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The Disappearance of the Ashtray

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Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#351

Post by grujicd »

j_m_b wrote: post #7

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…

Unfortunately, restaurants and bars still have "smoking or non" in Serbia, and in practice it's just smoking everywhere. So if you're hit with nostalgia and wish to smell like ashtray after going out - come to Serbia!

There is one small negative of banishing smoking in the rest of the world is dissapearance of ashtrays from modern cars. You don't have to smoke but it's convenient to have some kind of small trashcan for other purposes. Yes, you can buy third party one for a cupholder, but it's typically cheap and not nearly the OEM quality.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#352

Post by noduerme »

jdkoeck wrote: post #267
noduerme wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It’s amazing how backwards you got things there. The mental gymnastics you went through! Do you really think the air was cleaner in planes when people smoked in them? And you think children coughing is worse than smoking ? Jesus. By the way, I hope you know there are Covid vaccines now, but I hesitate to ask your opinion on them.

I really relish the type of high-and-mighty attitude of folks who bring their children coughing onto an airplane and then have the gall to tell you you shouldn't smoke. That's quite precious. Let's just say we're all allowed to pollute each other's airspace. Hasn't the person with a child on their lap gone further in polluting our entire world with their offspring? That child is taking up twice the oxygen and twice the resources left on the planet. The idea that someone who has a child (or three) should lecture someone who doesn't about what particles they put out in the air is the height of hypocrisy. You don't automatically win the war for the common air because you spawned.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#353

Post by chrisco255 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #304
chrisco255 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid exists, it always will at this rate, and the rest of us won't be suffering for your insecurity about your own immune system. You wear a mask if you like. If it works, you have nothing to worry about.

You misspelled "can't be bothered to contribute to the wellbeing of the people around us". Incidentally, you think wearing a rated mask for a couple hours qualifies as "suffering"? When did notionally adult humans get this soft? Try working 10 hours straight in a tyvek bunny suit and full face respiratory PPE. We'd be carting you off my jobsite in a wheelbarrow after 30 minutes.

I do contribute to the wellbeing of the 95+% of the people who choose not to wear a mask and want to engage in human connection with the full range of emotional and facial expressiveness we were blessed with for that purpose, by not focusing on the irrational belief that wearing PPE 24/7 is even remotely possible or desirable, and accepting the statistical reality that in 2023, the vast majority of the population have been exposed to several strains of Covid. No amount of hiding from it prevents the acquisition of it. But plenty of warmth and light is lost in the world from the social constraints imposed by mask-wearing.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#354

Post by seszett »

noduerme wrote: post #328
nindalf wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is hyperbole. You make it sound like you’re being personally harassed by a minimum of 10 children, possibly taking shift coverage to make sure to infect you 24x7. And you’re comparing that with actual smokers who would actually light up at every opportunity. Oh it’s “just one cigarette” that you would smoke right? Just one. Why are these unreasonable people persecuting you unreasonably for just one . O…

Children light up at every opportunity. If you've ever been in a row with a few of them, they have no control over the contents of their lungs. Smokers do, actually, ask in most cases. In terms ten second-hand cigarettes damaging you on a flight, or ten coughing children, I don't understand how you think the smoke would be more dangerous. Cancer risk from smoke is cumulative, whereas risk from contagious diseases is…

> Smokers do, actually, ask in most cases.

I take it you didn't live through the era of unrestricted tobacco smoking then. Smokers absolutely do not ask whether they can smoke unless they know they really shouldn't, but hope they'll be allowed to anyway.

Aside from that, it is obviously ridiculous to compare disease (which is rarely something one gets willingly, and cannot be stopped at will) with smoking (a wilful decision, and something that can be stopped at will).

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#355

Post by chrisco255 »

noduerme wrote: post #294
chrisco255 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid exists, it always will at this rate, and the rest of us won't be suffering for your insecurity about your own immune system. You wear a mask if you like. If it works, you have nothing to worry about.

Right! And if you can have covid and not put on a mask, why the fuck can't I smoke next to you on a plane?

Because regulating microscopic airborne diseases is impossible and beyond dumb. Every country that tried to do so failed to do so, even with the most Draconian laws imaginable.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#357

Post by durnygbur »

ornornor wrote: post #205
microtherion wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

Check the location of Philip Morris headquarters. Too many local salaries and careers depend on you passively inhaling the smoke... and lookup revolving door between tobacco and pharma industries.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#358

Post by subharmonicon »

Stratoscope wrote: post #43
j_m_b wrote: post #7

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…

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…

I remember in the late 70’s or early 80’s riding my bicycle to the convenience store to buy my mother a carton of cigarettes.

Technically I think you needed to be seventeen to purchase them in Michigan at that time, but I just told the person behind the counter I was buying them for my mother. I was around ten years old.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#359

Post by bambax »

rwmj wrote: post #346
bambax wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France in the 80s and 90s there was no such thing as a non-smoking section in restaurants. You could smoke anywhere, everywhere, anytime, all of the time. In high school our teachers would smoke, not in class but in the corridor leading to the classroom, and they would drop their cigarette buts on the door sill. People would smoke in cars continuously, including my parents when we were toddlers. It was forbidden t…

My primary school teacher chain-smoked in class. (She did later die of lung cancer while we were still school age.)

Wow. Where and when was this?

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#360

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #341
chongli wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.

That's untrue. You (maybe) choose to start smoking, but once you have started, choice is entirely taken away from you. Incidentally, that's precisely what helped me quit (a long time ago): I realized I was a slave to the cigarette and the only way to be free again was to stop it altogether. It was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. I stayed in bed for four days trying to think about something else and sleepin…

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