What does everyone think of Clive Palmer?
The TV ads are just cringe inducing, and the mute button is used a lot when they come on.
Now he's using the US term "fake media" in one of his ads and said he got voted a living national treasure.
Oh my in what universe is he a living national treasure?
So he seriously thinks he will win something in the next election? Imagine him as PM eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkk
The article is called "The US vaping flavour ban: twenty things you should know". The below segment belongs to the 18th part. Link to the whole thing here
Perverse and chaotic consequences
As with any prohibition, a flavour ban will not in fact ‘clear the market of flavoured e-cigarettes’, it will provoke a series of market and consumer responses, some of which may cause more harm than good. There are 14 million adult vapers in the United States and they have so far attracted little official attention or political concern, but it is important to ask: what will they do?
The likely consequences include:
- The closure of thousands of small to medium-sized businesses (vape stores and manufacturers) as the products they make and sell are predominantly flavoured. Many of these also provide a market-based supportive service to smokers wishing to take up vaping as an alternative to smoking. Analysis by consultants John Dunham & Company found that in 2018, the US e-cigarette industry created $24.46 billion in economic activity, supported 166,007 jobs (direct, indirect and induced) and consisted of 380 liquid manufacturers, 2,012 vape shop manufacturers and 11,469 specialist retail outlets (“vape stores”). flavored See court testimony of John Dunham.
- A transfer of the supply of flavoured products from legitimate American businesses to highly professional consumer-facing Chinese internet-based suppliers
- The development of a new and flourishing black market in flavored nicotine e-liquids manufactured by amateurs, opportunists, and criminal enterprise;
- Migration of users to the existing unregulated sub-culture of DIY mixing of nicotine and food flavours;
- Vapers or dual users may revert to smoking or the use of other tobacco products and current smokers who would otherwise switch to vaping in the future may remain as smokers;
- Some may switch to tobacco flavoured e-liquids (as we discussed, this experience is nothing like smoking);
- Some may quit vaping and smoking altogether (though may increase other risk behaviors).
Title says it all.
I probably won't build these guys anyways, but I would love to know what you guys thinkabout these characters and their new exclusive weapons. Are they good? Are they okay? Or are they still bad? Discuss.
My name is Clive Page and I am a Professor of Pharmacology at King’s College London and Director of the Sackler Institute of Pulmonary Pharmacology, King’s College London. I have spent my career working on understanding why people have asthma and other inflammatory diseases of the lung. I have also been very interested in the treatment of these diseases and have been involved in the discovery and development of a new drug for the treatment of asthma and COPD (smokers disease), RPL554, which is currently in clinical trials.
I recently gave the 81st Stephen Paget Memorial Lecture about the role animals have played in the development of medicines to treat asthma.
I have always advocated openness in discussing the role of animals in research and have contributed widely to the public debate about this important issue. This is my first AMA, I’m here to talk about asthma and other inflammatory diseases of the lung, the treatment of these diseases, and how animal research plays an important role, so Ask Me Anything!
This AMA has been organised by Understanding Animal Research.
Thanks for your questions and I hope the information supplied is of some help
I have this massive feeling it’s from some film or TV movie, maybe where an American is falsely accused of drug dealing and hauled off the sidewalk into a car by Thai police or something?
Here’s the parody, just trying to find the original:
https://youtu.be/Lma7Eutnhwk
The basis of a story is that there is change.
A character or world begins in one state, things happen, it ends at another.
It’s the basic requirement of a plot.
Clive Cussler understands this very well within a book, almost every single one deals with adverting a functional apocalypse, but he refuses to apply it to a series overall.
He has written 80 books, has five major series, 4 of which occur simultaneously and in the same universe, but nothing ever changes.
For example, within that world, the United States annexed Canada becoming the global hegemon, teleportation and infinite power (in multiple forms) have been discovered, human level AI exists, the USSR successfully launched a space WMD program (which implies massively more advanced and powerful rocketry), a way of perfectly discovering oil and mineral reserves has been found, cheap scalable water desalination has been perfected, and America loving self-aware quantum supercomputers have been built.
Actually, the America loving aspect wasn’t intentionally programmed in.
America is just so great that it makes even terrorist developed supercomputers fall in love with America.
But the world is still functionally the same as our own.
Dirk Pitt still drives a car to work.
Starbucks is still headquartered in Seattle.
The M16 was still the standard issue assault rifle.
9/11 and Hurricane Katrina happened.
Every book has a world threatening or world changing endgame, but they never have an effect on the ongoing story, which is honestly an issue when the technologies and changes in question would be fundamentally world changing.
Realistically, the limitations on a human utopia, one where all people are united under one nation, likely the United States given the author’s biases, with limitless energy, processing power, and leisure time are completely gone.
There is no justifiable reason why none of these technologies have been adopted on a mass scale, nor why said technologically superpowered democracy hasn’t engulfed the entire planet.
When you want a continuous story or series, you need to actually take the results of the previous stories and apply them forward.
The continuous soft reboots, except for Dirk Pitt’s various affairs and lovers, means that the story is entirely disconnected and sort of fantastic.
There is no real stake when the life-changing technology won’t ever be seen again, especially if you read more than one of his thrillers. Each one is just l
