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Comment by gburdell3 | Hacker News Reader

Flavors aren't effective at hooking young people, nicotine is. Nobody smokes because it tastes good, menthol or not. This is just another ban that makes some people feel good about themselves while pissing off the rest. I lean pretty far left, but this is the kind of meaningless ban that makes people hate Democrats.

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> Flavors aren't effective at hooking young people, nicotine is.

Wrong. Flavors are simply really effective at hooking everybody.

I watched this with a friend of mine who absolutely thought the same way as you. We got him a couple different flavored ones to try--all non-nicotine.

His reaction: "Alright, you win. You have to physically take the strawberry ones away as I will absolutely drain them all."

The flavors allow the industry to find the one that you personally find agreeable. Add nicotine on top of that and you have a device for personalized maximal addiction.

Given that the entire modern tech business is addiction as a service, I don't think we have any room for moral grandstanding.

Remember when Internet addiction was a big concern?

> Given that the entire modern tech business is addiction as a service

That is grossly unfair to the many of us who have absolutely nothing to do with the latest Social-Garbage-As-A-Service fads.

Just because VCs will only fund Internet Junk Food does not mean that all software that exists does that.

I commend you for your integrity. However the exceptions are a rounding error in terms of market cap, because today's tech industry is all about creating addicts and profiting from their addiction directly or selling access to them to a third party. Sometimes both. It's not a coincidence that we're one of only two industries that refers to customers as users.

While its probably hard to disagree about market cap, there are a lot of people writing software that backs your laptop/desktop, runs your bank, plans logistics delivery routes, runs medical equipment, etc.

There is a lot of software out there that isn't dedicated to triggering human dopamine receptors. You don't hear a lot about it as it's just part of the job.

And I didn't choose to have integrity--it's just that nobody ever offered me enough money to compromise it. :)

>Nobody smokes because it tastes good, menthol or not.

I was just talking with some online friends yesterday who smoke and say they would never have started if it weren't for menthols, so I think you're wrong about this.

Yes but most cigarettes are not menthols. And a good portion of the people I know who smoke hate menthols... so there's that anecdote. I only know one person who smokes menthols, and the rest just smoke regular cigarettes and did not start by smoking menthols.

It might not be what gets the majority of people, but clearly it gets some, and the parent said "nobody."

I will also note that my friends started when they were teens and no longer smoke menthols.

Part of the argument for this is that Menthol actually makes it less harsh on your throat, so it's easier for new smokers to start with Menthols.

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