The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
It was one of those rush laws. They are still for sale, I walk past a "BULK OUTLET FOR ELF-BAR" shop sign when I walk to work.
It's one of those UK laws of "we are doing something!" but not actually do anything. These companies either pay backhand or know how to skirt around the rule. Who's enforcing it?
Hardly, they banned fully disposable. You can still by them but now you can swap in a refill cartridge. The price of this refillable one is the same as the original.
Many places apparently don't even sell the refills so it's practically the same.
Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.
YMMV, but it's been the case in France. They were behind the ban on disposable non rechargeable vapes, because kids bought them as a candy. They'd prefer they buy actual cigarettes.
Well, since pretty much everything that consumes power today has an MCU in it, simple MCUs are extremely cheap. Volumes are immense. They are also space efficient and it is easy to manufacture PCBAs with them. They also occupy that sweet spot where the need for low power consumption means that you use gate sizes that are fairly largeish -- manufacturing processes and technology that is much, much cheaper than what is used for CPUs for instance.
Same thing with batteries. Ridiculous volume -> low prices. (Laptops and cell phones is why we have usable electric cars. If the EV industry had to drive up the volume all on its own it would have taken much longer to develop that industry)
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
Your point is quite valid, but example is wrong. Those vapes can have a lot of puff in them, they need to be really heavy smoker to smoke out in 1 session.
But reuseable vape has more stuff to manage and hide, and they are more expensive in short run.
I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.
Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.
Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.
I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.
The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).
Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves.
You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done.
But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need a lot of space for your new secret lab. For 99.999% of people, it's super not worth it to make at home.
Your home grow prices are high (even setting aside that you can just buy flower instead of the disposable vape). The right range is hundreds of dollars. And I'm sure making good oil costs somewhat more, but you can make crappy dab sludge (wax?) with some scissors, $10 of isopropyl alcohol, and a baking dish ("QWISO"), and that sludge can be loaded in some kinds of reusable vape.
Im talking about making full melt distillate. Crappy dab sludge can't go in a cart. It requires actual distillation to make what they put in the carts. QWISO is a joke.
I promise you, if it was easy, you would see more people making carts. I tried C02, water wash, sifting, heat press, everything you can think of. Its nowhere near the same. And that's just for the bare minimum distillate. We're not even talking about live resin or anything fancy.
You basically need a small factory to get close to the quality of the carts.
And my home grow prices are low. You cant just grow 2 or 4 plants if you want even a small steady supply of full melt wax. Like, 20 plants minimum is more close. And they have to be good. Living soil, aeroponic, whatever you want.
And that's if you can get actually good yield. I've seen people get such bad yield that they turn 1 pound of flower into less than 3 grams of wax. That's why you need an expert. Even putting together a successful distillation operation is no joke. Besides chemistry knowledge, you need lots of "industrial equipment" knowledge. We're not talking about using a heat press or a curling iron to make "dabs". We're talking about making the real shit.
To be honest 10k is in the range of the cheapest alibaba eqipment. Most commercial outfits, even smaller ones, use much more expensive equipment.
This is why people prefer to just buy it from the store for $20.
If the cars weren't considerably safer drivers than humans they wouldn't be allowed on the road. There isn't as much regulation blocking deploying this healthcare solution... until those errors actually start costing hospitals money from malpractice lawsuits (or not), we don't know whether it will be allowed to remain in use.
There's no lobbying necessary, because FICO isn't a government agency, its a private company. Why we have a private company determining such an important thing with minimal government oversight is certainly a question we could be asking.
That being said, there's an innocent explanation for this specifically. BYPL is pretty new as a common type of debt (became popular in the last five years). They're putting it into FICO 10. The last time they updated FICO was FICO 9 which was released in 2014, before that there was FICO 8 in 2008... a lot of banks are still using FICO 8 or even earlier models. Banks are slow to change, and FICO moves slowly because banks don't want their models upended every year. Fwiw if the government was more involved in this I doubt it would be taken into account any faster.
I tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.
LA Drivers aren't that bad, driving just is awful there because the amount of traffic. NYC Driving is an absolute pleasure compared to Miami driving. I have what should be an easy ten minute commute and every day I am avoiding an accident due to a driver doing something crazy you would almost never see in another US city.
This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.
Flooding is absolutely an issue, during the rainy season (third of the year) localized flooding is quite common. Some streets are partially flooded on an almost daily basis, something human drivers are used to but I imagine will pose a new challenge to waymo.
What this is really saying is that hardware is a necessary precondition for, but not determinative of, intelligence. If you have a human brain worth of neurons firing randomly you don't get consciousness. The structure and instruction set is crucial. And we are perhaps 20 years away from figuring out how to structure the compute power we have to get the consciousness of a human adult.
