[donkdonk]

I highly recommend MRESteve for content about military rations: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA

No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.

[talldayo]

"I quit smoking years ago, but an after-meal cigarette from 1973 might just tempt me..."

Never gets old :')

[wahern]

His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.

[mauvehaus]

As someone who smokes a small single digit number of cigars per year, I can attest that the nicotine buzz is incredible on the rare occasions that I do.

I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.

[vbezhenar]

I tried smoking multiple times and never had any good reaction. It's weird to me why people smoke. Is my chemistry differs from others? I even used to smoke for two years once, just for "community" because people I hanged out at time were smokers. For me cigarettes are just weird thing producing smoke. I learned to swallow it and not blew out my lungs, but I never found any amusement with this thing and dropped it eventually.

[Balgair]

Per their use in MREs, yeah, nicotine is a really good drug to have when you're likely to be in combat in the next four or so hours. It drives blood to the core and away from the periphery, it heightens alertness, it increases testosterone, and there are a lot of other effects.

Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.

[froh]

it may depend on the cigarette brand. they treat the tobacco differently. some will put it under ammonia fumes heh and that modifies the nicotine, cracks it of sorts, which increases the potency by two or three orders of magnitude, like cracking coke just with nicotine.

[datavirtue]

Same here. I'm a light-weight, so smoking a cigarette just makes me jittery and uneasy. Not a pleasant high. A feeling that says: "WTF did you smoke that?"

[Workaccount2]

When you have a hard addiction to cigarettes, just being asleep for 8 hours is enough time to give you a wonderful warm body flush of joy when you have that first cigarette in the morning.

[steve_adams_86]

I had a friend who loved smoking hookahs years ago. 16 or so years ago now, wow.

We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.

The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.

[Modified3019]

I had an old coworker that said the same thing, calling it nearly like getting a sort of high. He had been gifted some tobacco plants by a local tribal community he had a good relationship with. So basically the only thing he’d smoke was his homemade cigars that was its own involved process. Seems like a great way to limit intake and actually enjoy things. That said, I hate smoking, and find even campfires noxious most of the time so it’s not for me.

Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.

[Teever]

Talking about nicotine inducing a religious experience. In my 20s I smoked organic pipe tobacco from a bong and holy shit the experience was out of this world, I literally felt like I was flying and had the most insane headrush.

I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.

[eru]

Cigarettes only took off when they developed a tobacco with much less nicotine in it. Before it was too intense.

[jajko]

Many drugs have great effects, nicotine from cigarettes on me ain't one of them. 5 minutes of dizzy, uncomfortable, mentally still in the same place.

The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.

[0_____0]

Same. Part of the reason the addiction never quite took hold of me is that I could tell that despite the addictive rush they just made me kinda jittery and nauseous. Obviously this varies an incredible amount person-to-person.

[beloch]

I'd appreciate the perspective of an actual smoker on this, but I suspect those long-preserved cigarettes aren't that special in and of themselves. For Steve, it's a hit of both nostalgia and a chemical he's long been deprived of. It's probably amazing for him, and that shows in the videos, but telling himself that those preserved cigs are special might be a way for him to avoid relapsing. He craves more, but he can tell himself that the modern junk just wouldn't be the same.

If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.

[ssl-3]

Cigarettes haven't been the same (in the US) for well over a decade now, since all 50 States and DC require them to be "fire safe" cigarettes (FSC).

This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.

Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.

But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.

[freedomben]

Interesting. I rarely smoke, but did do a lot of smoking in the mid 00s. I recently indulged and damn, it was nowhere near as tasty as I remember. That probably explains it!

[lazystar]

Where would one go to purchase specialty cigarettes, without those compounds?

[IAmGraydon]

Any tobacco shop. You can buy empty cigarette tubes, which are basically just the paper tube with a cotton filter attached. They don't contain any extra additive. You can then load any tobacco you like with a cigarette loading machine (also known as an "injector"). You can also buy pure, high quality Dutch tobacco that's far higher quality than anything that would have been loaded into a cigarette in the 1970s.

[christophilus]

For pipe smokers, there’s a formula called “Doc Watson” which includes cigarette tobacco. It’s excellent. You will get a nicotine biz from it unless you sip it.

[ssl-3]

Somewhere else in the world that isn't the US, I presume. They aren't here anymore.

(One can make them themselves, just as one can make anything else by oneself, but then one would not be purchasing them as completed items.)

[esaym]

Link?

[talldayo]

https://youtu.be/K5OBBzvLnAM?t=831

The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.

Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.

[swarnie]

And maybe Ashens if you like your ration documentaries with a British twist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znmo1dMXerc

[lupusreal]

Nice.

[mnky9800n]

Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.

[throw0101a]

> Given the amount of advertising for vpns you might think they are a scam.

Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

In 2022 he made video with an ad read from a VPN provider with more honest claims about their use cases:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlQuTRSmzc

[Damogran6]

Man do I miss his content.

[PetitPrince]

Tom Scott is still producing podcast and/or gameshow via Lateral and The Technical Difficulties. It's certainly not a British guy in a red t-shirt explaining interesting trivia, but it's still entertaining.

[Workaccount2]

One of the main reasons you see so much advertising for them is because it's very easy to sell and very easy to get a partner account. They hand out those custom promo links to creators like candy.

[refurb]

Nah, just a super high margin business with dozens of minimally differentiated offerings.

[mnky9800n]

So what you are saying is I should start a vpn haha

[refurb]

5 years ago? Absolutely. But I think vendors are getting squeezed hard with all the new entrants.

It'll be great for customers. Prices should continue to come down.

[pxoe]

More like "scareware", maybe not quite to the term, but they generally advertise on 'aren't you scared of the threats on the web?? well here they are so you should be scared! buy product' kind of thing. There are legitimate uses, but they can be so benign and almost irrelevant to whatever security pitch (like...getting around georestrictions)

[4gotunameagain]

They are a priori a honeypot. Only useful for torrenting where illegal.

[mnky9800n]

But why is vpn a honeypot? Because they essentially have the ability to track all traffic and you basically have to trust them that they don’t?

[medstrom]

People making that argument basically assume you are not already stuck in the honey if you go with your default ISP.

[lupusreal]

If you know you're in honey then you act accordingly. If you think you aren't in honey then you're more likely to let your guard down and get into trouble.

For instance, an embassy with clear telephone and telegraph lines knows they're being listened to, and subsequently is very careful about what they transmit. An embassy who has bought Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG ) equipment thinks they are secure and transmits information they would never dream of sending if they knew they were being listened to.

[lazide]

You might get stuck in one or more foreign governments honey that you were not previously going to be stuck in.

[potato3732842]

A foreign government doesn't have the political authority or practical means to send armed thugs to kick in my door over petty dragnet crap.

Some jerk in a cube farm in Maryland does.

[mnky9800n]

Yeah I don’t understand the argument because it’s like essentially vpns are bad but what alternative is good?

[red-iron-pine]

Basically, yeah. Unless it's your server in your basement and/or colo, you have no way of knowing for sure. Plus reselling that data could be very lucrative, as there are a lot of companies (and governments) that would be quite interested in that data...

Specifically:

* there is a presumption that a VPN, esp. a commercial one used by the average person for non-work related activities, is doing something shady. not entirely unfounded, though "shady" could simply be watching Brazilian Netflix

* the ISP can't see what you're doing, but the VPN can, and they're almost certainly using some sort of specialty firewalls / VPN aggregators / custom devices. Chances are those devices can do some deep packet inspection, and any lag would be perceived as using the VPN. Might even be able to MITM connections, maybe.

* DNS is often just as interesting or damning as actual traffic, and most VPNs will configure you to use their DNS to prevent leaks. but that means they know you're looking up "totally-legit-bitcoin-trade-site.com", or maybe "hardcore-gay-pronz.net" 3 times a day. they don't know what you're looking at while on those websites -- maybe you're ssh-ing to their server to fix apache? -- but they can make assumptions.

[sebzim4500]

I don't think I'd use a VPN for that, but they are great for getting around geoblocks.

[Beijinger]

Depending on what you need them for. Privacy? Your VPN provider will know your traffic but your ISP won't. Circumvention of georestrictions? Preventing problems when torrenting? Circumventing the GFC? There are many applications.

You may want to consider this Helloween deal: 3 years for 65 Euros: https://airvpn.org/buy/

I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)

[donki]

How's the situation with VPNs these days in China anyway? I heard that they've been blocking them much more this year.

[KPGv2]

One of those situations where if you don't get a response you have your answer :P

[Beijinger]

I am not sure why my post was downvoted. I have no affiliation with AirVPN. I am not in China anymore but Astill was always the VPN of Choice. But 2 years are now 300 USD if I remember correctly.