I pay $80 for 172Mb down and 10Mb up. My mobile phone includes unlimited voice, text messaging, media SMS, and low-speed Internet, along with a few GB of high-speed Internet, but that costs $60 (I could get cheaper).
Your GDP-per-capita is as shitty as the UK's. Get ~12% more productive over there to catch up to the U.S. For the price I pay for Internet, I could buy 77Mb down and 4.5Mb up in France.
Even lagging as Europe is now, it won't be long before they catch up. What's holding Europe back relative to the U.S. is our wage slave labor culture here in the states: we have an insanely high labor force participation rate, and people are dumb enough to complain it's too *low*. More people working per capita means more buying-power per capita. 56.1% participation rate in France and 62.6% in America, which puts France's productivity per worker about on par with the U.S.
Part of my long-term goals for America (if I could ever get elected into the House, ffs...) is a reduction of working hours to 32/week, although that might be a longer-term goal. Bluntly, it would put us at the same working hours as we'd have with 50% labor force participation rate today; however, we have a lot of temporary and part-time work, meaning 17-18% of our workforce (in good times; we've been 19-20% since 2008) works fewer than 35 hours per week. We'd really come out at around 53%, putting our GDP-per-capita about 6.7% higher than France and the UK.
This is all mainly interesting to me because I've been developing a Universal Social Security plan which cuts back on the tax burden to the United States tax payer while remediating our completely-broken welfare system. It doesn't directly-export to France, Germany, UK, AU, etc.; I could tailor a similar plan to any of those places and work out viability--it may be non-viable in any economy not sufficiently wealthy, although the way I've defined viability is kind of inaccurate (I don't want to pass more money through the system than our current social services; however, most of the money passed through the system goes immediately back to the people paying into it, so "slightly more expensive" means "a trillion dollars cheaper"). My initial goal was just to end homelessness and hunger in this country because, fuck, why do we have this?
So child pornography and its production shouldn't be criminalized behaviors? Look, I'm explicitly not a family-values politician, and even I think that's loony.
Until recently, we might not have had an official explanation for why ISPs don't have strict control over content flowing across their pipes, and so handwaved liability based on common sense. Now, with rules and definitions in place, we have decided that an entity which asserts that it has control over what type of content it delivers must also have *responsibility* for that content.
Congress created laws for this already, and the President issued an executive order creating the FCC to enact those laws. By not acting, Congress is stating their position on the matter: the FCC was created to decide how this works, and Congress sees no need to intervene.
Vulkan has some merits, or at least novelty; OpenGL and DirectX are actually in competition, and DirectX long had features allowing DirectX programmers to more-readily take advantage of not-always-present extensions while OpenGL historically would just fail and not tell you. OpenGL has long since improved on that front; minor technical arguments still bounce back and forth between the two technologies.
Stuff like that is why I find graphics programmers weird.
The short version of your statement is "you're a dumbass."
The fact of the matter is PUTTING A HAND ON A GIRL'S SHOULDER is an invasive action, and can make her uncomfortable, and, if unwanted, CAN BE AN ASSAULT. Attempting to do so is a test of consent, and can--and does--get pushback. This is normal human behavior.
Your assertion is that you're supposed to ask before every little thing like moving closer, touching, or whatnot. A lot of actions are intimate and invasive, and nobody asks before doing them because the direct probe does something which people describe as "ruining the mood." It's been acknowledged that you're specifically not supposed to be a dork and ruin the mood; you're supposed to test boundaries. That's how normal human beings who aren't verbally negotiating an explicit consent contract operate--as in every human being who doesn't suffer from severe mental defects.
There's a 100% chance that everyone has been hacked; the question is only what you define as hacked (downloaded malware on their network? CHECK!) and scope of damage.
Last time I was put under collection by a local newspaper, I went Willy Wonka on them.
"You REFUSED no less than four requests to cancel! You STOLE $20 off my credit card after repeated contacts to Support to cancel! You CEASED sending the paper after failure to bill the NEXT issue, and now you demand payment for services not rendered! You will remove the debt collection from my credit history, and you GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!"
The performance was not your average court performance, but we weren't in court and they folded. I guess they realized I could legitimately get them into *real* court (not small claims) on damage to my credit history, and that I would *win* in less than six seconds, and that the court would have a four-page report regarding their conduct published as an opinion, and probably order them to pay me thousands of dollars in punitive damages for being bastards. It's ridiculous, but that happens when you engage in professional misconduct.
That was, however, several orders of magnitude less complex than any court case I've seen--probably because no sane lawyer would let their client take something like that to court. Jack Thompson might.
Sales taxes have been proposed and supported as a way to "make the rich pay their fair share". They use the argument that food is excluded, thus it's a progressive tax because poor people have little luxury. Many states and even some cities have sales taxes.
The proponents are, frankly, delusional. It has been shown that people with higher incomes save more; unless you want to charge sales tax on capital gains or on mutual funds and savings accounts, there is a large chunk of money not being spent on sales-and-use. That means, for all intents and purposes, those of us sacking hundreds of thousands away, the Warren Buffets, the Donald Trumps, the people who put 60% of their money into savings, from middle-class up to ultra-rich, we all get to avoid much more of our taxes.
They say, "Well, the rich can't hide their money over seas, because a sales tax applies on everything!" How does it apply to the $32 trillion bank accounts hidden over seas?
So, no, the Federal Government doesn't have sales tax; but some idiots have proposed it.
What happens when Apple just moves operations to Canada or Ireland, leaving the 13,000 employees in Cupertino out a collective $2 billion flowing into the U.S. from global sales? Do you still demand they pay taxes in America, somehow, on their Irish HQ?
Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in a bank account. It can spend $100,000 to move an employee's family from the United States to Ireland, and drop $1.3 billion. The whole workforce, up and gone. Ireland would probably outright waive taxes on Apple Inc for a decade, since $2 billion of global income would be flowing straight into the hands of 13,000 workers residing in Ireland, spent right into their economy, fully taxable and job-creating.
Cupertino would turn into Detroit overnight. Ireland would take note of America losing $2 billion of economic resources and the amazing impact on their economy and extend the tax waiver for all eternity, with a historical account of how this got put into effect stapled to every copy of the document and handed out as mandatory reading to every official who got voted into office until the end of time.
In 2014, corporations paid income tax accounting for under 10% of all taxes and 20% of all income taxes (Excluding OASDI). If you include OASDI payroll and wage taxes, corporations paid 23% of all taxes and 38% of all income+OASDI taxes.
Sales taxes, payroll taxes, and wages are paid by the consumer. These through some manner increase the cost of products directly. Income taxes skim the top: a business barely-getting-by doesn't pay income taxes. That is to say: If I pay $250,000 to employee wages, have $50,000 of other expenses, and have $310,000 of revenue, I pay income taxes on $10,000; if my operations grow 10x in size, I have $3,100,000 and pay taxes on $100,000. If I'm paying 10% on payroll, I've suddenly got to pay taxes on $250,000--and $25,000 of taxes! To compensate, I'll need more revenue; and to make more of whatever I'm supplying, I'll need more employee work time, meaning more wages, and more taxes on those wages. Basically, it means my prices have to go up by $15,000 for me to break even.
That doesn't mean a 40% business income tax is desirable. Business income taxes were $274 billion in 2013, SOMEHOW. Taxable business income was $2,090 billion, and wages were $7,633 billion. Wages would have about $1,700 billion of standard deductions, and total is $12,427 billion, so businesses would have under $1,100 billion in deductions in total.
Because it's so little, I typically ignore it as an accounting smudge. Business tax reform patently doesn't matter, and I am more interested in knocking down payroll taxes to produce the effect of lowering wages without lowering the amount of money that people actually take home. Sales taxes (and any form of VAT) also need to go away.
True, although I would call it a stretch to say women are significantly less-susceptible to the toxic potential of cigarettes than men. We would need a study to determine this.
Counterpoint. This is only the largest study; there are a lot of less-interesting studies that try to reproduce a lot of studies which, as you pointed out, do exist and do show a lot of good data that second-hand smoke causes health issues. My problem is with this:
the vast preponderance of evidence points one way, and it's not the way you say it does.
There *is* a vast preponderance of evidence pointing one way, in the same way that there's a vast preponderance of evidence that video games make kids into murderers or that homosexuality can be cured by therapy akin to torture. There's also a significant failure rate in reproducing those same studies; a full examination of the evidence shows only weak statistical linkage, if any.
I actually rewrote that claim multiple times before posting. It would be incorrect to say that second-hand cigarette smoke has been shown *not* to cause any health effects, in spite of the rather large and statistically-sound study released recently; it has *not* *reliably* been shown to cause any health effects. There is no overwhelming body of evidence; there is a lot of difficult analysis that's hard to control for, and a lot of outcomes that don't reproduce well. The level of certainty is about even with chance.
There is also a lot of evidence that high-carbohydrate diets (above 40% of calories) cause arterial build-up, and high-fat diets do not. The original consensus is based on flawed statistics, and current studies don't yet reconcile a concrete position.
There is also emerging literature suggesting AHA-recommended levels of sodium cause heart attacks. Below 1350mg/day will likely cause your heart to stop (too much potassium will do this, too); while high levels of sodium (up to 6,000mg/day) have no detrimental effect after about 3 days. Your kidneys release hormones to restore homeostatic balance and pump all that sodium out of your blood, but it takes a few days and you have high blood pressure until then. Keeping people on diets long-term is hard, and flaky; modern research looks at high-sodium-intake societies and compares heart attack rates with low-sodium-intake societies, which has its own problems.
The thing is we have cancer groups, the USDA, CDC, and AHA ignoring new literature and doubling-down on old literature. We also have economists contradicting the BLS on things like minimum wage. Every large organization takes a position and uses evidence to back it up; the whole of evidence necessarily outpaces them, because shifting your position as a large entity requires a much stronger degree of certainty than doing it as a small entity.
There are a lot of studies that support that, and a lot that show no link. Collecting all of one type or another can let you show that vaccines cause autism, for example.
Then there's a decade-long study of 76,000 women, the largest one in history, that attempts to single-handedly get a definitive answer (it doesn't work that way, but this is pretty strong evidence).
If not, then it sounds like the solution is to regulate the industry to only permit safe(r) products, along with studies so that safe(r) is based on the best known facts at any given time.
There are good and bad forms of regulation; it's not a matter of more or less. Regulation goes out of date, either becoming inadequate or hindering beneficial actions.
She gets $400 million for what? She's asserting that other people were wronged, that she had zero stake (she let the images out for free), and that she thus somehow is owed $400 million?
It really is. Join a terrorist organization, get yourself onto an operation that requires long-term infiltration of the United States or UK or such, use your contacts in the organization to move into the target zone, and then defect.
The problems with smoking in public are that the smoke is irritating (dangerous to athsmatics and other compromised respiratory systems; unpleasant-smelling), that it does property damage (it leaves a tar on things it contacts, and puts a lingering smell in the air eventually), and that it's a fire hazard.
Second-hand cigarette smoke has not reliably been shown to increase cancer risk or cause respiratory damage to healthy individuals even when those individuals are children raised in smoker households. For those unfamiliar with statistics: if you do 10 studies on the link between reading and cancer, likely 1-2 will show a link between reading and cancer; because this link is non-repeatable, it is most likely that reading doesn't cause (and is not otherwise correlated with) cancer. Many, many studies have been done on second-hand smoke and cancer risk, and the few which have shown an association have proven non-repeatable, and so the likelihood of an association is similarly low. (Note that the likelihood of a link between reading and cancer is non-zero.)
With e-cigarettes, we can more-readily examine the risks directly. Cigarettes have smoke particles and hundreds of chemicals to deal with, meaning loads of complex interactions making any scientific prediction of overall effect about as useful as just making a bunch of shit up. E-cigarette vapors contain a small handful of compounds, providing a great deal less interaction and less variance from predicted results. Even a cursory toxicology analysis would determine that second-hand e-cigarette vapor provides extremely-fractional exposure to toxins (that is: the chemicals each start having an impact at hundreds or thousands of times the dose you'd receive), and so any toxicological effect would require an interaction that magnifies the effect not two or three times, but by hundreds or thousands of time. That sort of interaction would be similar to sniffing a glass of vodka and then licking an ambien tablet and *immediately* dying from the combined sedative.
So the vapors are probably not harmful, in the same way the vapors coming off an open can of coca-cola are probably not harmful.
There are good points all around this discussion, and a lack of organization. Let's try to clear this up a bit.
Different e-cigarette juices contain different carriers. Some specifically exclude chemicals which produce formaldehyde or, particularly, acetaldehyde, largely because acetaldehyde is known to cause popcorn lung in chronic, high exposure. Most high-quality formulations list their contents in full; and the content of lower-quality formulations is often known, but not readily-listed. High-quality formulations often don't contain chemicals producing acetaldehyde, and use propylene glycol as a carrier; lower-quality formulations also often omit those compounds, but frequently do not.
Different e-cigarettes have different temperatures and control mechanisms as well. They may prevent overheating, or they may reach high temperatures, or they may be designed for brief activation intervals with no temperature controls. Fast-reaction circuits necessarily draw high current, and will overheat without temperature management; thus cheap, fast-reaction circuits intended for brief activation will most often overheat and cause reactions, converting benign substances such as propylene glycol into dangerous substances such as formaldehyde.
Finally, gaseous vapors produce visual distortion when diluted. If you suck in 2cc of suspended smoke or vaporized PPG and then blow it out into the air, it will expand to a liter or more and demonstrate itself as a gray cloud. The real measures are temperature and mass of substance; the substance changes its standard volume at pressure and becomes diluted when diffusing through atmosphere, and so these are poor measurements.
Thus it is wholly-possible to engineer a substantially-safe e-cigarette, if examining specific concerns of e-cigarettes (conversion of chemicals to dangerous chemicals; high-temperature vapor irritating the throat and lungs; basic chemical content). This requires engineering of the compound itself and the delivery device.
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I pay $80 for 172Mb down and 10Mb up. My mobile phone includes unlimited voice, text messaging, media SMS, and low-speed Internet, along with a few GB of high-speed Internet, but that costs $60 (I could get cheaper).
Your GDP-per-capita is as shitty as the UK's. Get ~12% more productive over there to catch up to the U.S. For the price I pay for Internet, I could buy 77Mb down and 4.5Mb up in France.
Even lagging as Europe is now, it won't be long before they catch up. What's holding Europe back relative to the U.S. is our wage slave labor culture here in the states: we have an insanely high labor force participation rate, and people are dumb enough to complain it's too *low*. More people working per capita means more buying-power per capita. 56.1% participation rate in France and 62.6% in America, which puts France's productivity per worker about on par with the U.S.
Part of my long-term goals for America (if I could ever get elected into the House, ffs...) is a reduction of working hours to 32/week, although that might be a longer-term goal. Bluntly, it would put us at the same working hours as we'd have with 50% labor force participation rate today; however, we have a lot of temporary and part-time work, meaning 17-18% of our workforce (in good times; we've been 19-20% since 2008) works fewer than 35 hours per week. We'd really come out at around 53%, putting our GDP-per-capita about 6.7% higher than France and the UK.
This is all mainly interesting to me because I've been developing a Universal Social Security plan which cuts back on the tax burden to the United States tax payer while remediating our completely-broken welfare system. It doesn't directly-export to France, Germany, UK, AU, etc.; I could tailor a similar plan to any of those places and work out viability--it may be non-viable in any economy not sufficiently wealthy, although the way I've defined viability is kind of inaccurate (I don't want to pass more money through the system than our current social services; however, most of the money passed through the system goes immediately back to the people paying into it, so "slightly more expensive" means "a trillion dollars cheaper"). My initial goal was just to end homelessness and hunger in this country because, fuck, why do we have this?
So child pornography and its production shouldn't be criminalized behaviors? Look, I'm explicitly not a family-values politician, and even I think that's loony.
Until recently, we might not have had an official explanation for why ISPs don't have strict control over content flowing across their pipes, and so handwaved liability based on common sense. Now, with rules and definitions in place, we have decided that an entity which asserts that it has control over what type of content it delivers must also have *responsibility* for that content.
Congress created laws for this already, and the President issued an executive order creating the FCC to enact those laws. By not acting, Congress is stating their position on the matter: the FCC was created to decide how this works, and Congress sees no need to intervene.
Vulkan has some merits, or at least novelty; OpenGL and DirectX are actually in competition, and DirectX long had features allowing DirectX programmers to more-readily take advantage of not-always-present extensions while OpenGL historically would just fail and not tell you. OpenGL has long since improved on that front; minor technical arguments still bounce back and forth between the two technologies.
Stuff like that is why I find graphics programmers weird.
The short version of your statement is "you're a dumbass."
The fact of the matter is PUTTING A HAND ON A GIRL'S SHOULDER is an invasive action, and can make her uncomfortable, and, if unwanted, CAN BE AN ASSAULT. Attempting to do so is a test of consent, and can--and does--get pushback. This is normal human behavior.
Your assertion is that you're supposed to ask before every little thing like moving closer, touching, or whatnot. A lot of actions are intimate and invasive, and nobody asks before doing them because the direct probe does something which people describe as "ruining the mood." It's been acknowledged that you're specifically not supposed to be a dork and ruin the mood; you're supposed to test boundaries. That's how normal human beings who aren't verbally negotiating an explicit consent contract operate--as in every human being who doesn't suffer from severe mental defects.
For Chrome, Honey, Dictionary of Numbers, Backstay, and Transover. Stop Autoplay for Youtube is a good one, too.
There's a 100% chance that everyone has been hacked; the question is only what you define as hacked (downloaded malware on their network? CHECK!) and scope of damage.
Unfortunately, you can be innocent, lose anyway (their lawyers are bigger), and then owe them $4 million damages.
Last time I was put under collection by a local newspaper, I went Willy Wonka on them.
"You REFUSED no less than four requests to cancel! You STOLE $20 off my credit card after repeated contacts to Support to cancel! You CEASED sending the paper after failure to bill the NEXT issue, and now you demand payment for services not rendered! You will remove the debt collection from my credit history, and you GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!"
The performance was not your average court performance, but we weren't in court and they folded. I guess they realized I could legitimately get them into *real* court (not small claims) on damage to my credit history, and that I would *win* in less than six seconds, and that the court would have a four-page report regarding their conduct published as an opinion, and probably order them to pay me thousands of dollars in punitive damages for being bastards. It's ridiculous, but that happens when you engage in professional misconduct.
That was, however, several orders of magnitude less complex than any court case I've seen--probably because no sane lawyer would let their client take something like that to court. Jack Thompson might.
Getting to first base requires consent. Finding out if you have consent requires testing that consent.
Sales taxes have been proposed and supported as a way to "make the rich pay their fair share". They use the argument that food is excluded, thus it's a progressive tax because poor people have little luxury. Many states and even some cities have sales taxes.
The proponents are, frankly, delusional. It has been shown that people with higher incomes save more; unless you want to charge sales tax on capital gains or on mutual funds and savings accounts, there is a large chunk of money not being spent on sales-and-use. That means, for all intents and purposes, those of us sacking hundreds of thousands away, the Warren Buffets, the Donald Trumps, the people who put 60% of their money into savings, from middle-class up to ultra-rich, we all get to avoid much more of our taxes.
They say, "Well, the rich can't hide their money over seas, because a sales tax applies on everything!" How does it apply to the $32 trillion bank accounts hidden over seas?
So, no, the Federal Government doesn't have sales tax; but some idiots have proposed it.
What happens when Apple just moves operations to Canada or Ireland, leaving the 13,000 employees in Cupertino out a collective $2 billion flowing into the U.S. from global sales? Do you still demand they pay taxes in America, somehow, on their Irish HQ?
Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in a bank account. It can spend $100,000 to move an employee's family from the United States to Ireland, and drop $1.3 billion. The whole workforce, up and gone. Ireland would probably outright waive taxes on Apple Inc for a decade, since $2 billion of global income would be flowing straight into the hands of 13,000 workers residing in Ireland, spent right into their economy, fully taxable and job-creating.
Cupertino would turn into Detroit overnight. Ireland would take note of America losing $2 billion of economic resources and the amazing impact on their economy and extend the tax waiver for all eternity, with a historical account of how this got put into effect stapled to every copy of the document and handed out as mandatory reading to every official who got voted into office until the end of time.
In 2014, corporations paid income tax accounting for under 10% of all taxes and 20% of all income taxes (Excluding OASDI). If you include OASDI payroll and wage taxes, corporations paid 23% of all taxes and 38% of all income+OASDI taxes.
Sales taxes, payroll taxes, and wages are paid by the consumer. These through some manner increase the cost of products directly. Income taxes skim the top: a business barely-getting-by doesn't pay income taxes. That is to say: If I pay $250,000 to employee wages, have $50,000 of other expenses, and have $310,000 of revenue, I pay income taxes on $10,000; if my operations grow 10x in size, I have $3,100,000 and pay taxes on $100,000. If I'm paying 10% on payroll, I've suddenly got to pay taxes on $250,000--and $25,000 of taxes! To compensate, I'll need more revenue; and to make more of whatever I'm supplying, I'll need more employee work time, meaning more wages, and more taxes on those wages. Basically, it means my prices have to go up by $15,000 for me to break even.
That doesn't mean a 40% business income tax is desirable. Business income taxes were $274 billion in 2013, SOMEHOW. Taxable business income was $2,090 billion, and wages were $7,633 billion. Wages would have about $1,700 billion of standard deductions, and total is $12,427 billion, so businesses would have under $1,100 billion in deductions in total.
Because it's so little, I typically ignore it as an accounting smudge. Business tax reform patently doesn't matter, and I am more interested in knocking down payroll taxes to produce the effect of lowering wages without lowering the amount of money that people actually take home. Sales taxes (and any form of VAT) also need to go away.
True, although I would call it a stretch to say women are significantly less-susceptible to the toxic potential of cigarettes than men. We would need a study to determine this.
Counterpoint. This is only the largest study; there are a lot of less-interesting studies that try to reproduce a lot of studies which, as you pointed out, do exist and do show a lot of good data that second-hand smoke causes health issues. My problem is with this:
the vast preponderance of evidence points one way, and it's not the way you say it does.
There *is* a vast preponderance of evidence pointing one way, in the same way that there's a vast preponderance of evidence that video games make kids into murderers or that homosexuality can be cured by therapy akin to torture. There's also a significant failure rate in reproducing those same studies; a full examination of the evidence shows only weak statistical linkage, if any.
I actually rewrote that claim multiple times before posting. It would be incorrect to say that second-hand cigarette smoke has been shown *not* to cause any health effects, in spite of the rather large and statistically-sound study released recently; it has *not* *reliably* been shown to cause any health effects. There is no overwhelming body of evidence; there is a lot of difficult analysis that's hard to control for, and a lot of outcomes that don't reproduce well. The level of certainty is about even with chance.
There is also a lot of evidence that high-carbohydrate diets (above 40% of calories) cause arterial build-up, and high-fat diets do not. The original consensus is based on flawed statistics, and current studies don't yet reconcile a concrete position.
There is also emerging literature suggesting AHA-recommended levels of sodium cause heart attacks. Below 1350mg/day will likely cause your heart to stop (too much potassium will do this, too); while high levels of sodium (up to 6,000mg/day) have no detrimental effect after about 3 days. Your kidneys release hormones to restore homeostatic balance and pump all that sodium out of your blood, but it takes a few days and you have high blood pressure until then. Keeping people on diets long-term is hard, and flaky; modern research looks at high-sodium-intake societies and compares heart attack rates with low-sodium-intake societies, which has its own problems.
The thing is we have cancer groups, the USDA, CDC, and AHA ignoring new literature and doubling-down on old literature. We also have economists contradicting the BLS on things like minimum wage. Every large organization takes a position and uses evidence to back it up; the whole of evidence necessarily outpaces them, because shifting your position as a large entity requires a much stronger degree of certainty than doing it as a small entity.
There are a lot of studies that support that, and a lot that show no link. Collecting all of one type or another can let you show that vaccines cause autism, for example.
Then there's a decade-long study of 76,000 women, the largest one in history, that attempts to single-handedly get a definitive answer (it doesn't work that way, but this is pretty strong evidence).
If not, then it sounds like the solution is to regulate the industry to only permit safe(r) products, along with studies so that safe(r) is based on the best known facts at any given time.
There are good and bad forms of regulation; it's not a matter of more or less. Regulation goes out of date, either becoming inadequate or hindering beneficial actions.
She gets $400 million for what? She's asserting that other people were wronged, that she had zero stake (she let the images out for free), and that she thus somehow is owed $400 million?
It really is. Join a terrorist organization, get yourself onto an operation that requires long-term infiltration of the United States or UK or such, use your contacts in the organization to move into the target zone, and then defect.
Like I said: reasonable, and carries risk.
Because inhaling hot ash is the kind of thing only a retarded dumbass would think is good for you.
The problems with smoking in public are that the smoke is irritating (dangerous to athsmatics and other compromised respiratory systems; unpleasant-smelling), that it does property damage (it leaves a tar on things it contacts, and puts a lingering smell in the air eventually), and that it's a fire hazard.
Second-hand cigarette smoke has not reliably been shown to increase cancer risk or cause respiratory damage to healthy individuals even when those individuals are children raised in smoker households. For those unfamiliar with statistics: if you do 10 studies on the link between reading and cancer, likely 1-2 will show a link between reading and cancer; because this link is non-repeatable, it is most likely that reading doesn't cause (and is not otherwise correlated with) cancer. Many, many studies have been done on second-hand smoke and cancer risk, and the few which have shown an association have proven non-repeatable, and so the likelihood of an association is similarly low. (Note that the likelihood of a link between reading and cancer is non-zero.)
With e-cigarettes, we can more-readily examine the risks directly. Cigarettes have smoke particles and hundreds of chemicals to deal with, meaning loads of complex interactions making any scientific prediction of overall effect about as useful as just making a bunch of shit up. E-cigarette vapors contain a small handful of compounds, providing a great deal less interaction and less variance from predicted results. Even a cursory toxicology analysis would determine that second-hand e-cigarette vapor provides extremely-fractional exposure to toxins (that is: the chemicals each start having an impact at hundreds or thousands of times the dose you'd receive), and so any toxicological effect would require an interaction that magnifies the effect not two or three times, but by hundreds or thousands of time. That sort of interaction would be similar to sniffing a glass of vodka and then licking an ambien tablet and *immediately* dying from the combined sedative.
So the vapors are probably not harmful, in the same way the vapors coming off an open can of coca-cola are probably not harmful.
Yes. That was the logical inconsistency that drew my attention initially.
There are good points all around this discussion, and a lack of organization. Let's try to clear this up a bit.
Different e-cigarette juices contain different carriers. Some specifically exclude chemicals which produce formaldehyde or, particularly, acetaldehyde, largely because acetaldehyde is known to cause popcorn lung in chronic, high exposure. Most high-quality formulations list their contents in full; and the content of lower-quality formulations is often known, but not readily-listed. High-quality formulations often don't contain chemicals producing acetaldehyde, and use propylene glycol as a carrier; lower-quality formulations also often omit those compounds, but frequently do not.
Different e-cigarettes have different temperatures and control mechanisms as well. They may prevent overheating, or they may reach high temperatures, or they may be designed for brief activation intervals with no temperature controls. Fast-reaction circuits necessarily draw high current, and will overheat without temperature management; thus cheap, fast-reaction circuits intended for brief activation will most often overheat and cause reactions, converting benign substances such as propylene glycol into dangerous substances such as formaldehyde.
Finally, gaseous vapors produce visual distortion when diluted. If you suck in 2cc of suspended smoke or vaporized PPG and then blow it out into the air, it will expand to a liter or more and demonstrate itself as a gray cloud. The real measures are temperature and mass of substance; the substance changes its standard volume at pressure and becomes diluted when diffusing through atmosphere, and so these are poor measurements.
Thus it is wholly-possible to engineer a substantially-safe e-cigarette, if examining specific concerns of e-cigarettes (conversion of chemicals to dangerous chemicals; high-temperature vapor irritating the throat and lungs; basic chemical content). This requires engineering of the compound itself and the delivery device.