My parents always used to sit in the smoking sections.
And they always smoked a few cigarettes during the meal.
I was so happy when they finally banned the cigarettes in restaurants. My parents were pissed.
As a non cigarette smoker who has tried them once or twice, the thought of taking a drag of a cigarette during a meal makes me want to vomit. It has to completely ruin the taste of whatever you are eating.
Afterwards, I understand. Maybe before if you’re trying to reduce your appetite or some shit. But during? That seems insane to me.
It has to completely ruin the taste of whatever you are eating
Smoking really destroys your tastebuds so it’s not like smoking while eating makes a huge difference anyway.
When you’ve been smoking for a few years, you lose a lot of your taste.
The crazy thing about this is that I did too. Then I was old enough to go to restaurants on my own. I also smoked, but you know what I did? I fucking went outside like a godamn person. I don’t smoke anymore but the idea of subjecting everyone else to my bullshit isn’t okay.
Same same same. My friend was bartending when they banned in New York and she smoked. I couldn’t believe how happy she was. She’s like, I’ll just go take a break, and not have to have this every second this whole bar.
As a non-smoker (cigarettes) who grew up as smoking was pushed outdoors, the one thing I feel like I truly missed out on is the social aspect of it. If you walk out front with a cigarette and/or a lighter, you’ve already got a conversation starter with literally anyone else standing outside (and then by extension, anyone else that they might be there with).
Just a massive tool for meeting people that I feel like I missed out on completely. Not sure if it’s enough to regret not smoking, but still…
As a smoker, I have had so many amazing conversations with fellow smokers. Back when they used to have those outdoor boxes outside of hospitals, I’d always meet someone interesting in there when I had a reason to be at a hospital.
I met an old dude one time that was nearly blown in half in Vietnam. He was so cheerful and joked about it, which blew my mind. We talked for three days. I was there with my ex for her uncle and he was there for his wife. He said, “It hurts getting blowed up, but not as bad as someone randomly puttin’ uh fanger up ya butt when you’re froggin’.” Then he looked around and said, “Lord, I better watch my mouth. My wife’s sister would drop dead if she knew her sister put her fangers in my butt and made her food with those hands. She’s one uh them Bible thumpers that would sleep on a pew if she thought it would make her look pious. She’d never leave the church. She’s on her way to hell like the rest of us but, bless her heart, she don’t even know it.”
Crude, I know, but he had me dying laughing. Had this real thick accent that made everything sound funny. He was also very insightful and intelligent. When it was just me and him out there he was so crude. The second someone else would show up he’d drop it. It’s crazy how you can make a connection with someone in such a short time and get to know their “at home” self.
Nowadays the smokers are all hiding behind a bush somewhere far away from each other.
I’m standing outside freezing right now for a cigarette because I don’t smoke in my home. I did when I was younger and it just ruined everything. It’s nice to repair something and it isn’t sticky inside when I open it up these days.
I gotta quit this crap. I really do.
You can do it, the first step to quitting is wanting to.
Reminder to anyone who still smokes: you smell like shit 100% to anyone you interact with.
And any place you still smoke in, whether your car or home, also smells like shit.
And to delivery drivers who smoke, the packages you deliver smell like shit, too!
Positive reinforcement works better for helping people quit :(
Especially when quitting smoking tanks a person’s dopamine levels. It takes weeks for the body to re-regulate production.
To anyone reading this who has quit/is quitting: congratulations! It’s tough, you have shown a force of willpower and should be proud of yourself.
Love, a fellow Canadian.
Edit:
As with other forms of punishment, aversive methods are generally less effective than positive approaches. It is more important to reward and praise desirable behaviors than to react negatively to unwanted ones. Encouraging a person’s ability to enjoy self-affirmation and self-pride will help them internalize healthy attributes and to become a person deserving of admiration…Shame doesn’t motivate prosocial behaviors; it fuels social withdrawal and low self-esteem.
Source: took some psych courses
&
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/longing-nostalgia/201705/why-shaming-doesnt-workI know intellectually that’s true but in my cursed heart I really don’t want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.
It’s just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I’m sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you’re not nice to them, they might shoot you.
edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like “You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you”, so that’s probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.
You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you
My parents said the same thing over 15 years ago, but this kind of shit just isn’t true. When you own your home or business, doing what’s expected of you results in your investments retaining or even increasing their value. That’s why the owner works 12 hours a day, and the homeowner fixes the broken windows.
When you’re just living or working somewhere but you don’t have a stake in it, what do you actually get out of your efforts? Communities of all types, big and small, are held together by the stake we have in them. If people have no stake, they have no reason to care. This is why you pay employees, and this is why parents should thank their kids for doing the damn chores.
Problem is so many people believe that you don’t deserve thanks for “doing what’s expected” while also refusing to allow young people the opportunity to become invested in their communities. This is why the social contract is destroyed and no one cares anymore. Why should they? The youth will never get to be part of their community the way we are. They will never benefit from it the way we do… Unless things change.
Positive reinforcement is the act of adding either a reward for good behavour or a punishment for bad behavior.
It seems like both of you are doing that.
Between the massive corporate wealth at stake and the millions of people literally addicted to the product, it’s hard now to imagine governments being able to ban them (and I lived through it).
And now we have vaping.
😭
Infinitely better for health and can only be used in private spaces or outside in most countries, would rather have some rights than none
How dare you impose your right to a thing that impacts no one else. I use vapour to scent my hous but how dare you use it for whatever you want. Under the guise of “quitting smoking for the betterment of your health”. spits
The world and it’s people needs to be how I want them to be. Only then can people be as tolerant as me.
Fun fact, no one cares if they use incense in their homes. It doesn’t affect others. Shit, you can even vape back home and no one will bat an eye. But since it is at very least annoying as fuck to sit in vape clouds, you are not allowed to do that.
It’s either the right to vape or the right to breathe clean air. You can’t have both.
Nothing about that fact is fun. It’s barely even mildly interesting or even a fact. The deceit! You should be ashamed.
I grew up in ghetto whitetrash America, wheee bit more than cigarettes
I hate how so many cities smell like asphalt and burnt rubber. It is a disgusting smell and it makes our cities feel so dirty and nasty.
For people too young to remember, a lot of people were against smoking bans. The argument was pretty simple: “Why not let the market decide? If you want to go to a bar with no smokers, go to one that doesn’t allow smoking.” This was persuasive to a lot of people.
But I recall that non-smoking bars were extremely rare and I would always end up smelling like smoke every time I went to the bar. The problem was basically that going to a non-smoking bar would exclude any friends that smoked, so bars that became non-smoking were limiting themselves to only those patrons who didn’t smoke themselves and had no one in their group who did.
In hindsight, it betrays a fundamental problem with the “let the market decide” argument: there are situations where a small number of consumers with uncommon preferences can end up altering the whole market such that the majority of consumers are forced into un-ideal purchases. In the case of smoking at bars, it was actually better to say “Hey you few people who smoke, you’re kinda fucking up everything and we do actually need big government to step in and stop you from doing that.”
In the UK, most places had a non-smoking section (even restaurants 🤮) which was just part of the same room. No barriers or anything. The whole place stank no matter where you sat
Same in the US. And it wasn’t hard to get seated at a non-smoking table right next to the smoking section since there was no space between the tables or anything.
Airplanes were even worse.
And airplanes. People used to smoke in airplanes.
Also it was a freaking huge industry to kill all the whales in the sea.
Once upon a time it was common to mine ice.
The world can be changed.
Would you believe that they had a smoking section on airplanes? That is, you could smoke in the back of the plane, but not forward of a certain row number.
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
With how hvac works when setup correctly it actually does.
It still isn’t ideal and I’m very happy it isn’t a thing anymore.
a freaking huge industry to kill all the whales in the sea
One of the wildest aspects of this was that they did it from fucking rowboats. I’ve never understood why the whales didn’t just leisurely swim away from that bullshit.
Because they didn’t know how the harpoons worked until they had been harpooned.
Just want to add that the biggest objection that I have heard from coworkers and friends about making recreational Marijuanna legal is the smell. Walk around a downtown in any state it is legal for recreation in and the smell is everywhere.
Non-users don’t want to smell burning weed or tabacco as they go about their day.
Yeah I walk downtown in my favorite city now and it smells like losers. It’s a bummer.
I live in a legal state. You get whiffs once in a while, which is more funny than it is annoying to me.
There are times when the smell lingers, and that’s pretty gross.
But other than that, it’s not as choking/poisonous as the cloud of cigarette and car fumes.
The car fumes are causing more cancer than the smoking. And is non majority directed at the user. We’ve known that for just as long as cigarettes being bad, yet people turned their head because they had good lobbying.
Gas powered cars are worse than cigarettes. We could have switched to majority electric cars in the 70s, and all the gas stations would have just been electric chargers and the tech growth for batteries would have happened 50 years ago.
Then again cars cause further damages to society than just fumes, but a lot of people don’t care about the layout of towns/cities and access and accept deaths from cars as par for the course.
How practical were electric cars in the 70s really though? I feel like the technology back then would have meant much shorter ranges, less performance, and also more environmental damage than even modern battery technologies cause in manufacturing.
Batteries already existed that could range up to 100 miles. This would have pushed companies into the battery evolution earlier, pushed industry away from shipping fuels (50% of all shipping overseas) across oceans, and created energy independence for regions around the world, depleting that as a mechanism of war. Also means public transit in form of trains and buses would have been hopefully pushed more as well.
Ah yes, the smoking section, and the second-hand-smoking section in restaurants
I remember this happening, and the smell went from just dirty and grim to a little bit of body odour. Many people complained, because they didn’t want to smell people’s BO, whereas 90% of others were just happy to not have clothes that stunk, or to be able to not have a sore throat after being at a club.
With that said, vaping is so much more commonplace today than smoking was. I’ve been to a few gigs in the last month or two, and people just vape wherever they want. Pretty much every venue, shopping center, and indoor area says you shouldn’t vape, but it’s just not enforced at all.
Vaping doesn’t negatively affect anyone else’s health though so wanting to prohibit it is just trying to control. It’s like banning scotch because you hate the smell of peat
Yeah, I remember the tail end of this. Dedicated smoking rooms, or smoking carriages on trains. Or cafés and restaurants that would promote themselves as places where you could freely smoke.
Thankfully that’s all gone now.
Hear me out though:
Smoking train carriage…
…for weed
How about not smoking at all?
Smoking means you’re exposing a pair of very sensitive organs to air that is relatively densely saturated with burnt particulates for prolonged periods of time. It doesn’t matter what you’re smoking, it’ll always be bad.
Moreover, it’s not a very efficient delivery system, as a lot of the working “stuff” gets burned and rendered useless.
You want weed? Go make tea or edibles. Much better in every way.
The freedom to do good is also the freedom to do bad so let’s get rid of freedom.
