@pclark | Hacker News

Hahahaha you think they had goals?? :)

If I had to guess it would have been some nebulous 'youth prevention' team thinking it was wise to go into schools and explain why cigarettes were bad and vaping wasn't encouraged yada yada.

Inexcusable but Juul was a quintessential "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" company. (I don't expect people to believe me on that.)

I wanted to reply since that NYT article is so damming and it's absurd for me to be parent comment about Juul and not reply (since obviously I saw your comment and have thoughts) and was thinking about how best to, I am not sure of the details of this but:

* I cannot reiterate enough just how incompetent Juul was in 2017. Everyone was running around with their hair on fire and had zero of the skills or experience to deal with these issues

* I believe that Juul did a lot of really really really stupid things like going into schools and trying to hamfistedly state that vaping was bad but safe — again, Juul had a lot of very inexperienced executives who were obsessed with doing things they thought were really smart but were just plain stupid

* It's worth noting that these actions didn't actually contribute to making youths vape. Vaping was exploding amongst teens because of social media and being a meme — in what world would going to a school and talking about Juul make youths want to use that product? that is what makes all this so hilarious - Juul did a stupid thing, has to live with the consequences, and the underlying thesis of why they did it in the first place was totally ridiculous.

Again, I was a Juul employee - I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul, but I am sure that their incompetence meant that their communication and actions blurred their dreadful attempts at dealing with the issues.

The very fact this NYT article exists without a clear rebuttal and explanation from Juul says it all, really.

Good grief — for one thing, teenagers vaping is a crisis.

That alone appears to render your entire comment moot, but I'll add that all of my comments today have been incredibly consistent: smoking cigarettes is really really really bad and vaping nicotine is really bad (because its addictive, there are longterm implications of inhaling nicotine, ...) - to put it another way, if you smoke combustible cigarettes then you should switch to vaping ASAP. But if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not start vaping because nicotine is highly addictive!

PS: equating nicotine to caffeine is incredibly stupid and offensive towards the millions of people that battle nicotine addiction every day.

Ha because of Juul's effective marketing and targeting campaigns? I'd wager zero!

How many because Juul essentially randomly went viral and is an inherently addictive product? Unfortunately way too many.

Ha, that is funny. I can see why they bought Juul — explosive growth and an alleged culture of technology — a perfect compliment to Altria.

Honestly, I feel slightly bad that Altria were hoodwinked into investing in Juul and having it implode like it did, all the Altria executives I interacted with were remarkably precise and lucid. BTW I think the FDA deserves 75% of the blame for their poor vaping policies (and total lack of enforcement.)

My guess is that Altria doesn’t know technology at all? They have the regulatory side locked in though. Juul understand technology but unfortunately wasn’t a technology led company. (and obviously didn’t understand regulatory side)

I am basing my opinion on data. The nicotine industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on studies discussing the incrementality of "years of life saved from switching to vaping from combustible cigarettes minus the years of life cost from net new people starting to consume nicotine"

Also this comment is correct that a poorly regulated and operated vaping industry fuelled a youth nicotine crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31836842

It was pretty inspiring seeing combustible cigarette smokers switch to Juul and having a much much healthier (and less smelly!) lifestyle.

Great to hear that you're off combustible cigarettes :) You can easily ween down the nicotine from 5% to 3% to 1.5% over a time period too.

I don't believe in conflating academic debates about the alleged complicated unproven merits of nicotine with the chronic public health policy failure of how the world has regulated cigarettes, vaping and wider nicotine products.

Sorry, I don't want my parent comment to be construed as being pro nicotine. If you don't smoke combustible cigarettes don't vape or touch nicotine. I feel a moral burden to be really clear about these topics as someone that briefly worked in this industry.

Vaping is much less terrible than smoking cigarettes but you still shouldn't touch them if you're a non-smoker.

They're very good (I initially said wonderful but I want to be clear that you shouldn't use these products unless you smoke combustible cigarettes because they're comically addictive) products because underage people do not want to use them!

There is some regulatory nuance I believe that makes them harder to buy than regular vaping products but I forget what it is — a simple fact though is that the social aspect of smoking breaks, smoking at bars, the habit of smoking is a huge draw and it's hard to replicate that with gum.

The best product to solve the nicotine crisis is a smart device that gradually lowers the nicotine invisibly to the user over a 3-6-12 month period. This isn't a super hard problem, the FDA and the market is just too non technical to execute.

I'm not sure what your point is but i'll just repeat: if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not vape.

People can debate if vaping or nicotine is good or bad or moot from a health point of view but a simple salient fact is:

A small percentage of people who never smoked cigarettes before start to vape and then switch to combustible cigarettes. That is bad.

Because with public health policy all nuance gets lost. If you say "well actually nicotine doesnt harm you but the tar in combustible cigarettes does so if you vape you're really doing no harm" people will render that as "nicotine does not harm you thus cigarettes are fine" this is literally how we got into this situation. There can be no grey area: if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not vape.

Btw all addictive substances are bad for you by definition.

Are you implying they're much less terrible? I am not sure your point. Ultimately not consuming nicotine is good and any form of nicotine consumption is very bad, with combustible cigarettes being far worse than vaping.

I like to say that vaping is slightly less terrible than combustible cigarettes because it is very clear that you. should. not vape. unless. you. smoke. cigarettes.

Important to remember that combustible cigarettes are terrible and e-cigarettes are a slightly less terrible alternative to those. In a world where cigarettes are so terrible however, e-cigarettes end up saving billions in health care dollars and quality of life.

Of all the e-cig players, Juul (which is now majority owned by Altria) is the most reputable one — by far - they have by far the best technology, quality controls, compliance and regulation teams, etc.

Unfortunately before Altria acquired Juul it was a terribly ran company. People spend a lot of time discussing the chronic youth issues but the reality is that Juul never wanted to sell to youths or anything of the sort — they were just _so_ incompetent at operations that they couldn't do anything.

They set fire to hundreds of millions of dollars on totally ridiculous projects plainly stupid ideas:

* A modular supply chain project with the idea that they could use manufacturing as a carrot for regulatory laws — this team was 50-100 people and had tens of millions of dollars in budget. Never did anything.

* All manner of vanity innovation projects: new battery technology, next and next and next generation projects, dozens of flavours, absurd marketing campaigns, rebrands, a $250k custom typeface, the list goes on.

* Hired McKinsey and Bain because the executive team (who were all ex-management consultants) wanted the company to move fast ....

* My personal favourite Juul story (ok I have a bunch) was that the company was so incompetent they didn't do headcount planning — You could just hire as many people as you wanted if your random (often incompetent) VP was okay with it. Juul had 50-100 VPs so it was sheer chaos.

It got so bad that Altria had to step in and install their own CEO and axe all of the existing executive team (and lay off thousands of random employees) to try and right the ship. Altria are a very legit operational business — you may not like them but they know how to work with the FDA within strict regulation guidelines. If Juul is removed from the market despite Altria taking over they're truly fucked.

In my time at Juul I have never worked with so many incompetent people. It was quite impressive but also incredibly depressing as someone that joined because the idea of creating a connected device vaping product to help switch Americans off combustible cigarettes was very compelling.

Modern tanks also use minerals and chips, they're basically armoured computers. They also, obviously, take a huge amount of resources to produce, transport and train to use.

It seems like the future of warfare is longe range (eg: firing missiles at tanks from across the horizon) or hyper short range (eg: troops clearing cities block by block) — anything else seems like it'll get wrecked by either the precision of long range or the precision of short range stuff.

A tank isn't hyper mobile, isn't hyper accurate and isn't hyper long range. I don't get it's role — especially when it costs tens of millions and can be destroyed with either a $5k anti-armor launcher or from a missile fired across the horizon.

I ordered a 6-row Model X approx 24 months ago - still waiting - and ordered a Model Y 7-seater in ~Feb this year and got it a month or two ago. It's awesome.

I can't really comprehend how the Model X can be ~$50k superior to a Model Y 7 Seater.

This looks great! do you have a discord or other community that I can follow to get updates?

the traffic/routing AI is terrible