Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to get 7th graders to smoke

experimental-history.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 263 posts

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#31

Post by t-3 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #7

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business,…

They can spend orders of magnitude less, or about the same depending on how they do it. Mixing your own fluid is stupidly cheap - a weeks spending for a pack-a-day smoker will cover at least a year of vaping like that. If they build their own coils, it's also very cheap - nearly a life's supply of wire can be had for one or two packs. On the other hand, if you buy disposable vapes or cartridges, you can easily spend more than a smoker, if you buy disposable coils and premixed fluid it probably comes about the same or slightly cheaper. If you have a huge collection of vapes and buy all kinds of different attachments and coil heads you are going to be spending a lot of money.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#32

Post by fuzzfactor »

You could always have a tobacco company sponsor a prime-time animated TV program intended for the whole family to watch before it was kids' bedtime.

Where the main characters took regular breaks to smoke their Winstons, using those ancient Zippo lighters that basically rubbed two sticks together to light up.

Fred & Barney never looked so relaxed and satisfied any other time.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#34

Post by hipadev23 »

throwup238 wrote: post #19
sandworm101 wrote: post #7

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business,…

Vapers spend a lot less. As a pack-a-day smoker I was spending $7-10 a day on cigarettes. Before I quit altogether, I was spending $20-30 a month on nicotine salts, $20 a month on cartridges, and $100 once a year or two for mods and batteries. Since I was working from home I was vaping constantly, so I didn’t reduce nicotine consumption despite the cost reduction. I could buy a brand new mod every month and it’d stil…

So nicotine salts are synthetic right? Is there a reason people consume them via oral pouches, does a pill simply not work?

Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#35

Post by sandworm101 »

t-3 wrote: post #31
sandworm101 wrote: post #7

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business,…

They can spend orders of magnitude less, or about the same depending on how they do it. Mixing your own fluid is stupidly cheap - a weeks spending for a pack-a-day smoker will cover at least a year of vaping like that. If they build their own coils, it's also very cheap - nearly a life's supply of wire can be had for one or two packs. On the other hand, if you buy disposable vapes or cartridges, you can easily spend…

So it sounds like the real money is in the hardware rather than the consumable juice?

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#36

Post by throwaway924385 »

nvahalik wrote: post #23
nobleach wrote: post #5

Show them a Quentin Tarantino film? ...or any film for that matter where the main characters seem so "cool, unfazed and untouchable". To a young (mostly male) mind, that's the ultimate goal; to be in charge. For most beginning smokers, it's not about the inhalation of tobacco, but the subversive "screw the rules, those don't apply to me" façade. This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smok…

Requiem for a dream still haunts me.

As a non-smoker, I’ve never felt like I needed a cigarette more than when the credits rolled on Requiem. Certainly scared me off of harder drugs, though.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#37

Post by Workaccount2 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #7

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business,…

Cigarettes are very expensive and there is no way to really get around it, except esoteric approaches like rolling your own cigs, which doesn't even save that much anyway (especially factoring in time).

Vapes on the other hand can range from expensive to cheap as dirt. When I vaped I was spending probably $10/mo to replace a pack a day habit. I made my own flavorless juice and used a $50 tank/mod system.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#38

Post by iamthepieman »

If you want someone to stop something you have to offer them a world of opportunities to replace it. Because you don't know exactly what will slot into that gap due to lifestyle, financial, personality and social factors.

If you want someone to DO something you just need to show that it COULD fill a gap in some other part of their life. If it's addictive as well then they don't need to experiment for long before it's a solid part of their life.

Getting someone to stop plays off loss aversion and sunk cost.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#39

Post by aeonik »

It's pretty funny in a sad way to me that this article talks about how little we know about human behavior and struggling to find answers about why the kids had a backfire effect.

I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol.

I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished.

The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare.

Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently.

It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails.

Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.

Re: How to get 7th graders to smoke

#40

Post by quacked »

At the core of the problem is that social services that address the physical consequences of smoking (mostly medical professionals and financial counselors) are run by people who believe that everyone ought to be treated similarly and have similar opportunities, regardless of behavior.

Smoking is considered "a problem" to society because intelligent, caring people that notice that smoking injuries and medical conditions cause sorrow, strife, and excess medical waste. They've run huge propaganda campaigns to get us to care about this problem: literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit."

But the people who smoke usually don't care about the social sorrow & strife caused by smoking, and they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide hospitals or lung cancer screenings. They just smoke because they enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences.

So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers.

The answers that actually solve "the problem"--ban cigarette sales outright, imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers--are unthinkable to the meddlers, because they genuinely believe in their principles, especially "everyone in society should be taken care of by competent people".

(For the record: I don't smoke, and I don't think anyone should smoke.)

Post reply on HN