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Lo que opinan la prensa y otras voces ...
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Caracas, Venezuela, Febrero del 2014
Este Cartel
nos fue enviado
por un empresario
amigo,
desde
Caracas,
Venezuela
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Why Liberals Should Be Thankful for the Tea Party (BusinessWeek)
Politics & Policy
Sometime in the next week or so, the White House will unveil its new budget for 2015, but the big news has already leaked: Obama will not include a proposal to cut Social Security cost-of-living benefits—by switching to the so-called chained Consumer Price Index—as he has in past budgets. This development was widely condemned by Republicans eager to cut entitlement spending. “The president has no interest in doing anything, even modest, to address our looming debt crisis,” House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman told the New York Times.
But that charge could just as easily be turned back on Republicans, and probably should be: Time and again, their refusal to negotiate has meant passing up significant concessions from the White House—concessions that drive liberals batty. By insisting on a cuts-only, my-way-or-the-highway approach to negotiating, Republicans have repeatedly and consistently protected liberal policy interests that Obama has been willing, even eager, to bargain away.
The chained CPI is only the latest example. As Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman note in today’s Times, conservatives’ refusal to accept modest advances when outright victory isn’t possible resulted in a farm bill that was more liberal that it needed to be. That’s because, when conservatives revolted, Republican leaders wound up needing Democratic votes to pass legislation and thus had to tilt the farm bill in a direction more to their liking. “Had a number of the forces out and around this town been more focused on trying to achieve doable reform, we might have gotten more,” Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, told the Times.
Of course, the biggest example of this is the “grand bargain” that Obama and Boehner negotiated in the summer of 2011 that would have cut trillions of dollars in spending over 10 years and raised about $800 billion in revenue. The prospect of such significant cuts outraged liberals who were angry that the White House would trade away their priorities for what they viewed as a relative pittance of new revenue. (Matt Bai wrote the definitive blow-by-blow account of the deal and its collapse.) But then, as now, conservative pressure killed the deal and let liberals off the hook.
The Markets Go Mad for Obamacare...(BusinessWeek)
Although President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law almost four years ago, much of Washington still treats the fate of his signature legislation as an open question. Last fall’s government shutdown was a Republican attempt to stop the law before federal exchanges began signing up customers. Even as the number of enrollees climbs into the millions, conservatives continue to insist that Obamacare will collapse. Lately, Republicans have rallied around Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s proposal to sabotage the law by abolishing “risk corridors,” a provision that induces insurance companies to participate in the exchanges by limiting their financial risk. (Rubio casts this as a taxpayer-funded “bailout.”)
A new online broker, Motif Investing, is offering Obamacare’s friends and foes alike a chance to put their money where their mouth is. Co-founded by a formerMicrosoft (MSFT) executive, Hardeep Walia, and backed by Goldman Sachs (GS)and other investors, Motif allows customers to bet on narrowly tailored concepts. “A lot of people think conceptually about investing,” he says. “We take ideas and translate them to what we call a ‘motif’—an intelligently weighted basket of up to 30 stocks, built around an idea that people can understand.” Examples of these baskets include Chinese solar, 3D printing, and “caffeine fix”—an assortment of coffee, soda, and energy drink companies.
Two of the hottest motifs right now are Obamacare and repeal Obamacare, Walia says. They represent, respectively, the idea that the law will succeed and that it will fail. The Obamacare motif is made up of hospitals, generic-drug makers, pharmacy-benefit managers, and companies specializing in electronic medical records, all of which stand to gain from the Affordable Care Act’s emphasis on cost control and its guarantee of payment. “Before the law, 30 percent of hospitals’ revenue was unbilled because you could walk into an ER and not pay,” Walia says. “They’re now paid by the U.S. government.” The Obamacare motif is up 46.9 percent in the past year, doubling the performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index (up 22.8 percent).
Repeal Obamacare is composed of companies that would benefit from the law’s demise, mainly medical device manufacturers, which the ACA saddles with a 2.3 percent excise tax; assisted-living and home health-care providers, which will suffer from reduced Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates; and medical diagnostics equipment and services providers, which may encounter reduced demand as a result of the law’s efforts to curb unnecessary testing. The repeal Obamacare motif has risen just 13.8 percent in the past year.
What’s most striking isn’t the performance of the two funds, but where investors are choosing to place their money. “We don’t have convictions or views on the law itself,” says Walia. “We give you both sides of the equation.” But one is clearly more popular: He says Motif investors have bet 45 times more money on Obamacare’s success than on its failure.
This trend reflects the beliefs of the investment community, where—unlike in Washington—the permanence of the health-care law is taken for granted and the prospect of repeal is given practically no credence. “Investors can’t imagine a scenario where the changes the Affordable Care Act started will be repealed and taken away,” says Bob Kocher, a partner specializing in health care and IT at the venture capital firm Venrock. “There’s a ton of money flowing into things that help health-care [companies] take advantage of the insurance market changes, the coverage expansion, the payment model changes, and the data liberation that are derivative of the law.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality in June 2012, investment in the health-care sector has soared. According to a study by Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas, exchange-traded funds focused on health care have seen their assets more than double, to $16 billion from $7 billion. All 17 of the health-care sector ETFs have grown, and nine have doubled in that period. “It’s impossible to know how much of that money is purely to position for Obamacare vs. investors just being bullish on other health-care trends,” Balchunas says. “But clearly Obamacare has provided a major catalyst to the investment case for this red-hot sector.”
The bullish sentiment isn’t universal. On Jan. 23, Moody’s (MCO) lowered its outlook to negative for U.S. health insurers, blaming the Affordable Care Act’s rollout problems. In a release, the company cited “uncertainty over the demographics of those enrolling in individual products through the exchanges,” particularly the lower-than-anticipated percentage of young people who have so far signed up.
“That was like a press release made for Fox News,” says Dan Mendelson, chief executive officer of Avalere Health, a Washington consulting firm, who argues that Obamacare’s rocky start won’t have much impact on large insurers. “The exchanges are a very small portion of the overall income of public insurance companies,” he says. A week after the Moody’s downgrade,WellPoint (WLP) CEO Joseph Swedish told analysts that the exchanges’ early stumbles hadn’t affected profit estimates.
Mendelson points out that the Affordable Care Act had begun to transform the health-care sector long before the exchanges opened for business. The focus on quality of care, the incentives for hospitals to reduce readmission rates, and the move toward high-deductible plans are just some of the industry changes prompted by the law that Mendelson says will endure. “You can’t go back and undo all the managed-care mergers that resulted from this law,” he says.
Private equity firms have also made major bets on the success of the health-care law. Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe is lead investor in NaviHealth, a Tennessee startup headed by Tom Scully, a Welsh Carson partner and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George H.W. Bush. NaviHealth works with insurers to manage patients’ recovery when they’re discharged from medical facilities after surgery—a service rewarded by the health-care law. “There’s a very strong level of interest by private equity companies and a good level of understanding of what the law is doing,” says Mendelson. “Most investors rationally and correctly assume this law has changed the health-care landscape and see this as a step along the evolutionary scale.”
There are signs that Obamacare denialists are reconciling themselves to the changes the Affordable Care Act has brought about. On Jan. 27, Senators Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, and Orrin Hatch released an outline of a Republican health-care plan, the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment (CARE) Act. Bowing to conservative politics, the bill would repeal Obamacare—but then it would restore many of that law’s most popular features, including allowing children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ plan and forbidding insurers from discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions. Now that Obamacare has taken hold, and taken off, even its most vocal detractors are trying to buy in.
The bottom line: An online broker offers funds that let investors put money in companies that have a stake in the future of Obamacare.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
The FCC Plans to Protect Internet Openness
The FCC Plans to Protect Internet Openness
Dear
Dr. F. Dominguez,
A fter a month of waiting, FCC
Chairman Tom Wheeler responded to last month's court decision overturning the
FCC's net neutrality rules.Today the FCC proposed a series of actions that
would leave consumers in
charge when it comes to their online experience.
These proposed actions could enhance transparency for consumers
, so they know if and when their Internet service provider is slowing down or
blocking online content, and includes a commitment to restore the
protections of the no-blocking and non-discrimination rules. The proposal
could also enhance
broadband competition by reducing barriers to
municipality-built networks.
Public
Knowledge is happy to see that the FCC
plans to protect Internet openness, promote transparency, encourage
municipal broadband, and achieve other goals. But while plans
are important, actions will have the real impact. We will continue to push the FCC to turn its plans to
protect Internet openness into concrete and enforceable rules.
Furthermore,
the recently proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast makes it even
more important for the Commission to move expeditiously to reinstate nondiscrimination
rules by using all regulatory tools available.
We
are unsure if the FCC's initial focus on section 706 will yield meaningful
results, but we are encouraged to see that the FCC plans to keep its
reclassification proceeding open. If the FCC cannot find a way to implement
meaningful protections under section 706, we will continue to urge them to do
so under Title II.
Thanks
for your support,
The
Public Knowledge Team
Tweet This: RT
@publicknowledge:
Public Knowledge Calls
for FCC to Act Quickly to Protect Customers http://bit.ly/1jHR8ro
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
La Riqueza de los Billonarios crece más rápido que sus donaciones...
Billionaires' Wealth Is Skyrocketing. Their Philanthropy Is Not
The Chronicle of Philanthropy released its annual “Philanthropy 50” list this week, detailing the gifts of the most generous donors in America. These individuals are “ditching the caution that marked so much of their giving as the economy stalled and are roaring back” with $7.7 billion in contributions, 4 percent more than in 2012, the publication says.
Some $7.7 billion is nothing to scoff at. It’s also possible that the figure would be higher if anonymous donations were included. The Chronicle publishes an excellent data set, however, and a closer look at the numbers suggests there is not quite a “surge” or “boom” in the largest gifts. This chart shows the top 50 over the last 13 years, adjusted for inflation—with an asterisk:
Why the asterisk? To make the trend more readable, that chart omits the most sizable gift in memory: Warren Buffett’s 2006 commitment of $36.1 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here’s the complete picture:
Giving is up since the financial crisis. But while the stock market has made a complete recovery, top-50 philanthropy has clearly not. And this kind of giving has not nearly kept pace with the rise in American billionaires’ wealth over the past decade. The Forbes 400 list, which tracks the richest people in the U.S., had a total net worth of $955 billion in 2003. By 2013, it had more than doubled, to $2 trillion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires index, which launched in 2012 and tracks the 300 richest people worldwide, saw a $524 billion increase in wealth during 2013 alone. Tech billionaires gained 28 percent on the year, led by Tesla (TSLA) founder Elon Musk, whose wealth climbed 233 percent.
This puts the 4 percent increase the Chronicle of Philanthropy hails in context. At a time when the richest Americans’ wealth is skyrocketing, it’s appropriate to ask whether their giving is skyrocketing as well.
The country’s non-billionaires are giving their share. As the New Yorker noted on Feb. 10, total annual giving by all Americans stands at about $230 billion, dwarfing the top 50’s $7.7 billion.
Tom Perkins, the near-billionaire venture capitalist, triggered a fresh round of soul-searching on American inequality in January, when he compared criticism of the rich to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. He apologized for causing offense in a subsequent interview, while reiterating his argument about “class warfare.”
“Do you worry at all that you are divorced from reality?” Emily Chang of Bloomberg TV asked Perkins on Jan. 27. “Are you divorced from reality?”
Perkins responded, “I don’t know if anybody can answer that. Truthfully, I don’t think so. I give and have given and will give millions and millions of dollars to a long list of charities. I have in mind some more chairs at universities.”
Gifts to higher education rose 9 percent in 2013, according to the Council for Aid to Education, led by Stanford University, which has a $18.7 billion endowment, and Harvard, with $32.3 billion.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Public Knowledge
|
Don't Let Comcast Kill
Competition and Innovation
|
|
Today
Comcast surprised everyone by coming to an agreement to buy
Time
Warner Cable.
This is bad for
everyone.
Comcast is already the nation's largest internet service provider, largest
video provider and one of the largest home phone providers. If this merger is
allowed to happen, Comcast
would become even more powerful, harming everyone that
depends on a well-functioning marketplace.
If
Comcast takes over Time Warner Cable, it would own roughly a third of the
national cable market, giving it even more leverage over content creators,
internet companies, and networks that must interconnect with it. This leads to price increases from their
rivals and business partners, and ultimately for you, the consumer, who gets
stuck paying the bill.
In addition, an
increase in cost would keep others from innovating, while
Comcast would face little pressure to improve its own service.
But there's still hope. There are regulators and law enforcement agencies who
must approve this deal and they are empowered to promote the public interest,
not Comcast's interest
in empire-building.
Public
Knowledge will fight
to stop this merger, but we can't do it alone. Please
consider making a contribution to
help us continue to fight the good fight. And follow us on Twitter
@publicknowledge for updates.
Thanks for your support,
The Public Knowledge Team
Tweet This: RT @publicknowledge:
Don't let #ComcastTWC kill Competition and Innovation. http://bit.ly/1opDb58
|
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Una industria de $1.5 Billones luchando para no ser regulada
E-Cigarettes: A $1.5 Billion Industry Braces for FDA Regulation
Verleur, a heavy smoker, was living in Prague and happened to spot the strange new product in a Vietnamese grocery store. The crude early version obviously didn’t work very well, but Verleur, a serial entrepreneur, immediately realized that if it did work, it could upend the tobacco industry. That was worth looking into: Cigarettes are a global business that generates more than half a trillion dollars every year, according to data from Euromonitor International.
In its simplest form, an e-cigarette is a cartridge filled with a nicotine solution and a battery powering a coil that heats the solution into vapor, which one sucks in and exhales like smoke. Typically, it looks like a regular cigarette, except the tip, embedded with an LED, often glows blue instead of red. The active ingredient in e-cigarettes is the same nicotine found in cigarettes and nicotine patches.
The effects of inhaling nicotine vapor are not totally understood, but there is no evidence to date that it causes cancer. Experts and logic seem to agree that it’s a lot better than setting chopped-up tobacco leaves on fire and inhaling the nicotine along with thousands of combustion byproducts, some of which are definitely carcinogenic. Because cancer is the main drawback of smoking for a lot of people, the delivery of nicotine without lighting a cigarette is very attractive. And because it produces a wispy vapor instead of acrid smoke, an e-cigarette lets you bring your smoking back indoors, where lighting up in an enclosed space is no longer socially, or legally, acceptable.
Verleur saw right away that if e-cigarettes could be made as convenient and satisfying as a pack of smokes, he’d make a killing. He enlisted the help of his brother, an engineer working for an Agilent Technologies (A) spinoff; booked a trip to China; and began meeting with manufacturers. In 2009 he formed his company, V2Cigs, with four employees working out of an apartment.
Five years later, V2Cigs has six manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen, China, a Miami headquarters, 250 employees, and 5 million customers worldwide. Verleur says more than a million of those are in the U.S., where Bloomberg Industries projects total e-cigarette sales could reach $1.5 billion this year. Other competitors now include NJoy, Vapor (VPCO), and Victory Electronic Cigarettes (ECIG), as well as the major tobacco manufacturers and hundreds of others.
It all still represents a tiny fraction of what Americans spend on tobacco, but it’s pretty solid for an industry that barely existed five years ago. A projection by Bloomberg Industries shows e-cigarette sales could surpass that of the traditional tobacco product by as early as 2023. Who will dominate the market is a different question, and one that may be answered not by the markets, but by the government.
A primitive, battery-operated “smokeless non-tobacco cigarette” was patented as early as 1963 and described in Popular Mechanics in 1965. Thomas Schelling, a Nobel prize-winning economist who helped start the Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School in the 1980s, recalls that people in the 1960s were talking about a charcoal-based vaporizer that would heat some sort of nicotine solution. While those early versions might have been safer than a regular cigarette, they were too expensive and cumbersome to become a substitute for a pack of Camels in a country where, as Schelling notes, “you’re never more than 5 or 10 minutes away from a smoke.”
In a way, electronic cigarettes were made possible by cell phones. The drive to make phones smaller and lengthen their battery life led to the development of batteries and equipment small enough to fit in a container the size and shape of a cigarette. There’s some dispute over who invented the modern e-cigarette, but the first commercially marketed device was created by a Chinese pharmacist, Hon Lik, and introduced to the Chinese market as a smoking cessation device in 2004. From there, e-cigarettes made their way to small shops such as that of the Vietnamese grocer who sold Verleur his first one four years later.
To continue reading this article, please, goto:
E-cigarettes beat the traditional kind in one big way: You can legally have them shipped to you in the comfort and privacy of your home. (It’s not legal to send traditional cigarettes through the U.S. mail.) Blu, made by Greensboro (N.C.)-based Lorillard (LO), one of the biggest producers of tobacco cigarettes, makes a starter pack that comes with a charger that doubles as a storage container, and it looks just like a pack of cigarettes. It also comes with two batteries and five nicotine cartridges good for about 150 puffs apiece. The pack costs about $80 before shipping, which is roughly equal to the price of 8 to 16 packs of cigarettes. (Disposable e-cigarettes are cheaper to start, but in the long run they’re much less economical.) Because nicotine cartridges are exempt from tobacco taxes, which now make up much of the retail cost of a cigarette, a pack of cartridges is competitive with old-fashioned smokes, especially if you live in an expensive jurisdiction such as New York.
E-cigarette cartridges come in classic tobacco and menthol flavors—Verleur’s company even offers V2 Red, Sahara, and Congress, clearly aimed at loyal smokers of Marlboros, Camels, and Parliaments. But most companies also have less conventional flavors. Blu offers Peach Schnapps, Java Jolt, Vivid Vanilla, Cherry Crush, and Piña Colada, presumably for people who don’t just like a drink with a cigarette, but in one.
Jeff Ky is a salesman at My Vapez in Arlington, Va., where you can buy a variety of e-cigarettes and larger vaporizers that look like cigars. The array of flavors is astonishing, and he says the fruity flavors, not the traditional tobacco styles, are the most popular. Potential customers come into his store looking to quit and usually buy the classic tobacco flavor. Once they’ve kicked traditional cigarettes, they often start wanting something sweeter tasting, which Lorillard says is also its experience with Blu. Ky’s best-selling flavor is cantaloupe-kiwi, and he uses a mixture that’s supposed to taste like Strawberry Nesquik. Cartridges also come in varying strengths, ranging from high concentrations of nicotine to low concentrations to no nicotine at all for smokers trying to quit.
To find out how they tasted and if they were anything like a real cigarette, I ordered online a starter pack of Blu in menthol with a high concentration of nicotine. When the pack arrived, I had to read the directions carefully just to figure out how to charge the battery, which looked like the white part of a traditional cigarette, and then connect it to the nicotine cartridge, which looked like a filter.
After I’d put it together, I had something surprisingly close to one of the cigarettes I used to smoke. The mentholated tobacco flavor rolled sinuously over my tongue, hit the back of my throat in an unctuously familiar cloud, and rushed through my capillaries, buzzing along my dormant nicotine receptors. The only thing missing was the unpleasant clawing feeling in my chest as my lungs begged me not to pollute them with tar and soot.
I couldn’t wait to try them in a bar, so I met a friend for a drink at a local Washington watering hole. I hadn’t had a cigarette in a bar since sometime in the late 1990s, and I felt self-conscious, maybe a little bit lonely: There’s no social aspect, or even the hint of an invitation, in an e-cigarette. You don’t pass the pack around, and no one is going to bum an e-cigarette off of you. “It becomes more like a hobby,” says Ky of his customers, with users showing off their newest gear. But yes, an e-cigarette still tastes good with a drink.
In fact, it tastes almost too good. Like most smokers, I quit cigarettes several times before succeeding, and each time I quit, I had reached a point where I was basically glad to put down the cigarettes because they made me feel terrible. E-cigarettes don’t hurt and don’t offer the same incentive to quit. You could use one on the treadmill if you were so inclined.
Nicotine helps regulate your mood, and it is an appetite suppressant, too, which is why smokers who quit generally gain weight. It’s a cognitive enhancer, and there’s some hotly contested evidence that it may slow the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. For a sedentary knowledge worker facing the declines of middle age, that’s an attractive combination. Indeed, one academic who does research in this area confided that he’s thinking of taking up e-cigarettes because of the advantages of nicotine, even though he’s never smoked. (He is not prepared to go on the record recommending that people add nicotine to their diets.)
The professor and I are exactly why some public-health experts want e-cigarettes treated like regular cigarettes: plastered with warnings, laden with taxes, and definitely not sold in flavors such as piña colada. “If e-cigarettes were regulated so that they became a way to get people off cigarettes, we would lead the cheer. But the issues are complicated,” says Matt Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “E-cigarettes are not harmless. You want to discourage people who do not currently use e-cigarettes from taking up the habit. Our concern is that it will re-glamorize smoking and lead people to switch to cigarettes, or experiment with cigarettes.”
In October the European Parliament rejected a proposal to regulate e-cigarettes as medical devices. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is in the process of drafting rules, is expected by observers to follow suit. The decision is important to pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Pfizer (PFE), which sell nicotine patches and gums that are regulated as medical tools and may not want unregulated competition.
The proposed regulations could be anything from basic rules ensuring that the nicotine cartridges contain what they’re supposed to and that the devices are safe to a scheme of the kind that Myers wants, with restrictions on flavored products and sexy marketing campaigns. Tight regulation would make the market much more complicated for upstarts such as V2Cigs, which don’t have the marketing or lobbying muscle of Big Tobacco.
Some local government officials and regulators in other countries have already made a decision. Under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who owns Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg Businessweek), New York in December expanded the ban on smoking in public places to include electronic cigarettes. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed for the same restrictions, and they have been adopted. Brazil has banned e-cigarettes outright.
As nothing but a replacement product for existing smokers, e-cigarettes seem like a public-health win. Widespread adoption by current smokers “could potentially reduce smoking deaths by more than 90 percent,” says Joel Nitzkin, a public-health physician who is a senior fellow at free-market think tank R Street in Washington.
But what if current smokers aren’t the only people who use them? What if e-cigarettes lure back people who used to smoke or attract new smokers? What if people who otherwise would have quit keep using nicotine? And perhaps the No. 1 argument: What if e-cigarettes make smoking normal again in public places, with the attendant annoyance of a neighbor or officemate blowing nicotine-laced steam everywhere?
Since the Office of the Surgeon General warned of its dangers in the 1960s, smoking has declined dramatically and is quite rare among the U.S. middle class. That’s because of its health risks, but also because of the social stigma and inconvenience associated with smoking. With the exception of some hipsters, smoking is largely a lower-income phenomenon. “You may be establishing something you want to establish in your group, but it’s a pretty downscale group,” says Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles.
But if the stigma is undone, “we could go back to 50 percent of the population routinely using nicotine,” Kleiman says. That doesn’t mean he thinks we should ban e-cigarettes. “Given the certain gain from switching current smokers to e-cigs and the uncertain signs of the effects of adding new users, it seems to me that we should get public policy out of the way for now while watching to see how many of today’s happy e-cig users become unhappy users three years from now.”
A 2011 study published in the Journal of Public Health Policy concluded that “a preponderance of the available evidence shows [e-cigarettes] to be much safer than tobacco cigarettes and comparable in toxicity to conventional nicotine replacement products.” It also said there’s “reason to believe that they offer an advantage over traditional nicotine delivery devices.” The other main ingredients in e-cigarettes are what the FDA calls “generally recognized as safe”: glycerine, found in many foods, and propylene glycol, the main ingredient in theatrical fog.
E-cigarettes don’t only assuage the desire for nicotine but also the desire to have a cigarette, which isn’t exactly the same thing: One study found that even an e-cigarette rigged to deliver “minimal” nicotine could reduce cravings in a substantial minority of smokers. V2Cigs’ Verleur estimates that while half of his customers use his product to replace cigarettes, either completely or in places where they aren’t allowed to smoke, about one-quarter start at the highest concentration and work their way down toward the no-nicotine version, at which point some stop entirely, while others keep buying the nicotine-free ones.
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