It's so strange sometimes watching tv shows and movies from the 90's where you see characters smoking indoors in public places.
Like in Seinfeld you will have episodes where Kramer is smoking in offices....and even in the doctor's clinic! There was an episode where Kramer took out a cigar and smoked in a doctor's waiting room. I thought he would immediately get in trouble but none of the other characters cared.
And then you got movies from back then like Jackie Brown (which is a great movie by the way) where you see character's smoking in a mall cafeteria. A mall! A family friendly environment! And it's considered normal!?!?!? Blows my mind.
torben-friis 16 hours ago [-]
It is hard to overstate how common that was in the nineties, at least here in Spain.
Clouds would come out of family bars and diners when you opened the door. Movie theaters and art galleries would have people smoking inside as it was part of their intellectual aesthetic. During weddings giving out Cuban style cigars as a present was assumed. Schools would not allow it officially, but every bathroom and teacher lounge would clearly smell from the people hiding for a smoke. Same for hospital waiting areas and bathrooms. Trains had smoking and non smoking wagons, which people complained about, feeling smokers were being ostracized. Beaches were full of cigarette buts to the point that accidentally stepping on a not yet cold one was a common concern. Not "going for a smoke" at work was considered socially isolating, and particularly for men saying you don't smoke would lead to others questioning your heterosexuality in a non PC manner. Teenagers would start smoking around the family as a "proof of adulthood" as soon as they had their first part time job to pay for it.
tsoukase 4 hours ago [-]
Same in Greece, that came last in banning smoking in closed spaces since the last 5-6 years! Funny thing, now our clothes in taverns don't smell smoke anymore, but meat and garlic.
zeristor 2 hours ago [-]
I can remember there used to be a tube train set aside for smokers.
Sometimes it was thick with smoke and the walls would have tar.
After the Oxford St, Kings Cross Tube station fires, along with the Bradford stadium fire in the 80s they thought that safety could be improved a tad.
Personally, I like my air fresh.
hackeraccount 6 hours ago [-]
I remember visiting a friend in California which I think was the first place to ban smoking in bars. Anyhow we want to some jazz club and no one was smoking. So weird. And I didn't and don't smoke.
If you had asked me I would have said, nah I don't smoke and I don't like the smell but I get used to it. When I got out of that place I suddenly realized that it I didn't "not like it" it really bugged me. And no, I never really got used to it.
So strange.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
It is kind of weird but I have nostalgia for cigarette smoke smell. When I catch someone on the street smoking I take a big whiff.
I will say bars do not smell better now that the cigarette smoke is gone. At least for some dive bars. That smoke was doing some heavy lifting...
wildzzz 2 hours ago [-]
In college, we had two bars that still had smoking despite it being banned in our state. The exception was it had to have doors and a completely separate HVAC. One bar had a smoking second story that had most of the pool tables and TVs while downstairs was a more relaxed area. Another bar bought out the building directly behind them and put a door connecting the two buildings.
Hookah bars got wrapped up in the smoking ban too which I think was an overreach. You go to a hookah bar to smoke, you don't go there to watch a game, shoot pool, and have a beer. The one hookah bar in town actually sued the state over it. Because they also sold hookah supplies, they were exempted.
cjrp 18 hours ago [-]
Smoking on airplanes is the one that just seemed like an accident waiting to happen. And yet there were (relatively) few incidents caused by cigarettes.
black_knight 17 hours ago [-]
I heard that air quality on planes was better back then (maybe someone who was alive then can confirm). Because of smoking they had to ventilate the whole aircraft much better. While these days I feel like they are just starving us for oxygen so as to not have to heat up fresh air.
michaelbuckbee 17 hours ago [-]
Old person here. I think it's really hard to convey the extent to which smoke literally permeated everything. It's not just the immediate air quality aspects of it, but there was just a residue on all the surfaces, every cushion and fabric held onto the stuff.
I can recall the week that no-smoking indoors at restaurants/bars passed and it was literally shocking to walk into a place and not have it be hazy. It really felt weird.
Anyway, air quality + quality of life was much worse. Sometimes the future does get better.
asplake 7 hours ago [-]
Another old person here. At an office in Zurich I saw a layer of smoke filling the upper reaches of the atrium. I wondered how many working (i.e. smoking) hours it would take before it reached the balcony on which I was standing.
hbogert 7 hours ago [-]
except for the dance bars. Dear lord the sweat smell during the transition was bizarre. It as always masked thanks to the smell of smoke. I think a lot places had to start thinking about adding nice parfumes, because almost at the end of that first year of zero tolerance inside bars, it was 'solved'.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
I had also heard that during regular aircraft inspections, the residue from cigarette smoke made small cracks and such in the airframe obvious.
Today that sounds to me like urban folklore (or Big Tobacco folklore).
panflute 5 hours ago [-]
The airplanes were awful, usually with silly little signs stuck in some seats to designate the switchover which the smoke didn't seem to respect. I was in a train brought back to service from smoking times a few years ago and the stench still emanating from the fabric seats brought back those memories right away.
chris_st 17 hours ago [-]
Nope, not better quality if you don't like the smell of cigarettes.
05 17 hours ago [-]
Turns out using less engine bleed air is good for fuel economy, so now it's 50% recirculated HEPA filtered (which does nothing for the co2 contents) air.
xattt 17 hours ago [-]
How does this work for all-electric planes like the 787?
05 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
phs318u 17 hours ago [-]
Lol. I was 14 when I took a long distance international flight on a 747 in 1979. The family was sitting in the “non-smoking section”. I can tell you for a fact that the air quality in that plane was terrible. Possibly because a number of passengers in the non-smoking section still deigned to smoke. Whaddaya do eh?
vintermann 17 hours ago [-]
There seems to be a door smoker effect to this day, where smokers are drawn to smoke just inside of the areas you aren't supposed to smoke.
tialaramex 16 hours ago [-]
It's an addiction, they're compelled to smoke, and so at the edges of the area they'll light up.
That's how the Kings Cross Fire started. Escalator full of potential fuel, smoker drops a used match, it falls inside the machine, fire. It wasn't legal technically to be smoking on that escalator, but it would have been legal in a few paces so "everybody" did it. The investigators found signs that such fires had likely started or almost started many times before, the disaster was just that this time it burned for long enough to create a pool of extremely hot gas flowing up the inclined ceiling for the escalator, and we got to discover the Trench Effect in the least fun way possible.
gedy 6 hours ago [-]
I flew to Japan from US in the "non smoking section" and which the smoking section started in the row immediately behind me... A woman smoked in the seat behind me most of the trip.
m-i-l 17 hours ago [-]
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
collingreen 7 hours ago [-]
Even the hindenburg had a smoking lounge! Included a bunch of extra tech to make that less dangerous in a giant explosive balloon.
I like how they still have the ash trays in the bathroom. I get it, throwing the heater into the paper towel trash is a recipe for disaster. But still, the idea of taking a poop in this tiny little uncomfortable bathroom with 5 people waiting for you and sitting there demolishing an entire cigarette while you do it is sort of hilarious in its desperation.
You don't have to go back 30 years to see it. Just take a shared taxi in Sumatra. Most of the men and some women will be smoking. Inside the car. With the windows closed. Sitting next to babies and young children.
acc348 16 hours ago [-]
I was recently watching some TV show and there was this one scene in maternity hospital. The doctor(!) was smoking while talking to the main character. Insane for today's standards.
18 hours ago [-]
socalgal2 16 hours ago [-]
You can still smoke indoors in public places in many places in the world
Theodores 1 hours ago [-]
The last hold out in the UK was the offices of BAT (British American Tobacco). They had ashtrays, spittoons and untold free cigarettes for their staff to help themselves to.
To spice it up a bit, they had lots of cigarettes to try from developing markets. Sometimes these had extra flavour that appealed to the smoker, so more nicotine and tar.
They had this 70s style going on in the early 2000s, at a time when smoking had been outlawed from enclosed public spaces plus lots of outdoor spaces such as sports grounds and train platforms.
Out of the 70s context, the dedication to normalising smoking in the BAT offices made the place sound like more of a cult. I did not work there myself but I had a friend that did. He didn't smoke once he left the 'cult'.
notabotiswear 17 hours ago [-]
Airplane!, 1980.
petesergeant 18 hours ago [-]
I remember transatlantic flights with smoking sections
ArnoVW 17 hours ago [-]
The day they introduced non smoking (late nineties?) a friend of mine found out as the aeroport. He made a big stink, canceled his ticket and booked a new flight for Amsterdam - NYC with the only company still allowing smoking: Aeroflot.
He spent the better part of a day, flying via Moscow.
The next time he had to fly he grudgingly accepted it.
Sometimes even Shaw's unreasonable man has to come to terms with defeat.
CodeCompost 17 hours ago [-]
Quit smoking 10 years ago. Best thing I ever did. I'm particularly inspired by articles like this:
According to the article I have 5 years to go till my body has completely recovered from the effects of smoking.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
I quit in 1999. I don't need to tell you how hard it was. A year of still wanting a cigarette, having to fight the urge, every single day.
Two years quit and I was still having dreams where I am lighting up…
Twenty-seven years since now and it's all a distant memory. Even forgotten in dreamland…
anygivnthursday 17 hours ago [-]
Congrats! I quit around the same time cca 2012-2014.
I did not smoke on a plane, but smoking on trains (and many places indoor) was "normal" before like 2010 around my place. I did not like it even as a smoker and rather went out.
But fully echo you that quitting was one of the best decisions of my life.
what will our grand kids be shocked to read about us and our acceptable 'cigarettes'?
plastic everywhere
social media as news
teflon
fossil fuel cars
sugar/ultra-processed food
kuerbel 17 hours ago [-]
Not only teflon, but pfas. Overuse of pesticides. The second coming of authoritarianism 80 years after the last time. Not doing enough about climate change. Anthropocene extinction.
tialaramex 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Nazis again surprised me and I'm not even a young person.
I figured sure it's a pattern, but it'll take like 150 years or something, nope, here we are in less than 100 years and there are Nazis again.
silvestrov 17 hours ago [-]
> plastic everywhere.
plastic will still be everywhere. The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
> social media as news
Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.
> teflon
teflon has gotten a lot better since it was introduced. It will stick around.
> fossil fuel cars
will be seen like rotary phones: they will not understand why they are so cumbersome or why so many people had resistance against electric cars. It's like electric lights versus living with only oil/candle lights.
I think a near term would be: "you had to go to a cinema to watch a movie?"
everdrive 16 hours ago [-]
>Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
This is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination.
danaris 8 hours ago [-]
> The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
Look at all the wood you have in your house.
Notice that it is still there. Despite the fact that bacteria are very, very good at eating wood.
Even in the hypothetical case that bacteria evolve that can digest plastic, the idea that they would somehow instantly spread to consume all plastic in the world is ludicrous.
We would just need to take a few new precautions with it.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
A bacteria that could eat plastic and shit something nicer or at least further-biodegradable would be an absolute miracle. Sprinkle it on every landfill and ocean "plastic island" in the world and let it do its thing.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
I'd guess there would probably be significant greenhouse emissions just like other digestion.
phs318u 17 hours ago [-]
> Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.
Perhaps. But “social media as news” is definitely going to get a lot worse.
> Teflon ... It will stick around.
Please tell me that was a deliberate choice of words :)
Kreutzer 7 hours ago [-]
gambling commercials that are so pervasive on streaming platforms/cable
hackeraccount 6 hours ago [-]
The other stuff the parent mentioned I don't know about but this one I can totally see. Legalized gambling is going to see like a weird mania of this time in the future.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
Time will ultimately tell, but I'd guess that the brief period of illegal gambling might end up being the weird blip, just like I think the period of illegal drugs will ultimately turn out to be a brief blip of history.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
Ha ha, the replies to your comment have become a laundry list of people's grievances and/or agendas.
5 hours ago [-]
throw9393ir 17 hours ago [-]
Perhaps overuse of medication. No real proof it works, severe side effects, "misterious" rise in cancer and other dissieases, state sanctioned censorship, billion dolar corruption scandals...
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago [-]
You think that our grandchildren will be shocked by sugar, something that has been in use for hundreds of years (and that's just refined sugar, not counting natural forms)? Not very likely.
kortilla 17 hours ago [-]
Medication for normal emotions
tialaramex 16 hours ago [-]
> fossil fuel cars
All or almost all of fire is my guess. My guess is that celebratory fire is last to go, bonfires, fireworks, in 2070 probably roasting marshmallows is at the edge of reasonable behaviour, but the idea that we deliberately burned things as part of normal life will seem very odd.
In 1870 fire is the usual (and incredibly wasteful) way humans make light and heat everywhere. In 1970 there's more abstraction, the light is electrical but from thermal generation, so there is still fire but it's somewhere else, and your heat is more likely from fire inside a metal box in a distant room, a gas, oil or in some cases coal boiler to heat air or water.
My guess is that even in pessimistic models in 2070 that's all electrical and the electricity is generated from sources which do not involve fire. PV, wind, hydro, even the geothermal and nuclear plants don't actually make fire to heat steam, they're just hot.
ahazred8ta 4 hours ago [-]
With the decline of cigarettes, there are homo sapiens children growing up today who have never seen fire. First time in two million years.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
Fires—interesting point.
I'm in a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska that is maybe 5 years old—new housing development. There are no chimneys on any of the homes.
When I was in the Bay Area, sure, not a surprise. I am surprised the Midwaste gives a shit.
(To be sure, everyone seems to have fire pits in their backyards, ha ha. You take what you can get, I suppose.)
tialaramex 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think new builds in this country (unless they're large houses and it's for show) have had chimneys for close to fifty years.
Bathrooms needing an openable window for ventilation lasted longer than chimneys here and I guess those were gone by like the turn of the century because fans†?
cucumber3732842 6 hours ago [-]
It's not about giving a shit. It's about everything costing money and the highly engineered finance math that underpins 99.9% of construction/development and all the sub trades works out best when you use high efficiency everything which doesn't have "hot" exhaust so you get little vent stacks per appliance instead of a chimney.
Pay08 17 hours ago [-]
No, it's going to be about either the roll back of nuclear reactors or various social movements.
petesergeant 18 hours ago [-]
Meat not as a treat, but as a staple
nxm 16 hours ago [-]
Huh? As has been the case since our species evolved into homosapiens?
socalgal2 16 hours ago [-]
yes, And smoking has been around for 1000s of years and only recently it became common to ban it in shared spaces
nxm 17 hours ago [-]
Covid vaccines to young and healthy individuals
autoexec 17 hours ago [-]
Thanks for reminding me. Hopefully antivaxxers
collingreen 7 hours ago [-]
Just Covid? Not all vaccinations for endemic disease they will definitely be exposed to?
If so, why just covid? If not, when is the right time, if any, to give vaccinations that appear to be very effective (or do we think the data is unreliable/dishonest here?).
I certainly have my own take here but I'm trying to ask a neutral question and understand your perspective before it gets downvoted away.
hackeraccount 6 hours ago [-]
This is my take (speaking of political preferences) but gender reassignment surgery is going to look like giving people lobotomies.
I don't know when but I think attitudes abut sex/gender in future will be really different - not your side won and my side lost but just different then we understand. Like people won't do single sex sport different. I think the model for sports in the future is things like those obstacle course shows - Men and Women both compete at the same time but viewers are just aware that they have different capabilities; so they know that a woman doing X is much more amazing then a man doing X+10.
Clamchop 4 hours ago [-]
These don't seem strange to me at all.
Lifestyle marketing, romance, appeals to independence, metaphor, and humor. All timeless advertising tropes. It's cigarettes themselves that are passé.
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of reading my grandparents' old copies of National Geographic from a similar era. The ads were all attractively retro cars or cigarettes. A couple of taglines that stick in the mind are "the thinking man smokes" and "doctors recommend..."!
cucumber3732842 6 hours ago [-]
I remember reading one and they were advertising all the benefits of tubeless tires on drop center rims. High technology at the time.
"Error establishing a database connection", apparently? Groovy.
noelwelsh 18 hours ago [-]
> Groovy
PHP / Wordpress I think.
jonplackett 18 hours ago [-]
Hug of death
17 hours ago [-]
Vasbarlog 17 hours ago [-]
Works now!
0rbiter 17 hours ago [-]
And there I was wondering where all the bunkum came from that LLMs spit out. This is proof that we don't need AI to write hilariously absurd copy.
ffaser5gxlsll 17 hours ago [-]
Press page-down: scrolls the galleries right. Somebody thought this was a good idea, let alone intuitive.
RichardCA 9 hours ago [-]
Here's a fun one, Benson and Hedges commissioned some classic 80's CGI, it got played at one of the art-house animation festivals that was a thing for nerds to do in the 80's. Looks like it was Robert Abel who did it.
But what was the point? It seemed like they were trying to sell gold collectibles to rich people in Malaysia.
Absent any restrictions on targeting adults, what would cigarette ads look like today?
amriksohata 15 hours ago [-]
For those who are not that old, when cigarettes were mainstream there were many scientists (or business backed science) telling people that smoking was healthy. Then they decided to change tact when it became obvious it was causing lung disease.
juleiie 17 hours ago [-]
I miss this awful habit so much.
Ever since quitting years ago I never really recovered. It’s like 35% of my mental focus and clarity evaporated.
All these moments when something had to be figured out suddenly things became easy if you only went for a smoke. Solutions became crystal clear obvious and effortless.
At a price.
Without it is always like a little bit of heavy fog is obscuring everything. That I know could be instantly lifted by this terrible drug.
I even remember my first time what a transcendental clarity it summoned. It was as if some thick veil fell from me in an instant. That’s very, very addicting and just useful.
Does overclocking your brain is worth the accelerated parts wear and tear? Well I made a decision that it isn’t. That I am intelligent and privileged enough to hopefully achieve the things I want and enjoy them for longer.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Why not chew some nicotine gum? People cite things like blood pressure and cardiovascular effects, but seems like caffeine has these same issues and they might just be general stimulant related effects. Have you ever considered if you have add/adhd? You might benefit from adderall as well or some other stimulant. These also have extended release formulations.
I wish coca leaves were available stateside. Not sure the growing requirements, but it seems like they have a lot of similar neuro benefits without much of the harm from the narcotic derivative.
sumanep 2 hours ago [-]
Drink "yerba mate"
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
That is just caffeine.
5 hours ago [-]
Pay08 15 hours ago [-]
Have you tried doing something similarly meditative instead?
juleiie 13 hours ago [-]
I tried using matcha tea instead and it is kind of similar in that general direction but it doesn’t work quite the same mostly due to being constant effect for a few hours after a strong drink instead of a precise impulse.
It was alright for a couple of projects but the day I drink matcha is firmly a “matcha day” with its characteristic of great energy at first and then feeling kind of shitty the rest of the day. It shapes your day too much.
I am sure there are some substances that are similar to nicotine in mechanism and less harmful to the heart and blood thickening but they aren’t easy to get usually or aren’t well researched.
Despite all nicotine is fairly well known and tested on huge population not to mention virtually unlimited access for any interested adult.
Pay08 12 hours ago [-]
I don't mean any sort of substance, but a habit. That can be consuming something (be it cigarettes or tea) but it doesn't need to be. I used to be in a similar position as you (except with food). I've found that doing something similarly meditative, in my case listening to music, achieves much the same effect as food did.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
Nicotine is a bonafide stimulant though, hard to get that any other way.
bramgn 18 hours ago [-]
and yet somehow that world seemed more healthy than today's
pavel_lishin 6 hours ago [-]
I talked to everyone I know who was alive in the 1970s, and they're still alive today. That proves it.
Vasbarlog 17 hours ago [-]
If you wear your nostalgia glasses it sure does "seem" more healthy. Life expectancy at birth in the 70s was 70.8. Now it's 79.
I wonder how much of that was occupational vs lifestyle.
JKCalhoun 14 hours ago [-]
I get what you're saying. And seeing your detractors here, I can't argue with the data.
I wonder though if we didn't trade the low-hanging fruit of lung cancer for the kinds of things that kill us now. I won't argue that we didn't add a decade to our average lifespan, but it does seem our lives have become more sedentary than they were. (Mine certainly has—but then I'm also forty-plus years older, ha ha.)
I wonder how 70's man and 70's woman fared who didn't smoke or live with a smoker—if you compared just that group with modern man and woman.
narag 17 hours ago [-]
What seems to me is the ads seem less staged and processed than current ones. They're wilder and not as softened as every media are now.
As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.
phs318u 17 hours ago [-]
“Seemed” is the key word here.
Pay08 17 hours ago [-]
It wasn't. Lifespans were almost a decade shorter.
17 hours ago [-]
felooboolooomba 17 hours ago [-]
They didn't have a scientific proof that smoking was bad for you. Just like we don't have the proof that social media is awful for you and that Trump is a cult.
Vasbarlog 16 hours ago [-]
Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics
And to think that in the 1920s, doctors prescribed cigarettes for weight loss. And now the tobacco industry is moving on to weed, and repeating the same marketing tricks that they used to sell cigarettes nearly a 100 years back ...
hackeraccount 6 hours ago [-]
Looking at smoking rates for people in the US - it peaks for men in the 1950's. I'm not saying studies and taxes and PSA's did nothing but on some level I think most people had a pretty good idea that smoking was no good long before they ever saw scientific proof.
I think those studies, taxes and everything else was as much an expression of that thinking as it was an influence on it.
Like in Seinfeld you will have episodes where Kramer is smoking in offices....and even in the doctor's clinic! There was an episode where Kramer took out a cigar and smoked in a doctor's waiting room. I thought he would immediately get in trouble but none of the other characters cared.
And then you got movies from back then like Jackie Brown (which is a great movie by the way) where you see character's smoking in a mall cafeteria. A mall! A family friendly environment! And it's considered normal!?!?!? Blows my mind.
Clouds would come out of family bars and diners when you opened the door. Movie theaters and art galleries would have people smoking inside as it was part of their intellectual aesthetic. During weddings giving out Cuban style cigars as a present was assumed. Schools would not allow it officially, but every bathroom and teacher lounge would clearly smell from the people hiding for a smoke. Same for hospital waiting areas and bathrooms. Trains had smoking and non smoking wagons, which people complained about, feeling smokers were being ostracized. Beaches were full of cigarette buts to the point that accidentally stepping on a not yet cold one was a common concern. Not "going for a smoke" at work was considered socially isolating, and particularly for men saying you don't smoke would lead to others questioning your heterosexuality in a non PC manner. Teenagers would start smoking around the family as a "proof of adulthood" as soon as they had their first part time job to pay for it.
Sometimes it was thick with smoke and the walls would have tar.
After the Oxford St, Kings Cross Tube station fires, along with the Bradford stadium fire in the 80s they thought that safety could be improved a tad.
Personally, I like my air fresh.
If you had asked me I would have said, nah I don't smoke and I don't like the smell but I get used to it. When I got out of that place I suddenly realized that it I didn't "not like it" it really bugged me. And no, I never really got used to it.
So strange.
I will say bars do not smell better now that the cigarette smoke is gone. At least for some dive bars. That smoke was doing some heavy lifting...
Hookah bars got wrapped up in the smoking ban too which I think was an overreach. You go to a hookah bar to smoke, you don't go there to watch a game, shoot pool, and have a beer. The one hookah bar in town actually sued the state over it. Because they also sold hookah supplies, they were exempted.
I can recall the week that no-smoking indoors at restaurants/bars passed and it was literally shocking to walk into a place and not have it be hazy. It really felt weird.
Anyway, air quality + quality of life was much worse. Sometimes the future does get better.
Today that sounds to me like urban folklore (or Big Tobacco folklore).
That's how the Kings Cross Fire started. Escalator full of potential fuel, smoker drops a used match, it falls inside the machine, fire. It wasn't legal technically to be smoking on that escalator, but it would have been legal in a few paces so "everybody" did it. The investigators found signs that such fires had likely started or almost started many times before, the disaster was just that this time it burned for long enough to create a pool of extremely hot gas flowing up the inclined ceiling for the escalator, and we got to discover the Trench Effect in the least fun way possible.
https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-smoking-room/
in the office: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/14040813590...
in university: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1315981/mediaviewer/rm154904524...
in airplanes: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/15032513024...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma_XNn1bwOM
https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2620/how-do-they-...
To spice it up a bit, they had lots of cigarettes to try from developing markets. Sometimes these had extra flavour that appealed to the smoker, so more nicotine and tar.
They had this 70s style going on in the early 2000s, at a time when smoking had been outlawed from enclosed public spaces plus lots of outdoor spaces such as sports grounds and train platforms.
Out of the 70s context, the dedication to normalising smoking in the BAT offices made the place sound like more of a cult. I did not work there myself but I had a friend that did. He didn't smoke once he left the 'cult'.
He spent the better part of a day, flying via Moscow.
The next time he had to fly he grudgingly accepted it.
Sometimes even Shaw's unreasonable man has to come to terms with defeat.
* https://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/what-happens-body-qu...
According to the article I have 5 years to go till my body has completely recovered from the effects of smoking.
Two years quit and I was still having dreams where I am lighting up…
Twenty-seven years since now and it's all a distant memory. Even forgotten in dreamland…
I did not smoke on a plane, but smoking on trains (and many places indoor) was "normal" before like 2010 around my place. I did not like it even as a smoker and rather went out.
But fully echo you that quitting was one of the best decisions of my life.
plastic everywhere
social media as news
teflon
fossil fuel cars
sugar/ultra-processed food
I figured sure it's a pattern, but it'll take like 150 years or something, nope, here we are in less than 100 years and there are Nazis again.
plastic will still be everywhere. The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
> social media as news
Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.
> teflon
teflon has gotten a lot better since it was introduced. It will stick around.
> fossil fuel cars
will be seen like rotary phones: they will not understand why they are so cumbersome or why so many people had resistance against electric cars. It's like electric lights versus living with only oil/candle lights.
I think a near term would be: "you had to go to a cinema to watch a movie?"
This is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination.
Look at all the wood you have in your house.
Notice that it is still there. Despite the fact that bacteria are very, very good at eating wood.
Even in the hypothetical case that bacteria evolve that can digest plastic, the idea that they would somehow instantly spread to consume all plastic in the world is ludicrous.
We would just need to take a few new precautions with it.
Perhaps. But “social media as news” is definitely going to get a lot worse.
> Teflon ... It will stick around.
Please tell me that was a deliberate choice of words :)
All or almost all of fire is my guess. My guess is that celebratory fire is last to go, bonfires, fireworks, in 2070 probably roasting marshmallows is at the edge of reasonable behaviour, but the idea that we deliberately burned things as part of normal life will seem very odd.
In 1870 fire is the usual (and incredibly wasteful) way humans make light and heat everywhere. In 1970 there's more abstraction, the light is electrical but from thermal generation, so there is still fire but it's somewhere else, and your heat is more likely from fire inside a metal box in a distant room, a gas, oil or in some cases coal boiler to heat air or water.
My guess is that even in pessimistic models in 2070 that's all electrical and the electricity is generated from sources which do not involve fire. PV, wind, hydro, even the geothermal and nuclear plants don't actually make fire to heat steam, they're just hot.
I'm in a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska that is maybe 5 years old—new housing development. There are no chimneys on any of the homes.
When I was in the Bay Area, sure, not a surprise. I am surprised the Midwaste gives a shit.
(To be sure, everyone seems to have fire pits in their backyards, ha ha. You take what you can get, I suppose.)
Bathrooms needing an openable window for ventilation lasted longer than chimneys here and I guess those were gone by like the turn of the century because fans†?
If so, why just covid? If not, when is the right time, if any, to give vaccinations that appear to be very effective (or do we think the data is unreliable/dishonest here?).
I certainly have my own take here but I'm trying to ask a neutral question and understand your perspective before it gets downvoted away.
I don't know when but I think attitudes abut sex/gender in future will be really different - not your side won and my side lost but just different then we understand. Like people won't do single sex sport different. I think the model for sports in the future is things like those obstacle course shows - Men and Women both compete at the same time but viewers are just aware that they have different capabilities; so they know that a woman doing X is much more amazing then a man doing X+10.
Lifestyle marketing, romance, appeals to independence, metaphor, and humor. All timeless advertising tropes. It's cigarettes themselves that are passé.
PHP / Wordpress I think.
But what was the point? It seemed like they were trying to sell gold collectibles to rich people in Malaysia.
https://youtu.be/fdBoKOpctp4
Ever since quitting years ago I never really recovered. It’s like 35% of my mental focus and clarity evaporated.
All these moments when something had to be figured out suddenly things became easy if you only went for a smoke. Solutions became crystal clear obvious and effortless.
At a price.
Without it is always like a little bit of heavy fog is obscuring everything. That I know could be instantly lifted by this terrible drug.
I even remember my first time what a transcendental clarity it summoned. It was as if some thick veil fell from me in an instant. That’s very, very addicting and just useful.
Does overclocking your brain is worth the accelerated parts wear and tear? Well I made a decision that it isn’t. That I am intelligent and privileged enough to hopefully achieve the things I want and enjoy them for longer.
I wish coca leaves were available stateside. Not sure the growing requirements, but it seems like they have a lot of similar neuro benefits without much of the harm from the narcotic derivative.
It was alright for a couple of projects but the day I drink matcha is firmly a “matcha day” with its characteristic of great energy at first and then feeling kind of shitty the rest of the day. It shapes your day too much.
I am sure there are some substances that are similar to nicotine in mechanism and less harmful to the heart and blood thickening but they aren’t easy to get usually or aren’t well researched.
Despite all nicotine is fairly well known and tested on huge population not to mention virtually unlimited access for any interested adult.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/data-finder.htm?&subject=Life%2...
I wonder though if we didn't trade the low-hanging fruit of lung cancer for the kinds of things that kill us now. I won't argue that we didn't add a decade to our average lifespan, but it does seem our lives have become more sedentary than they were. (Mine certainly has—but then I'm also forty-plus years older, ha ha.)
I wonder how 70's man and 70's woman fared who didn't smoke or live with a smoker—if you compared just that group with modern man and woman.
As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
I think those studies, taxes and everything else was as much an expression of that thinking as it was an influence on it.