Last I checked, nicotine isn't carcinogenic. It's the tobacco that kills you. Or, at least, there isn't enough research yet to say that nicotine alone is harmful enough.
So I may be playing devil's advocate here, but isn't this a net improvement over the last few decades? Kids getting hooked on something that's significantly less deadly? It's not ideal, sure, but it's better than a slew of cancer epidemics.
> Kids getting hooked on something that's significantly less deadly? It's not ideal, sure, but it's better than a slew of cancer epidemics.
The whole point is that these are kids who wouldn't be using nicotine products at all. Smoking rates have declined in the US over the last 40 years, and yet there's been an uptick in youth nicotine usage since the introduction of e-cigarettes.
So when talking about youth usage, no, this is clearly not an improvement, by any measure.
> If we don't block the consumption of caffeine in youths, why should we block the consumption of nicotine - a compound with similar effects?
i.e. Why is nicotine so much worse than THC, alcohol, caffeine, guarana, or any number of other stimulants/depressants?
Alcohol and THC are both already restricted to adults. Caffeine is restricted as well, in that many places won't sell caffeine pills to people under 18.
Nobody is talking about preventing kids from buying tomatoes. But when we're talking about concentrated and extracted forms of a stimulant... those are already heavily restricted.
The actual numbers matter. Suppose vaping is 20% as harmful as smoking, and out of every 100 children, the availability of e-cigarettes causes 5 to switch from smoking to vaping and 5 others to start vaping who wouldn't have started smoking. That would be a substantial improvement.
Maybe only tangentially related, but Michael Pollan's recent book about psychedelics "How To Change Your Mind" goes in-depth on this. There's something about being able to quiet the "default mode network" that lends the mind to transcendental/creative thought. The same effect can be achieved through meditation or breathwork.
i'd bet that proto-beer and proto-bread appeared around the same time, and techniques were developed over generations to calibrate different recipes until they resembled what we might recognize as "beer" and "bread" today.
One theory was nascent in the 70's, but the Freudian bullshit was the age of an old man by then, and the demon possession idiocy was millenia old. We still have remarkably bad effectiveness on the drugs and therapies, so there will come new theories and they will, hopefully, be better in turn.
> In most other contexts we encounter, stuffing an adjective in there means "NOT".
I think that's less a comment on grammar and more about how there's a tendency to name stuff that is similar to other stuff, yet markedly different, in oxymoronic ways. For example:
To me, none of those on their own, without context are oxymoronic. Yes, their meaning is often stretched without that being realized by the speaker, but at the same time they have a useful baseline meaning.
Recently finished The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte and How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. I would have been embarrassed to have been caught reading the latter given the subject matter, despite how influential he's been on how I think about food, but it was a real insightful treat.
Currently reading The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South and Safe Area Goražde, a comic book about the Bosnian War.
Also reading Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy in between books, but that's a book I'll never really finish.
The cynic in me believes that as much as those family members may hate the state or elder care, they much prefer it to the alternative, ie having their relatives move in with them and taking care of them themselves.
1. Leafy greens don't need pollination. It's in your best interest to avoid flowering if you want product anyone will eat.
2. Very few food plants are dioecious, and the ones that are (like asparagus and dates) are either ones where the fruit don't matter or are not likely to be grown indoors
While #1 (and your general point) is correct monoecious crops still have to be pollinated if the product is a fruit or seed. The stone fruits for instance are monoecious with male and female parts of flower on same plant unlike marijuana or dates where plants are either male of female. But this isn't leaf crops as you mention.
In some species pollination occurs generally just with wind or movement (rather than insects), for example corn where the pollen falls down from flowers above onto the silks which are the female portion (sort of a vaginal canal if you will, i.e for every corn seed there is an attached silk). Or tomatoes which have closed flower and generally always self pollinate as the flower is blown or shaken with a very small amount of cross pollination on occasion. Pretty cools setup with these type of plants, massive reproductive efficiency through mostly self pollination but a little bit of crossing occurs as the occasional foreign grain of pollen gets from another plant so there is genetic variation.
You're right.. It's not some kind of laborious process though. Having grown all these things (except corn) hydroponically, the problem is heavily overstated. For personal production, you basically have to do nothing. For commercial production, you could turn on a fan.
I can attest to this. I've struggled with anxiety/depression/insomnia/adhd for years, and over the past couple years I've learned that careful attention to exercise, diet, and sleep are the most reliable ways I can ensure a healthy baseline.
I used to run a couple miles in the morning and evenings, on streets, until I injured my leg. So I switched to hiking after my leg recovered. Short 2-3 mile hikes turned into 12 mile stretches, which turned into short trail runs, and now I'm running 5-6 miles of trails 2x a week and 12+ mile runs/hikes on weekends (I'm secretly training for an ultra). I'd always thought I'd hate running, because it was too strenuous or something, but I haven't looked back. Maybe I'm just literally running away from my problems, but, it's far more rewarding in any case.
So I may be playing devil's advocate here, but isn't this a net improvement over the last few decades? Kids getting hooked on something that's significantly less deadly? It's not ideal, sure, but it's better than a slew of cancer epidemics.
What is the FDA trying to achieve?