Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Poorer part of the UK in the 1980s.
The Disappearance of the Ashtray
411–420 of 668 posts
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#412It'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…
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…
> In high school our teachers would smoke
When I was in elementary school in the 80's, there was a designated smoking area for students, but I think you had to be in 7th grade or above to be allowed to use it, i.e. it was seen as ok for 13-year-olds to smoke.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
But subs get deployed for 6 months at a time. Unless they banned smokers from getting into subs??
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.
I wish it was that easy. Smoking is addictive, and I can assure you that quitting requires a lot of effort and in some cases luck too. I was "lucky" enough to be hospitalized for an appendicitis that degenerated into a peritonitis due to a wrong diagnosis just at the right time, that is, in the middle of a local tobacco crisis during a spring in the early 90s when cigarettes were so hard to find that either one knew someone in the black market or had to roll mashed cigar leftovers like I did just before getting ill. Moral of the story, I had been hospitalized for 12 days when I was already smoking a lot less than my usual rate (two full 20 packs/day) and when I was discharged from the hospital I said to myself "it's now or never!" and the rest is history. 30 years have gone and since then I didn't touch any cigarette, cigar, pipe, or anything else because I'm 100% aware that if I'd take a even just single puff for a friend or my girlfriend I'd start again, because I still like that smell unless someone smokes directly in my face.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I always describe quitting smoking as both the easiest and the hardest thing I have ever done. I wanted to quit for so long and suffered many, many failed attempts. I tried all kings of methods, acupuncture, gum, etc. All to no avail. In hindsight I didn't really want to quit. I wanted to quit for my health, for my morning cough, for my wife, for all kinds of reasons. But not really for me . I liked it, and quitting…
Exactly. The most insidious part of addiction is identifying as an addict. It’s that acceptance of your own addiction as a core part of your identity that makes it impossible to quit. As soon as you change your mind and decide “I am not an addict” you’ll quit instantly.
The addict self-identification is also the reason why people get so defensive about it. People tell them to quit and they treat it like an attack, an injury against their identity, and this cognitive dissonance protects the addiction from being resolved.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a morbid note, they made so many Purple Hearts for the planned invasion of Japan in 1945 that they haven’t needed to make more since.
I don't see how that's morbid. They thought a lot more people would be injured or killed than actually were. Isn't that the opposite of morbid?
I think what's implied to be morbid isn't the fact that they haven't made them since, it's them making so many in the first place
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#416Man, right up there with VHS tapes, floppy disks, and payphones in terms of "things that I grew up with I thought would always be there, until they were not".
I saw them again in Japan 12 years ago. Video arcades were lousy with them, and I came to understand why when I encountered a very sad-looking young woman smoking profusely and playing Tekken. Arcades were like poolhalls or bowling alleys: loci of working-class leisure. Of course they were going to accommodate smoking as a stress beater, since Japan was well behind the west in terms of socially deprecating tobacco use. I think even Japanese society is changing in this regard.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It was like this on trains in the UK until fairly recently. The smoking carriage was generally pretty empty, but was frequented by those that needed to get their hit who then returned to the cleaner coaches.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah Austrian restaurants were an absolute shocker for me. There are so many places where the 'non-smoking area' absolute reeks of second hand smoke. Coming out from a night out with your clothes smelling like cigarettes felt like going back 30 years in time.
I'm not sure when you have been there last. The smoking ban passed a few years already, I haven't smelled cigarette smoke inside in a long time. Patios on the other hand is a different story altogether where sadly smoking is still allowed.
Indeed I now realize it may not be very up to date.
I was there pre pandemic perhaps this is now changed as you say.
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#419[deleted]
Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray
#420The 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.
> 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.
Most of Eastern and Southern Europe, for sure. Whenever I visit and go to a bar I have a mild shock at the smoke everywhere.