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Facebook’s own security department has shockingly acknowledged that over 600,000 accounts are compromised every day. Did you get that? Not 600,000 accounts per year or even per month, but per day.
Future Crimes
Marc Goodman
It was this sugar-sauced Burley tobacco that R. J. Reynolds blended into Camels, a decision that the SRF report called either an act of “necessity [they had mainly stocks of air-cured tobaccos used in the manufacture of plug] or the stroke of genius anticipating future trends in demand and consumption.” Either way, if the explicit goal had been to maximize the delivery of nicotine—and so, regrettably, carcinogens with it—to the human lungs, they may not have been able to find a better way to do it. American cigarette manufacturers all followed suit. By 1929, U.S. tobacco growers were saucing Burley tobacco with fifty million pounds of sugar a year and using it in over 120 billion cigarettes.*3 The sugar balanced out the tobacco’s naturally alkaline smoke, maximizing its inhalability and delivering even more nicotine into the lungs. The sugars in the tobacco also “caramelize” as they burn (technically, during the process of pyrolysis) and the caramelization of the smoke provides a sweet flavor and an agreeable smell that made cigarettes more attractive to women smokers and to adolescents as well. (“This [caramelization] process adds as much to the flavor and smoking enjoyment of cigarettes as it does to the arena of confectionary and bakery products,” notes the SRF report.)
The Case Against Sugar
Gary Taubes
because the subjects were recording responses about an activity at the very moment they were engaged in it, the responses were more accurate. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson called the approach the experience sampling method (ESM), and it provided unprecedented insight into how we actually feel about the beats of our daily lives. Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi’s work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong: Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
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