Or, you know, seeing as you guys are the ones being downvoted into the negative, you could take your own advice and start your own Elon-free tech community. Nothing is stopping you.

1/4 yes, but also worth mentioning that today far more than 1/4 of the present-day population live in that quarter of the world that has a history of being under British rule in recent history.

Couple that with the UK population being far more likely to be proud of the empire, wish Britain still had an empire, and insist the colonies wee left better off for having been oppressed, the British Empire has a certain stench about it many of the others haven't, or haven't anymore because of either age, a greater willingness to admit it was a bad thing, or lack of scale.

Funny thing is it's not a proper lake, and not very old. It's an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.

I've addressed your points repeatedly, while you resort to fiction and defamatory lies.

And again, actual murders trump your fictional headcanon any time. This "it's for the good of everyone" argument is the traditional argument of fascists to justify dismantling democracy and hunting down political opponents. Every brutal dictator and their supporters think they are the heroes and project their own brutality on the people they murder while they leave a trail of blood behind them.

Allende didn't carry out any mass murder. Pinochet did. Hence your purported "knowledge" about what Allende might have done had your preferred mass murderer not taken power is only in your head.

Trying to set up strawmen by pointing to entirely different regimes that nobody in this thread have expressed support for does not change the fact that you're still the only one here repeatedly arguing in favor of someone who actually carried out mass murder.

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

I tried to start with both a patch and gums years ago because of the stimulant benefits and the decent risk profile of nicotine on its own. I've never smoked, never will. Didn't stick - it was too hard to get used to. If I could get it as a flavourless pill, maybe.

The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.

The first link has nothing wrong in it. It's correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.

To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:

Thus, the induced activation of nAChRs in lung and other tissues by nicotine can promote carcinogenesis by causing DNA mutations[26] Through its tumor promoter effects, it acts synergistically with other carcinogens from automobile exhausts or wood burning and potentially shorten the induction period of cancers[43] [Table 2].

This makes sense. Don't inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words. There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it's perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.

What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we're perfectly fine with.

I'll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).

It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).

The "Materials and methods" section also goes on to say "Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded" but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. "Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume") and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made ("Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.")

So, yes, if you make claims about how you're going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you've not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.

They also end with subjective statements they've not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they've gone from "here is why it's dangerous" to "it should be restricted", but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it's a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.

That doesn't mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we're happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don't inhale it.

Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There's little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You're more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.

The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn't get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That's not to say you can't develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it's as a substitution for smoking than "from scratch".

Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.

My terminal is written in Ruby, and it uses a font-renderer that's 100% Ruby ( https://github.com/vidarh/skrift - I didn't write it from scratch, it's a port from C ), and it's definitely possible to get things "fast enough" for a surprising portion of code in Ruby these days, but you may end up writing Ruby code that is "surprising". For faster Ruby, see e.g. Aaron Patterson's walkthrough of speeding up a lexer which ends up doing things most Ruby devs would not usually do because at least some of the things he ends up doing goes against the readability (e.g. the TrueType renderer I linked above definitely sacrifices speed and assumes you'll memoize heavily to maintain readability). For an interpreter, you're probably right to drop to something lower level.