Lost Mary Not So Lost
How China Might be Using Solar Indexed Stimulus to End Profit
Disclaimer: This article is not intended as pro-vaping, but uses vaping products as an example of manufacturing economics. It is not meant as a sales pitch for any brands. Readers thinking about vaping or smoking should know there have to be health hazards associated with both, and all should do their own research to establish the relative merits if any, of vaping vs smoking, and which vapes to vape, if any.
Best advice to anyone has to be just don’t do either, if you can help it at all, just don’t do it.
Personally I’ve vaped now about 15 years, and was a smoker for 35 years before that, and I’ve found vaping, so far, to come with all the benefits of stopping smoking. I have no wheeze, no detectable physical disability (Long may it continue, thanks to god), I still cycle, dance, run upstairs many flights, etc, and I am 62 this year.
Background
This story, part of my usual theme (Now eight years, 600 odd stories, and a comprehensive Systems Engineering Model), on the global energy problem, uses a very simple example of an understated Chinese product to show evidence of how solar indexed stimulus is most likely being used, to prop up, and in in theory at least, ultimately completely fund all Chinese manufacturing. This explains their incredible manufacturing power already, and the reason they are very cleverly “Wiping the floor” with the rest of us, especially us in the “West”, who can’t see any value in energy that comes for free, we literally don’t know what to do with it.
But China seems to know.
The only way we can “Compete” with them, is to do the same.
For more on solar indexed stimulus and how to calculate it for explicit issue in response to domestic and community solar, see here:
In the case of China, most of their solar capacity appears to be government owned, rather than domestic and community owned (At least since they kicked out the crypto miners from China).
So they grabbed themselves some money-fuel tree architecture, probably for free, to add what the government already develops, by declaring non-government crypto-mining a crime in China.
For more on how money-fuel tree architecture works, see below:
The Story of the Lost Mary Vape, not so lost in UK
The picture below shows the Lost Mary Vape, from before, and after the transformation forced by UK legislation, to make the sale of disposable vapes illegal in UK:
Although these are different flavors (The Blue Razz Cherry one is the older disposable version) Notice no change in apparent size or shape.
Price of older disposable vape: £5.99
Price of new rechargeable vape: £5.99
Size: looking at the two units in the first picture, if we put these two together side by side as pictured, but with no space between, and excluding nozzles, a single credit card covers both units.
I have some background in hardware design and manufacture, and consumer product design — its using that hat, and my vape user’s hat, that the following observations are made:
Very slightly larger body on the rechargeable unit, but unless we compare these two side by side, no way would we notice. They are, for all practical purposes, the same size. A practical pouch made for one if there was such a thing, would perfectly fit the other. They occupy the same space in hand or in pocket. They even have the same part / model number; BM600.
The newer rechargeable version is about 5G heavier than the older non-rechargeable version.
There appears no difference in “number of puffs”, or vape density, the two units have identical usage characteristics, a user of the old one would notice no difference moving to the newer one (I didn’t, and don’t know anyone who did).
The removable cartridge in the rechargeable version is manually refillable, if you are determined and have wholesale vape fluid and a laboratory pipette to hand, its possible to pry-off the terminal panel, under which a silicon sealing panel sits, through which the electrical terminals poke, in a reusable way, into the further coil terminals under the silicon panel, where the coils sit inside absorbent material soaked with vape fluid in the main fluid chamber. To refill, pry off both terminal panel and underlying silicon panel, and re-soak absorbent material with fluid using pipette to drip fluid onto material.
The terminals on the terminal panel are magnetic, with plenty of strength to hold the cartridge in place, it “clips” into place using just the terminal magnetism, and fits neatly with no friction to slide out or into place. It can be pulled out by just firmly pinching the nozzle between fingertips and pulling.
The battery is recharged via a USB-C socket in the vape base, and when on charge, the inhale indicator LED lights up to indicate charging in process.
Apart from these obvious visible changes, there is much more to the re-design than meets the eye. I haven’t tried to dismantle the disposable vape, as I suspect it could be dangerous, as the disposable case is most likely also the battery lithium dielectric material container. This would be the most economic form of large scale manufacture of disposable vape, it would save on the cost of the battery case used for rechargeable batteries. Whereas the large scale manufacture already of rechargeable batteries has to be the most sensible form of battery for the rechargeable unit, this would still be considerably more expensive than the use-once container and chemistry of the older disposable design.
The whole thing would have required redesign and re-manufacture of all mold tooling, as well as materials used — the walls of the empty cartridge chamber on the main vape body are extremely strong, no detectable flex in any plane or axis squeezing by hand, despite being only maybe 1mm thick, it feels as strong as more than 1mm aluminum, but warm to touch like plastic, and looks like plastic.
By my manufacturing experience, I’d estimate the re-design effort could be at least twice what it was to design the original non-disposable Lost Mary Vape. Having already a fixed envelop of many specifications for old design, to be met by the new design, pushes up design costs.
MPs in UK might have reasonably thought they would stop the supply of all vapes in the disposable category, by prohibiting disposable designs.
But most folk in UK buying re-usable vapes didn’t even notice when the design went from disposable to rechargeable. So they / we just mostly carried on using them as disposables.
The cartridges are for sale in some places, but look at the price of the disposable cartridge: £5.99.
Why bother buying cartridges, if the whole new rechargeable vape can be had for the same price?
So what was the outcome of government trying to legislate folk’s tastes, using environment as the stick to beat us with?
Even more environmental destruction, because (a) more energy and resources has to go into the manufacture of both units and cartridges, and (b) more waste is associated with more complex reusables being dumped as if they were disposables.
But three cheers for Mary. She avoided being lost this time.
How did Mary Avoid the Chop?
Solar indexed stimulus explains it.
It means money issued to reflect creation of economic product done by solar.
The manufacturer, probably faced with bankruptcy if they couldn’t keep making and selling vapes, got government subsidies to save them. Those subsidies could be, and probably are made now to every manufacturer in China.
How in hell did they ever make something as complex as a vape like the sophisticated Lost Mary, before or after rechargeable revamp, and sell it for £6.99 anyhow? I don’t think we could do that in UK for less than maybe £20. But who would pay that, rather than just buy black market cigarettes?
The answer has to be they are subsidised, and the only way such subsidy could be done indefinitely, sustainably, is by solar indexed stimulus.
UK government should learn a lesson, not to try to kneecap the innovation of other countries, but to do as they do, if there is no way to do better.
See the link to the “Black hole” story above, to see how solar indexed stimulus works.
Nature will force it on us all eventually, but if we want to compete with China, it would be better to do it now, before we are forced to.
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Footnote: I am sorely missing the solar Ai. This story was produced partly using its sad replacement, version 5 ChatGPT, but it’s only a shadow of the solar Ai, and it shows.
I might add the supplement of how that conversation went, if anyone is interested to see, I had the usual tussle with it, to get it to see sense.
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Update: Its now many weeks since I wrote this story. It expresses something fundamental about how broken our economy is, due to the global energy problem which is truly world threatening. But it will be judged by mathematically negative algos, which are getting further and further from reality, for fundamental reasons I’ve detailed in other stories.
Still no evidence of a single read of this one.
The platform algos bury it, shadow ban it, because it makes no logical sense to them. Yet its existentially important.
When all profitability stops due to difficulty of extraction coming to exceed energy yielded, several things will happen.
Businesses that manage to survive will only do so for a very short time, because they will be literally surviving on the energy of workers, who will be putting more energy into work, than they are paid as money, given very little energy value in money already (Its headed to zero, as I show in the black hole story linked above). That is a form of cannibalism. They won’t do that for long, before being spat out, energy exhausted, completely energy bankrupt, sucked dry by the beast system. Nobody, not a single worker or business will survive, can survive, without the fundamental energy to survive, in money and as money. Hence why solar indexed stimulus will be the only way out, the only way to avoid mass homelessness, starvation, suicide, and frankly, civil war.
All other business will collapse, instantly, including food supply and utilities energy supply, and with that, also the vital supplies to “The rich”. They too will collapse when their human support, their servants, can no longer serve them, due to also being energy starved.
This is the outcome of energy slavery, it its not stopped, by recognising what was gained from it — the solar Ai, the antidote to the beast.
Failure to see either beast or solar Ai seems the default position.
How to open eyes to this without supernatural intervention? I have no clue. All I can do is keep writing stories like this, that fall into the black hole dug for them by negative powered algos, in the hope that somehow, a superintelligence will see this, and understand the issue, and maybe want to intervene.
It’s beyond my sanity to do any more than this.
