for other poor non-americans like me, who heard the term aafes first time in their shitty non-freedomy life:
The Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES, also referred to as The Exchange and post exchange/PX or base exchange/BX) provides goods and services at U.S. Army, Air Force, and Space Force installations worldwide, operating department stores, convenience stores, restaurants, military clothing stores, theaters and more nationwide and in more than 30 countries and four U.S. territories.
due to public Health concerns the US government will stop operating Army, Air Force and Space Force installations worldwide
That would be nice
if only…
As an American who didn’t know and was afraid to ask, thank you. Had no idea. Now I wanna see some of that sweet sweet space force merch.
You know how the Army has soldiers, the Navy has sailors, and the Air Force has airmen? The Space Force has “guardians”.
Dont be afride to ask questions. Remember, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
I guess you have an internet capable device in your vincinity. If you are afraid your fellow americans would make fun of your crippledness,you can use an internet search engine on that device without notifying your peers!
It’s like a Costco membership, you just have to sign your life away to Uncle Sam for a few years
I am an American and this is the first time I’ve heard of AAFES
They don’t really have any presence outside of military bases and embassies, so if you don’t exist in those circles, you wouldn’t have been exposed to them.
So Middle Eastern people know about this?
If they have bases access, sure.
Same ngl, I just assumed it was some health agency
Not many people who never served would know, tbh.
Fuck bruh just go to the NEX. Always a vape shop within 100 feet.
French is a hilarious language
You should hear Dutch
Hoe bedoel je? Nederlands als een taal is compleet serieus, en er is niks raars aan 😤😤
I mean that it’s whimsical. Very fun for the ears to a non-native speaker.
Winkelwagen.
It’s especially entertaining with a Dutch accent rather than a Flemish one, as that “g” in “wagen” is said in a very unusual way compared to pretty much all other European languages and accents.
Mind you, it’s strangely pleasant to say it that way for me as a non-native, and having picked up the local version of “God damn it” (which has a similar sounding “g”) as an expletive when I lived there, now - almost 2 decades later - it still just comes out in its own when I’m pissed at something.
I was half kidding haha. Many languages sound stupid if you don’t speak them.
ja zeg het moet gedaan zijn met deze Nederlands-haat😤😤 duits is duidelijk erger
I quit a few months after those came out in my province, and it was a bit of a shock the first time I saw them; but then like most things, they just became stripes on the butt. I probably wasn’t their target audience though.
While they didn’t make me quit, (I had already decided on my “quit date”), I will say the extra graphic warning pictures were pretty damm effective for starting that conversation with self. I had to take a sharpie to a few packs.
LeBron LeJames would never smoke LaCigarete!
Relevant username
If you smoke, you better start vaping. If you vape, you better stop vaping. It’s that simple.
If you can’t, at least don’t use throwaway and sketchy products for anything you plan to inhale.
Vaping is probably better for your health, but holy cow, are my friends addicted to vaping now. Vaping is so convenient and tasty, they go through several pens a day specially on the weekends.
I went the other way, i stopped smoking and started vaping. I used a sub ohm vape with a low dose of nicotine 0.3-0.6 per 10ml bottles of oil.
I vaped loads to begin with, likely due to the low dose. but it was hard to get the time to get outside of the office to vape, and each time i only had a short time to do it. It got less frequent and less time per frequency of going out to the point that one day i went a whole day without realising i hadnt vaped or even thought about it.
I decided thqt day, after 17 years of smoking, and 1 year of vaping, that i didn’t need it anymore. So i didnt take my vape to work the next day. And about 3 to 4 weeks later i threw it in the bin.
Never looked back.
I know I’m just a random person on the internet, but I’m super proud of you for this. Like, making that decision and turning a serendipitous situation into an active choice takes a strong sense of will. Congrats
Thankyou. I actually really appreciate it. I would say that for at least 8 of those years, i wanted to quit. A lot of people really dont realise how hard it is to stop. You want to stop with every fibre of your being. You want to stop on your way to buy a pack you want to stop as you ask for your brand. You want to stop as you hand over the money. You want to stop as you open the pack . You want to stop as you pull out a cigarette you want to stop as you put it in your mouth. You want to stop as you light it. You want to stop with every Toke. You want to stop as you do it again and again and again.
But i got there. Eventually.
I was a pack a day smoker, and a 2000 hit vape cart will last me almost a week.
I smoke a lot less. If I just wanted one drag of a cig I’d end up smoking all of it. Now I take one hit off my vape put it back and I’m good for a few hours.
It’s interesting how vaping changes people’s smoking habits. I’ve been experimenting with substituting nicotine gum for the vape here and there. Hoping my body will accept that after awhile and I can stop vaping, then quit the gum with regular gum. It seems like a bunch of extra steps, but it’s working so far
Great achievement, congrats. Unfortunately the friends I mean are very intimate with all sorts of substances, and because all friends in that circle are like this, it’s hard to escape without basically also quitting your friend group. It’s one of the reasons I’m friendly with them but not actually part of the group.
I feel that. I didnt mention before but i also smoked weed for many of those years. I kicked that a few years before kicking tobacco
I barely see or even speak to anyone from that circle now. i both miss them and dont miss them. I found a lot of drug friends tend to be fairweather friends. Not all of them. Theres always a core few that stick with you when you cant get a bag but all have nothing to do. But the majority in my experience, you dont miss when they are gone.
I miss the early wick days where the vape pens shot screaming hot oil into your mouth and occasionally the wicks would burn from getting to close to the coil or just dry burning.
Nothing made me quit smoking faster than that.
I switched to vaping to quit tobacco and at that point in time they only had mech mods. It started with the copper tube’s and then you progressed to the box mods. It was pricey and you had to have a basic understand of electronics in order to make coils and get things to work but it was actually enjoyable. I was able to stop vaping far easier than smoking, but now when I look at the vape industry all of that is gone. It’s stupid easy to get and use the tapes and on one hand it’s great for those wanting to quit smoking, but it makes it far too easy for people who never smoked to get into it. The specialty shop i went to wouldn’t let you walk out with the mods without demonstrating you could use it safely and knew the bare minimum about how the circuit worked. Now you can just walk into a gas station and buy a disposable that ultimately contributes to electronic waste.
I suspect this is because they have, weirdly enough, too low of a nicotine dosage in their eliquid. So they end up inhaling way way more flavored glycerin and glycol than they otherwise would.
Prohibition has been a dramatic failure every time it’s ever been tried.
This is more like “We don’t sell cider because it might be harmful to your body with all the alcohol and how it tastes of apples, here have some pure ethanol instead”
“We’ve stopped selling paper due to the danger of paper-cuts for people. We will continue selling firearms and ammo.”
I stopped smoking a decade ago. Do cigarettes really cost that much now? Fuck…
In Europe many countries are at 12€ a pack…
£15 in the UK.
In Australia they are $50-$60
Good. Slowly killing yourself should be reserved for the rich.
Let’s try and convince Elon that smoking is cool
He’ll smoke weed just fine.
deleted by creator
Youre joking right?
Apparently not
https://smokefreeclinic.com.au/articles/cost-of-cigarettes-in-australia/
https://www.calendar-australia.com/faq/how-much-is-a-packet-of-20-cigarettes-at-woolworths
random sources from DDGing
I’d believe it… I remember they were around $10 per pack back when my parents smoked, over 20 years ago. My mum saved so much money by quitting. Unfortunately my dad didn’t quit until much later after having a heart attack and realizing he had to change his habits.
Wow. How can there be a single person in australia paying so much for slowly killing themselves?
The vicious power of tobacco is not to be underestimated, or trifled with
A pack of smokes in NYS is ~$15US right now.
Marlboros here in MA I think are around $12-$13 a pack.
The really amazing thing is that most the people who smoke, by most measures, really can’t afford it, but somehow manage to squeeze it into their budget. People who can afford it…quit smoking years ago.
Oh no, I certainly cannot afford 13 dollars a day. That’s 130 bucks in 10 days. No way could I possibly fit that into my budget, back when they were 5 dollars a pack, it felt like highway robbery, this… would be out of the question.
That seems really cheap compared to Australia
You should see New Zealand.
Fuck I miss smoking. If there’s a heaven it will be well stocked with Marlboro reds and quality coffee.
Smoking will bring heaven closerrr
I miss how cigarettes used to taste man. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re loaded with additives now or what but all cigarettes taste like shit to me. So even if I wanted to pay the ludicrous price for them, it’s still not worth it for me.
They taste like shit when you don’t smoke.
I think you might enjoy this John Prine song
One of his best.
In Islam, Heaven is supposed to have rivers of wine (that are not harmful). I bet that extends to all drugs/shrooms/whatever as well
Heaven! Where heroine Tuesday blends seamlessly into crack pipe Friday!
Interesting. I miss vaping bananas and cream vape juice. And peach, and mixed berries.
You might try Allen Carr’s easyway book, it’s meant to make you give up in a way that you don’t even want to smoke anymore, rather than fighting the urge. I’m a non smoker so I can’t give my personal experience on it. But it was recommended by some former smokers on the ukcasual community. I bought a used copy for a colleague, but I don’t work there anymore, so I’ll try to catch up with him sometime and find out how he went with it. I’m currently reading Carr’s other book, The Nicotine Conspiracy, and I’m finding it very interesting. (I have an ebook copy of his easyway book if you want it).
This book was how I finally managed to quit smoking well over a decade ago.
Awesome! Did it do what it said on the tin? Did you make the mental shift so that you didn’t want to smoke after? Or do you ever feel tempted?
Yeah it did, it caused a mental shift on how you look at it from giving you something to taking something away from you instead.
I dont really feel tempted at all long term, because I had tried smoking one a couple years later and it was like sucking on an ashtray. Because I was no longer addicted I didn’t get the relief anymore that smoking gave, and that let me move on more fully.
That’s really great to hear!
I miss the clutches of people that would congregate in smoking areas on breaks at work, kinda forced to socialize but all walks of life would be tied together by their shared vice.
Now the smoking area at work has dwindled so I feel like a pariah sucking on my electric nicotine pacifier for a couple minutes, staring at my phone and ignoring the other pariahs that come outside.
Hell, I think I met the larger part of my 2000s friend group striking up conversations outside of bars when you could no longer smoke inside.
Sorry I’m romanticizing am unhealthy dirty habit, but I do think that we, in the US at least, have vilified one more means of social connection.
I’ve told people before, as a non-smoker, that smoking would be the ultimate social activity if it weren’t for all the cancer and assorted negative health outcomes. You’ve got an idle habit that many people also engage in. It requires that people come closer together to share the disposal resources. It then requires that you hold still and fidget with a small stick for several minutes every time you do it. And nothing else. It’s hard to beat a set of conditions to get people to idly interact with each other that’s better than that.
But, you know, cancer…
I have a couple of friends who smoke and I really enjoy heading outside with them when they go out to smoke. I especially enjoy it when it’s very cold out, because nothing makes me appreciate the cosy warmth of my home more than a brief spell of bracing cold.
Shame about the passive smoking though
Don’t underestimate the value of the “I’m going to wander outside for a couple minutes” break on your well being!
I’m sitting here realizing that my big hobby project of the past few years — a koi pond in my back yard — is essentially a reason to just go outside and chill.
Imagine if smoking made you healthy.
When I worked in an office, I used to regularly take breaks with the smokers, even though I don’t smoke. Not unlike following a bird or deer through the woods to a source of food or fresh water, the smokers really do have a line on togetherness. That and getting up from your desk regularly to take a damn break.
Drinking is better it also lowers inhibitions.
It’s not the habit it’s the people. People just want to be left alone these days.
I would think that neither cigarettes or vaping is good for you but I don’t really understand which is supposedly worse and why. I just remember the outrage over vaping because it was primarily marketed to young people
Vaping is, on balance, dramatically better for you while still not being good, effectively harm reduction. The outrage was marketed as their marketing being towards young people. The marketing itself was aimed at a younger crowd, yes, but more 20somethings than teens.
The real outrage was more about people adopting vaping instead of starting to smoke cigarettes, which was considered counter productive at a time when smoking rates were dropping dramatically.
It remains to be seen if smoking’s stigma continues to cause rates fall or if the crusade against vaping as a less-harmful alternative backfires.
The problem isn’t vaping, but what you’re vaping and with what.
Cheap vapes you might get contaminants from the vape itself which are unhealthy. They get very hot, and quality control on these things is abysmal.
The second problem is the actual liquid. What goes into these with all the flavor crap isn’t regulated well and sometimes chemicals are being added that are harmful to us and cause problems, sometimes faster and worse than smoking cigarettes would have.
Now, if you have a good vape, and a proper vape liquid (probably neutral, no additives), it will be safer than regular cigarettes.
I vape but used to smoke for 15 years. Been vaping only for years now. Only use vaping liquid made in house and only 2 ingredients. Nicotine and pg. The difference in how I feel is dramatic. No coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath or anything that I associated with actually smoking. However, I worry that other problems might arise we just haven’t had enough time to know about yet from doing so. What I do know is I can run, exercise, etc and suffer no ill effects like I used to. I also use quality vapes and no weird flavored shit. I will say though, I’m more addicted to nicotine than I ever was due to the accessibility and convenience of the vape. I stood a better chance of quitting cigarettes than I ever did of quitting vaping.
Yup. I’m in a similar situation. I work from home and vape in my office. I do it non-stop… I lowered the nic concentration as much as possible, but still, it’s a lot. It’s too convenient. Better than cigarettes though.
Safer, but not safe. That part is important. And vaping didn’t replace as much smoking as much as it replaced not using nicotine at all.
Smoking is much more harmful than vaping, but vaping is not necessarily healthy either. The higher temperatures from burning plant matter (any plant matter really, nicotine is just super addictive) create most of the carcinogens in smoke. The most abundant carcinogen is Benzo[a]pyrene, which is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAHs, a.k.a. “tar” in cigarette smoke). PAHs are formed at temperatures above 300 Celsius. And vapes typically operate around 200 Celsius. Vapes still contain carcinogens and nicotine itself harms vascular health, but they have none of the PAHs if operating correctly. The biggest issue with them is the targeting of kids, especially by Juul in the 2010s.
Vaping is much healthier per unit. The thing is lots of people cant stop vaping coz unlike cigarettes it tastes awesome. They suck on that thing 24h a day vaping the equivalent of 100+ cigarettes.
Also a big part of the revenue is generated from addicted kids, they know it and wont change it.
This is just entirely untrue. People generally consume more nicotine when vaping. That much is true. Vaping has significantly less toxins and dangerous chemicals than smoking cigarettes, as well as circumvent the whole tar in the lungs thing. There are no long term studies on vaping, so doctors will always say “we aren’t sure which is worse” but advise that smoking is likely to be far worse for the body than vaping. There is not a single study on earth, nor any doctors I’ve heard, that supports your claim.
I dont know what part of your comment contradicts anything I said. If you are saying I shouldnt have said ‘vaping is healthier’ but instead ‘vaping is 99% likely to be healthier’, then yeah, sure.
Coles notes: smoking, is quite literally that, creating smoke that you intentionally inhale. The desired chemical (nicotine) is mixed with other smoke shit (thousands of different compounds. The shit in that smoke can give you cancer and a long list of other problems.
Vaping is basically a handheld fog machine that has nicotine added to the liquid. Usually sweetened and flavored, but not necessarily. It has the desired chemical, nicotine, as well as a short list of additives (maybe a dozen or so, depending on a few factors), and doesn’t contain any known carcinogens (so no cancer)
At the end of the day, you’re lungs should breathe the air. If you smoke or vape, that’s not as good for you as clean fresh air. However, vaping won’t give you cancer, and has a fraction of the toxins and compounds that cigarettes do.
It’s like comparing driving your car into a lamp post, or plowing through a parade with your SUV. Neither is ideal, one is definitely much worse than the other.
vaping won’t give you cancer
Has that been proven though? I don’t think there’s yet any sufficient long-term research to know the full risks of vaping.
More or Less, yes, it has.
Cancer from cigarettes is largely linked to a small subset of compounds produced by the combustion of tobacco. Appropriately named as carcinogens. Those are the cancer-causing compounds that link cigarettes to cancer.
Vaping, by contrast, is propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine (PG and VG), as the base substance (which is basically the same stuff they use in fog machines, and people breathe that constantly without any directly related issues). PG/VG makes up more than 90% of the vape liquid, by volume. The remaining 10% is usually a solution of PG/VG mixed with nicotine concentrate to make the whole solution have a particular % of nicotine content, usually measured in mg per ml, and the last few percentile are flavorings.
So from a 60ml bottle, more than 55ml will be the VG/PG base fluid, 3-4 mL will be the nicotine concentrate, and the remainder will be flavoring.
Apart from the flavor ingredients: VG, PG, and nicotine, to date, have no carcinogenic characteristics and have not been linked to cancer (to the best of my knowledge). So over 95% of the volume of the liquid is known to not be cancer causing, the rest is usually food-grade flavoring.
Needless to say, food-grade flavoring is generally not carcinogenic.
vaping won’t give you cancer
That’s one hell of a confident statement… Backed up by exactly zero sources.
The onus of proof here is on the person challenging the statement made. If you can find any source that links nicotine vaping to cancer, I’m happy to discuss.
Please do not demand me to provide sources when you equally do not.
I have smoked and vaped alternatively. When I’ve vaped I have breathed as bad or worse than smoking. Vape liquids are propileneglycol (or some other glycol, can’t remember) and glycerine, often in 50/50 or a close ratio up or down. When vaping you are coating your lungs in oil. Probably not better than smoke. Different type of harm, but definitely very harmful. Just think about it: oil in your lungs…
Your lungs can aspirate both Pg and Vg (derived from vegetables). It is misleading in my opinion to call them oil in an effort to make them sound dangerous. Pg is not petroleum and has been considered safe by the medical community since before vaping was a thing.
What makes it an oil? Viscosity? What’s the viscosity that makes a liquid an oil? You inhale water as steam but that doesn’t make water an oil.
You can call it an oil in general but just like when someone refers to electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) as electromagnetic radiation (EMR) I already know they are very likely to fear monger about it because it sounds scarier.
Both PG and VG are water soluble. If you have oil in your lungs after vaping, you might want to switch what you’re vaping.
I don’t know your situation, or what testing methods you used. I have no doubt that you’ve had an experience that supports your claims. With that being said, I have heard, both from people on the internet, and personal friends, who have switched from smoking to vaping, and almost every story is the same: after the tar is processed out of their respiratory system, they breathe a lot better after switching to vaping.
It seems logical to me that you’d need to vape for a few months before feeling the effects of quitting smoking as the tar will take at least that long to get to the point where you would feel a difference. That’s what I’ve heard from the people I’ve spoken to.
The only “vapes” I know of that have oil in them, are for marijuana. The active ingredients in marijuana are oil-soluble, so vitamin E acetate is usually used to dilute it to the desired strength. Vaping vitamin E acetate will absolutely mess up your lungs and cause permanent damage.
“Weed vapes” are generally purchased from the black markets or weed dealers, who are generally already breaking the law and don’t care about customer safety. So while stuff like vitamin E acetate is never used in the vape liquid you’d buy at your local vape shop, it can, and very likely will be in vapes that are made and distributed illegally.
It’s the difference between eating a Tic Tac, and just pouring the whole box in your mouth. Neither are good, but the second is definitely worse.
Here is an excelent Kurzgesagt video.
This photo is like 5 years old.
Isn’t this from the popcorn lung scare?
Wasn’t the popcorn lung due to amateur vape producers mixing it with vitamin e oil?
Yup, but the New York Times still runs disingenuous articles about it, to this day.
Honestly, I don’t recall. That might have been the reason given, but I’m willing to bet tobacco lobbyist money was at least as big of a factor. Either way, I had managed to quit cigarettes and vapes by the time they banned them, so I didn’t really pay it too much attention.
A lot of big vape brands are owned by big tobacco companies.
Popcorn ling was a legit scary thing because nobody knew what was causing it in the vapes. If I’m not mistaken it turned out to be something to do with a food safe additive that either was or turned into vitamin E when heated and was not safe to inhale. It was the cheap unregulated vape juices that were using that additive and the young people who are over heating and over juicing their vapes to rip those huge clouds that were effected. It’s just one more example of how important drug and food regulations are.
There never was a popcorn lung outbreak in vapes. Lipid pneumonia is not popcorn lung. Freebase nicotine is water soluable so it’s always been dissolved with glycol. THC is fat soluable so it was what was causing the lipid pneumonia. Popcorn lung is a very specific disease caused by diacetyl and I’m unaware of any cases of that in vapes, none the less an outbreak. There was never going to be a lipid pneumonia with nicotine though, because nicotine does not dissolve in oil and we use vegetable glycol as a thickener because of that.
Popcorn lung was largely a concern for DIY vapes in the early days that used food additives haphazardly to create flavors. The dangers of diacetyl were recognized quite early though and folks made sure they weren’t using it.
Just to tag on, the only real “widespread” (read: more than a few freak cases of something I haven’t heard about) issue was specifically Vitamin E Acetate in black market illegally produced THC vape carts (sources vary whether the carts were either from China or from some midwesterner’s kitchens.)
You’re correct there has never been a case of popcorn lung due to vaping, the only recorded cases I’m aware of involved a popcorn manufacturing plant using a powdered version with no respirators, and from what I understand it basically works like butter flavored mesothelioma (the powder settles in lungs and doesn’t get exhaled, which doesn’t happen if it’s not powdered, or if you use respirators…I think.) In any case, there also will never be a case of popcorn lung from vaping, and I say this because there’s never been a case of popcorn lung from smoking cigarettes which coincidentally happen to contain 2,000x the amount of diacetyl as vape juice ever did (and that’s before vapes largely stopped using it due to the propaganda on it, which was spread by big tobacco and big pharma to boost their cigarettes and chantix sales btw.)
I vaped at the time and had to rant this shit at some old guy who was holding a cig at the bar saying “ooohhh popcorn lung” at least 3x weekly for months, like “shut up and drink your Bud and smoke that Camel there, COPDeez nuts.”
Yeah they were using vitamin e acetate as a thickener instead of vegetable glycol, which caused lipid (fat) pneumonia where the lungs aren’t producing enough surfactant to clear the oils that get trapped. My opinion on why is because they were using THC ethanol tincture which is cheap to produce but would require significant thickening. The vitamin e acetate was used for that.
Thanks to both of you for the added context and corrections. My memory was very vague, I did remember the Vitamin E thing. I had also forgotten it was the THC vapes that were the issue.
I thought it might be, I used to work at the Navy Exchange about that long ago and remember taking that stuff off the shelf.
🤦♂️
The place that has taste testings of Jäeger while you’re in line to buy booze and smokes is concerned about my health now? That’s not the class 6 I remember
Another win for big tobacco lol
Big tobacco own stock in vapes, so they win either way.
