Yeah Japan. The argument is that the big souvenir boxes are typically left open and shared among all your coworkers (which to be fair, is usually the case in my office). It still seems excessive though.

What are people doing in the states that they actually have even more?

A base of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with additional additives for nicotine and flavour.

I bought my VG and PG from a local vendor, but those are readily available basically anywhere because they have a lot of uses outside vaping. I ordered pure liquid nicotine (in a PG suspension) online. Flavour additives also ordered online from a fairly reputable vendor that was well known in . I have no idea what policies about sharing vendors are here, but I am happy to give recommendations to anyone if they are looking to make their own juice to save money/be safer.

I mostly made fairly simple flavours, nothing too fancy. I had a friend who actually just vaped VG/PG with nicotine and no flavours at all.

I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.

Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn’t be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!

Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn’t be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.

A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.

When I was vaping I always mixed my own juice, so was very sure of what went in. There’s always the chance of buying from a sketchy vendor and getting something weird in your mixes, but most were fairly benign. Vaping liquid is actually pretty simple in composition.

As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.

The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.

The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren’t a smoker already, don’t start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it’s still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It’s one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.

If you don’t vape or smoke already, don’t start though.

My country is exceptionally bad about this.

Buy a plastic package of crackers? It will be filled with smaller packages of crackers all wrapped in plastic with a plastic freshener pack for each one. I am not exaggerating. I am not sure I have ever bought something that didn’t have at least two degrees of plastic wrap.

We did stop giving plastic bags out at cashiers unless requested, but that means shitall when everything you buy is triple-wrapped to begin with.

One can only hope that without the “cloudy” connection the thing will continue to function on a “dumb” level.

I actually like smart products, but this is a requirement for me. It needs to be a functional “dumb” product if internet connections/servers fail, I usually won’t buy anything I can’t verify that for (or will return it if I find out that is not the case when I test it). I never want to be stuck in a situation where I can’t turn my house lights on because the router went down, or the blinds become inoperable.

Smart features should always be on top of basic functionality, they shouldn’t be a requirement just to remove a couple physical buttons.

Things I use it for with almost 100% accuracy: Timers, Alarms, Lights, Pausing/Playing TV.

Things I use it for with like 70% accuracy: Weather and anything interfacing with maps. To be entirely fair to it though, I live in a non-English speaking country and use voice assistants in English usually, so city/place names REALLY throw it. If I change the voice assistant to my local language and use it, it works a lot better.

I have honestly never tried setting a reminder because my brain is still rooted in early voice control tech where something like that would never conceivably work.

Most social media.

I used to use reddit, I have moved all my presence over here. That’s about it.
I have a FB Messenger account because that is how a lot of my family keeps in touch with me, and I have this. I had a proper FB account back when I was in uni and Facebook was still only for uni students, but I think I dropped it shortly after that.

It’s not some grand principled stance, I just don’t get most of them because I am apparently an old man. Like Instagram, why do I want to share pictures with just random people? How am I networking with anybody by doing so? I honestly don’t get why it is so popular.

Kind of similar situation, I am [sole] IT for a 24/7 business so I am never fully off-duty. Getting Teams notifications routed to my watch saves me from having to look at my phone as much as I otherwise probably would be. It actually reduces my overall phone time, which is a honestly a plus.

We do have a ticketing system, but execs like to ping me directly to look at the ticket they just submitted.

The health stuff on the Apple Watch is basically just for entertainment at this point. Which isn’t to say it can’t be useful, I definitely know people who have gotten more active because of the “gamification” of things like the activity rings.

If your watch reports say, a single atrial fibrillation event in any otherwise healthy individual, it doesn’t do a whole lot for you. Even if you bring that information to your doctor, they can’t be expected to do much with it. They could strap some additional monitors on you, but if it is a very rare event there isn’t much chance of it recurring when they are actively looking at it. In some cases, the anxiety caused by worrying about it can actually cause more issues than just not knowing.

I actually like my watch a lot, but more for just a notification device/convenient payment interface rather than a health tracker.

I have only very recently come around on that. When voice commands first came out, they were absolute garbage. I am still conditioned to never expect them to work, and am always pleasantly surprised when they do.

To be fair, I largely only use them for things like setting my alarm, because I still have an engrained expectation that they won’t work otherwise.

I have always hated that advice. While exceptions exist, there is no faster way to burn yourself out on something you love than making a career out of it. I generally do like my work (IT) now, but a lot if that is because I actively try to not even look in the direction of a computer when I am not in the office. I probably consume less tech/IT industry news now than I did before I worked in the field.

I feel like if you feel like you need to cultivate a mindset for a particular activity, you are probably better off finding another activity. Unless you have extremely specific goals that really demand a particular exercise, it is better to simply be moderately active doing something you enjoy doing.

I’ve tried running/jogging, I am actually not bad at it. I freaking hate actually doing it though, I would rather be doing almost anything else. Which makes it a terrible exercise for me to do, because I will find any excuse to not do it. Same for lifting weights. I enjoy swimming but dislike public pools, in my current country nobody has private pools, even the rich.

For me I have always enjoyed martial arts, particularly sparring. I can’t necessarily find people to do that with regularly where I live now, but I can still practice forms and the like by myself. I get a not insignificant workout from regular Beat Saber sessions too, honestly.

Not sure exactly how much money that constitutes, but assuming I somehow inherited a reasonably large sum of money, do mostly the same thing I am doing now.

Pay immediate cost of living expenses for myself and my partner. I don’t have any expensive hobbies that I would need much more. I don’t make a ton of money right now, yet it’s still more than I can reasonably spend. After rent and food, like half my paycheque goes into the bank already. I am lucky to live in a country where I don’t have to worry about an unexpected medical condition costing me millions.

The remaining would go towards charities/local political groups I am involved in. While not without precedence, it would be a strange look to be a stupidly wealthy socialist, and again the money would have no real use to me and would be better served elsewhere.

I don’t normally enjoy many walking sims, but something about the pacing and delivery of Firewatch nailed it for me. Didn’t overstay its welcome and kept me interested enough in the story that I think I did the whole game in one or two sittings.

I love Cities Skylines, but I absolutely suck with traffic management. I know it’s supposed to be the game’s big challenge, but it’s the one thing I really don’t enjoy. Anytime I have tried to plan a city from the beginning with traffic in mind, I find myself not having nearly as much fun as when I just built stuff haphazardly.

I kind of just want a mod that abstracts out traffic (I know about TPM, but that isn’t exactly what I want).

Subnautica simultaneously my favourite “I like build base” game and horror game.

I really like the open-ended gameplay loop with a structured narrative. Had way more story than I expected going into it.

Terraria is one I should probably like, given that the other games there are among my favourite games ever. Just never could get more than an hour into it without just getting kind of lost. I get a house for me and the guide guy and then…am not sure what to do exactly.

Is it more action-adventure than I think? I just kind of want to build a town I think.

It is demanding but the devs seem very dedicated to optimization. I have never read a dev blog post entirely about CPU optimization that sounded so excited about it. For an early access game, it really is super polished.

I haven’t tried scaling to super late game production levels, but you can easily finish the non-repeatable techs before noticing any performance hitches.