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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?"
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.
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...
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..."!
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.
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
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 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.
Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260514073345/https://tohippo.c...
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.
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.
Nope, not better quality if you don't like the smell of cigarettes.
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).
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.
How does this work for all-electric planes like the 787?
[dead]
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?
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.
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.
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).
The Sixties where the time!
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...
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.
"You're too young to smoke. You're going to set this whole place on fire."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma_XNn1bwOM
https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2620/how-do-they-...
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.
You can still smoke indoors in public places in many places in the world
Airplane!, 1980.
I remember transatlantic flights with smoking sections
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.
Quit smoking 10 years ago. Best thing I ever did. I'm particularly inspired by articles like this:
* 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.
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…
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
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.
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.
> 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?"
>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.
> 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 :)
Ha ha, the replies to your comment have become a laundry list of people's grievances and/or agendas.
Meat not as a treat, but as a staple
Huh? As has been the case since our species evolved into homosapiens?
yes, And smoking has been around for 1000s of years and only recently it became common to ban it in shared spaces
> 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.
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.)
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...
Medication for normal emotions
No, it's going to be about either the roll back of nuclear reactors or various social movements.
Covid vaccines to young and healthy individuals
Thanks for reminding me. Hopefully antivaxxers
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..."!
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.
"Error establishing a database connection", apparently? Groovy.
> Groovy
PHP / Wordpress I think.
Hug of death
Works now!
Press page-down: scrolls the galleries right. Somebody thought this was a good idea, let alone intuitive.
Absent any restrictions on targeting adults, what would cigarette ads look like today?
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.
and yet somehow that world seemed more healthy than today's
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.
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/data-finder.htm?&subject=Life%2...
“Seemed” is the key word here.
It wasn't. Lifespans were almost a decade shorter.
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
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
[dead]
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.
Have you tried doing something similarly meditative instead?
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.
Is it about how Joe Camel looks like a cock?
Nope!
Someone forgot to code a 5-liner RAM cache.
It's up now!