131–140 of 668 posts
The plummeting rates of smoking in the US is one of the rare areas where this country really shines when it comes to social welfare. Even many European states that have what I'd consider much more progressive social welfare systems have smoking rates that are appalling, often 3x or more the US rates.
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Smoking or non? Looks like you're about 25 years younger than me. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a nonsmoking section. Of course you could smoke, anywhere! Us kids didn't get real tobacco cigarettes, but we always had candy cigarettes so we could "smoke" along with the grown-ups. https://www.google.com/search?q=candy+cigarette&tbm=isch One difference from today was that our candy cigarettes had brand na…
Smoking on planes is absolutely something I can't wrap my head around in any possible way. How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?
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If only BigSugar could have a day in court like BigTobacco. Sugar addiction is the next big social health care type of thing I'd like to see recognized. Yes, opiates are bad right now, but I don't think anyone would have ever denied it out side of the people making/selling. Great majority people do not even recognize sugar as a problem.
no one is getting stage 4 lung cancer from sugar. Or having their jaw removed due to mouth cancer . Or hooked up to one of those oxygen machines due to irreversible lung damage. Sure, there are risks with obesity, not not as lethal or causal as with tobacco products. Fats are also a major contributor too, like steak.
There may be other problems with certain fats. In particular there is growing evidence that highly processed seed oils are problematic, although that hasn't been definitively proven yet.
Tobacco smoking has pretty much disappeared —unfortunately some people believe smoke from marijuana is less dangerous to lungs and don’t affect other aspects of cognition… so it has an non disapproving audience. That said… while ashtrays have disappeared, the electric cigarette lighter lives on in most cars if only as a way to get juice out of the car to run appliances of off.
Marijuana is less dangerous to lungs than tobacco. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277837/ > Tobacco has dramatic negative consequences for those who smoke it. In addition to its high addiction potential [1], tobacco is causally associated with over 400,000 deaths yearly in the United States, and has a significant negative effect on health in general [2]. More specifically, over 140,000 lung-related dea…
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I think there’s some nuance here. You can’t totally prohibit something people really want to do, but you can pretty effectively prohibit something almost no one wants to do or where there is a very good substitute. Having a tiny landmass, and no land borders also helps. It’s possible to grown tobacco hydroponically but I’m not sure if anyone would bother unless there was an overnight hard ban.
That's a reasonable line of thought, but NZ already has a fairly robust black market for tobacco products: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/12/17/new-zealands-pl... > a tenth of the tobacco consumed in 2019 in New Zealand was illicit. which is broadly similar to the US market, if admittedly on the low end: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/19016/understandin... > the portion of the total U.S. tobacco ma…
It's tough to portray just how ubiquitous smoking was to a modern audience. You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"? I remember standing in a checkout line in the 80s as a child and being fascinated with the billowing clouds of smoke an old lady blew. I remember coming home from bars reeking of smoke, even though I didn't. Even teachers had their own lounges that re…
It's still ubiquitous in China, or at least was when I was there several years ago. On the other hand, perhaps because of that, some of their buildings seem to have insanely powerful ventilation systems. I remember being in a mall and talking with someone who was smoking only a few feet away, seeing the smoke get sucked straight up into the vents on the ceiling as he exhaled, and I couldn't even smell it (I have a ra…
I inherited from my dad an ashtray made from the end if a three inch artillery shell. As an ensign in the US Navy in 1960, he had a machinists mate make one for him by cutting the end of the shell down and then welding bent pennies onto it for the cigarette holder portion. My favorite detail was that it was stamped 1944 on the bottom. “But dad, you were in the Navy in the 1960’s?” “They made a LOT of shells in 1944”
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Airplanes have ashtrays in the armrests to this day!
No, those are pretty much gone. An ashtray in airplane lavatories, though, remains mandatory by law, right next to the "no smoking" sign.
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Time to read up on how NZ implemented it. Already smoke, even if incidentally? You're 100% unaffected, you can still buy them until you die from old age. Too young? Cool, you're never going to get ciggies sold to you, and you're not going to miss suddenly no longer have access to them because you never did anyway. No one loses. It's a very long term solution, and one that (the current forms of) the US or Europe could…
What happens to immigrants or tourists? Is vaping included? I don't smoke but am curious about how this type of phase out system works.
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Smoking on planes is absolutely something I can't wrap my head around in any possible way. How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?
Well, in the early days of aviation lung cancer was, erm, pretty far down the list of hazards.