221–230 of 493 posts
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Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.
Do vapes have ad budgets? All I see are anti-vape ads?
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This is why to me it’s so damn disappointing to me that vaping is targeted so forcefully by the various scolds in the “regulate everything” camp when smoking isn’t yet eradicated. Things like banning flavor and stuff. They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco, which reduces the likelihood of people switching from tobacco to vaping, killing many of those smokers as a way to “save” teens from taking up an overall not…
There are numerous other options for supporting smoking cessation that do not risk lung injury.
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I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough. But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it. Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here" All that hardware must surely…
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product! I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable. I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish…
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…
a.) the world of electronics is moving too fast
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
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>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere. It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the…
> It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
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Modern smoke detectors, at least here in the US, have a 10-year sealed non-replaceable battery.
every smoke detector i've seen takes a 9volt battery. maybe this is true for commercial units
The landlord special on older construction (maybe >10 years old, can't remember when the hardwire code went into effect) will usually be the 9v. Because they don't care about you having to get on a ladder to change the battery every year. They get to save $5-10 per smoke detector. Practically any homeowner is going to choose the 10 year option as the batteries don't have to be swapped.
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Between (a) component that costs tens of cents to mass produce and can be bought off the shelf and is reusable vs (b) component that needs actual experienced electronics engineers working on a single-use design that can not be repurposed later, I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
I don't follow the logic. Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components? Sorry for being dumb here.
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
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>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere. It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the…
> It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, optical sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…