I love it, a _nicotine hearth_. As a child of the 80s, I remember these things quite well. I also remember smoking in restaurants, stores, malls, et. al.
The Disappearance of the Ashtray
231–240 of 668 posts
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really tough to become obese by eating steak, even if it has a high fat content. You just can't physically stuff yourself with that much meat. Carbohydrates, especially simple sugars, are absolutely the main culprit behind the obesity epidemic. 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 definiti…
For 20 years we’ve been eating fewer carbs and getting fatter (on average) http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0OuoFyJtZuI/VkofY-qgeOI/AAAAAAAAbb...
I don't think your data is accurate. Where did that chart come from? And not all carbs are created equal. From an obesity perspective, 100 kcal of sugar in soda pop appears to be far worse than the same amount of sugar in fruit.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You would go to a restaurant and the first thing your hostess would ask is "smoking or non"? I remember being asked this the first time I visited the US in the early 1990. To me, this was downright progressive: In Switzerland, at the time, you did NOT have the choice of a non-smoking section available.
I moved to Switzerland recently and I was very unpleasantly surprised at the general attitude towards smoking here. It’s routine to see someone hold an infant or child in one hand and a smoke in the other. It’s technically forbidden to smoke in train stations but there is no enforcement and people will smoke everywhere anyway. Same thing for underground parkings. The “rule” seems to be that if you can somehow see the…
The train station smoking ban is only a few years old, it used to be a lot worse, you get off the train and many people would be smoking (either their last cigarette before the ride, or their first after getting off). Nowadays it's just a few people who ignore the rules, without consequences.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
The smoking rate in Canada is far lower than the United States, despite having universal healthcare. I think it's more cultural than financially driven (though aggressive taxation of tobacco could be a factor if that's a thing in the US, too).
You both could be right. Especially in places like NYC, cigs are very expensive.
Well, legal cigs. There is a healthy black market in NYC.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Which countries are those? I ask because it would be nice to compare the incidence of the top smoking-related diseases between the countries.
France is a smokers country for instance.
France is an interesting comparison. As I understand it, smoking is highly class correlated in the US, but much less so in France.
I have a PhD and studied for a time at one of France's premier universities: my advisor smoked, and one graduate student in his lab smoked. All told, probably 10-20% incidence. In America I've worked with or around close to 100 physicists, and only one of them was a smoker.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#236> Everyone had hard-smoking relatives who looked like absolute hell by their late 30s, were coughing up a lung in their 40s, and by their 50s were being hoisted by pallbearers. Smoking is a disgusting habit and I love working from home because I never have to step in an elevator with folks fresh from a smoke break, but it isn't nearly that fatal. I grew up when smoking was literally everywhere and the "hard-smoking"…
But 55 year olds died all the time from smoking: heart attacks and strokes are smoking deaths too
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It is even better than that. Smokers used to sit and smoke in "non-smoking" to be away from the stale smoke.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect they also don’t really want to know how strong and obnoxious the smell is to the rest of us.
Only speaking for myself as a smoker: I can smell it very prominently indoors without powerful ventilation. I don’t like it for me and don’t want to inflict it on others. I either steer clear of people outdoors, or put it out if they’re going to be nearby. The only exception is if they want to interact with me individually while I’m smoking, then I stand as far away as I can for the interaction they invited.
I wish all smokers were as considerate as you are.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You disregard diabetes rather lightly there. Diabetes can result in amputations, blindness, heart attacks, strokes and other fun things. Sure there are other food choices that lead to obesity, but sugar is certainly high on the list. One thing in common though is that telling a smoker to "just quit" is about the same as telling someone who likes sugar to "just stop". Personally I'm working to "reduce my intake", slow…
> Edit:but for sure there's no such thing as second-hand-sugar and that a Huge difference between the two.
Obesity can cause epigenetic changes that are passed down to offspring.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#240Smoking is divine. Eh, sorry, I mean Cigarettes are Sublime
https://www.dukeupress.edu/cigarettes-are-sublime
Ashtrays may go along into the dark arts of secret knowledge, along with hooking up a modem, coding your own BBS, repairing your own leather boots, starting a fire to cook dinner over, etc. But something human, something tactile, something that carries with it dangers and pleasures and the competence to determine your own safety, gets lost each time we're proud that the next generation doesn't have to think about these things and can't even conceive of them. I don't really think it's human advancement to throw out the bad things if it means forgetting what they are and why they were bad; then we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. Cigarettes are unquestionably a net negative, but if you haven't understood the pleasure and beauty of them, you can't really understand what makes them tempting. Just like you can't understand what makes religion tempting if you're an atheist, or what makes sex tempting if you're asexual. Yet these things we look down on are all parts of the human experience, and if all you do is look down on things that you never partook of, you really aren't well-qualified to decide whether they had merit.