A measure of the market's perception of the threat to Meta from these lawsuits. The uncertainty is over now, so the price goes back up.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
There isn't some magical switch that's flipped on your 18th birthday where you suddenly be pragmatic and make rational decisions. Even into your 20s, your brain is still developing. My mother is in her 60s and addicted to facebook and tiktok. It takes significant willpower to overcome addictions for most people. The brain of an 18 year old addicted to social media is mashing the "do the feel good thing" button just the same as a 17 year old.
I'd prefer facebook to not give away free drugs to the drug addicts.
Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.
A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.
A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.
Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.
I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.
The state already tells adults what content they can consume. Truth in advertising laws, pornography restrictions, MPAA ratings and age restrictions, pirated media, and so on. Even with a default of freedom of speech, the state has numerous subsidy/financial-penalty mechanisms by which it can and does restrict what content is practically available for consumption.
The state already restricts what adults do on their phones. You can't buy drugs or look at CSAM. You can't use your phone while driving or operating dangerous machinery. You can't install apps which facilitate piracy. You can't wipe your phone when the state lawfully requests it from you. The list goes on.
Are you saying that because laws exist, and it’s illegal to break the law while using your phone, that is therefore justification for making it illegal to scroll on social media for longer than an hour each day?
Only if we make sure it applies to your HN social media time. After all, we wouldn’t want you to get too used to your own freedom and autonomy. We must remind you that random people like me must consent to you doing what you want with a social media platform!
Market cap is generally the wrong measure. If you registered asf1254 Inc., and it was always just you, and it traded like Meta stocks trade, then "asf1254 Inc." would have a market cap ~6.2× whatever you're currently earning.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The sibling comment, talking about Schrödinger, is correct for the wrong reason.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
What % of META (shares) are owned by Meta Platforms Inc.?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
That's like a court ordering 10% of your home be put on the market in a way that never forces you to pay rent, when you're likely to live in it for the rest of your life.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
> it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
> And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
Only to children? What about adults? Yes, I know we are supposed to be more responsible, but this things are made to be addicted and you don't realize until it is too late.
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
If you inhale the smoke, it's quite irrelevant whether smoking an industrial cigarette, pipe or a hand-crafted cigar without additives. You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough. Smoke is always carcinogenic.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
I don't smoke, but when I've talked to smokers a lot of it is about the ritual. Filling the pipe, cutting and smelling the cigar, or removing the cigarette from the pack, tapping it, lighting it up, the taste and smell of the smoke, it's all part of it not just the nicotine.
That’s not true. The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%, not “probably” (somewhere between 15 and 30 times higher risk than a non-smoker).
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
> By age 80y, an estimated 48.3% of current-smokers (41.1% never-smokers) will develop cancer, and 14% will develop lung cancer [0]
"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".
Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.
OP said: “You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough”.
That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.
That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.
You're not wrong about smoke always being bad--there's a reason American Spirits have to have a disclaimer about "additive-free" not meaning healthier. Tobacco takes up alpha emitters from the soil and leaves them in your body--never good.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
Fun fact: the stress that smoking cigarettes relieves is only the stress caused by the addiction/relapse from nicotine. Surely, there might be some placebo effects going on, but nicotine is not a stress relieving chemical.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
Zyn is freebase nicotine which does show some signs of being performance enhancing; mostly around focus. There are a lot of people with unmedicated ADHD self-medicating with Zyn, or vapes, or smoking due to the this.
>Vaping is not healthy but there is a lot less material inhaled. No fine particles which do real damage.
Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.
Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.
If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!
>You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.
I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.
Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.
It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.
Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.
My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").
That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.
Im not confused. A lot of the context you are inferring is just in your mind.
It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.
We don't actually know that yet. The main studies are still ongoing, because this tends to be the kind of thing you measure over decades, and we haven't had those yet.
Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?
We don't know.
We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.
Smoking's harms are observable in the short term! You don't need long-term longitudinal studies to show smoking is bad. And we have known mechanisms for that harm that relate to combustion. We know mechanically that vapes are not combusting plant material, and we also don't see the same kinds of obvious harms in the short term. It takes willful blindness to the ills of smoking to suggest that vaping might be as harmful or more harmful than smoking.
It takes "wilful blindness" to suggest vaping can be understood completely today.
We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.
I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.
So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!
I suspect (anecdote) vaping is just as bad if not worse. People vape EVERYWHERE. Almost any place you can't smoke, people still vape. So - that it happens that way makes me think the total exposure is a lurking problem.
I just bought a $50 Android phone, quad core, 8GB RAM, 1 year of mobile service (albeit limited, but free WiFi is everywhere).
Have all the age restriction you want. A kid goes into the store with their lunch money (a few days worth) and they have a valid phone number and an unrestricted device.
Everything requires ID to use? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I agree.
Interesting point. Clear and visible warnings similar to tabacco and gambling websites (at least here in NZ) would be great. A clear and explicit call out of the dangers and a direct link on how to get help would be a good place to start.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.
I dunno, I kinda feel they have to pay the price for governments not having applicable regulations on this kinda stuff.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
So what should the law be? Don't be negligent? Don't be reckless? It already functions that way. Do we need to have statutes expressly dictating what people are allowed to do?
Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)
And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
Maybe, but I'm not sure how that might work. Meta was being sued by states in federal court, here--not the federal government. Is the theory that they would have paid more in penalties had not the White House pressured the federal court in Oakland (who aren't necessarily nominated by/beholden to Trump) to reject bigger demands from the plaintiffs? Or is the theory that the White House influenced the plaintiffs' (states) lawyers to offer/accept smaller settlements than they would have otherwise? Or that the White House pressured Meta to accept a larger settlement when they ordinarily would have fought more (in which case, I don't understand what Meta gets: they lose this case and then you theorize they'll help manipulate elections in favor of the group that forced the loss)?
> Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands...and your plan is to blackmail this person? [pauses, smiles] Good luck.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
The other article says: "OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade" [1]
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
Exactly. Meta basically got out of this without any meaningful penalty or deterant for the future. Paid out to the 50 states, it only averages $36M a year per state. I can't believe all of the state AGs signed on for this no-op.
The pain inflicted is way worse than the cash. They now must make teens have aggressive time limits and time of day boundaries. Meta knows this means teens will leave forever to competitors and never come back as they age. That is a death sentence for them unless they can somehow convince their competitors to follow suit. I kind of hope the competitors laugh and watch Meta burn. Then each get sued to the same end individually.
Except that the settlement includes making YouTube and TikTok implement the same stuff. The settlement amount stops by a third if the states don’t make their competition make the same changes.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
What more are you looking for?
Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.
A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.
A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.
Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.
I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.
> You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already does that.
Initially read this as "can't install apps which facilitate privacy."
And that was before I got to your next sentence . . .
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
The point is "Market cap is BS".
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
Diluting existing shareholders by 10% would send a much stronger message than whatever's happening now.
The shareholders already can't remove Zuckerberg, he has 57% of voting control.
And by diluting all shareholders it depresses the price in the future.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
So was Tesla until it wasn't: https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2024/06/1...
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
First, that would be communism, and second, what would the government be able to use that for?
That would be news to all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
> what would the government be able to use that for?
Even if the government didn't have such a fund, it could sell all the shares at once. Or slowly over time.
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".
Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.33685
That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.
That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
It probably can't be eliminated completely, but if they slowly make it illegal for young people to start the habit it can be reduced
So vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters.
Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.
Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.
If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!
Also proof that people did die from respiratory failure due to propylene glycol inhaling?
You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.
I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.
Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.
It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.
Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.
My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").
That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.
I hope I've cleared up your confusion.
It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.
Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?
We don't know.
We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.
We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.
I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.
So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!
I saw way more smoking 10-20 years ago. All have quit now.
I see a good amount vape but rarely see cigarettes these days
What country?
In a lot of the US, smoking sections still existed in restaurants then.
Just checked my home town, some bans were enacted in 2014 and existing restaurants and bars are still grandfathered in!
For the 11-15 group as a whole it dropped from 11% to 1.2%
Vaping in that 11-15 group was 5% in 2023
So combined smoking and vaping in young people halved from 11% in 2000 to 6% in 2023, almost all of which is vaping
https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Youth-Smoking-Fact-Sheet.pdf
https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-...
The business model, incentives, and practices that led them down this road? No, those don't need to change.
Have all the age restriction you want. A kid goes into the store with their lunch money (a few days worth) and they have a valid phone number and an unrestricted device.
Everything requires ID to use? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I agree.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
They literally don’t care.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
Tiktok and YouTube are going to cannibalize Meta.
For rich people, fines are just the price of doing things