> If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares?
Because we aren't doing anybody any favors when we permit the industry to give teenagers a chemical addiction to their commercial product, even if their product were harmful in no ways other than financial.
(Yes, I also object in strong terms to other addictive substances in consumer products, don't even bother replying with whataboutism.)
If they’re directly advertising to kids, that’s a problem and already illegal. If they’re making universally enjoyed flavors, like apple, I don’t see a problem with that specifically, if we are going to continue to allow the ingestion of nicotine for any adult.
Again, if they are advertising to children, that is a very, very serious problem and should be dealt with immediately. Selling apple or caramel or chocolate or mint flavor is not sufficient, in my opinion.
Arguably, advertising flavor at all is sufficient, but don’t we already have laws for advertising, period?
Were nicotine harmless I'd be ok with teenagers getting hooked on it. After all many of them are hooked on excessive sugar consumption and that is not harmless. Better to care about where the harm really lies than where it doesn't (again, if nicotine is harmless).
Please don't say "aargh, drugs!" and lose your cool. We need a rational not emotional response or things will be made worse.
> "Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too."
I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?
The general thrust of my argument here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537240 also applies to flavored cigarettes. Its going to be race to bottom of extremely harmful products.
I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. I take it you can't identify any other 'harm.'
Thoughts on adults enjoying marijuana? How about pot-brownies? Alcohol? Flavored liquors?
If something is legal for adults and illegal for children, then why is it okay to restrict the methods of enjoyment of that item in ways that do not impact other people (e.g. driving while drunk impacts other people).
Your whole argument seems to be built around protecting children, so let’s protect them by disallowing advertisement of the product, especially explicit or advertisement that can be reasonably expected to be viewed by minors, and by carding people that buy the products.
Let’s make all vaping, nicotine, thc or otherwise illegal for minors.
Please don’t come after my apple vodka. I like those flavors, too.
I think you're discounting the roll of America's massive industrial output, which shipped more than 17 million tons of goods to the Soviet Union throughout the war, including more than 400,000 trucks/jeeps, 7,000 tanks, 11,000 airplanes, and 1.75 million tons of food, just to name a bit.
Relative to national size, the Soviet Union received more tanks and planes from the British than the Americans, but the American trucks in particular were incredibly important for the Soviets. During that same period the Soviet Union only produced a fraction of that many trucks and Soviet trucks were frankly inferior trucks. Beyond the obvious logistic advantages of trucks in a war largely characterized by mobility, receiving American trucks allowed the Soviet Union to dedicate more of it's (relatively limited) industrial capacity to the production of tanks and airplanes.
Incidentally, here is something else American students aren't taught (I wonder if Japanese students are?): The leadership of the Japanese military considered the emperor to be a figurehead and after the 2nd atomic bombing when the Emperor was preparing to surrender, the staff office of the Ministry of War as well as several members of the Imperial Guard seized control of the Imperial Palace, with the goal of preventing surrender. They failed of course, but only due to the bravery and good luck of a few people in the Palace. The point here being, there were high ranking elements of the Japanese military that wanted to continue fighting even after the second bomb, and even with the Soviets preparing an invasion. Nationalism is a hell of a drug...
The only thing I'm discounting is the American tendency to talk like we are the center of the universe and always have been. I'm saying "WW2 wasn't a war with the US. There were multiple countries on both sides of that war."
That's it. That's all I'm saying. It doesn't actually translate to "America didn't count and made no difference whatsoever in the war effort."
Perhaps pedantic. But the comment I was replying to specifically framed WW2 as "a war with the US" and I've had foreign friends, such as in Canada, who have commented on America's tendency to talk like we singlehandedly won that war.
I don't think "war with the US" was meant to imply "A war in which America was on it's own and did everything"; that's a cynical read of it. A less cynical read would be that "war with the US" means "war in which the US was a participant."
Germany did declare war with the US, hence there was in fact a war with the US. Of course, Germany was also at war with lots of other people. All Americans are taught that in schools. It's called a World War for a reason and people do understand that, even when they're going out of their way to mention it. If Americans don't mention Canadian participation much it's simply because they don't talk about Canada much in the first place. It's not because they're unaware that Canada participated in the war. Canada is a commonwealth country, of course they participated in the war. Everybody here knows that.
> "aren't those ads targeted to the viewer (you) rather than the content of the video?"
That shouldn't matter; youtube should not be showing adult ads to an adult when the adult is watching a children's show. Did nobody at youtube consider the probability that the adult's account is watching a children's TV show because there is a child in the room and the adult put the tv show on?
> " The fact that this isn't a difficult problem to solve is the strongest indication that A) YouTube knows exactly what's going on"
It may also be the case they're totally incapable of doing it right, despite trying their best. I'm not sure that possibility really changes the situation though; either way the outcome is not quality entertainment for kids.
It may be the case that they do it with sufficient accuracy to stay in business, but insufficient accuracy to provide quality content streams for children.
My above comment seems a bit unpopular, but I really don't think youtube is deliberately trying to show inappropriate content to kids. I think it's happening despite their efforts to do something about it. In other words, they are trying and failing. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but you've got to remember a lot of youtube employees have kids too.
My (uninformed and possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube wanted to maintain the fiction that, to the best of their knowledge, everyone using the service was the person who signed up, so that it could argue it was not intentionally showing videos to children. When YouTube knows kids are using the app, it's supposed to be doing lots of things to protect their privacy (which it has not been doing).[1]
Building an algorithm to guess when children were likely using YouTube on their parents' account, in order to show age-appropriate ads, would show that YouTube does know that kids are using the app. So my (again, uninformed and quite possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube did not try and fail at creating such an algorithm; they deliberately decided not to try.
FB is good at behaviorally targeting ads. Google is good at at search ads (90%+ of revenue). Google sucks at behavioral ads. Source: I manage lots of ad spend for many companies.
If kids 'need' TV shows to watch and parents need a source of children's entertainment they can trust, isn't that were we normally expect an organization like PBS to fill the need?
With an organization like PBS, they have a reputation of manually curating what they show, while something like Youtube Kids just has automated systems and manual reports to supplement it. It's hard to believe Google/Youtube could ever provide automated curation as well as PBS. How many media articles that boil down to "youtube showed this to kids but PBS never would have" are we going to have before people get the idea?
I think YouTube is avoiding responsibility here - hosting videos for kids with billions of views and running ads on them, while saying "it's not for kids" to save money to actually curate / avoid showing videos not safe for them.
YouTube kids is also disingenuous here - no 10+ year old would want to watch that.
Saying "it's the responsibility of parents" is the same PR driven avoiding of responsibility by YouTube.
YouTube themselves make it as easy as possible for kids to use YouTube (preinstalled apps on TVs etc), they should bear some responsibility too.
Oh, I completely agree. Youtube should stop pretending they have a service suitable for children. Youtube should be making it clear to consumers that their service is for mature viewers only because they are incapable of vetting content for children with the accuracy consumers rightfully expect from a children's entertainment company.
Either go out of their way to prevent kids from using the service or invest and make it safe for kids. I think they will lobby / PR heavily to continue to do neither.
Yep, people saying Breezewood isn't special probably haven't been there. The experience isn't something you can really derive from looking at any picture. I've driven across America numerous times, been to more rest stops and exit towns than I could ever remember. Breezewood is a uniquely frustrating experience.
> "[fans don't] help when it gets above the 98.6 degree body temperature."
I'm not sure about that. It would be true with a spherical cow, but I don't think it's true when real people are involved because people sweat to cool down. I believe that phase change of water evaporating off your skin should continue to cool you down no matter how hot it gets, like a swamp cooler in Arizona. A fan should help this by rapidly replacing the humid air around you with more dry air.
(However my understanding is that evaporation cooling stops working once humidity hits 100%)
I would say that if the fan is used as part of a ventilation scheme, yes the dehumidification, and moving air displacing hot air coming from your skin is helpful. If you're in a closed room you just get the benefit of moving air, which tends to be marginal.
As for humidity, the evaporative cooling from sweat should aid cooling until you hit 100% humidity (at which point sweat can't evaporate). But we're just talking about the mechanics of cooling here. If we're talking about human thermal comfort, which has been (with some debate) empirically quantified, thermal comfort only exists within a narrow band of temperature and humidity. So for example, a person sitting indoors clothed with typical summer clothing, will only be comfortable at a temperature of 27C at a humidity of approx 55% or lower (see this tool for more info: http://comfort.cbe.berkeley.edu/)
Because we aren't doing anybody any favors when we permit the industry to give teenagers a chemical addiction to their commercial product, even if their product were harmful in no ways other than financial.
(Yes, I also object in strong terms to other addictive substances in consumer products, don't even bother replying with whataboutism.)