[HN Gopher] There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable ...
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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
Author : abnercoimbre
Score : 711 points
Date : 2026-01-12 17:50 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| We really need to ban these things.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point
| though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so
| if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They
| don't seem to be on display anymore though.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them
| chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started
| raiding the stores in the last few months.
| denkmoon wrote:
| The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes
| are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to
| discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
|
| Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I
| need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
| sitharus wrote:
| Wow that is stupid. NZ banned disposable or non-
| rechargeable vapes only, refillable/pod-swappable and
| rechargeable ones are still on sale.
| robertjpayne wrote:
| They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get
| one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.
|
| Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll
| reduce the number of users and make it more cost
| prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.
| jareds wrote:
| Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian,
| but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not
| alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong
| opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with
| negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather
| hear people's opinions then ask AI.
| eli wrote:
| No, banning disposable vapes
| jareds wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification, I can see banning disposable
| vapes but still allowing reusable ones.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers,
| we should ban those too.
|
| I don't think the post you're responding to is saying that
| vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
| tomcam wrote:
| > If alcohol came inside of little battery powered
| computers, we should ban those too.
|
| I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW
| let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol
| prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| We're not talking about alcohol or tobacco prohibition.
| We're talking about single use e-waste prohibition.
| tomcam wrote:
| You may wish to reread the comment. I started the phrase
| with "BTW", implying I knew it was slightly outside of
| context.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| I think broadly prohibition didn't work but smoking bans do.
| Where "work" means fewer people smoke and passive smoke.
| parineum wrote:
| Prohibition works to stop some people.
|
| It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb
| the appeal of the product. People who think
| tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they
| don't have any positive effect associated with them.
|
| People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies
| tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it
| feels good to do it.
|
| A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other
| recreational drug prohibition.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies
| tricked them and now they are addicted.
|
| Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette
| advertising is banned in many countries, and why
| marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly
| restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines
| around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
| parineum wrote:
| People have been smoking for thousands of years.
| prmoustache wrote:
| People have been stealing and killing other people as
| many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do
| a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results
| against that.
|
| I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape
| is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of
| public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to
| curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a
| little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors
| cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban
| to non smokers by spreading their poison around them.
| They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their
| hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius
| around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively
| prohibited.
| laken wrote:
| Outdoor cafes/restaurant terraces that allow smoking
| effectively are marketing to smokers. Smokers generally
| stay longer (therefore may order more), and basically are
| giving themselves dopamine at this venue, therefore
| creating associations to possibly draw them back in the
| future. These places could just not provide ashtrays and
| could just not allow smoking, but they do allow it,
| because it's good for business.
|
| If you really don't like it, you could just not visit
| these establishments. To these businesses, the benefit of
| allowing smoking doesn't outweigh the negatives (some
| people not liking it). Obviously you don't not like it
| enough to just not go there. Not a smoker, but i've never
| understood this puritanical attitude towards smoking and
| only smoking. Yeah, it's not great to breathe in an
| enclosed space, but in an outdoor space, I don't see how
| much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality, etc.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > If you really don't like it, you could just not visit
| these establishments.
|
| Well I go inside, because there are no establishment in
| my area that ban smoking in their terrace.
|
| > it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in
| an outdoor space,
|
| It is exactly the same unless there is significant wind
| is in a direction that push the fumes away. Obviously it
| depends on how tightly the tables are put as well but it
| is just super annoying. I have a friend whose eyes turn
| red immediately when exposed to tobacco product fumes and
| he suffers way more than I do.
|
| Also it ruins the taste of food and drinks.
|
| > I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air
| quality
|
| Usually those that are close to traffic and car exhaust
| are less popular than those that are less directly Unless
| you live in a complete smog, cigarettes/vapes fumes that
| goes directly to your face are always more annoying.
|
| You would have compared to sweaty and smelly bodies in a
| dance club you would have got a point.
| parineum wrote:
| > People have been stealing and killing other people as
| many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do
| a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results
| against that.
|
| This thread is/was about prohibition of smoking. I was
| making the point that tobacco/nicotine is a drug that has
| positive psychoactive effects, that's why people use it.
|
| People seem to have this misconception that smoking is
| just some thing tobacco companies tricked people into
| doing and so prohibition would work. It wouldn't. We can
| already see in places where the prices of cigarettes
| create a nearly de-facto ban that it creates black
| markets and we know that black markets create crime.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Hence legalizing where you can smoke vs prohibition of
| the sale. There will always be some private place hosting
| semi-public parties where people can smoke but if you
| enforce non smoking in public areas that forces everyone
| to reduce a bit their consumption, makes it more an
| antisocial thing and allow those that don't like being
| exposed to it.
|
| I was suprised to see recently that ban on smoking is
| still not enforced in some bars/club playing music in
| Germany. It was like a blast from the past to me after
| living in countries that implemented that strict ban much
| more seriously for years.
| tayo42 wrote:
| If that's how you you define work, prohibition worked.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Alcohol prohibition did actually work.
|
| It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased
| health. It increased safety for women and children and
| reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It
| reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed
| less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol
| positively affects non-drinkers too.
|
| It was the organised crime side effects and societal
| unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol
| prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I
| wouldn't want to live there.
|
| Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that
| continue to raise their head from time to time here and
| there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
|
| Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
| Quinner wrote:
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Good intentions and lack of foresight often combine poorly.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The fault lies with vape manufacturers. It's big tobacco.
| They are soulless ghouls.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That hasn't been true here in New Zealand. Although the
| nuance around what counts as a vape may be where this is
| happening.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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.
| spankalee wrote:
| > FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include
| disposables
|
| Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
| jhanschoo wrote:
| If true I wonder if that has to do with this incident https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...
| loeg wrote:
| It isn't. That was illegal marijuana vapes.
|
| 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).
| mjevans wrote:
| I'm kind of in favor of non-persecution OTC at a pharmacy
| nicotine patches.
|
| I hate anything added to the air. Even perfumes irritate
| and make me sneeze in high quantity.
| cons0le wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| 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.
| cons0le wrote:
| 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.
| cons0le wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| Putting vitamin E acetate into vape liquid appears to be
| extremely hazardous.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lu
| ng_...
| mikodin wrote:
| 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.
| tthoou34233423 wrote:
| I seriously wonder how it's even feasible for these things to
| be profitable.
| bborud wrote:
| 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)
| loeg wrote:
| The other reason is regulatory arbitrage -- the disposal
| vapes are often illegal products that circumvent laws in
| general.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The other reason is kids.
|
| 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.
| flexagoon wrote:
| > They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
|
| That would require a crazy high amount of smoking. AFAIK,
| disposable vapes usually last about a week.
| wielebny wrote:
| Or 7 undergrads and one day.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/f72f17e4-a83d-4494-b1e7-a349cc7ae.
| ..
| dbbk wrote:
| UK also banned them
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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?
| walthamstow wrote:
| We're doing about as well at policing the vape ban as we
| are the ban on cocaine (which, in case you hadn't
| noticed, is everywhere)
| jackdh wrote:
| 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.
| nikcub wrote:
| Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now.
| Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and
| restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just
| swap out the pod).
|
| Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are
| there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving
| black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really
| nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and
| slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
| anonym29 wrote:
| There aren't really alcohol or cannabis junkies like heroin
| either. That didn't make prohibition or the war on drugs
| successful.
| cons0le wrote:
| There definitely are "alcohol junkies"; we just call them
| alcoholics
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| There were two countries in the 20th century which tried to
| ban alcohol. Both had a.. very lasting consequences.
|
| You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You _would_
| get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.
| lostlogin wrote:
| New Zealand was making really good progress on getting
| down the smoking rate with a variety of measures
| (primarily ramping the tax).
|
| The current government has started rolling back decades
| of progress, and SURPRISE, they have close ties to the
| tobacco industry including MPs who worked for tobacco
| companies.
| exidy wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker
|
| As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a
| similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of
| existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered
| the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding
| citizens towards illegal tobacco.
|
| There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared
| to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not,
| and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than
| traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ,
| Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban
| vape usage when the alternative is far worse.
|
| "The more you tighten your grip .. " etc.
| lostlogin wrote:
| NZ isn't trying to ban it, not at all. Winston Peters
| loves tobacco. This government loves the tobacco
| industry, to the extent that it has them helping with
| legislation (industry documents mysteriously getting used
| to write policy). Casey Costello is a corrupt joke.
|
| Having just spent a bit of time travelling, I think vapes
| are worse to be near than cigarettes or cigars.
|
| Walking down busy street in the UK is just so gross. The
| sickly sweet strawberry, cinnamon etc. I'd prefer tobacco
| smoke.
|
| And at least there was some etiquette around tobacco
| smoking. You don't often encounter it inside, in planes,
| trains, theatres, malls etc. all those were going on this
| month.
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/573271/casey-
| costello-b...
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/579431/absolutely-
| ludicr...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Everyone I know who vapes nicotine is a junkie about it.
|
| In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin.
| I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine
| many times and cannot stay off of it.
|
| Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is
| insane.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| It's the habit, not the high.
|
| Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less
| taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the
| brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more
| pernicious.
| userbinator wrote:
| No, just let the scavengers continue collecting and reusing
| them.
| tomcam wrote:
| I hate smoking, never smoked. Should the vapes be banned
| because of e-waste, or high school kids getting strung out, or
| what? It's not a world I know.
| odiroot wrote:
| Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it
| seems to be actually enforced. They have completely different
| grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this
| space.
| halapro wrote:
| Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how
| enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can
| extract thousand-dollar bribes.
| allarm wrote:
| Pipe and roll-your-own tobacco are also banned in Singapore,
| but regular cigarettes are sold just fine. There may be a
| different reason for the bans.
| tcper wrote:
| Vapes illegal, but weed legal, that's great
| swyx wrote:
| as a first step, let's tax these things. this is such an
| immense waste of electronics.
| smashed wrote:
| Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an
| electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine
| to throw away.
|
| These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of
| soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the
| 'empties' back.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product
| manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be
| required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of
| it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking
| about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage
| containers, the lot.
| rvba wrote:
| Because it has to start somewhere.
|
| Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Trash piles is one way the actual cost of things is
| obfuscated and punted to future generations.
|
| A lot of people wouldn't want this because it's asking for
| stuff to become more expensive for them.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-
| front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.
|
| That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back,
| and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds.
| Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured
| against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is
| subject to opinion and bias.
| teiferer wrote:
| You don't need to get it perfect though. The right
| incentives get you most of the way. Perfect is the enemy
| of good.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at
| end of life.
|
| Any items found by garbage program will be collected and
| returned to manufacturer at cost.
|
| All items sold in country must be identifiable for this
| purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must
| retrofit products.
|
| Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden
| to society.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| The amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we
| would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They
| don't have anywhere to put that trash either.
| teiferer wrote:
| So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is
| currently just externalized) then they might start
| disappearing by not being produced in the first place by
| lack of demand.
|
| People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it
| because it's cheap.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it
| because it's cheap.
|
| This is an interesting thread to pull on. Why is it so
| inexpensive for the east to make plastic garbage and sell
| it to the world?
| pyrolistical wrote:
| 1. Plastic is cheap
|
| 2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of
| the eventual disposal. So the cost isn't seen by the
| consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen
| in increased taxes for garbage disposal
| lend000 wrote:
| I don't hate the idea.
|
| But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to
| 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost
| more to get them back for multiple reasons, including
| products not being as neatly packaged and often going from
| many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also
| need to double their specializations and adopt recycling
| processes that will largely be redundant with other
| companies; you basically make it impossible for small
| companies to make complicated products. And are we
| including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a
| lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit
| from economies of scale.
|
| Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of
| course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and
| environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it
| will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills
| for different types of enriched materials, and government
| subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of
| greater public interest to recycle.
|
| I've been working on the software side of the technology
| needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years,
| waiting for some hardware advancements.
| tomcam wrote:
| > You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all
| products... Companies also need to double their
| specializations and adopt recycling processes that will
| largely be redundant with other companies
|
| I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that
| stuff
| __d wrote:
| Agreed. Companies could "outsource" their recycling
| obligations to local (national, regional, whatever)
| providers.
| CableNinja wrote:
| That was tried, and what ultimately occured was
| disgusting.
|
| The world was full of new computers popping up and every
| middle class or above person buying new ones like they do
| with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs,
| and many immediately went the route of corruption. They
| would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with
| 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them
| to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd
| world countries, with people standing over a burning pile
| of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at
| one point, even images of children doing this work. The
| usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing,
| leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to
| buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.
|
| We are talking about less critical things now, like vape
| pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become
| an actually bad idea to let other companies do the
| recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even
| the city/state, via public intake locations (like was
| mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
| teiferer wrote:
| Why past tense? That's describing exacty the world we are
| living in right now.
| CableNinja wrote:
| As far as i know a large portion of what i described
| shutdown after it came to light, although i would not be
| the least bit surprised if it was still happening in some
| capacity, or even in full under the disguise of something
| else
| adrianN wrote:
| Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all
| refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that
| the city should do so that we don't have a dozen trucks
| collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Consider that there are some things society can and
| should do that are independent of the profit motive, hm?
| lostlogin wrote:
| The full cost of product has externalised the waste bit,
| and made it the customer and societies problem.
| teiferer wrote:
| > You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products
|
| As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A
| change in conditions causes a change in behavior.
| Increased costs will cause a change in how products are
| designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes
| through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use.
| Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and
| multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.
|
| It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans
| in an otherwise static world.
| geysersam wrote:
| Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but
| ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans,
| destroying the basis of our future food production, etc,
| be tractable?
| kube-system wrote:
| > Go further. Every product must be returned to
| manufacturer at end of life.
|
| Well that Charmin bear will certainly have his work cut out
| for him
| nottorp wrote:
| You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to
| quality of life appliances like washing machines as well,
| right?
|
| Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can
| afford washing machines?
|
| Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while
| I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics
| in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
| ajb wrote:
| The EU and UK already require sellers to recycle
| electronics, and we can still afford washing machines.
| Here is Amazon's page:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?no
| deI...
| nottorp wrote:
| Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I
| get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them
| pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers
| too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer
| doesn't.
|
| Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that
| doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll
| eventually get around to picking up the old appliance
| from your home.
|
| However, this is not done by the manufacturer or
| importer, as the OP suggested. There are separate
| organizations and it's paid for via a tax on new device
| purchases.
|
| Which means a new washing machine manufacturer doesn't
| need to worry about having their own recycling
| infrastructure. And I move that the recycling tax I pay
| for national level recycling adds less to the price than
| $NEW_COMPANY building their own, just for their models.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > for some reason my washers break but the freezer
| doesn't.
|
| The properties of your running water and the presence of
| very much moving parts in the former?
| nottorp wrote:
| Noo it can't be that! I definitely don't have to
| rebalance the washer regularly to stop it from dancing
| around my bathroom!
|
| It's one of them new solid state washers designed by
| "AI". Very advanced technology!
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Thinking for a moment what "recycling" a washing machine
| would look like and it's very obvious it would just mean
| paying a 3rd party to dump it in the 3rd world somewhere
| to be stripped if at all. Hard to imagine it's not
| causing more environmental damage by having this policy.
| ajb wrote:
| A washing machine has a decent amount of metal in it,
| that's definitely going to be recycled, as it has value.
| A policy like this _could_ cause environmental damage,
| but saying that it 's inevitable is just defeatist. In
| fact the manufacturer is the one with the knowledge to
| recycle stuff properly as they know what went into it.
| This is actually a way to work _with_ the market. Any
| other option, other than just giving up, involves _more_
| government intervention.
| jaggederest wrote:
| There's also Stewart Brand style cradle-to-cradle design,
| where you build in features that allow recycling to be
| easy, that's really my goal when I say manufacturers
| should be responsible - change the design
| vel0city wrote:
| The scrap metal yard near me definitely pays to take
| washing machines and dryers. There's a lot of steel
| scrap, some circuit boards, and a motor in there.
| hippo22 wrote:
| Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer
| took it back it would still be... trash.
| throwmeoutplzdo wrote:
| It should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are
| the environmental effects not a factor for you?
| loeg wrote:
| Regular trash is already stored safely.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The great pacific garbage patch disagrees.
| loeg wrote:
| As mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have
| nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're
| mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from
| mismanagement by a handful of poor countries.
|
| I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply
| unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage
| patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your
| arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in
| response to discussion about landfills.
| schrodinger wrote:
| It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you
| doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the
| trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a
| lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a
| beach.
| loeg wrote:
| Trash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is
| enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every
| item through a laborious return program doesn't improve
| anything.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.
|
| The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.
| The plastic is ending up in everything. We need to do
| better.
|
| Make less waste. Use less plastic.
| loeg wrote:
| > Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.
|
| And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass /
| volume.
|
| > The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.
|
| Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of
| (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western
| consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The
| "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the
| scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic
| density region of ocean.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Go on, give us some numbers.
|
| Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't
| seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.
| hippo22 wrote:
| The main thing about plastic is that it's made from oil,
| and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back
| into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution
| involved in manufacturing.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Right, but there's ground and there's ground.
|
| Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above
| aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.
|
| Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be
| fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy
| level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a
| few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable
| from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice
| to begin with).
| hippo22 wrote:
| I don't think disposing of stuff deep in mines would be a
| good idea as it would be easy to contaminate the ground
| water. Modern landfills are generally well engineered and
| don't contaminate the surroundings too badly.
| dTal wrote:
| It doesn't go "back in the ground" though, does it? It
| gets scattered all over the ecology. When you take
| something that was buried deep and scatter it all over
| the surface - _especially_ when that something is oil -
| that 's usually considered an ecological disaster.
| Deepwater Horizon, the worst oil spill in history, has
| had catastrophic effects on the local wildlife, and it is
| still dwarfed in scale by the amount of plastic annually
| strewn to the four corners of the Earth.
| dmurray wrote:
| 7 billion kg at the density of water would fit in a cube
| 200 m on each side.
|
| All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into
| one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such
| mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.
|
| It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to
| move it around the world, but a small amount compared to
| the total amount of _stuff_ we take out of the earth.
| morsch wrote:
| We've produced 6-8 billion _tons_ of plastic /plastic
| waste and its bulk density is much lower than water
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-
| productio...
| lostlogin wrote:
| > And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass
| / volume.
|
| Are you sure? It's getting into food. We are eating it
| and drinking it, and it's getting more prevalent.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not getting there from competent landfills, and
| there are many many competent landfills. An elaborate
| return program wouldn't do better.
| small_scombrus wrote:
| > Even if the retailer took it back it would still be...
| trash.
|
| Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive
| incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make,
| or to make it recyclable/processable.
| hammock wrote:
| > more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say,
| lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the
| product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
|
| Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and
| bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in
| plastic bags.
|
| But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a
| PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying
| a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a
| "litterbug" and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the
| manufacturers.
| tomcam wrote:
| It was amazing being a kid back then because you could earn
| some decent coin returning bottles
| foolfoolz wrote:
| there are still people today who roam neighborhoods
| collecting bottles and cans
| tombert wrote:
| My neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I
| take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic
| back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that
| the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is
| always a homeless person that will walk around and pick
| up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them
| somewhere.
|
| I don't have an issue with it, if they want to do what I
| am too lazy to do, more power to them.
| teiferer wrote:
| Nowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage
| earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in
| cities all over north america and europe if you pay
| attention.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can
| get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none
| to be had in Portugal.
|
| In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having
| other source of income, that there is a culture where and
| how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier
| to collect.
| systemtest wrote:
| I kinda prefer cultures where benefits and pensions are
| enough so that people don't have to dig into trashcans
| for Pfand.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is getting hard across many countries.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Listen, we can hold Big Plastic accountable and _also_ not
| throw trash out of our cars, I think.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What's something we have managed to do this with?
|
| Maybe the process could be emulated.
| pixl97 wrote:
| To play devils advocate I'm old enough to remember when
| glass bottles and cans were what was around and there are a
| number of problems there that manufactures would fight...
|
| Glass is heavy as shit. For as much plastic waste as we
| create, we've saved a ton in fuel costs that would be in
| the atmosphere otherwise.
|
| Glass likes to break and become a dangerous object/weapon.
| How much less glass litter is around is amazing. Always fun
| when you went to the lake, then the hospital because some
| dipshit broke their coke. It still can happen with liquor,
| but it's massively reduced the problem.
|
| Also, glass likes to break and cause product inventory
| shrinkage, which the manufactures and retailers hate.
|
| Same with bulk goods. Never underestimate how fucking dumb
| your fellow citizens are in their ability to screw up and
| ruin bulk product displays.
|
| Also, when something in bulk is polluted/one piece goes
| bad, typically the entire container is a loss.
|
| What we have to force manufactures to do is use plastics
| that are recyclable and put deposits on them. And then
| force recycling on the items they collect. This would
| massively reduce waste by incentivizing the public to
| gather any they see.
| throw101010 wrote:
| Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called
| the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any
| electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and
| used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it
| will generate.
|
| The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell
| electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the
| exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell
| similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without
| paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop
| owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return
| something.
|
| [1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-
| Vorgezo...
| Domenic_S wrote:
| We have it in California, just for monitors for some
| reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded
| devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax
| vapes (???)
|
| https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/covered-electronic-
| waste...
| array_key_first wrote:
| Big tobacco strikes again!
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Probably originated for disposal of CRTs, due to all that
| leaded glass.
| consp wrote:
| Same here in the Netherlands. But only for larger
| appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you
| have to be able to send for free but there are too many
| exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems
| and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we
| don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it
| to their free postage address they use for broken items
| with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Every trash collection site (afvalpunt) has a container
| for electronics too, that's where the smaller stuff
| should go.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is
| collected and used for the recycling and collection of the
| future waste it will generate.
|
| I call bullshit on these initiatives. It is a tax, period.
| The government collects money and it does... stuff. It is
| not a deposit, so it doesn't incentivize people to return
| the thing, and it is too general to de-incentivize
| particularly bad products like disposable vapes.
|
| The tax can be used on recycling efforts, and it probably
| is, however you don't need a specific tax for that. These
| investments can come from other sources of government
| income: VAT, income tax, tariffs, etc... I don't think
| people are paying a "presidential private jet tax" and yet,
| the president has his jet, and hopefully, all government
| effort for the environment is not just financed by a small,
| specific tax. Saying a tax is for this or that is little
| more than a PR move, they could do the same by increasing
| VAT, and I believe it would work better, but that's
| unpopular.
|
| > The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell
| electronic devices
|
| That is more concrete.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm reading 'The World Without Us' by Alan's Weisman. Last
| thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!).
|
| Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a
| small amount we have burnt.
|
| That's concerning.
| bloppe wrote:
| All petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of
| the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and
| durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too
| tough and durable for any other living things to decompose
| it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the
| resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all
| sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up
| buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the
| means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned
| into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into
| plastic.
|
| Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern
| microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up
| too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually
| evolve the means to digest it and make use of this
| abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already
| have [1], but it's still early days.
|
| I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first
| ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably
| adapt to.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_degradation_by_m
| arine_...
| defrost wrote:
| You are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual
| explanations of the formation of oil:
|
| * https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
|
| these _other_ sources all assert that
| The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition
| of buried dead organisms, particularly planktons and
| algae.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| I think they are conflating Carboniferous Period / white
| rot slowing _coal_ formation with Oil formation.
| bloppe wrote:
| Ah, yep. Did conflate coal with oil. I guess my nice
| analogy doesn't quite hold, but the point stands that
| plastic originally came from organic matter and is
| technically biodegradable.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > It stands to reason that microbes will eventually
| evolve the means to digest it and make use of this
| abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already
| have [1], but it's still early days.
|
| That's a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.
|
| I don't have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are
| coming.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The ecosystem will be fine, the question is whether we
| are going to be part of it.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Mechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the
| same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming
| language is hard.
|
| I'm not kidding :)
| jaggederest wrote:
| It's funny because I'm working on a type theory first toy
| language as we speak... so you're not wrong, but I'm also
| foolish enough to be ambitious.
| teiferer wrote:
| "Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why
| do small if you can go big right away? Because going big
| right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how
| much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents
| people from doing it in the first place because the threshold
| is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step
| first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a
| next phase where you do more.
|
| Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind
| power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not
| immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic
| is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because
| the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to
| take one step at a time.
|
| That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There
| is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better
| scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first
| step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. _Then_ maybe
| do some tiktok, but the little first step won 't be too much.
| Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and
| actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more
| steps of the ultimately big task.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
|
| Yeah, because they _suck_. Uh, pun not intended. Paper
| straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They
| are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace,
| so people resist them as much as they can.
|
| If you want to actually make a difference with an
| environmental effort, you need to make something
| _superior_. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up
| front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent.
| People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out.
| The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of
| paper straws.
| jquery wrote:
| I'm convinced paper straws are a psy-op by the plastics
| industry to make us hate environmentalists.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Or 4D chess by the environmentalists so we go without
| straws entirely
|
| Classic replacement of something good with something
| terrible so customers opt out
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| No it's to punish us when it isn't us causing the alleged
| plastic problem. When the orders went out all the western
| media took holidays to the far east to film garbage
| filled rivers in india, the philippines, indonesia. Your
| disposable plastic straw wasn't ending up there. Your
| plastic bottle might have been but that's only because of
| the recycling scam. It should have been burned like the
| oil it is.
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at
| it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make
| straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
|
| Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to
| water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are
| almost 100% recyclable
|
| Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced
| with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
| injidup wrote:
| Soggy is not a problem.Recycling paper involves wetting
| it to loose the fibres and then reforming it. It's how
| paper is made.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| But usually paper and cardboard that has been in contact
| with food is not recyclable because it contaminates the
| batch. That's why pizza boxes also cannot go into the
| cardboard/paper fraction.
| vanviegen wrote:
| No, that's because pizza boxes are contaminated with fat.
| That messes up the paper recycling process. Water is
| fine.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| Man, if that's the problem then I can only assume any
| fast food box is not recyclable too?
| teiferer wrote:
| The point of paper fast food boxes is not to recycle them
| but to have no trash in the end as they just burn or rot,
| all in a sustainable way. In contrast to plastic.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > Soggy is not a problem.
|
| It is when you're trying to suck a thick milkshake
| through one, though...
| vanviegen wrote:
| > Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make
| straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
|
| Uhh.. yes? Trees can be grown, just like any agriculture
| product.
|
| > Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
|
| In theory. However that rarely works out in practice, due
| to the complications of mixing various types of plastic
| in a single stream of garbage.
|
| > Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced
| with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
|
| The glue for paper straws will be a biodegradable water-
| based adhesive. It may be finished with natural wax. And
| that's it. I think you are intentionally spreading FUD
| saying glue and chemicals.
|
| That being said, I hate paper straws. I like bamboo
| straws though.
| bluGill wrote:
| Natural and biodegradable doesn't mean safe of human
| ingestion.
| vanviegen wrote:
| And made from petroleum with many interesting additives
| _does_ mean safe for human ingestion I suppose?
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe. Safe of ingestion means we have to know what
| happens in the body. Some plastics just pass right
| through and are safe; some biodegradable things are good
| food for the body. Some biodegradable things degrade to
| something harmful, and some plastics do get absored into
| the body and are harmful.
| minitech wrote:
| > Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make
| straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
|
| It's more okay to make things out of paper than plastic,
| yes. Plastic waste and microplastics are a huge problem.
| Trees are a renewable resource.
|
| > Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to
| water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are
| almost 100% recyclable
|
| Plastic straws are almost never (literally never?)
| recycled. Paper straws are supposed to be fully
| biodegradable.
|
| > Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced
| with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
|
| But yes, this and the usability issue make the other
| points moot (n.b. leaching harmful chemicals is a concern
| that also applies to plastic straws and paper cups). The
| vast majority of existing straws should be replaced with
| no straw, and most beyond that with reusable straws.
| teiferer wrote:
| > Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
|
| Nope, that's a myth. Plastic is essentially unrecyclable.
| Some types of plastic can be made into "lower" quality
| types with lots of effort, but there is no circular
| reuse. The oil and plastic industries want to make you
| believe that this is all a solved problem, but it very
| much is not.
|
| In contrast, paper and wood products just rot away at the
| end of their life, and a new tree grows in their place.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled
| plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have
| the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be
| useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items
| do not require pristine materials anyway.
|
| It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much
| better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a
| tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than
| burning it, by the way.
|
| https://plasticsrecycling.org/how-recycling-works/the-
| plasti...
| volemo wrote:
| I'd argue it's kinda a myth, because I used to believe we
| could create a perfectly closed loop (you know, like the
| one the recycling symbol suggests) if only we could
| cleanly separate the materials (which in my imagination
| requires consumers to vigilantly separate the waste into
| dozens of different bins). I'm beginning to think I was
| wrong.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| If 1kg of "recycled" plastics allow to reduce the
| production of 1kg of pristine plastics, it's already a
| big win, even if it's downcycling. No need to throw away
| the baby with the bathwater.
| merelythere wrote:
| It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling.
| After the last six months exploring the recycling process
| what I get is this:
|
| Reduce, reuse, recycle.
|
| The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the
| last step when something has to be trashed away. In the
| case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and
| reuse much better than the two others solutions.
|
| A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling
| while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about
| how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult
| to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very
| appealing for sellers either.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The vast majority of paper products made from farmed
| trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use
| really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release
| from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the
| next tree planted to replace it.
|
| Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels
| that aren't being actively produced via recaptured
| atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.
|
| And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that
| the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free
| as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want
| octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also
| going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which
| is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization
| away from polyethylene.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Isn't this a bit like "paper" cups for coffee / water? We
| switched to these at work a few years ago, and it's an
| all-round horrible experience.
|
| I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that
| don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do.
| So you end up going through like 10 of those a day. I
| also don't know how "eco-friendly" they actually are,
| since there's a picture of a dead turtle on them under a
| text to the effect of "don't throw out in nature".
|
| I guess on the plus-side, our company at least provides
| ceramic cups to their internal employees. But since it's
| the employees' responsibility to clean them, not
| everybody is off the disposable cup train.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I swear every other one leaks right away, and those
| that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they
| do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day
|
| Yeah, if you're using that many, the solution is, and
| always has been, to get a proper reusable cup (ceramic,
| glass, whatever).
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Right, but this just shows why these policies don't work
| in practice. People will just use 10 paper cups which are
| free, rather than cart around a big ceramic one.
|
| Especially in situations where people don't even have an
| assigned spot in the office anymore, it's not exactly
| shocking that many will choose the easier route.
| bluGill wrote:
| My company told everyone to bring their own mug, which
| they were expected to wash from time to time. Then they
| give mugs for "thanks for working here" awards once in a
| while so they can be sure everyone has one. Soap and a
| sink are provided near the coffee makers.
|
| Paper cups are still provided, but it is intended
| visitors not people who work in the building.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| But do people actually use them? That's the theory where
| I work, too, but most people just use paper cups.
| repeekad wrote:
| Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we're actively
| composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about
| our waste without actually giving anything up
|
| https://fortune.com/well/2023/08/24/paper-straws-harmful-
| for...
| qmr wrote:
| Thanks just the dystopian news I needed today.
|
| What a stupid joke.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front
| cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent
|
| There was huge resistance to wiping out the inefficient
| bulbs in the UK. Many many people stockpiled them.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| At switching time, the affordable option was compact
| fluorescents. Which did suck.
| simgt wrote:
| Good that they suck, people might realize that they may
| as well refuse the straw, drink from the glass and that
| their life is exactly as comfortable as before the ban.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| > Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front
| cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent.
|
| There's burgeoning movement called "PWM sensitive"[1]
| that's opposed to (cheap) LED lights.
|
| [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/
| Liftyee wrote:
| The frequencies that they claim affect them are
| disputable but the flickering in some cheap LED lights is
| real. Badly/cheaply designed electronics can have flicker
| as bad as 50 Hz if they use half bridge diode
| rectification only (e.g. that time I was passing through
| Geneva airport and the Christmas lights flickered in my
| peripheral vision)
| evandrofisico wrote:
| yep, i had one led stripe with a controller with a
| flickering that was kinda invisible to the eye, but very
| noticeable on camera.
| triceratops wrote:
| I don't understand the moaning and bellyaching about
| straws. Are people that bad at drinking from cups? If you
| aren't a toddler or bed-ridden patient in a hospital
| (EDIT: or anyone else with physical conditions that
| necessitate a straw) you should be able to drink without
| a straw.
| zweih wrote:
| Mouth cancer. I can live a normal life EXCEPT I can't
| allow liquids to touch my lips. Without straws I have to
| go through agony just to be minimally hydrated. Paper
| straws get stuck to my necrotic flesh and tear it off.
|
| There are a variety of conditions that straws are helpful
| for. A lot of people have health issues that make it
| difficult to swallow. A lot of people have mouth and lip
| conditions.
|
| What I don't understand is all the moaning and groaning
| about the smallest piece of plastic that helps a LOT of
| disabled people have a semblance of normalcy, when here
| are much larger plastic fish to fry. We use plastic for
| basically everything but people have tunnel visioned on a
| minor piece that actually helps people. It's myopic.
| triceratops wrote:
| I thought "bed-ridden patient" covered everyone who is
| physically unable to drink without straws due to
| disabilities or other conditions. I guess that wasn't
| clear enough though. My apologies. I've edited my comment
| now.
|
| > What I don't understand is all the moaning and groaning
| about the smallest piece of plastic that helps a LOT of
| disabled people have a semblance of normalcy
|
| You have to admit it's been turned into a culture war
| point by people who mostly don't need straws. They just
| need boogeymen to rile up people against environmentalism
| in general.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Are people that bad at drinking from cups?
|
| You ever had the ice in the bottom of the cup turn into a
| large chunk then hit you in the face?
| triceratops wrote:
| No
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > Why do small if you can go big right away?
|
| You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure
| requires a robust business case. That's why scale is
| critical.
|
| Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass
| and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an
| industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept
| at an artisanal scale.
|
| Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put
| together a coherent business plan. The people you need to
| work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process
| whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere.
| How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to
| support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random
| people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
|
| > Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
|
| This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs,
| and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are
| a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the
| start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with
| an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to
| work and was still disposable.
|
| If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced
| with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers
| don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging
| deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and
| contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste
| cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to
| shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not
| an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
| pixl97 wrote:
| In theory plastic food 'waste' could be far more
| recyclable if it were standardized on plastics that were
| recyclable and we had a deposit system.
|
| Needless to say the food and drink industry has spent an
| epic fuckton on lobbying to ensure that doesn't happen.
| Remember to give a proper fuck you to the Coca-cola corp
| about this.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yes let's burden any fledging company with the added
| bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal
| and recycling.
| erfgh wrote:
| It will raise the costs and the prices, people will be
| unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties
| taking over.
| sneak wrote:
| Stopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a
| landfill isn't harmful. Lithium batteries require special
| hazmat procedures.
| lagniappe wrote:
| What if it worked like the carts at Aldi? Put something
| reasonable like 3-5 bucks on the sale amount, and redeem the
| same amount when returned.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| i pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot
| anonym29 wrote:
| You paying a nonzero cost for creating a negative
| externality is an improvement compared to the status quo,
| in the context of this economic philosophy of discouraging
| production of negative externalities by aligning economic
| incentives.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| big words for you. I pay for it.
|
| If i do not pay, i always return the cart.
| pests wrote:
| Congrats.
| triceratops wrote:
| Someone else brings it back and makes 25c. Win-win. That's
| how any deposit program works.
| robertjpayne wrote:
| Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the
| small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling
| costs.
|
| It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices
| otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic,
| hazardous and labour intensive.
|
| 100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device
| which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be
| required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans.
| The deposit is part of why that is
| throwmeoutplzdo wrote:
| How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for
| you?
| seemaze wrote:
| I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my
| motorcycle battery to the battery shop.
| zelon88 wrote:
| That's a good point. In America we call this type of
| deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you
| return to the store to get your deposit back.
|
| This is done for components like starter motors,
| alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety
| of other components. The complex components are re-
| manufactured to like-new specifications and the less
| complex components are recycled to recover materials. The
| battery is a probably the only component where the
| potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
| mindslight wrote:
| Lead actually has a pretty good scrap value.
| pests wrote:
| I never thought about it but it is odd car-components are
| the only thing most people will experience with a "core"
| charge. Why don't more industries do something similar?
| Is it just because car ownership and car repair has been
| such a core (no pun intended) component of American
| culture? That a system of recycling has been set up?
| tstrimple wrote:
| I was curious about when and where these core charges
| started. It looks like it was the result of WW2 and the
| shortage of steel and other materials forcing both the
| military and civilian manufacturers to turn to recycling
| and rebuilding parts out of necessity. After the war, the
| remanufacturing industry was large enough to stand on its
| own and the concepts stuck around. Some hazardous items
| like lead acid batteries have legislation helping to
| enforce the core charges but the rest seem to be market
| driven.
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| > It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices
| otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic,
| hazardous and labour intensive.
|
| Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or
| production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with
| plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are
| _not_ an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is
| justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries,
| which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment
| the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to
| a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in
| the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent /re-
| fillable ones are also available, often right beside the
| disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower
| cost of ownership.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the
| first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-
| fillable ones are also available
|
| I suspect you could make the same argument for manufactured
| cigarettes vs pipe tobacco. It seems people will pay for
| convenience.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think waste management should be required to scan the
| garbage and remove useful items, i.e. recyclables. This
| would take the burden off consumers and allow more items
| like this to be intercepted. The technology is there, why
| not force the corporation to innovative?
| computersuck wrote:
| It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some
| economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or
| Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive,
| it's untenable
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Because they are a fire hazard:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o
|
| Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A
| deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed
| responsibly.
|
| Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though
| that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it
| would be.
| tjohns wrote:
| The problem is you can't find any company willing to recycle
| them. Because of the nicotine content, I've heard e-waste
| recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch
| them.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the
| 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open
| fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
|
| Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste
| being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-
| new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
| mamonoleechi wrote:
| vape products does not all contain nicotine, it's an
| ingredient you choose to add in your blend,
|
| you can choose to either vape a flavour version only, or one
| containing a certain amount of nicotine
| tjohns wrote:
| Sure, but the people doing the recycling have no idea
| what's inside of it.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going
| to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means
| it's destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at
| worst.
|
| This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
| bjackman wrote:
| Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the
| article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits
| they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
|
| Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a
| really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this
| can only go so far before it's counterproductive.
|
| I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-
| filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of
| nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large
| minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the
| device up before they use it, I think they are much more
| likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's
| dead.
|
| Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I
| bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at
| 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan
| ahead that might also help.
| contravariant wrote:
| > Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging
| and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away
| after use.
|
| Well that _is_ fixable, it 's even one of the solutions
| posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by
| adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it
| to the shop (instead of throwing it away).
| bjackman wrote:
| But they don't need to be taken back anywhere. They are
| reusable. So this just ends up back at what I said about
| "taxing waste".
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I
| think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the
| non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they
| can be disposed of when empty.
|
| I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal
| costs into the price of the original product. That changes
| prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.
| loops wrote:
| This is true but as a workaround disposable vapes now all
| include a charging port but are still treated as disposable
| (so is just another component to be wasted)
|
| I'm in favour of a full ban but it's complex
| Freedumbs wrote:
| Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context.
| Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't
| smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that
| they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think
| people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw
| the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
| RulerOf wrote:
| Smoking is expensive, and people carry these in their
| pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry.
|
| If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd
| wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.
| subscribed wrote:
| This is so incredibly simplistic it cannot be an argument in
| a good faith.
|
| Addictions exists. To stop smoking is HARD. Nicotine addition
| us on par with benzos, prescription opiates or amphetamines.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most countries don't do enough at all.
|
| For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole
| splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see
| the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
|
| As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place,
| and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to
| the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke
| down, or call the city hall to collect it.
|
| We should go back to the old days, when electronics were
| repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as
| that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential
| growth in sales.
| computersuck wrote:
| https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
| bojan wrote:
| > As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in
| place
|
| In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I
| believe, they have bins for electric devices.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For used toner/ink cartridges yes, for electric devices in
| theory yes, in practice not everywhere.
|
| However that doesn't change the disposable garbage thing, I
| bet most of them land in some African landfill instead of
| being properly recycled.
| nicbou wrote:
| Those are mandatory in Germany. Recently-ish they started
| forcing supermarkets and other large retailers to accept
| small electronics, but in practice I never managed to do
| it. You pretty much have to argue with the staff every
| time.
|
| https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| > For example Germany, while the country is famous for the
| whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20
| years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have
| in Portugal.
|
| Because German environmental policy is about virtue
| signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental
| problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural
| gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about
| disposable packaging, car regulations and city design
| dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby,
| combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers
| thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and
| subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it
| just goes on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, what is so hard to have something like this? Sorry
| only in portuguese, you will need to use automatic
| translation on it.
|
| https://www.prio.pt/pt/prio-ecowaste
|
| This is only one of the places, there are others where used
| oil can be brought in.
| rm30 wrote:
| Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the
| municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying
| a new device. On the street they started to place bin for
| small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
| tiagod wrote:
| >As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
|
| I Portugal there is Rede Electrao. You can deposit those
| devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up, I thought the only way was to
| drive down the city recycling center where they get pilled
| up inside a shipping container.
| jjice wrote:
| Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to
| recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old
| Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd
| assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so
| I don't recall). This is in the US.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The point is what happens to them when the container full
| of them ships away.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Home Depot accepts old batteries. Though it's kind of
| terrifying because they accept batteries in any condition
| as long as you put them in individual plastic bags.
|
| And then there's a huge bin of damaged LiPos just chilling
| by the front door. I'm astonished we don't hear about fires
| in these bins.
| eru wrote:
| > Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans
| [...]
|
| Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already
| widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely
| for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like
| mandatory deposits.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate
| and bring their trash to a common place.
|
| I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much
| much more littering compared to places having deposits on
| every types of metal/plastic beverage containers
| csomar wrote:
| I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a
| disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid
| from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is
| actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
| flexagoon wrote:
| I've seen some universities in my country have deposit boxes
| specifically for single-use vapes
| hennell wrote:
| I feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the
| retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway.
|
| Looking at this device it feels like it shouldn't be hard to
| have a reusable base with battery and electronics, and a
| disposable capsule that attaches on top but is replaceable.
| xmprt wrote:
| Who bears the cost of that improvement? Either the
| manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is
| that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so
| there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the
| government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we
| won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with
| old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
| comonoid wrote:
| God bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions
| every day as bottles are!
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| You think China is gonna take all of em back?
| subscribed wrote:
| Why should that be China's problem?
|
| Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores.
|
| If the price of the "disposable" is, say, PS5, make the
| deposit PS50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the
| retailer.
|
| And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return
| the used disposables and that's it.
|
| I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to
| tackle the problem, otherwise how you can explain minimum
| price on plastic bags but tolerating toxic landfill fires and
| staggering waste of lithium (recycling will inevitably br
| fixed soon).
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Well realistically just ban imports. But then people will
| import them criminally anyway. And to your point; what if
| Chinese companies assist in evading import bans or customs,
| as they do now and have done for decades.
|
| Even in the UK, they've added restrictions to it
| but...surprise, surprise the Turkish/Kurdish corner shops
| all have a steady supply, with nothing being done about it.
| As a foreigner living here it's honestly pathetic how
| disengaged the public here are with things like that.
| People drive like absolute wankers, too.
| kev009 wrote:
| "I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
| ch4s3 wrote:
| What a brave and adventurous soul.
| avidiax wrote:
| If you believe Lumafield, 8% of low-quality lithium ion
| batteries have a mechanical defect that can sometimes lead to
| a short circuit.
|
| Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
|
| https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-
| th...
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| He put a fuse on every individual cell and on the overall
| unit, so I would say he was reasonably cautious (although
| he deployed a bunch of high-voltage exposed wires at the
| end of the video, but we can assume that was just a tech
| demo).
| superxpro12 wrote:
| fuses only help for overcurrent scenarios. if they cell
| overdischarges due to a mechanical fault, or internally
| shorts, the fuses wont do anything. any then if it
| internally shorts at an SOC > like 20-30%, it'll vent and
| cascade into other cells.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| Man. I don't actually know anyone who vapes. I see it in public
| sometimes and just assumed people refilled them - maybe they
| do. Seeing him hold some up, seeing all that plastic, metal,
| electronics, all that Work (Joules) expended, in something that
| you just dump after a day is _nuts_. I can 't think of anything
| else like that. Maybe plastic water bottles but they don't have
| even half the materials or complexity? Maybe I under-estimate
| how much is put into regular cigarettes or beer & cans.
| kentiko wrote:
| The complexity of a can isn't as extreme as a disposable ARM
| chip, but it is still quite a sophisticated mass produced
| object. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
|
| Many daily life, single use objects have a lot of thoughts
| put into them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0ze8GnBKA
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| A little calibrating correction: A vape should last more than
| a day unless you're a very heavy user. Around three days with
| a '700 puffs' one maybe, and a week wouldn't be unheard of.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The puff number was extremely exaggerated on the disposable
| ones I've tried.
| lachiflippi wrote:
| Refillable vapes used to be the standard around a decade ago,
| back when a liter of vape base (without nicotine) cost 30EUR
| at max. Disposable vapes pretty much didn't exist. Now the
| same liter of vape base (still without nicotine) is a
| "tobacco product" and costs 400EUR+ due to taxes thanks to
| decade-long lobbying efforts by big tobacco, turning
| refillable vapes into a massive niche product due to single-
| use vapes costing the same or less, without any of the hassle
| of mixing your own liquids or having to refill them.
| squigz wrote:
| Are you referring to VG/PG? Are they really that expensive
| for you? That's wild.
| lachiflippi wrote:
| Yes, 100ml from the same store I bought a liter from for
| 40EUR in 2015 now cost 56EUR. There is currently a tax of
| 0.32EUR per ml on liquid, no matter if you're buying the
| base or the finished product.
| squigz wrote:
| I guess it's time to not only make the vaping liquids
| yourself, but the bases too :P
|
| Quick Googling suggests I'd pay less than 30 euro for a
| liter of VG. What about for the nicotine concentrate? I'd
| pay about 20 euros for 100ml of 20mg/ml concentrate.
| xmprt wrote:
| I'm confused. Why wouldn't the same taxes apply to a
| disposable vape which has the same liquid inside of it?
|
| Also, in the GP comment, you mentioned the cost was
| 400EUR but here you're saying 56EUR. Are you talking
| about different things?
| kazinator wrote:
| I promise to cry if a docker container is found in there.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Scheduled by k8s
| Raed667 wrote:
| the way they're discarded definitely embodies the "cattle not
| pets" approach
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| By 2040 there will be a disposable LLM in there as good as
| today's claude.
| avidiax wrote:
| By 2080, it will be fully sentient, and derive pleasure when
| you use it, and suffer loneliness if you don't, and do its
| best to convince you.
|
| Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot
| from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| "I'm Mister Vapeseeks, smoke from me~e!" *shudder*
| icameron wrote:
| Running a web server off a disposable vape:
| https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
| realaaa wrote:
| of course it had to be Bogdan to do something like this ahahah
| :)
| gosub100 wrote:
| Soon: "Quake on a vape pen"
| phrotoma wrote:
| Is that a LAN party in your pocket?
| Etheryte wrote:
| I mean, naturally there's Doom on a vape [0], so as far as
| I'm concerned, that box is already ticked. Someone should
| give a good name to the law that every hardware device with a
| screen has a Doom port.
|
| [0] https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
| wutwutwat wrote:
| See also
|
| Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
| tomcam wrote:
| Hugged to death atm I guess
| trhway wrote:
| The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is
| probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've
| been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world
| where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a
| ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than
| "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| $5 is very expensive in the microcontroller world.
|
| Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the
| CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-n7vXHAqm8
| juris wrote:
| Can it run doom?
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Kind of! https://www.pcmag.com/news/hacker-gets-doom-running-
| on-a-vap...
| ynac wrote:
| I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer
| with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could
| feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell
| was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
|
| I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a
| series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED
| bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way
| on to the shelf.
| zxexz wrote:
| With regards to the microwave, here's a token "please safely
| discharge and double check the cap" comment!
|
| With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk.
| I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area.
| Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age,
| please be extremely careful about the magnetron the
| insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can
| kill you.
|
| There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal
| favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor,
| which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the
| caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for
| somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
| userbinator wrote:
| _the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide_
|
| As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer
| microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron
| insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the
| legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF
| transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings
| of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than
| regular alumina.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| That's my understanding as well, but I still wouldn't
| disassemble a 1960s microwave without protection (I have
| assisted in the dismantling of a couple microwave
| communications devices which did contain BeO and were
| also very well-labeled as such). Anything from the 80s on
| at least is almost certainly aluminum.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
|
| Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the
| problem still that big?
| zxexz wrote:
| I haven't been back since February last year. I guess a win
| for some people!
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the
| companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which,
| AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same
| fashion.
| domh wrote:
| Sample size of 1, but I have a friend who does buy the
| refills and charges the original unit. Every shop that
| sells the combination units also seems to sell the
| refills (at least around here).
| mlrtime wrote:
| Go too far and you might be labeled a hoarder.
| waldrews wrote:
| There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular
| machinery of a single bacterium.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| When you poo though it doesnt require landfill and relatively
| less toxic.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Where do you think it goes?
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| In the ocean.
| gentooflux wrote:
| The water from sewage might end up there after it's
| extracted and sanitized, but all the solids have to be
| disposed of too. Those solids, plus the leftover
| chemicals used to extract and sanitize the water, go to
| landfill.
| ggm wrote:
| Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has
| gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the
| cheapest possible flow process.
| your_challenger wrote:
| Is this the "John Graham-Cumming", ex-CTO of cloudflare?
| arajnoha wrote:
| yes! F9 on his website links to this very blog https://jgc.org/
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yes, that's me.
| CivBase wrote:
| I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things.
| I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just
| throwing something like that away.
| userbinator wrote:
| Some of the COVID test kits that were popular a few years ago(!)
| were even more complex.
|
| "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In
| reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder
| mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply
| replaced.
| franciscator wrote:
| I think recycling and upcycling are good practices. With them,
| you can build missile, drone tracking systems and water
| irrigation systems, smartwear and other control for almost
| nothing.
| GeertB wrote:
| For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap.
| Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642,
| PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind
| of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These
| are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or
| similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
|
| To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home
| computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full
| 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't
| even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some
| BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at
| the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude
| faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of
| magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!
| uxhacker wrote:
| The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
| truekonrads wrote:
| Technical Boy's vape is here:
| https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-
| gods-26BGN...
| lazystar wrote:
| This is your brain. This is your brain on ARM.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Not smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC
| free.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Hey man, RISC architecture is gonna change everything
| kolanos wrote:
| RISC is good.
| mosquitobiten wrote:
| it's literal vaporware
| tombert wrote:
| What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where
| computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be
| "disposable".
|
| It's beautiful, I love it.
| rob74 wrote:
| For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable".
| As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how
| many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on
| it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a
| non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up
| the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a
| rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably
| shouldn't end up in a landfill...
| adrianN wrote:
| To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small
| handful of exceptions).
| stmL wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that?
|
| Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling
| supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a
| scam.
| mngnt wrote:
| This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists,
| how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created
| to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to
| electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I
| can buy, consume an recycle".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes
| that their company doesn't physically retrieve from
| customers to be recycled ...
| DaSHacka wrote:
| A completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can
| only assume was said in jest.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It sounds like a description of most of a deposit system
| to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging
| recycling.
| tstrimple wrote:
| See "core charges" for many automotive parts to
| incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the
| higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the
| lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of
| our society can seem so foreign in others.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual
| garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making
| sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact
| the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only
| thing they will change their behaviour for.
| sofixa wrote:
| _wildly_ country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the
| EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-
| news/w/d...
| rjh29 wrote:
| Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're
| recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's
| either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck
| it all in the garbage"
| vasco wrote:
| It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't
| a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than
| that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a
| landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| > because it gets burned
|
| I wouldn't really call that recycling.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| As long as the heat is used for something (electricity,
| building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of
| parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is
| also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage
| dump and forgetting about it.
|
| But yes, not proper recycling.
| eru wrote:
| Well, it depends a lot on material.
|
| Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because
| it actually makes financial sense.
|
| Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them
| for electricity.
| chpatrick wrote:
| In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently
| implemented a bottle return system that (although it's
| annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and
| glass, all of which are recyclable.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Even with PET, arguably the most recyclable plastic, most
| of it doesn't go bottle-to-bottle but rather bottle-to-
| textile. Because most PET "recycling" doesn't close the
| loop, so it's dubious to even call it recycling. That
| said, some bottle-to-bottle recycling of PET is done, and
| this has been getting better.
| adrianN wrote:
| I'm relatively sure that electronics are not recycled
| properly anywhere. At best some of the metals are
| extracted (hopefully not by mixing the ashes with
| mercury).
| Fargren wrote:
| What would be properly recycling electronics, if not
| extracting the metals? should the worthless based board
| to be melted and used for bottles?
| sejje wrote:
| Isn't that the point of recycling? To reuse the reusable
| materials like plastic?
| Fargren wrote:
| If salvaging 100% of the materials that make up something
| is the only way to "properly" recycle, we are not
| recycling anything properly. Some components are not
| recyclable.
|
| I won't speculate about whether the plastic on the board
| is recyclable, or ecological to recycle. I don't know.
| This is what I'm asking.
| adrianN wrote:
| Not burning all the ICs and all the other components that
| still work perfectly fine would be a good start imo.
| Fargren wrote:
| That would fall under Reuse rather than Recycle. Reduce,
| Reuse and Recycle are in the order of best to worst.
| Recycling is the last ditch effort to not completely
| waste something. It's always going to feel like a half
| measure, because it is.
| shibapuppie wrote:
| To do WHAT with? Catalog and categorize the millions of
| random penny-priced ICs that MIGHT be usable for
| something else?
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| what about best buy and staples? that's where I take mine
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment or not,
| but all of that is shipped off to 3rd party "recyclers"
| who pinky promise that they will dispose of it properly.
| Very often those 3rd parties rely on _other_ 3rd parties
| until the it ends up in a waste pile in a developing
| country, but with a long enough chain of differed
| responsibility that nobody can be held accountable.
|
| The fundamental problem with "recycling" is precisely the
| fact that we just hand it off and don't ask questions
| about where it ends up, all while feeling great about
| ourselves afterwards. Bestbuy and Staples are offering
| accountability laundering so that you don't have to feel
| bad and in exchange are more likely to become a customer.
| The 3rd parties working for them do the same thing, but
| they usually want cash for it.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| sounds like cynicism without any factual basis. I just
| checked and ERI says otherwise:
| https://eridirect.com/blog/2025/01/rare-earth-metal-
| recovery...
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
|
| This sentiment is the case because very often that's
| where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to
| move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when
| it happens.
|
| Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one
| of the US largest _exports_ to China was cardboard boxes
| sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel
| shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net
| environmental impact would likely have been less had we
| just kept the boxes at home.
|
| It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely
| acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.
|
| I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my
| city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough
| room in my trash bin sometimes.
| setopt wrote:
| Depends, it's hard to make a blanket statement like that.
| Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not
| a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration
| is mostly a better solution than recycling (which
| produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy
| contaminants in the few cases that it's not actually a
| scam).
| csomar wrote:
| > As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but
| how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written
| on it?
|
| You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if
| you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will
| recycle.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I concur on this one.
|
| Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands
| available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling
| program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next
| vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling
| dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned
| on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of
| disposables returned for the discounts.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme
| entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only
| exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or
| demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or
| equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my
| country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.
|
| Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor
| people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to
| them (something about making a problem invisible and
| hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect
| goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product
| would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2
| on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother
| with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the
| logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is
| redirect money stream from poor people to recycling
| companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle
| less.
| eru wrote:
| Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with
| less resources and in higher quality from scratch?
|
| (The above is not so much about processors, but about
| plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels
| at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling
| and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever
| so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead
| use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.
|
| Especially considering the extra logistics and quality
| degradation that recycling entails.
|
| Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still
| be worth it, though.)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an
| ignorant point of view?
|
| The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.
|
| Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
| eru wrote:
| We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
| ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the
| centre of the solar system that's providing us with
| energy.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24
| kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big
| fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should
| stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.
|
| Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the
| weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction
| of what has to be processed and build in the supply
| chain.
|
| Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to
| burn it directly.
| eru wrote:
| > Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then
| to burn it directly.
|
| My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil
| and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new
| oil and gas.
|
| If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think
| more seriously about recycling plastic.
| M95D wrote:
| Did you ever try to burn plastic?
|
| 1) Plastic is not liquid, so you can't pipe it to a gas
| or oil power plant. You may argue that coal isn't liquid
| either, but continue reading...
|
| 2) Burning plastic generates toxic fumes.
|
| 3) Plastic ash is sticky and very difficult to clean.
| eru wrote:
| You might like to read about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy_plant
|
| It's a fascinating topic. There's even more problems than
| the ones you bring up, but engineers are also pretty
| smart.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint.
|
| The world has effectively infinite resources, getting
| more is usually just a matter of figuring out better
| extraction techniques or using better energy.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >effectively infinite resources
|
| Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink,
| effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh
| water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these
| things as true, because the World is big and population
| of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a
| time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.
|
| Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of
| them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then
| spend those resources. We're not wizards, _deus ex
| machina_ only reliably happens in movies.
|
| A little Malthusian.
| tzs wrote:
| The world only has effectively infinite resources if
| growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand
| surprisingly quickly.
|
| For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only
| take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual
| consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way
| galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming
| all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all
| the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing
| everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable
| stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational
| potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning
| everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.
|
| From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k
| years to using all the energy in the whole observable
| universe annually.
|
| Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand
| surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in
| about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k
| years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical
| region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual
| growth from the current population in 12k years the
| volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--
| and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no
| wasted space.
|
| We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to
| around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.
| volemo wrote:
| > Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might
| still be worth it, though.
|
| Directly reusing plastic bottles that were not meant to
| be is bad for your health though, isn't it?
| vel0city wrote:
| The biggest risks are that single-use bottles are usually
| pretty difficult to clean (usually a narrow opening). The
| second biggest, which is related, is that those single-
| use bottles usually aren't very rigid and will tend to
| make small cracks in the surface as the material flexes
| which makes things even harder to clean. After that, all
| the cracks that will develop will mean it'll leach out
| the bad stuff in the plastics far faster than if you had
| some other kind of water bottle.
|
| If you just opened it and drank the drink in it, there's
| probably no harm in filling it soon after and using it a
| few times like that. Using that same disposable bottle
| for a few months is probably not a good idea.
| amelius wrote:
| Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >they could use a non-rechargeable battery
|
| The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they
| can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would
| drain charge first.
|
| But that brings in the second issue of the device not being
| refillable, which may be the bigger sin.
| smj-edison wrote:
| It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have
| computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our
| concrete and be put throughout our space.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Russia started with mixing diodes into concrete a while
| ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979
| progbits wrote:
| A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge has this as a minor plot
| point.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > It's beautiful, I love it.
|
| When computers become disposable, their programmers soon
| become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That doesn't make sense.
| sejje wrote:
| Life lessons from anime and the WordPorn meme account.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > It's beautiful
|
| Especially since both the waste created in the process of
| making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal
| are somebody else's problem!
| SuperMouse wrote:
| I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat
| little things!
| torginus wrote:
| How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences
| with more obscure chips requiring custom
| programmers/debuggers.
| dvdkon wrote:
| They're great, because you can use all standard ARM
| tooling, including CMSIS-DAP dongles for debugging.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make
| wireless communications?
| kvdveer wrote:
| > How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we
| make wireless communications?
|
| There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power
| (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape),
| and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of
| carrier wave).
|
| I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but
| that does externalize the power supply.
| slow_typist wrote:
| RFID tags are powered wirelessly, one could imagine
| powering smaller particles when operating on higher
| frequencies (RFID is on 13.something MHz requiring
| relatively large coils). A directional antenna could send a
| pulsed beam to power a subset of the particles in the area
| and afterwards receive their signals.
| regularfry wrote:
| It needs to be in the infrared spectrum at least to be
| useful for smart dust, otherwise the package size is
| still dominated by the size of the antenna. Even mm-wave
| radar is marginal here.
| volemo wrote:
| So... smart dust powered by the sun? Cool!
| slow_typist wrote:
| Okay if you take dust literally. The important part is
| that the particles fly. Like dandelion seeds.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| We are going to have to rethink power for smart dust. Like
| consider that no creature out there is powered by
| batteries. From the biggest land animal to the smallest
| microbe it's all chemistry.
|
| Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to
| stay active.
|
| As for communication, we can't go shoving antennas in them
| as then they'd be larger than dust. And you can't use the
| optical part of the spectrum because of interference with
| basically everything. You can't use wavelengths smaller
| either as you get into UV and high radiation. There is the
| terahertz radio spectrum [0] between 3mm and 30um that is
| pretty open and not utilized at all because we haven't
| figured out how to make good transmitters. Plus the
| spectrum isn't very useful as it isn't very penetrating and
| water vapor absorbs it... and it requires lots of power.
|
| Smart dust might have to be more of a distributed computer
| or something. Or a micro machine that uses chemistry and
| mechanical magic to do its operations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe
| it's all chemistry._
|
| Batteries _are_ chemistry. ATP is a chemical battery.
|
| The difference between living things and our machines is
| primarily in manufacturing methods: we do things in bulk,
| because we reach from the top with crude, meter-scale
| tools; nature glues things up from lots of tiny
| biomolecular nanomachines, and each of those tiny
| machines has to carry its own power source!
|
| Still, it's highly likely that any form of "smart dust"
| will resemble living cells as much as, or even more so,
| it will resemble miniature devices we build today, simply
| because that's the kind of chemistry that's efficient at
| smaller scales.
| DANmode wrote:
| > There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power
|
| RFID is historically powered by one of three methods,
|
| one of which is completely wireless/battery-free.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for
| embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what
| many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can
| only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded
| systems have become.
|
| Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the
| planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what
| serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my
| garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and
| magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
| pkolaczk wrote:
| > Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ
| for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like,
| and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home
| computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful
| modern embedded systems have become.
|
| Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key
| press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me
| to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I
| initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it's not
| the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers
| thinking they don't need to care about performance because
| their chip runs in megahertz.
| pjmlp wrote:
| What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping
| the browser alongside the "native" application, and
| scripting languages using an interpreter are used in
| production code?
|
| Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s
| eru wrote:
| Interpreters don't have to be slow.
|
| Forth is usually interpreted and pretty fast. And, of
| course, we have very fast Javascript engines these days.
| Python speed is being worked on, but it's pretty slow,
| true.
| anthk wrote:
| Some Forths are dog slow such as PFE compared to GForth.
| Meanwhile others running in really slow platforms such as
| subleq (much faster in muxleq) run really fast for that
| the VM actually as (almost something slightly better than
| a 8086).
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| It's not really "interpreted", in the way that for
| example BASIC or Java is.
|
| It's a list of jumps to functions.
| upofadown wrote:
| Classic Forth Dimensions article: Why Forth Isn't Slow
|
| * https://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V06N5.pdf
|
| Basically it is because Forth programs are fairly flat
| and don't go deep into subfunctions. So the interpreter
| overhead is not that great and the processor spends most
| of the time running the machine code that underlays the
| primitives that live at the bottom of the program.
| anthk wrote:
| - TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4
| with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad back in the day, and with
| 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away.
|
| - Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to
| like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and
| management software. The rest... oh, they tried to create
| a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than
| one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 and up
| you could emulate it at decent speeds with TCL/Tk 8.6
| since they got some optimized interpreter. IDK about VB6,
| probably the same case. But at least we know TCL/Tk got
| improved on multiprocessing and the like. VB6 was stuck
| in time.
|
| - TCL can call C code with ease, since the early 90's.
| Not the case with Electron. And JS really sucks with no
| standard library. With Electron, the UI can be very
| taxing, even if they bundle FFMPEG and the like. Tk UI
| can run on a toaster.
|
| - Yeah, there is C#... but it isn't as snappy and
| portable TCL/Tk with IronTCL, where it even targets
| Windows XP. You have JimTCL where it can run on scraps.
| No Tk, but the language it's close in syntax to TCL, it
| has networking and TLS support and OFC has damn easy C
| interops. And if you are a competent programmer, you can
| see it has some alpha SDL2 bindings. Extend those and you
| can write a dumb UI with Nuklear or similar in days.
| Speed? It won't win against other languages on number
| crunching, but for sure it could be put to drive some
| machines.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I worked on a startup that was mostly powered by Tcl, the
| amount of rewriting in C that we had to do between 1999
| and 2003, when I left the company among all those dotcom
| busts, made me no longer pick any language without at
| least a JIT, for production code.
|
| The founders went on creating OutSystems, with the same
| concepts but built on top of .NET, they are one of the
| most successful Portuguese companies to this day, and one
| of the few VB like development environments for the Web.
| stavros wrote:
| Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke
| to a server and waiting for the response.
| amelius wrote:
| A server on Mars?
| stavros wrote:
| Gotta have multiple AZs.
| me551ah wrote:
| The server is probably running Python
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| lol it's the flask debug server, "don't use this in
| production" banner and all
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Na each key press goes to a separate lambda invocation
| that gets submitted to a Kafka queue, and what happens
| after that is a mystery to all involved.
|
| We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space
| transmission necessary
| labcomputer wrote:
| No, not a mystery, in fact.
|
| Each keypress is appended to an 80 line prompt (key name
| along with timestamp of keypress and current text shown
| on the screen) and fed to a frontier LLM. Some of the
| office staff banged on the keypad for a few hours to
| generate training data to fine-tune the LLM on the task
| of denouncing key presses.
|
| Thanks to some optimizations with Triton and running
| multi-GPU instances, latency is down to just a few
| seconds per digit entered.
|
| You see, we needed to hit our genAI onboarding KPIs this
| quarter...
| trinix912 wrote:
| Probably a Celeron-powered PC tower barely keeping up
| with Windows Server 2008 R2 in a closet of a public
| office ;)
| csomar wrote:
| Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40
| something stories) for several hours. When I asked the
| concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out
| they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for
| some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end
| to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere
| (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back
| with this system hosted on AWS. Absolute nightmare.
| exikyut wrote:
| I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1
| went down.
| csomar wrote:
| This is in SEA. They probably operate from ap-southeast-1
| or 2. But yeah, if the internet goes down, the provider
| service goes down or AWS goes down they are cooked.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now I am waiting for time when they move us-east-1
| physical security to run in us-east-1... Thus locking
| themselves out when needing some physical intervention on
| servers to get backup.
| proctorg76 wrote:
| Facebook already got bit by this when their BGP setup
| pooped its pants on Oct 4, 2021
| iamtedd wrote:
| They could ask facebook for advice.
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52448/were-
| face...
| blitzar wrote:
| I wonder what happened to the building when the internet
| went down. How do you get into the room to reboot the
| router?
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| There is probably a break-glass procedure for such cases,
| like, break the literal window.
| blitzar wrote:
| Is that why there is a brick next to the procedure
| manual?
| lazide wrote:
| That's the emergency escape brick.
| bluGill wrote:
| A lot of modern glass is hard to break. In many cases
| this is a safety feature (if you can't break the glass
| you can't get shoved out the window in a fight...)
| stephen_g wrote:
| There's usually a back door with a physical key. The
| problem can be getting ahold of one of the people with
| that key though!
| Someone wrote:
| As the parent said: _"Everyone was locked out in a
| building am staying at (40 something stories) for several
| hours."_
| sofixa wrote:
| > Absolute nightmare.
|
| Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both
| the building management and the software vendor to have a
| SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put
| somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling,
| etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update,
| etc. all of that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > with redundant power, cooling, etc
|
| The doors the system controls don't have any of this.
| Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it
| definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to
| the cloud-based control plane.
|
| This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a
| container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates
| a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that
| pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it
| can't reach the server.
| onli wrote:
| What updates? That would be on a local network and have
| no internet connection, if done right.
| sofixa wrote:
| And? That doesn't mean, especially for a system with
| security impact (like door access), that it should never
| be updated.
| csomar wrote:
| I am guessing the main attraction of such a system is
| that owners can set the cards remotely and get data about
| it (ie: who accessed and when)
| lazide wrote:
| Those devices can be trivially power cycled, and won't
| have as many issues with dodgy power. Some PC somewhere
| with storage is a bigger problem.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem
|
| Both an embedded microcontroller and a PC have storage.
| The reason you can power-cycle a microcontroller at will
| is because that storage is read-only and only a specific
| portion dedicated to state is writable (and the device
| can be reset if that ever gets corrupted).
|
| Use a buildroot/yocto image on the PC with read-only
| partitions and a separate state partition that the system
| can rebuild on boot if it gets corrupted and you'll have
| something that can be power-cycled with no issues.
| Network hardware is internally often Linux-based and
| manages to do fine for exactly this reason.
| lazide wrote:
| PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more
| to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for... what?
|
| Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course.
| Which they won't always, then oops.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you're relying on AWS you either way have a "PC" to
| relay communication between AWS and the keycard readers &
| door latches.
| lazide wrote:
| There are IoT libraries that don't require that.
| bluGill wrote:
| A large number of embedded micro controllers are just PCs
| running Yocto linux configured as GP said. You can save
| money with a $.05 micro controller, but in most cases the
| development costs to make that entire system work are
| more than just buying an off the shelf raspberry pi.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys
| and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work)
| without electricity. The tech is mature and well-
| understood.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The reason for moving away from physical keys is that key
| management becomes a nightmare; you can't "revoke" a key
| without changing all the locks which is an expensive
| operation and requires distributing new keys to everyone
| else. Electronic access control solves that.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| You might find Matt Blaze's paper on vulnerabilities in
| master-keyed physical locks interesting:
|
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the
| building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have
| someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of
| that.
|
| You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the
| electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all
| the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the
| like) to connect to.
| sofixa wrote:
| And when that box fails, you're looking at how long with
| no access? Longer than any AWS outage.
| trinix912 wrote:
| The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead
| of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and
| restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for
| something magic to happen.
| sofixa wrote:
| The building has an onsite IT guy with enough spares to
| fix anything that could go wrong with the box?
| trinix912 wrote:
| Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's
| usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton
| of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy
| 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some
| spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well
| (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them
| back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-
| arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch.
|
| The one at my previous office even had centralized
| management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No
| internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall
| us ever being locked out because of that.
| gopher_space wrote:
| You also have real-time ETAs from an actual human local
| to the issue. Plenty of domains where your clients won't
| _care_ if AWS is down for everyone.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| If you buy hardware from HID Global / Assa Abloy the box
| never breaks.
| csomar wrote:
| The system was not built with resiliency in mind and had
| no care/considerations for what a shit-show will unfurl
| once the system or the link goes down. I wonder if exit
| is regulated (you can still fully exit the building from
| any point using the green buttons and I think these are
| supposed to activate/still work even if electricity is
| down).
|
| > Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both
| the building management and the software vendor to have a
| SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put
| somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling,
| etc.)
|
| A isolated building somewhere in the middle of the jungle
| dependent for its operation on some American data-center
| hundreds of miles away is simply negligence. I am usually
| against regulations but clearly for certain things we can
| trust that all humans will be reasonable.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| In the US, the answer is that exit would have to work in
| the event that AWS is down or power is out. Some
| exceptions exist for special cases.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Easier maybe. But significantly worse. Parts of these
| systems have been build and engineered to be entirely
| reliable with automatic hand-overs when some component
| fails or with alternative routings when some connection
| is lost.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Its absolutely possible to have both a SaaS based control
| plane and continue functioning if the internet
| connection/control plane becomes unavailable for a
| period. There's presumably hardware on site anyway to
| forward requests to the servers which are doing access
| control, it wouldn't be difficult to have that hardware
| keep a local cache of the current configuration. Done
| that way you might find you can't make changes to who's
| authorised while the connection is unavailable, but you
| can still let people who were already authorised into
| their rooms.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| _Cooling_ for a card access system?
|
| A card access system requires zero cooling, it's a DC
| power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that
| fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no
| management other than activating and deactivating badges.
|
| There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock
| functionality tied to the cloud, it's just shitty
| engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from
| their customers.
| sofixa wrote:
| The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You
| can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and
| expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless
| you live in the Arctic.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff
| around my house, including homeassistant. The case is
| basically a big heat sink.
|
| It started crashing during backups.
|
| The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is
| literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It
| now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's
| not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of
| available air around it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such
| mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie)
| from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+
| degree Celsius heat all the time - but _SSDs don 't
| mind_, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive
| for a solid state one.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses
| an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the
| error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could
| well have been happening during read or write.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| There are card access systems that don't require a
| computer, just a microcontroller. Perhaps if you need to
| integrate with multiple sites or a backend system for
| access control rules you can add computers, but card
| access systems are dead ass simple for a reason; they
| need to be _reliable_. The good systems that have
| computers still allow access in the event of a network
| failure.
|
| Any access control system that fails in the event that it
| loses internet connectivity is poorly designed.
| trinix912 wrote:
| You're saying that as if we never had Z80-based
| microcontrollers doing all this without problems.
| Complete with centralized control and all.
| anthk wrote:
| You must be young. We used to have handhelds and
| computers with no cooling at all.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That is, in fact, exactly what we typically see in
| reality with local access control system head-ends.
|
| At the doors, there might be keycards, biometrics and
| PINs (oh my!) happening.
|
| But there's usually just not much going on, centrally. It
| doesn't take much to keep track of an index of IDs and
| the classes of things those IDs are allowed to access.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought
| and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire
|
| Actually in almost all products meant for real companies
| doing real work, this is an explicit design requirement.
|
| Every cash register runs off of a computer that sits in a
| tiny metal oven with no cooling and is expected to run
| 24/7 without fail.
|
| The difference between a tech gadget and a real world,
| real purpose appliance.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It's also easier to keep all the water for fighting fires
| in trucks that are remote, than to run high pressure
| water pipes to every room's ceilings, with special valves
| that only open when exposed to high heat. Imagine the
| overhead costs!
| jwr wrote:
| That's programmer incompetence. Unfortunately pervasive,
| especially with devices like parking meters, EV chargers,
| and similar, where the feedback loop (angry customer) is
| long (angry customers resulting in revenue decrease) or
| non-existent.
| ttoinou wrote:
| It could be a management problem instead also, while
| developers are just following instructions sent by
| management
| Nextgrid wrote:
| And nobody with options would settle for the low pay and
| terrible working conditions, so the quality of the output
| also reflects that.
| jwr wrote:
| I disagree -- developers are not sheep.
| graemep wrote:
| They also prefer you to use the mobile app so they can
| gather more data so they do not want the devices to work
| well in the first place.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| It's a nice theory, but many of those terrible parking
| ticket machines predate smartphones, so it might be the
| case for machines built now, but it's really hard to
| imagine that that was the original intention
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I work in an adjacent industry, and trust me when I say
| that a lot of older equipment companies just did not care
| much about the experience of using the equipment. It's
| much more important to tick all of the boxes in the back
| end accounting system than to have a high quality
| experience on the kiosk.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's organizational incompetence driven by companies that
| see software development as a cost centre rather than a
| key asset.
|
| It's usually clear when this has happened. Buggy bargain
| basement output.
| smokel wrote:
| One of the more inspired design choices of the parking
| ticket devices in my area is the inclusion of a key repeat
| feature.
|
| If you keep your finger on the touchscreen for just long
| enough, it helpfully repeats the keystroke while you're
| entering a license plate.
|
| Given the inevitable hardware issues, this means that what
| should be a single tap frequently becomes a burst of
| identical characters.
|
| The programmers who worked on this probably would've liked
| to be game developers instead.
| contravariant wrote:
| Give it some slack, it's probably doing its best to
| _inexplicably_ run windows.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Disagree. Windows for embedded runs extremely well,
| though can take a minute to boot.
|
| My underpowered cash register that hadn't been updated in
| a decade could run POS on top of Windows 7 Embedded
| POSReady buttery smooth.
|
| Occasionally they would start performing poorly, and it
| was always a network issue.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It could also be intentional UX design. Or a result of the
| keyboard hardware.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| And the self service kiosks/checkouts at supermarkets. So
| infuriating! Like I'd have to try to make something that
| slow myself on purpose!
|
| Besides the fact that scanning a barcode seems beyond much
| of the general population, they do it so sloooow.
| jon-wood wrote:
| The self service kiosks are intentionally throttled when
| scanning barcodes, at a guess to prevent people
| accidentally scanning the previous/wrong item - I once
| had some problems with one and a staff member flipped it
| into supervisor mode at which point they were able to
| scan at the same rate you'd see at a manned checkout.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think that's handled by the barcode scanner itself, at
| least on the ones I've used. The scanner will not
| recognize the same code immediately, but will immediately
| pick up a different code.
|
| What's slow is that after each scan it needs to check the
| weight which means it lets the scales settle for one
| second before accepting another scan.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Now take that, and add someone in our Polish supermarket
| chain (Biedronka) having the dumb "insight" to disable
| "scan multiple" option. Until ~month ago, whenever buying
| something in larger quantity, I could just press "Scan
| multiple", tap in the amount, scan the barcode once, and
| move all the items of the same type to the "already
| scanned" zone. Now, I have to do it one by one, each time
| waiting for the scales to settle. Infuriating when you're
| buying some spice bag or candy and have to scan 12 of
| them one by one.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Idt that's it, at least in my experience.
|
| I scan as fast as a manned checkout (I did my time in
| retail). And I can scan my groceries at the speed whilst
| the people next to me spend most of their time rotating
| an item to find the barcode.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Some of these are just dumb terminals with the entire
| state handled on a server. I've seen a bunch of them
| freeze at once where no UI would respond (but the
| interactions were buffered) and then when the network
| hiccup was over they all unfroze and reflected the input.
| tialaramex wrote:
| There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody
| making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere
| I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no
| direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky
| they at least asked the people who need the product what
| the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they
| (who don't use this product) thought would be good.
|
| "Key presses are 15x slower than they should be" gets
| labelled P5 low priority bug report, whereas "New AI
| integration to predict lot income" is P0 must-fix because
| on Tuesday a sales guy told a potential customer that it'd
| be in the next version and apparently the lead looked
| interested so we're doing it.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > There's no pressure to make a good product because
| nobody making this decision has to use the machine.
|
| Most software sucks, even when people have to chose using
| it. Everything is buggy and slow, people are just used to
| software being bad.
| ryandrake wrote:
| While this _is_ a decision-making problem, it is also an
| engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy
| haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately
| software developers are the ones writing the code, and
| are responsible for how awful it is.
|
| When it comes to priorities about what to write and what
| to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership.
| When it comes to the actual quality of the software
| written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be
| shared.
| lazide wrote:
| You mean the developer hired by (and fired by)
| management?
| freetinker wrote:
| To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a
| man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon
| his not prioritizing it."
| tialaramex wrote:
| Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is
| that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be
| unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired
| for saying what I think to management.
|
| I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the
| "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate
| sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really
| does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't
| have to figure out whether I _can_ say Fuck Off. The
| answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the
| question of whether I _should_ say that. Sometimes I do.
|
| And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired
| as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But
| also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to
| the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired
| (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no
| reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck
| off.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > When it comes to the actual quality of the software
| written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be
| shared.
|
| No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev
| that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to
| improve "quality" gets fired.
|
| We have no labor power because morons spent the good
| times insisting that we don't need a professional
| organization to solve the obvious collective action
| problem.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The idea that workers are not responsible for their own
| competence or the quality of their work output is such a
| bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because
| nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean
| you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush
| your teeth, either, so why do we do it?
| lazide wrote:
| Nobody here is writing that code.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Precisely this. We love to put our colleagues as
| competent victims of the system, but a competent engineer
| is unlikely to build an embeeded UI with high latency at
| their first try. It's a combination of cheap,
| underqualified labour and careless management.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This is only partially true.
|
| If developers prioritize customer experience instead of
| velocity and cost in situations where that isn't
| warranted, the company they work for can no longer sell
| products as cheaply as their competitors do. This
| decreases their market share and their revenue, which
| means they'll employ fewer developers in the future.
|
| This is almost an evolutionary process, many (but not
| all) markets choose for developers which don't care about
| such things.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on
| the UI of the machine.
|
| Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because
| some of them started to do so, and people started
| switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding
| subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only
| available on AT&T, which was the first time people
| started switching plans to get a specific phone instead
| of the other way around.
|
| People usually choose their parking based on where they
| want to go and how far it is from that place, and that
| trumps all other considerations. Paying more for
| programmers or parking machine processors would be a
| waste of money.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| > Paying more for programmers or parking machine
| processors would be a waste of money.
|
| The rise of parking apps on mobile adds an interesting
| angle to this.
|
| No doubt, many of us favour apps because the UX is so
| much better. Not quite sure if that affects the bottom
| line short-term, but long-term I'm sure it will.
| bdamm wrote:
| Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my
| local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual
| UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for
| the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the
| lobby of the building I had the app.
|
| But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I
| actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The
| instructions were clear, but the latency on the app was
| unusable. The Internet connection was fine. It was the
| app. So I skipped the whole thing, went to dinner, and
| was happy when I found my car without a ticket.
|
| "Unable to buy a ticket" would have been an interesting
| day in court.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Whilst I can not see a motivation I refuse to accept that
| parking machines are not advisarial design. Why do they
| have haf a dozen things that look a bit like tap n pay if
| they are not trying to make it eaiser for card skimmers.
| lallysingh wrote:
| My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the
| switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made.
| Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're
| taking their sweet time to register it.
|
| When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to
| wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that
| programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire
| time, yes, but the same as the day it was new.
| philipallstar wrote:
| That's a good point. When I use them I assume they're
| making API calls to a central server to validate (or
| something) them.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| Making API calls to a server to do button debouncing does
| sound like something so stupid a tech company would do it
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| in the worst case, they don't know they're doing it,
| because they've called some 'debounce.js' microservice
| wrapper and haven't audited it
| scrumper wrote:
| I was late for a train at my local station and the
| parking machine was taking ages to respond to keypresses.
| I could see the training pulling up to the platform and I
| was still stuck entering the second digit of seven. In my
| shameful frustration I hit the machine fairly hard. While
| the button presses might take a while to register, the
| anti-tamper alarm has _really_ low latency and is also
| quite loud.
| bluGill wrote:
| You need to find the right person to complain to. Here we
| are sympathetic, but can't do anything.
|
| The right person is the other riders on the train - but
| the hard part is to frame this such that they join you on
| a march to the the agency that owns that machines to
| complain. I wish you the best of luck figuring out how to
| do that (I don't know how to do it - and if I did there
| are might higher priority things that need to be fixed).
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Debouncing would be smart, sure. But sometimes, these
| sorts of embedded machines are weirder than that.
|
| At Kroger-brand gas stations near me, I get to interact
| with the buttons on gas pumps to select options and enter
| a loyalty ID.
|
| Those buttons have visible feedback on a screen, and also
| audible feedback consisting of a loud beep. And there's
| always delays between button press and feedback.
|
| Some combination of debounce and wear might explain that
| easily enough.
|
| Except... the delay between pushing a button and getting
| feedback is _variable_ by seemingly-random amounts. The
| delay also consistently increases if a person on the
| other side of the pump island is also pushing buttons to
| do their own thing.
|
| It's maddening. Push button, wait indeterminate time for
| beep, and repeat for something like 12 or 13 button
| presses -- and wait _longer_ if someone else is also
| using the machine.
|
| I can't rationally explain any of that variability with
| debounce.
| lazide wrote:
| They are running it on a Java VM in a container - on a
| 386?
|
| Over WiFi?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Perhaps.
|
| Or perhaps the original programmers skipped the class on
| concurrency 25 years ago, and nobody has subsequently
| bothered to pay anyone to update that part of the
| software.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| One time I decided to test whether these grocery story
| loyalty card XX cents off per gallon transactions were
| properly isolated, when my wife and I were both filling
| up vehicles at the same gas station at the same time. We
| both got the $0.50 discount per gallon with no problem.
| I'm sure there are lots of creative ways you can exploit
| the poor design of these things.
| megablast wrote:
| Anything that makes the world worse for car drivers is a
| huge bonus for The planet.
| afpx wrote:
| Sorry to rant, but this kind of stuff is the only thing
| that triggers me. It's gotten so bad that my family makes
| me put a dollar in a 'complain jar' everytime I talk about
| how poor quality software has become.
|
| Just one recent example: few months ago, I replaced a Bosch
| dishwasher with the latest version of the same model. Now,
| when I press the start button to initiate the cycle, it
| takes over 3 seconds for it to register! Like, what is
| going on in that 3 seconds?
|
| How was it possible that even 'kind of good' developers
| like me were able todo much more with much less back in the
| 90s? My boss would be like, "Here's this new hardware
| thingy and the manual. Now figure out how to do the
| impossible by Monday." Was it because we had bigger teams,
| more focus, fewer dependencies?
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| I think we've been trained to accept bad software at this
| point, and a lot of people don't know anything different.
|
| I suspect that a lot of it is caused by shoving Android
| onto underpowered devices because it is cheap and seems
| like an easy button. But I don't know for sure, that's
| just an impression. I have no numbers.
|
| Could there be an opportunity here, for a specialized
| kiosk OS or something like that?
| itsamario wrote:
| Only in America. America is deigned to make you mad that
| public common life isn't keeping up with whats in
| everybody's pocket.
|
| Gently forcing the individual to choose sapient or
| insentient.
| linkregister wrote:
| Be heartened that your choices are meaningful. The impact of
| e-waste on ground contamination from landfills in the United
| States and Europe is negligible, and landfill capacity itself
| does not approach the level of emergency that planetary
| warming is for human civilizations.
|
| Bicycling, transit usage, and switching to lower-carbon food
| sources significantly reduces your CO2 footprint. Your
| example influences others in your community, though it may
| not be personally apparent.
| eru wrote:
| > [...] while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of
| magnitudes less.
|
| Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is
| even starker.
| torginus wrote:
| It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's
| the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters,
| an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't
| really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a
| charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).
| londons_explore wrote:
| I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...
|
| Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom
| silicon. Then the mosfets and charge circuit could be on the
| same die. It could be mounted COB (black blob).
|
| They could probably use a single 'microphone' (pressure
| sensor) and determine which setting based on a photodiode.
|
| The PCB's could be replaced with a flex PCB which integrates
| the heating elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C,
| whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while).
| Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the
| PCB _inside_ the injection moulding machine for the cavities,
| eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks,
| and reducing part count
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant
| custom silicon
|
| Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts
| aren't much more.
|
| Putting high power electronics and analog into the same
| custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial.
| They're made on different processes.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But you need very very little digital logic... The same
| kind of quantity to do the little power indicator LED's
| on a battery bank (which are charlieplexed btw), and
| thats done in the same ASIC that also has the 5V boost
| power supply (multi-amp gnd isolated n type mosfet) and
| charge circuitry involving voltage references and laser
| tuned comparators, and sometimes negotiates USB-C PD as
| well (needs an internal ROM). And the whole thing needs
| to be really cheap _and_ with a standby current of uA 's.
|
| As long as you aren't interested in multi-Mhz operation,
| combining the rest at very low cost isn't too tricky.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| If simplicity is the goal, then sure: Maybe spinning up a
| custom part can become useful.
|
| But simplicity isn't always the goal. I have a throwaway
| vape here with a color LCD screen that plays full-motion
| animations.
|
| To be sure, that's not necessary at all. But this
| functionality does exist, and people do buy them.
|
| IIRC, they're said to use a 48MHz Cortex M0 part. More
| information here:
| https://github.com/ginbot86/ColorLCDVape-RE
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But you need very very little digital logic...
|
| Right, which they already get from a $0.01 MCU
|
| Combining an MCU and multi-amp power transistors into the
| same package is expensive.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I love the term "high power" even though we are talking
| maybe a watt or two when that bad boy's element is doing
| its thing!
|
| I mean relatively it absolutely is high power. The
| quiescent current on that thing has to be microamps...
|
| It's just funny because to me "high power" is hundreds or
| thousands of watts. Like an incandescent light bulb or a
| hair dryer. Or at least it was until I started tinkering
| with battery powered microcontrollers and doing math to
| realize exactly how long an 18650 might power a small
| strip of individually addressable LED's...
|
| "High power" is a very relative term :-)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Vape wattages are more like 15 watts, which is an awful
| lot for a battery smaller than the tip of your pinkie! I
| believe the power density (not energy density) of those
| batteries is market leading.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I love the term "high power" even though we are talking
| maybe a watt or two when that bad boy's element is doing
| its thing!
|
| Your estimate is 1-2 orders of magnitude too low. Small
| vapes pull a couple amps, as I understand it. Larger
| vapes can pull over 50-100W. The modded ones into the
| 200W range. These things can use more power than most
| CPUs for the brief moment they're on.
|
| The power draw is so high that vape fans compare and
| review batteries to show which ones can sustain the most
| power output.
|
| It's an unexpected boon for those of us who use batteries
| for other things: The vape craze has made more high
| current batteries available with a lot of user
| contributed test data.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The vape is disposable, no need for a charging circuit and
| maybe a simple ADC to determine battery life based on a
| discharge curve.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Apparently there is a charging circuit, because the battery
| will run out long before the fluid does
| tstrimple wrote:
| This is the brand I usually use. https://www.off-
| stamp.com
|
| It has a separate magnetically attached battery /
| charging unit. I have to charge 5-6 times per "tank"
| that's attached. The battery side also has a mini-led
| display showing animations and battery / juice left so
| it's actually communicating with the tank side. A kit
| with battery and tank runs me about $25, but the tank
| alone is about $20. So they add $5 to cover the battery /
| charging component. It's a vice, but at least with this
| brand I'm not throwing away batteries weekly.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I always felt those Off-Stamps were at least a bit better
| than other disposables since the battery portion was at
| least reusable.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz
| clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
|
| So, probably enough to land on the moon. And cheap enough to
| justify a dozen backups.
| wingtw wrote:
| idea for a hobby project for someone better versed in hw than
| me - create a computer that can at least run basic with the MCU
| from the disposable vape.. :)
| dionys wrote:
| first one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on
| youtube
| azornathogron wrote:
| Already been done.
| M95D wrote:
| Link?
| azornathogron wrote:
| Looks like I was probably wrong about this. There _are_ a
| lot of "doom running on a vape" videos on YouTube - very
| easy to find, that's what search is for - but the best
| primary source I could find quickly actually has doom
| running separately and the vape just being used as a
| display.
|
| Search for something like "doom on Puya PY32"
|
| https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-
| doom...
|
| https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
| evandrofisico wrote:
| Not doom, but (sorta) a website
| https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-
| dispo...
| rwmj wrote:
| The Z80 didn't even do 8 bit _add_. The ALU operates in two 4
| bit cycles.
|
| I am now wondering if it's possible to put a ZX81 emulator on
| one of these microcontrollers. It would need to emulate the Z80
| but you've got plenty of spare cycles, and 3x the ROM and RAM
| of the original, so enough space for a small emulator!
| zoobab wrote:
| "Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642,
| PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range"
|
| LCSC says between 6 and 8 cents in volume:
|
| https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5292058.html
|
| 500+ $ 0.0802 2,500+ $ 0.0727 5,000+ $ 0.0682"
| rm30 wrote:
| Nowsdays computers misguided us to think that we need to
| measure RAM in GB and storage in TB. There are a lot of
| "invisible" applications running on 8bit MCU (not ARM based and
| more modern than ZX80) and few kB of flash and a bunch of RAM
| (64 bytes in luxury models). In this context matter more the
| integrated peripherals like ADC, DAC, PWM, etc that simplify
| the complexity of board and reduce the total cost.
| jijijijij wrote:
| > What an amazing time we live in!
|
| I feel like, pioneers of the past would be rather disappointed
| with us.
|
| I mean, primarily we're not using this ridiculous power to
| solve actual problems, but to enslave one another in addiction,
| mindless consumption and manufactured consent to a lesser life.
|
| Almost 100 years later, now with computer enabled
| misinformation and agitation campaigns by tech oligarchs, a new
| fascism is on the rise and Alan Turing would be called an
| abomination, again.
| bartread wrote:
| This is exactly it. The tech in these sorts of devices is way
| overpowered for what they are or need simply because it's a lot
| cheaper to do it that way than it would be to use more
| appropriately scaled computing power. Either the "more
| appropriate" components are no longer in production, or they
| are in production but are now considered somewhat niche and are
| only produced in volumes that make them considerably more
| expensive than the more advanced/powerful options.
|
| So you end up with something that could probably be coaxed into
| running DOOM at playable FPS (if it had enough RAM and a
| display) relegated to running a humble - and frankly
| objectionably wasteful (coupled with questionable health
| outcomes with long term use) - disposable vape.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Something I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are
| small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables
| to handle protocol negotiation between devices.
|
| Given that the moon lander had a 1Mhz processor and 4kb of ram
| means we landed on the moon with the compute power of a Vape or
| USB cable. Wild times indeed.
| efields wrote:
| Wow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around
| PS49.95 as a kit (PS50) and PS69.95 assembled, making it
| incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair
| 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled)
|
| Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| For the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing
| dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing,
| battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's
| astonishing.
|
| It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the
| microphone.
| noman-land wrote:
| So who is going to make some mesh firmware for these and all
| other garbage computers?
| SecondChancemnd wrote:
| Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion
| cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the
| recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower
| required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting
| close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for
| stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater
| Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to
| know more: https://2ndchancemnd.com/
| jrmann100 wrote:
| Came to this thread to shout you guys out! I was super
| impressed by your presentation at Open Sauce 2025.
| 7e wrote:
| These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle
| schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone
| involved in making them can rot in hell.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| They're better than cigarettes, so they're the lesser evil.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I would argue that in the context of ops complaint they are
| worse.
| internetter wrote:
| You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost
| endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks.
| By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness?
| Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I
| assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this
| point all we can say is _probably_ better), but in the
| context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in
| an environmental context, of which I haven't really been
| convinced either way.
| willtemperley wrote:
| They're not. The list of drugs found in them is terrifying:
|
| https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439.
| ..
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine
| addiction doesn't ruin lives. Other than that it's marginally
| bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| Nicotine itself is carcinogenic in the mouth:
|
| > Nicotine in tobacco can form carcinogenic tobacco-specific
| nitrosamines through a nitrosation reaction. This occurs
| mostly in the curing and processing of tobacco. However,
| nicotine in the mouth and stomach can react to form
| N-nitrosonornicotine, a known type 1 carcinogen, suggesting
| that consumption of non-tobacco forms of nicotine may still
| play a role in carcinogenesis
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The dose in urine is 1-3% of that of cigarette smokers so
| it is a significant, order of magnitude decrease in risk
| based on the paper another GP has posted below. In the
| mouth the levels also seem to be an order of magnitude
| lower than cigarette smokers (though similar in a majority
| of cases). Those are relatively acceptable risks for a vice
| I would think.
| c_hagau wrote:
| As stated by a sibling comment, at least the carcinogenicity
| part isn't true. Unfortunately, even nicotine gum should be
| carcinogenic (and is of course not intended to be used for
| consumption besides of alleviating withdrawal effects).
|
| Presence of the Carcinogen N'-Nitrosonornicotine in Saliva of
| E-cigarette Users:
| <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00089>
| Findecanor wrote:
| Nicotine gets metabolised into several compounds within the
| human body which are carcinogenic, even if pure nicotine in
| itself isn't.
|
| Cancer risk is more complex than just carcinogens. Nicotine
| is known to promote the growth of existing cancer cells, and
| in multiple ways. A big thing with cancer that not many
| people are aware of is that we all have cancer cells, and get
| new cancer cells all the time -- but that the human immune
| system is _normally_ effective at detecting and killing them
| before they have multiplied too much. Old cancer mutations
| can lay dormant or kept in check for many years, but if
| promoted and /or the immune system gets stressed or
| suppressed, they'd grow and you'd "get cancer".
|
| Different types of E-juice also contain additives for
| flavour, and we still don't yet know the long-term effects of
| some of those -- when ingested _as vape_ -- which is a
| different to being swallowed. And by long-term, I mean 20
| years or more, which in some cases is the time a cancer cell
| can take from formation to detectable tumour.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a
| Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the
| pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking
| around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?
| michelb wrote:
| Indeed: https://futurism.com/neoscope/vape-tamagotchi-interview
| kochikame wrote:
| I think you might be joking but OK, I'll respond like you're
| serious as this is HN.
|
| You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
| xigoi wrote:
| They're making a prediction, not a value judgement.
| teleforce wrote:
| Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape
| is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette,
| pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no
| small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI,
| for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.
| nxobject wrote:
| After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an
| Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their
| pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
|
| https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
| zk wrote:
| In 40 more years I wonder what the equivalent of "same specs in a
| disposable vape as home computer from 80's" will be
| willtemperley wrote:
| Cyberpunk is real.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| And they have little displays on them, OLED displays which show
| the battery life and remaining fluid.
| fithisux wrote:
| Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact.
|
| Use regular vapes with e-juice
| Findecanor wrote:
| It upsets me that disposable vapes are not more prohibited.
| Where I live I often find vapes discarded in parks and other
| areas where they can be a fire hazard.
| fithisux wrote:
| here in Greece you find it everywhere. I personally use the
| traditional e-juice vape to minimize waste.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery
| and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can
| be refilled but nobody ever does?
|
| It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a
| vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the
| addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of
| it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation
| of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it.
| Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It
| really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.
|
| In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do
| wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people
| use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage
| reuse if so.
| dduvnjak wrote:
| It's both disposable and rechargeable. It has to be
| rechargeable as the battery doesn't contain enough capacity for
| the total amount of juice that's stored in them. E.g. a vape
| could have 10k puffs of juice, but the battery only lasts for
| ~2k of puffs so you have to recharge it about 5 times until the
| juice runs out. But once it runs out, there's no way to refill
| the juice so they get discarded. I remember when these USB-C
| vapes originally came out, we were joking that vapes got USB-C
| before the iPhone did.
| kombine wrote:
| What a waste of precious resources
| blauditore wrote:
| Can it run Doom?
|
| Also, it's fun to imagine someone building whole racks of these
| (e.g. recycled ones) for a computation farm. Or a cheap home
| server, whatever.
| concats wrote:
| > Can it run Doom?
|
| Yes, there are even videos showing it on youtube.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| Someone reversed a vape that contains a Puya Microcontroller.
| https://github.com/grahamwhaley/py32c642_vape
| psychoslave wrote:
| It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning
| with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on
| public area is not that different from the one who would
| diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to
| enjoy analysis of the device.
| haritha-j wrote:
| This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article
| imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about,
| what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would
| love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very
| strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart.
| Inspirational!
| charlzee wrote:
| There's a rotating mouthpiece apparently
| https://vaping360.com/vape-products/fizzy-max-iii-6in1/
|
| I also found it interesting that the mouthpiece position would
| be detected with microphones rather than any other electronic
| sensors.
| haritha-j wrote:
| That's such an interesting design choice. Very curious why
| they went with the mic approach. maybe because it was already
| there to sense sucking anyway.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| The "interesting design choices" in these things knows no
| bounds... I recently came across one that had a glitter
| snow globe built into the side of it. Well, more of a snow
| hemisphere, but still so absurd.
| boredumb wrote:
| A few years ago I saw a vape with a full display that played a
| pac man clone aside from the state and settings, and now I have a
| drawer of random vape screens and components that I swear i'm
| going to use one of these years.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health
| benefits.
|
| My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have
| outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I
| hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids.
| This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance.
|
| But disposables? Ban that shit
| xandrovich wrote:
| The issue is that when legislation comes in regarding
| "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making
| the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for
| others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.
|
| The issue is that to the end user this is still tangibly the
| same product - and mostly gets treated in much the same way as
| the original "disposable" vapes.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Have you seen the list of substances found in these things?
|
| https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
| willtemperley wrote:
| I would dearly love to know why I get downvoted for providing
| concrete evidence of serious problems with controlled drugs
| in vapes.
| floro wrote:
| You get downvoted because you're implying substances like
| methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked
| article), which it obviously is not, and already highly
| illegal.
|
| The truth is you can mix your own vape juice from just PG, VG
| and nicotine. Which are completely harmless to eat (except
| nicotine) and used in food products. A more rational
| discussion would be about if _inhaling_ PG and VG is harmful
| to the lungs, or the additional unregulated stuff you find in
| flavoring of vape juice.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Unfortunately the legal vape market acts as a cover for the
| illegal vape market. Vapes containing cannabinoids and
| other drugs are sold in shops.
|
| I fully support banning these things. It's impossible to
| regulate effectively without.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The rechargable vapes just get disposed anyway.
| barnacs wrote:
| I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy
| housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and
| juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils
| you built. Those things would last forever.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Until people started launching them into the ceiling...
| kleene_op wrote:
| Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced
| alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact
| that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks
| for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the
| capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the
| transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into
| redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized
| hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the
| distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal
| computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn
| to satisfy your monkey brain.
|
| It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to
| satisfy it's primitive needs.
| lonetripper wrote:
| And yet it utterly fails to satisfy these needs in a real way
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It's interesting that this is where your mind goes on an
| unrelated bit of content.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 3% of the internet is complaining that 20% of the internet is
| porn.
|
| --source, my butt.
| ivm wrote:
| In the past, entire intercontinental trade routes existed just
| to get food seasoned, so what you're pointing out isn't that
| unusual. The desire for sensual pleasures drives most things
| (and not only in humans).
| kowbell wrote:
| Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk
| food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very
| smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you
| hooked on them.
|
| IMO this is as much a "we are hopelessly dumb monkeys who just
| want to satisfy ourselves" as as it is "there's clever monkeys
| who know and exploit our monkey weaknesses so they can make
| more money."
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while
| now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate
| rewards from using computer technology in ways that many
| people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or
| exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never
| imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I
| know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more
| resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so
| exploitation is in their tool box.
|
| I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies
| would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the
| past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be
| intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community,
| but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling
| factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation
| of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale,
| all of it... It's too much for people to really track
| anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many
| cases.
|
| All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people
| are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is
| arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are
| certainly others.
| chamomeal wrote:
| I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil
| fuels. Like why is it profitable to
|
| - build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear
| down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell
| it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean
| instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?
|
| To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an
| energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it
| just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most
| of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that
| constraint was just blown the fuck off.
|
| I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy.
| We attribute so much progress to things like science and
| democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much
| of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??
| mrheosuper wrote:
| I just dont understand disposable vape. It's very easy to convert
| one into "reuseable": Add a charging port, a cheap li-po charger
| ic, some mechanism to let user refill the boiler. Disposeable
| vape should have not existed at first place
| rantallion wrote:
| Given the environmental impact of disposable vapes (the
| littering was _awful_ ), some places have already implemented
| bans. The UK's ban came into force June 2025.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Disposable vape should have not existed at first place
|
| When herbal vapes for cannabis came in around 5-10 years ago,
| it was the catalyst that started all this. Pax are the main
| manufacturer of these disposable vapes and one of the first on
| the scene to push THC following with nicotine. These were
| originally expensive, bulky and seen as an luxury item. I
| bought one, an DeVinci Ascent, I loved it.
|
| I used it to hide that I was smoking cannabis from my parents
| and all the opportunities to walk the families dog and get high
| were wasted by playing CS:S and getting high. Teenage-hood for
| you.
|
| Coil driven vapes are a different ball-game. Require actual
| human intervention and know-how. They are refillable in a
| sensible way, coils need replacing and I've seen some very cool
| rigs.
|
| A USB port is pointless if you know that the user isn't going
| to refill the cart. If you can produce the device cheaply and
| not get taxed for the environmental waste. Add the R&D costs,
| additional safety, additional materials for the tank. What do
| you do with the now empty toxic tank? There are additional
| costs for stocking vape shops to refill the liquid. The latter
| is a more sustainable business option than the former.
|
| They know the playbook. They would much prefer for you to be
| out with mates, stop off at a newsagents, pick up some chemical
| brain-rotting Dragon Soup and grab an elf-bar. Act like a twat
| outside of the venue and then throw it on the ground. Anything
| to do with vaping is foul-play. The Alcohol biz is tightly
| knitted with the vape/smoking biz.
|
| Disposable also gives you plausible deniability. They get in
| trouble, close up shop. Relabel their brand and start again.
| reisse wrote:
| Some of them (actually most of them where I live) are
| rechargeable, they're not refillable and you can't change the
| atomizer (wick and coil). And the most expensive part of the
| vape is the tax on nicotine liquid, so there is little sense to
| hassle with wicks and refills.
| st_goliath wrote:
| A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable
| vapes, in case someone's interested:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+
|
| Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled
| over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC
| channel.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Not great from a hygiene perspective given they never show it
| being sterilised after the manual check.
| forinti wrote:
| It's not that surprising that a company that sells these
| awful gadgets to people who don't really care about their own
| health would behave in such a manner.
| csomar wrote:
| That's much less automated than I would have thought. Also the
| dude vape testing the sticks... I don't think they are aware
| they are probably doing more damage than good.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| lol, at 0:15 someone is literally testing the vapes with their
| mouth. I hope they don't do that all day long
|
| Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them
| kubb wrote:
| It's hard to know for sure what's acceptable when it comes to
| working conditions in China. The information we get is
| incredibly limited. Most of what makes it through is
| propaganda.
|
| That said, it wouldn't surprise me if he does it all day
| long, 6 days per week.
| akersten wrote:
| They are, there's a video on YouTube you can find where they
| interview someone with that job and they test 10,000 a day.
| Then they mention that they go home and vape some more
| goodpoint wrote:
| I haven't seen one in years, are they still legal?
| heckelson wrote:
| I can't believe this things even have microphones in them! That's
| a crazy amount of tech just to end up as e-waste.
| bborud wrote:
| Probably because the cost of adding it is low. If you already
| have an I2S capable MCU then adding a microphone is fairly low
| hanging fruit.
| bborud wrote:
| This shouldn't be surprising since a vape is a safety critical
| device. Primarily because the temperature control has to be
| precise and you have to solve a surprisingly large number of
| control problems that can arise in real life. For instance, if
| you overshoot the temperature the amount of toxic by-products can
| increase sharply. You can also cause parts of the vape to
| disintegrate, and then aspirate things you really do not want in
| your lungs.
|
| And this is before we get into dealing with the battery -- which
| has its own set of risks.
|
| (One of the early sources of funding for MyNewt development was a
| company that made vapes. Though not disposable ones if I remember
| correctly).
|
| Also, the MCUs they use are very cheap. They are cheaper than
| having lots of specialized discrete electronics.
| f311a wrote:
| I think you overestimate how much vape companies care about
| safety. When there is no liquid left, you just vape smoke from
| burning cotton (it tastes like burned plastic) on half of these
| devices. There are checks for this, but they are not that good.
| bborud wrote:
| I'm sure most don't care more than regulations require them
| to care (including making tradeoffs in terms of risks of
| getting caught, and the chance of actual enforcement). But
| that doesn't change the fact that it is a safety-critical
| device. It produces something that interfaces directly with
| sensitive tissues.
|
| I talked to someone who worked on developing vapes and they
| spent much, if not most, of their engineering on safety-
| related issues. They may be an outlier. The reason I remember
| is because I was surprised how dangerous these devices really
| are if you get things wrong.
|
| As a software engineer with some hardware experience, I would
| never use a vape. It strikes me as way too risky. Much for
| the reason you point out: the companies probably don't care
| more than they are forced to by regulations.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| I'd love to see a breakdown of the design and whether or not
| any of these vapes have any Safety Critical Function
| considerations, or if they just rely on the mcu for everything
| and have a ton of single fault risks.
| qoez wrote:
| It being activated by microphones makes me think you could add
| speakers to this tiny format and make a tiny digital instrument
| that's influenced by blow intensity etc.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Suck.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| It feels like we've turned every physical object into a
| distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a
| failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute
| just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for
| decades, except now it can also crash.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I to wait for the deposable vape robotic uprising.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| It's hard to take these vape teardowns seriously when they call
| Propyleenglycol, nictotine salts, and flavors "poison".
|
| It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.
| MarginalGainz wrote:
| It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are
| effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of
| complexity and lithium every week.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| Amazing that they use a microphone array to sense the position of
| the suction.
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| I can't believe these are legal, especially in countries that
| supposedly care a lot about the environment and where people are
| even quite annoying about, for example, only using the "Eco Mode"
| on household appliances (also known as the "won't clean your
| dishes" mode, "won't clean your clothes properly" mode...)
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Run your hot water for a few mins prior to turning on your
| washing machine - makes a hell of a difference, everything else
| being equal.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Slightly deranged but serious question: what vape would be the
| easiest to convert/Frankenstein it into a Meshtastic node?
| brk wrote:
| Alternate take: Is this really "a ridiculous amount of tech", or
| just "how things are today"?
|
| At one point in history aluminum and other alloys were considered
| pretty cutting edge. As was in-house electricity and plumbing.
| Now, those things are just everyday stuff that gets no special
| regard.
|
| When you can build disposable computers at scale for pennies, it
| might not be "tech" anymore in the sense of cutting edge things,
| and instead it's just "an average Tuesday".
| pornel wrote:
| Both are true. Today we get a ridiculous amount of tech for
| <$1.
|
| ESP32 has a compute power of a PC from the early '90s (it can
| run Quake!), in addition to having wireless connectivity you
| couldn't even buy back then.
| d--b wrote:
| It's beyond ridiculous, it's rechargeable but not refillable. As
| if a silicon tap was more difficult to design than a USB charging
| port.
| barnas2 wrote:
| I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available
| recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen,
| could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The
| other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic
| games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them
| apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware.
| Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at
| the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC.
| It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit,
| and a microprocessor for like $12.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Such terrible waste of technology and environmental resources.
| Gotta be a better way. Maybe no vaping and some sort of paper
| patches instead?
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| In the 70s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera included a disposable
| battery in every film pack. After 10 shots, you threw away both
| it and the plastic film case with its large metal spring
| mechanism. When the film production stopped in the late 00s, you
| could use 600 film designed for other polaroid bodies reloaded
| into a 779 native SX70 cartridge, because the battery would last
| much longer than the initial 10 shots.
| slicktux wrote:
| There's more computing power in a disposable vape than in the
| Apollo Guidance Computer???
| cousinbryce wrote:
| Yes, but there's exponentially less talent on the engineering
| team
| lionkor wrote:
| That is a lot! But that's also an expensive vape, with way more
| tech than cheap ones. Here you can get one for ~10 Euro, and they
| are NOT rechargeable or anything.
| le-mark wrote:
| Does anyone remember when e-cigarettes first came out and they
| were intended to be a stop smoking aid? That didn't last long!
| dml2135 wrote:
| What do you mean? Smoking rate have certainly declined since
| vapes have been a thing.
| Lapsa wrote:
| this is a minor reason I like disposable vapes - have seen myself
| teenagers tinkering with them. has potential to teach a lot
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| I have used these disposable vapes before, and it saddens me that
| so much tech (including those batteries!) are just thrown away.
| Like what ever happened to reducing e-waste.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Reminds me of a website that's hosted on a disposable vape:
| https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
| markstos wrote:
| I found a discarded working vape that had a complete working game
| system (screen with controls) built-in... a very attractive
| package to small kids.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I knew it was vapor ware.
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