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When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing.
by CapitalistCartr 5mo ago
When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.
- hliyan 5mo agoI remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoAs was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.
- pavlov 5mo agoElementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day. If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.
- hnlmorg 5mo agoYeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.
- redwall_hp 5mo agoI vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now). And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
- cogogo 5mo agoThink these bins persisted on some aircraft until fairly recently. Maybe 10 yrs ago?
- cogogo 5mo agoHa my first ceramic project in elementary school art class was an ashtray. Smoking was everywhere.
- Ma8ee 5mo agoI remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.
- paulpauper 5mo agoIt makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.
- margalabargala 5mo agoI would expect it to be the other way around. If nearly everyone smoked, then even nonsmokers were constantly getting a fair amount of secondhand smoke. This would raise the background rate of cancer, making it appear that smoking raises your risk by less than it actually does.
- rjsw 5mo agoNon smokers did get lung cancer [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death
- margalabargala 5mo agoYes, exactly my point. If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.
- paulpauper 5mo agothis agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
- margalabargala 5mo ago> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer. No, that's where you're wrong. You are only interested in that independent risk. I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk. Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to. But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5mo agoYeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes. It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.
- bokkies 5mo agoI remember flying in the 80s (and early nineties in parts of Europe) and always got 'air-sick' which made flying awful. Only after smoking was banned did I realise I wasn't motion sickness but it was instead poisoning from the smokers around me. My parents would book non-smoking seats and we'd be 1 row in front of the smokers...wild times
- WalterBright 5mo agoSo true. My parents would bring out ashtrays when we had guests.