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The Disappearance of the Ashtray

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Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#441

Post by PaulRobinson »

Dalewyn wrote: post #432
PaulRobinson wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you say this to all addicts? There are countless reasons people make bad choices: peer pressure, to calm anxiety, dealing with depression, and yeah, sometimes, abusive parents. But you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance and saying "well, sucks to be you", and taking the high ground. Good for you, it must be great up there never having made a bad choice. The moment somebody makes a poor choice…

Adults are responsible for themselves, and smoking is absolutely a choice regardless addiction status. If you can't control yourself and be responsible, you shouldn't be in the military let alone manning a submarine.

I kindly suggest that you google "Is addiction a choice?" and "Is smoking addictive?" and learn a few things before taking such an absolutely absurd high-ground devoid of empathy or experience of either subject from the perspective of the person addicted to smoking.

If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit. All humans make poor choices, and for all sorts of reasons. Smoking is just one example that many people - yourself included - seem quick to condemn without understanding.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#442

Post by astura »

chongli wrote: post #208
csomar wrote: post #200

Earlier 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.

Exactly. People replying to you are acting like a smoker will literally explode if they don't smoke for a few months. Some of these comments are truly bizzare! We're talking about cigarettes here.

Just like a nonsmoker, smokers are just fine being forced to go without cigarettes while underway. My husband was both a smoker and a submariner at the same time for many years. He couldn't stand vaping or using dip so he was just was forced to go without nicotine for the duration of the underway. Of course he (and the other smokers) were really grumpy about it, but that's it.

I also have smoker relatives who were somewhat frequently hospitalized. You simply can't smoke in a hospital, tough cookies if you want a cigarette. You simply just deal with going without - you can be prescribed nicotine patches is all, which aren't helpful to my family members.

We are talking about people getting annoyed they can't smoke.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#443

Post by karashi »

noduerme wrote: post #396
seszett wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far removed from real life must you be to complain that parents aren't asking you for permission before... allowing their children to be sick? Allowing their sick children to cough? Disease is an unavoidable fact of human life and children are a necessary piece of society, but tobacco is entirely unneeded.

I'm just saying that it's hardly more of a burden on society for someone to burn some dry leaves than for someone to create a new human or several of them, with all the burden that places on our ecosystem and our society. Having children is a wildly antisocial and narcissistic act in the modern world. It's hilarious and ironic that the people who defend it are the same ones who care whether I smoke a cigarette from t…

This line of reasoning troubles me. Calling swaths of people narcissistic and antisocial isn’t productive and comes off as really hateful and bitter. IDK. Maybe hacker news isn’t a healthy place for me to be. Perhaps I need to take a break from the Internet.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#444

Post by Dalewyn »

camillomiller wrote: post #88
Stratoscope wrote: post #43

Earlier 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?

As unhealthy and disgusting as smokers' clouds are, that wasn't the truly dangerous thing.

What was and still is dangerous are the open flames and high temperatures involved with smoking and other flammables. A fire aboard an aircraft can quickly lead to a crash, so the less flammables there are the better.

You don't use fire on airplanes, end of.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#445

Post by whywhywhywhy »

tsimionescu wrote: post #308
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.

It's a basic courtesy to wear a mask if you know you have a respiratory issue (whether it's a cold, the flu, or Covid doesn't really matter). Masks work much much better when the sick person is wearing them. I think it should also be something that cabin attendants can force you to do - if they notice you have cold/flu/Covid symptoms, and you are not wearing a mask, they should be allowed to bring a mask to you and a…

Yeah but what you gonna do if they do say no?

You can’t kick them off, you’re not going to get violent with them and coerce them so the only answer is turning the plane around if they don’t and how do you think the other passengers will react to that.

End of the day the rest of the world has moved on and no longer consider all this an issue and would rather just get on with their lives without inconvenience and yeah we can imagine a world where they have a bit more empathy for those that haven’t but I just don’t see how you can imagine that scenario playing out.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#446

Post by dsfyu404ed »

masklinn wrote: post #275
bruce511 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s. Today I know of people who can't fly at all (because they can't stop smoking long enough.) even short flights of a couple hours are out of reach. (I was once on a 2 hour flight that took 6 hours for reasons, and some of the passengers fairly sprinted in the destination airport to get to a smoking area at 1am) So…

> It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s. It’s more than 30 years older. The first commercial airline opened around the start of WW1, and most major airlines (western at least) were founded in the 20s. The 60s is the effective start of the jet age.

I don't disagree but prior to ww2's investment into R&D, infrastructure and labor force the economics of the industry were fundamentally different. The 1950s and early 1960s were to airlines what the 1990s were for computing.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#447

Post by Dalewyn »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #441
Dalewyn wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adults are responsible for themselves, and smoking is absolutely a choice regardless addiction status. If you can't control yourself and be responsible, you shouldn't be in the military let alone manning a submarine.

I kindly suggest that you google "Is addiction a choice?" and "Is smoking addictive?" and learn a few things before taking such an absolutely absurd high-ground devoid of empathy or experience of either subject from the perspective of the person addicted to smoking. If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit…

I'm overly simplifying, but if policy is to not smoke and you can't (or refuse to) follow orders, you're out. Dishonorable discharge.

Adults are not children, much less military personnel. Smoking is a choice and you are responsible for your choices. "It's an addiction." is a lazy, irresponsible excuse and escape.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#448

Post by Dalewyn »

noduerme wrote: post #374
chrisco255 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. But how is that any different from regulating the burning of leaves?

Covid doesn't crash planes.

Smoking can.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#449

Post by genidoi »

noduerme wrote: post #287
stonogo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a lot easier to agree with you if the tobacco companies hadn't spent decades of time and millions of dollars trying to gaslight the world about the consequences of smoking, aiming advertising at children, and generally making comic-book villains of themselves. Unfortunately they fought so uncompromisingly to avoid having to cede even the slightest of their market that they made complete ostracization the…

It's fine - this is not in defense of RJR or something. I truly love to smoke. I love to smoke a pipe, to feel the sting of the smoke and the richness and then take a glass of wine next to it, taste the leather and dried fruit interacting with the bittersweet tobacco. I love to roll cigarettes, the act of doing so for others and for myself, delaying the intense pleasure of the flick of the lighter and the sound of th…

I truly love to ride a motorcycle.

No ignorance on it’s order-of-magnitude lethality multiplier over cars. But there is a certain cognitive-adrenaline fused pleasure that comes with seamlessly gliding your way through the perfect Bézier-esque curve over a gentle highway turn, whilst being held in the ever-present protective arms of gyroscopic precession, that makes the danger of it all worth it to me.

Rollercoasters let you experience a far greater degree of adrenaline and wind rushing through you, but don’t come close to this particular feeling of smiling at death.

Re: The Disappearance of the Ashtray

#450

Post by globular-toast »

nine_k wrote: post #406
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nicotine high is a very pleasant headspace. I only smoked occasionally in college and grad school for a few years and off-and-on afterword socially for a few more years but I miss the scintillating conversations and the headspace nicotine put you in. More pronounced than caffeine but not so stimulating as a stronger stimulant. Some of my most interesting conversations happened over a cigarette.

AFAICT nicotine is the lesser evil. It's addictve, and somehow toxic, but not hugely. What makes cigarettes so vile is the actual smoke. The tars, the CO, the nitrous mess that's needed to keep the cigarette from extinguishing. The filter helps, but not a lot. A cigarette without any nicotine would still damage health a lot. Fortunately, the addicts, and those who want the nicotine high, have the option of vaping now…

Nicotine isn't a particularly difficult addiction in the grand scheme of things. It takes most people only a week or two to overcome nicotine addiction. Alcohol and opiates are on a different level. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are extremely addictive. There's something about putting a little stick in your mouth, inhaling, tasting it, then exhaling a cloud of smoke/vapour. I was given a nicotine-free disposable e-cigarette and was quite alarmed at how quickly I became addicted to it.
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