bullshit. Honestly, if you work at a job where you need to smoke to get a break, you should be finding another job anyway. Let’s just stick to hating the drug instead of the smokers.