Yeah seems like it, the gold standard coil alloy is kanthal and, don't quite me on this, but I think it's been basically the only one considered acceptable for "roll your own" coils since like forever, so almost certainly what you were using. And most DIYers used to use nic freebase only (not sure if that's still the case), the paper implicates the hcl salt nic as possibly making the metal leeching thing more efficient:

Nicotine salts introduce organic acids (5) in e-liquids, which may facilitate metal dissolution in e-liquids through ligand–metal interactions.

Anyway, the metal of concern in kanthal is chromium which can be non-toxic depending on the chemical form. The paper stated they didn't detect any toxic version of chromium in the vapor, although they speculate it might be possible for this to undergo a further chemical change in the lungs:

Nontoxic Cr(III) was the only oxidation state of Cr observed in aerosols

But they also detected metals that didn't come from the coils! Like Escobar brand apparently has a coil sheath that is 40% lead. Like what the actual fuck were they thinking with that design decision? And sure enough the juice had lead in it before it was even vaped. Also they found antimony and stated they didn't know where it came from, presumably it would be something the juice came into contact with before the device was put together.

A vape with a borderline dangerous amount of lead in the liquid might still be superior to cigarettes from a health standpoint, but why risk it when you can just use a regular non disposable one with coils and juice from reputable brands?

Holy shit, that's what I get for using a heuristic. Unless the results were faked this seems highly concerning. Relevant quite from the study:

Across all devices, virgin e-liquids exhibited relatively low concentrations of the primary elements observed in the heating coils, including Cr (3 to 20 μg/kg) and Fe (148 to 1090 μg/kg) (Table S2). Across ELF Bar and Flum Pebble virgin e-liquids, Ni was similarly low to Cr and Fe (14 to 29 μg/kg; Table S2). Unexpectedly, elements that are not present in heating coils (Table S1), including Pb, Cu, Zn, and Sb, were observed at excessive concentrations in Esco Bar device virgin e-liquids, with the exception of Ni which was elevated in virgin e-liquids relative to ELF Bar and Flum Pebble virgin e-liquids and present in coils (Figure 1). Esco Bar Flavored and Clear virgin e-liquids showed extremely high concentrations of Pb (64,000 to 127,000 μg/kg), Ni (13,000 to 38,400 μg/kg), Cu (344,000 to 533,000 μg/kg), and Zn (240,000 to 376,000 μg/kg) (Table S2). For context, concentrations of Pb, Ni, Cu, and Zn were universally and comparatively low in all other virgin e-liquids from Elf Bar or Flum Pebble devices, at ≤15, ≤29, ≤24, and ≤331 μg/kg, respectively, with the exception of Zn in the ELF Bar Flavored virgin e-liquid at 4420 μg/kg (Table S2).

I'm skeptical. The same claims were made about vaping before disposables were even a thing and it always turned out they were abusing the device somehow, deliberately overheating it or dry hitting. I'm sure there are a ton of random chemicals in disposables just doubtful that heavy metals are a problem. Avoid them cause they're wasteful.

How can New Yorkers be so gullible, Zohran's very name is a dog whistle!

Zohran = one letter off from Zofran

Zofran = the most popular prescription antiemetic

Antiemetic = one letter off from a slight misspelling of antisemitic

Communist liberals will have the gall to respond "this is a coincidence" and "he didn't choose his name" or "what are you talking about?". Oh yeah, maybe he should have chosen it then, since you wokies are all about that. What if his parents had named him Hitler, eh?

The very first paragraph of the final report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a PDF that took 3 years and presumably millions of dollars to create

Americans are already familiar with how the Chinese government conducts economic warfare with crucial technologies such as semiconductors: corner the supply chain, then choke it to weaken the United States. But this is not the last time Beijing will run this play, and it is not even the most dangerous version of it.

Imagine a not-so-distant future where researchers in Shanghai develop a breakthrough drug that can eliminate malignant cells, effectively ending cancer as we know it. But when tensions over Taiwan reach a breaking point, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the strategic apparatus of the Chinese government, hoards the treatment under the guise of national security, cutting off supply to the United States. After years of access, this lifesaving drug is immediately in shortage, requiring doctors to ration it while American biotechnology companies scramble to reconstitute production in the United States. The streets and social media overflow with people demanding that the United States abandon Taiwan. The Administration faces an agonizing choice between geopolitical priorities and public health.

This scenario is fiction. But something like it could soon become reality as biotechnology takes center stage in the unfolding strategic competition between the United States and People’s Republic of China (China).

This is pure speculation but I'm 90% sure that the NVidia drop had nothing to do with Deepseek R1 and was actually insider trading on the "news" that Trump was considering a tariff on Taiwanese chips.

First, R1 was released on the 20th, 5 days before the stock dropped. It wasn't at all a secret, basically it was the talk of the town that whole week and their capabilities claims were shown to be solid very early on by many many people running independent benchmarks. But the market didn't react.

Second, the big AI companies want all the compute they can get, they aren't satisfied with training 10 or 100 or 1000 times more quickly, this is why they're talking about trillion dollar data centers with nuclear reactors. Also of note, R1 was trained on Nvidia TPUs with the same amount of vram as the H100s. You couldn't cheaply train such a model on any other brand of hardware, demand for Nvidia products isn't going anywhere.

Third, if anything it's the AI software companies that would take a big drop, they're the ones who are supposedly spooked and scrambling to replicate R1 internally. The major software only players took only a small hit but recovered quickly, that would be Microsoft and Meta. Google is also a hardware company, they're trying to move some of their chip fabs to TMSC but their TPUs are made by Samsung. They took a small hit and have not yet recovered. AMD is a hardware company, they have fabs all over including sourcing from TMSC, same story. Intel, a similar company, no change whatsoever, they don't use TMSC at all. Nvidia took the big one, and they get ALL of their chips from... TMSC. All the action happened about simultaneously in after hours weekend trading.

Fourth, when the tariff news dropped the market seemed to be unaffected almost as if it had already been priced in over weekend trading.

I just fucking can't with this shit, if the election takes place without her clarifying her position on Gaza and she doesn't catch some major mainstream criticism for it, I will have lost all hope

We're not gonna make it are we? People I mean

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/crime/2024/05/10/professor-richard-heyman-ut-austin-pro-palestine-protest-arrested-fired-interfering-police/73639778007/

The charging document notes that Heyman broke the trooper's "state-issued bike bell," which costs $62.

And through the grapevine I've heard at least one student received notification from campus police that they are banned from campus with no mention of exceptions for educational reasons. It seems they are planning to suspend or expel at least some students.

You know something is legit when it has this menu