As a fellow CPAP user, I did raise an eyebrow when I learned of the existence of vaporizers as a marijuana consumption device, because some of them do bear a striking resemblance to a CPAP (especially when one considers the humidifier).

(I discovered these because of a jargon intersection between the marijuana users that prefer these devices and e-cigarette users, as e-cig consumption is typically referred to as "vaping." Nothing quite like trawling through Twitter data to get a handle on discussion of e-cigs, and finding, instead, a picture of a dimebag and what looks like a CPAP with design aesthetics from 1973 that has a plastic bag hung onto the filter exhaust for some reason.)

Oh, it wasn't for personal use; it was for work. I'm a public health policy economist, and a lot of my work is on tobacco/nicotine policy. (And, believe you me, there is a lot of policy interest in e-cigarettes.)

There's a couple of e-cig lobbying groups out there, although they don't have a ton of money behind them. Also, Big Tobacco is buying into e-cigs in a major way, either by buying up an established brand (Blu) or developing their own, and they're supportive of regulation. That's both because they'll take anything they can get that improves their public image, and so they can erect barriers to entry so that the tiny little basement/garage e-cig businesses won't be able to stay in the market.

So, hypothetically speaking, (a) is it even possible to get a group of three or four people hanging out on the street puffing on vaporizers, like you do with burning death-sticks (great turn of phrase there, btw), and (b) if they did, what would it be like to stand downwind of them?

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I regularly 'attend' a local vape store - I hang out, answer questions, make clouds of vapor, and use the opportunity (and their work table and excellent lighting!) to maintenance, clean, and even develop vaping hardware. Recently, we were talking about... I think it was stardrives and the usefulness thereof as weapons, actually. When a nice young lady came in with her dog. Her ancient, tiny, fluffball chihuahua variant dog. The dog spent about a half hour cruising around scoring pets and love, and having a grand old time.

Think about it. Those horrible little rat dogs tend to just pop if they encounter bad air - their physical endurance is drastically lessened by the crude techniques we have used to produce them. They're like canaries, and this critter didn't mind at all.

Now, real data aside, it'd be a minor irritant. Propylene Glycol has been used in its vapor form for years, in fog machines and as aerosol disinfectants. There's a minor chance you may have an unpleasant reaction to a particular flavor, sure. But the same could be said for perfume. Or deodorant.

It can be toxic, but only in stupidly large amounts (or somewhat less stupidly large if you drink it, urinate, and then drink your urine, so that you're ingesting the metabolite that's actually deleterious, but I think if you're doing that you probably have larger problems to worry about, if you're capable of worrying at that point). It's used in many medicines as a stabilizer and to slow systemic uptake (so that, for example, that Nyquil hits you over the course of a few hours rather than all at once).

That said, there's clinical evidence that it's not quite as safe for the lungs as it is for ingestion. For example, it's also used as a stabilizer in house paints, and there's been cases where it's induced an asthma attack in children sleeping in freshly painted rooms with poor ventilation (so don't let your kids vape -- here in NC, it's now illegal to buy or sell e-cigs or e-liquid to people under 18, in fact). There's been observed, documented temporary decreases in lung function as a direct result of vaping, although it appears to abate fairly quickly after one finishes the vaping session (so don't vape while exercising). And, most recently, there are some studies, based on early longitudinal results, which suggest that there's long-term harm in vaping. Unfortunately, I haven't read those studies yet, nor do I have the reference to hand here at home -- I'll see if I can dig out the link once I get into the office, and if I have the time today I'll try to read up on it.

The other risk is that, with no regulations in place to control content or labeling of e-liquid, there's some potential danger there, depending on where you buy and who you buy from. There's no guarantee that any given batch is safe to consume, or that the stated nicotine content is accurate (at least, not on a federal level; I don't know all the state laws).

With all of the above said, it's almost certainly less bad than smoking or chewing tobacco.

"... I don't wanna sell ya death-sticks."

"You want to go home and rethink your life."

"I'm gonna go home and rethink my life."

-- One of the vanishingly few funny bits in the Star Wars prequels that is intentionally funny.

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"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

OK, so you've taken me aside to prove you're not racial profiling and informed me that if I put anything down, it will be confiscated and I'll be arrested. Then you tell me to present my hands. What, exactly am I supposed to do with the crying toddler in one hand and the freaked out preschooler in the other?

Apparently, I'm supposed to shut up and comply.

I don't fly much anymore. Too much trouble.

There's a passage in one of Bill Bryson's books (Neither Here nor There, I think) in which he is unable to cash a traveler's check in Norway or someplace, because his traveler's checks say "Bill Bryson" on them and his passport says he is "William McGuire Bryson".

(Do they even make traveler's checks any more? I remember using them aeons ago, but, I mean, even my father has an ATM card that can pretend it's a Visa now, and he's the kind of guy who wouldn't buy a car with power windows if they still made cars without them. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I believe so, but that's partly because some countries (and I mean developed economies, like Japan) are very cash-centric and aren't very big on plastic (be it credit or debit). You can still use an ATM, of course, since they're all then relevant networks (when I visited Singapore many years ago, I just hit up an ATM to pay for most things), although, in Japan, they're kind of pathological about that, too (like, it can be a challenge just to find an ATM that's open outside of Mon-Sat business hours, in some places).

What possible business reason is there for turning an *A*TM outside business hours? Does the imp have to go home for dinner?

S.

Take it with appropriate sodium chloride, as I'm relating what other people have relayed to me, but my understanding is this: they tend to be in places like the entrance vestibule of a bank, i.e., between the inner and outer doors, and both sets of doors are locked outside business hours. Here's a blog post discussing it, and another one attributing it to make-work and fear of technology. In fact, once you're outside of Tokyo, Japan tends towards a level of low-tech that's completely at odds with its international image as a place of ubiquitous vending machines that sell anything you might imagine, cell phones that do everything short of walking the dog, and so forth. Another blog post detailing this, mentioning that, where the author lives, the ATMs stay open until 9 PM.