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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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?"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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†?
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.
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.
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.
> but gender reassignment surgery is going to look like giving people lobotomies.
Unlike lobotomies, there will always be some subset of the population who needs those kinds of surgeries. That said, as they've become increasingly sought after I do sometimes wonder if there will be enough detransitiors to cause us to be more cautious about performing them as readily in as many situations. Especially at young ages.
> Men and Women both compete at the same time but viewers are just aware that they have different capabilities;
I doubt that'll happen. Not as long as we have sports with winners and losers. Too often it would mean that women would never (or almost never) win. Women would need to accept never stepping into the winners circle and taking the trophy home. Either that or we'd end up giving two trophies at the end of every game, one trophy for the best male winner, and another for the best female loser. At that point however, the men and women aren't really in the same competition with each other and you might as well just have two separate teams.
There are also a number of sports where it would be dangerous for women and men to compete together. It works out fine when they're just taking turns running an obstacle course, but it's less fine when you've got men killing and causing serious harm to women in contact sports like rugby, MMA, and ice hockey. There are sports that many women wouldn't want to participate in at all if they had to play against men. We shouldn't deny those women the ability to play the sports they love on teams where they feel safe. That said, I've always felt that the men's teams should be open to anyone who wants to participate and can qualify (and often that's already the case today).
Not to overly infantilize the fairer sex here, but imagine that same proposal only with children. We don't put 6 year olds on NFL teams for many of the same reasons. No amount of bonus points awarded to the kids for the handicap of their size/skill would make it acceptable. It'd be less safe, it'd be demoralizing for children to lose all the time, and it'd be less fun for the players and less fun to watch for spectators. People want to see the best of the best go head to head. We can compartmentalize them because even pitting teams of the best 10-12 year olds against each other is exciting. Everybody has a reasonably fair chance. What teams would even pick up the 8 year old football player when they could get even a poor adult player instead? I know that the differences between men and women athletes aren't as extreme but I think it illustrates the issues.
Plus having separate teams for people of different sexes, ages, weight classes, and skill levels means that there are more games to play/watch/bet on/sell tickets for.
Lifestyle marketing, romance, appeals to independence, metaphor, and humor. All timeless advertising tropes. It's cigarettes themselves that are passé.
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..."!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
