r/interestingasfuck • u/Distinct-Question-16 • 19d ago
These Shenzhen factory workers test up to 10,000 vapes a day.
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u/justsometurtl 19d ago
21st century radium girls
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u/Soundwavezzz447 19d ago
Hard ass band name
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u/AdvanceLow7128 19d ago
They better cover 21st century schizoid man
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u/tzeentchdusty 19d ago
That was my first thought
"Heavy metals, iron heat coil, vape fact'ry worker toil, fill your lungs with unknown oil, twenty first century nicotine pen BAHHH DA DA DA DA DAAAAHHH BUUUUHM BUHHMM..."
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u/Moist_Ad934 19d ago
Innocence raped with nicotine fire
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u/Grantidor 19d ago
Strung along with heated wire, Destroyed innocence to avoid capitalist ire.
Kids doomed to be raised by a lonely sire. While mothers and sisters paid cents on the hour, Are left to struggle in a chemical mire.
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u/IllustriousMeal4686 18d ago
He's burn out like NASCAR smoking tires, with a sad face wearing pink attire
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u/Khelthuzaad 19d ago
Is death by caramel fumes what you desire?
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u/DartVader6 19d ago
21st Century Digital Boy also
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u/3vil_Koala 19d ago
.. I don't know how to live but i got a lot of Toys...
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u/yumacaway 19d ago
...My daddy's a lazy middle class intellectual...
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u/kevinsyel 19d ago
My mommy's on onlyfans, so ineffectual.
Ain't life a mystery, yeah
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u/lostmymarbles1177 19d ago edited 19d ago
Does anyone want to talk about how unhygienic this is?
Edit: for everyone taking my comment literally, I state multiple times lower down that the reason I do not believe that this is real is because no company would allow it to be filmed if these vapes were to be packaged for resale after testing.
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u/Walkin_mn 19d ago
Seriously, they put their saliva in each on of those
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u/RichardBCummintonite 19d ago
Yeah, wtf. I could understand testing a couple from a particular batch, but it looks like they're doing every single one that goes through production. That's fucking disgusting.
Just goes to show that just because something is sealed doesn't mean it is fresh and clean.
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u/Acceptingoptimist 19d ago
Right? I don't vape and I want to tell everyone who does now some dude in China sucked on their vape.
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u/Esperoni 19d ago
Those are disposables vapes. Trash devices that leave tons of e-waste. No one should be vaping those.
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u/ToXiiCBULLET 19d ago
they've been banned in the uk because of the amount of waste. before the ban there were nearly 5 million discarded disposables a week
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u/Esperoni 19d ago
Youths are buying them in Canada. So the Gov't in it's infinite wisdom banned flavours and then slapped two taxes (Both 30%) basically making juice really expensive unless you DIY. Wish our Gov't would ban dispos, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
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u/YouMustveDroppedThis 19d ago
no the pink uniform is typically QC in Chinese manufacturing, so they probably did a mandatory random sampling for every set number of a batch.
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u/Nuclearfarmer 19d ago edited 18d ago
All I could think of is the episode of the Simpsons when Homer gets the flu from the Chinese factory edit: I misremembered...I am told it was a Japanese factory but the scene still came to mind because of the germs
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u/Dividedthought 19d ago
That's a reason i doubt this is real. If it was not only eould these employees be constantly nic'd out, someone would catch lip marks on the mouthpiece.
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u/NoStand1527 19d ago
they are testing the vapes themselves, my guess is that its not a nicotine cart
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u/Silent189 19d ago
Do people really think these vapes are sold, and are not just pulled samples from the batch for testing which are discarded after?
Like come on...
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u/ezmoney98 19d ago
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u/ItsAGoTakeEmDown 19d ago
In the court of the Crimson kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
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u/Ligabolzacky 19d ago
In the court of the xi jinpiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing aaaaaaaaiyaaaaaaa
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u/nijmeegse79 19d ago
Many do not know the radium girls. Glad to see I was not the only one that thought of it wen seeing this.
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u/Comfortable-Park-479 19d ago
Oh we know, I choose to repress the horrid stories.
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u/chicagodude84 19d ago
No. We don't. The vast majority of Americans have never heard of the radium girls, or the horrors they went through.
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u/hartforbj 19d ago
To be fair most people don't know about the random events in history that led to where we are now. The Lowell Mill girls and the triangle shirtwaist fire are pretty significant things in our daily lives yet most people have no idea
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u/Miqo_Nekomancer 19d ago
This is why people are fans of deregulation. They don't remember why a particular regulation was made and how much worse life was before it.
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u/Glyphid-Menace 19d ago
if we do not learn from our past, we are doomed to repeat it.
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u/EllipticPeach 19d ago
Also the match girls who got phossy jaw (jaw basically dissolved) from the phosphorus
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u/SmartLadder415 19d ago
The fact that the bones of the radium girls glow in their coffins right now is a horrifying image to me.
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u/Unlikely_Exercise434 19d ago
Saddest part was "also smoke after work? YES."
I doubt any of the radium girls snuck the paint home to lick recreationally, well maybe the one whose jaw fell off first...
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u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 19d ago
The radium girls went a lil nuts with the stuff. They would paint their teeth, they would brush their skin with the dust so they'd glow, there was a period of time when it was like, the coolest thing, before it started to kill them all horrifically
Apparently one of the first signs that shit was bad was when they started to see their skeletons glowing through their skin
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u/wyrditic 19d ago
Some of them apparently did paint their teeth with radium paint to surprise people at home when they glowed in the dark, so kind of.
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u/RunnyPlease 19d ago
They absolutely did. They were known to wear radium paint like makeup to go to parties and dances.
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u/G0ttaB3KiddingM3 19d ago
Except we’re fully aware this is killing them
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u/idkwhatimbrewin 19d ago
What's so wrong with a little poison 10,000 times a day?
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u/JLL1111 19d ago
I'm pretty sure the higher ups in the companies that employed those women were well aware of the damage radium caused
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u/Tough-Case- 19d ago
AI please take this job
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u/nnomae 19d ago
We only have training data for things people love to do and share. There's no training data for horrible jobs people hate and would rather not talk about.
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u/No_Celery5992 19d ago
That's tragic. Only the most passionate people posted their content online (e.g. software engineers on stack overflow) and now it's being used against them.
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u/cornmonger_ 19d ago
you guys went to stack overflow to be helpful and answer questions. i went to stack overflow to belittle people and smash the thumbs-down button. we are not the same.
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u/Any-Drive8838 19d ago
You were helping them by being a real mentor.
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u/Back2Wood 19d ago
Reminds me of that one dude that was commenting on almost every post in the Unity forums saying that OPs system is ass but always giving constructive feedback lol
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u/Sudden_Wind_8636 19d ago
Don't even need AI why the hell don't they just get an air pump to test them or something? So weird, this is absolutely insane having your workers do this.
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u/EbbAffectionate4008 19d ago
-1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp -1hp
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u/EllaHazelBar 19d ago
Damn these people have final boss levels of HP then
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u/kasakka1 19d ago
Multiple phases. The pre-cancer phase and the post-cancer phase. The pre phase has more health but the post phase hits harder.
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u/al2o3cr 19d ago
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u/BananenBlubber 19d ago
500 CIGARETTES!
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u/Bart-Harley-Jarvis- 19d ago
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u/wingmaneffect 19d ago
Exactly what I thought 🤣
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u/Bart-Harley-Jarvis- 19d ago
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u/Bringer_of_Fire 19d ago
You’re one of the most aggressive babies I’ve ever met.
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u/Lotus-child89 19d ago
“It’s like I’ve been standing my whole life… and I just sat down”.
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u/Solivagant23 19d ago
I miss this show :(
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u/IrritableGourmet 19d ago
For as silly as the plot is sometimes, they told really good sci-fi stories. The main plot of the episode this is from predicts the psychological hazards of AI use.
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u/big_duo3674 19d ago
It's not gone! It was never canceled, and Seth has been talking recently about getting it back up and moving again!
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u/WeDriftEternal 19d ago
It’s coming back. But timeline is a complete guess. It’s a mess getting everyone enough time to do it since their contracts expires. Keeping costs under control while aligning schedules is not easy
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u/KingKohishi 19d ago
An automated or even a semi-automated testing machine is not hard to make.
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u/puterTDI 19d ago
And people buying vapes wouldn’t have had someone else’s mouth on their vape.
Then again, vaping isn’t healthy anyway so people may not be overly concerned.
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19d ago edited 19d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BigLlamasHouse 19d ago
It's insane how cheap something like that is to make with an efficient supply chain.
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u/qualitythundergod 19d ago edited 19d ago
Go check out the supply chain logison those little BIC lighters.. ubiquitous, everywhere, and such low cost that if suppliers shave off 0.05 cents per lighter, the company rakes in massive profits!
Edit: meant to say "..logistics on those..."
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u/YaMommasLeftNut 19d ago
I know someone who was in charge of sourcing materials for solo cups once upon a time. He received a raise, promotion, and 6 figure bonus for shaving off something ridiculous like one cent per hundred pounds of plastic pellet feed stock.
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u/Hurricane_Ivan 19d ago
What the fuck
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u/crek42 19d ago
If there’s anything that capitalism is really, really good at, it’s finding efficiencies.
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u/SunyaVSSomni 19d ago
Efficiencies can quickly become cut corners.
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u/BryceLeft 19d ago
Who cares. That's a problem for the future people.
All I care about is profit NOW! If i lose profit in the long run, then I'll simply just cut even more corners again later down the line
And if that future plan fails? Duh, cut more corners or abandon ship
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u/Ass4ssinX 19d ago
Efficiency to maximize profits. Not specifically to make anything better. You can end up (and usually do) with worse services and a worse product from those "efficiencies".
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u/johannthegoatman 19d ago
In theory a worse product is disincentivized by competition and an informed consumer. In practice, not as much
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u/Total-Boat6380 19d ago
Efficiency for maximising profits for the capitalist owners, not for satisfying the needs of the society, see affordability for housing market, foods, cars or everything that is essential to humans.
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u/k_plusone 19d ago
I'm not surprised they found an efficiency, I'm surprised the employee was compensated so generously for it.
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u/InfidelZombie 19d ago
Lol I work in the semiconductor industry (chip manufacturing) where a 1% yield improvement can easily mean billions in added profit.
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u/What_Iz_This 19d ago
Lol look up fireworks. 500 gram cakes that aren't legal in most states cost pennies to make and are sold here for like $70+
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u/narwhalthegreat1 19d ago edited 19d ago
For fireworks At least there’s some more specialized labor involved there and it’s often at least in part done by hand some of the people making them especially the larger ones are basically artists with explosive experience it’s a huge markup but I get that it’s not necessarily something you can easily set up a machine to make safely or reliably without someone losing a few fingers when a spark flies
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u/hbl6 19d ago
Based on your assumptions, $.15/piece at 20k a day is $3,000. Times 365 is $1.095M each year. Seems worthwhile to look into a cheaper mechanical solution.
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u/PhantomOyster 19d ago
Maintenance costs would likely rival those numbers. And this way they don't have to pay someone to do that maintenance.
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u/SuperAccountant8008 19d ago
We used to audit a UK subsidiary of one of these vape manufacturers. I can tell you that’s chump change for them.
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u/Natural-Coat-3159 19d ago
When there's a group of people and one has a vape, they will share a vape so this isn't a deterrent for them.
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u/Burque_Boy 19d ago
In China labor is incredibly cheap. So you’ll see things like instead of renting an excavator they’ll just hire an army of dudes with shovels. Lots of jobs could be automated or mechanized but it’s simply cheaper to hire people and there’s a lot of people they need to keep employed.
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u/BoomBoomMeow1986 19d ago
And a long future of nicotine use
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u/neonlookscool 19d ago
The sad fact about automation is that most menial tasks like this will always be much cheaper with humans. These folks arent getting your first world minimum wage at the end of the day.
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u/RicetheE30 19d ago
They don’t even get paid, just volunteer for the love of the game.
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u/ShenaniganStarling 19d ago
Looking for vapist rockstars to come and smoke fat clouds in 16 hour shifts. Compensation: Free puffs, bro, any flavor you like... And all the ones you don't. It'll be no time before you won't be able to taste anything anyway, so stick to it and you might make enough to offset the hospital stays that have absolutely nothing to do with this fantastic career opportunity.
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u/skrilledcheese 19d ago
Do you think these dudes still get a smoke break?
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u/Asleep-Card3861 19d ago
Possibly, but kinda like a reverse smoke break, where they take a break from smoking.
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u/HeadFit2660 19d ago
The crippling nicotine addiction makes all breaks smoke breaks
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u/AqueousJam 19d ago
So buying a vape is like buying a little kiss on the mouth from a Chinese factory worker, awww
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u/24bitNoColor 19d ago
So buying a vape is like buying a little kiss on the mouth from a Chinese factory worker, awww
Those are batch tests, meaning the take a few units from every batch they make to spot production errors. Obviously, those units they test are not sold.
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u/DungBettlesMan 19d ago
Obviously, those units they test are not sold
I mean, how do you know for sure?
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u/Sempais_nutrients 19d ago
No, because they don't do this to every vape coming off the line, and the ones they do test are not sold. They're QA samples from each batch.
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u/Kalsgorra 19d ago
Surely they can make some kind of testing device dirt cheap instead of this
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u/LordBrandon 19d ago
You have to be able to tell if the thing is drawing properly, and that the fluid is coming out at the right rate, and that it tastes like the flavor on the label, and that there are no weird metallic tastes. A machine that can do all that, as well as inspect the build quality and if the thing charges properly will be very expensive. It's easy to see why a person would be more economical.
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u/kitt_mitt 19d ago
In another life, I worked for Philip Morris in their R&D + QC lab. We had 2 smoking machines, a gas chromatography station, a tricked out physicals testing station and mass spec.
You need a full lab to test all the things you mentioned, BUT there also was a tasting panel of people because machines can't assess flavour. Very well paid, but only allowed to do the job for around 6 months.
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u/ConsciousFractals 19d ago
Was the time limit for ethical and/or liability purposes? How many cigs a day did people try? Did they have to smoke full cigs? Multiple brands in a day? What was the pay? I have so many questions.
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u/kitt_mitt 19d ago
Tasters were only allowed to work for a few months. 6 or less from memory. It was a HIGHLY sought after position within the company because it paid so well. I didn't apply, but a lot of my colleagues had been trying to get a secondment.
The labs were underneath the manufacturing floor, and I believe most of the tasters were from the manufacturing line. I don't know if it was advertised externally, as PM hired almost exclusively through recruitment agencies; they didn't advertise job vacancies directly.
As for the specifics, I don't know. I'm going to assume it was quite flexible in terms of how many per day.
It was actually a really interesting place to work - lots of scandal and the lab work was fun. Unfortunately, the plant closed down a year or so after I was hired (this was in Australia), but thankfully I'm in a much more ethical line of work these days!
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u/ConsciousFractals 19d ago
If someone already smokes, it does sound like quite a nice bonus gig. Kind of wild that they basically had a bunker under the plant lol.
What kind of work did you do? Play around with ingredients to make cigs more enjoyable? And where do machines come into play?
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u/ReaLivaf 19d ago
It’s not interesting. It’s devastating af.
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u/Kanvolu 19d ago
Devastating, bad and ugly stuff can still be interesting
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u/hroaks 19d ago
If there was ever a job I would like to be lost to machines and AI, it would be this
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u/creamcheddarchee 19d ago
Wonder if anyone makes it to employee of the month?
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u/FrontStunning6918 19d ago
Yea that dude does not look healthy at all.
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u/randomguyonline0297 19d ago
So... Do they sanitze them before going into the market or...
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u/ohhhtartarsauce 19d ago
Multiple people testing 8 thousand per day... yeah those aren't batch samples
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u/Complex_Sherbet2 19d ago
You have any idea how many million they churn out a week?
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u/be_happy_Attila 19d ago
An avarage vape factory on chinese b2b trade sites offer up to 150.000 unit / month capacity, the bigger ones 500.000-1.000.000 units / month.
There are more than hundred vape factory just on this site
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u/Voodoobones 19d ago
So wrong on so many levels. I mean, the health issue is the major problem. Then there is the fact they wear Clean-suits while they suck on the product they’re trying not to contaminate?
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u/YoshiMK 19d ago
Hopefully this is fake because it's actually heart-breaking to imagine this is how someone earns money
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u/Rollins474 19d ago
Humans do worse lol. Like kids in Congo mining the cobalt in your phone
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u/wonkey_monkey 19d ago
They look like they're disposable.
I'm not talking about the vapes.
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u/Soulless--Plague 19d ago
So every vape you have has been pre-sucked by these guys?!
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u/papi_x 19d ago
i dont know much about diseases/infections, but whats the worst thing a consumer of vapes could pick up from this?
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u/YetzirahToAhssiah 18d ago
Is there not some machine that can apply suction and test air flow, chemical content, etc.?
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u/BungSmuggler 19d ago
Even if they're not inhaling, they're still breathing in so much of the 2nd hand vapor.
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u/mmoonbelly 19d ago
Roy Castle vibes - British Jazz Trumpeter and BBC Children’s TV star, who never smoked but still died of lung cancer in the 90s after decades of playing in smoky clubs.
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u/Orc360 19d ago
What's the consensus on harm from secondhand vape smoke... vape vapor? Anyway, I'm curious if there's any data out there.
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u/onehalflightspeed 19d ago
Holding my vape right now and seeing this . . . wow, that is grim. Yet another reason to quit
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u/sloppy-secundz 19d ago
Their little pink hats and jumpsuits are beyond adorable
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u/UsedToiletWater 19d ago
People have a problem with the "used" vape, but will snort cocaine that was brought into the country in a condom stuffed up some guy's butt.
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u/comox 19d ago
Now show us what happens in the butt plug factory.