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.
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.
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.
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.
When you’ve been smoking for a few years, you lose a lot of your taste.
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-work
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.
That’s not quite what positive reinforcement is but im not sciency enough to understand it either lol
I’ll paste Wikipedias explanation:
In the behavioral sciences, the terms “positive” and “negative” refer when used in their strict technical sense to the nature of the action performed by the conditioner rather than to the responding operant’s evaluation of that action and its consequence(s). “Positive” actions are those that add a factor, be it pleasant or unpleasant, to the environment, whereas “negative” actions are those that remove or withhold from the environment a factor of either type. In turn, the strict sense of “reinforcement” refers only to reward-based conditioning; the introduction of unpleasant factors and the removal or withholding of pleasant factors are instead referred to as “punishment”, which when used in its strict sense thus stands in contradistinction to “reinforcement”. Thus, “positive reinforcement” refers to the addition of a pleasant factor, “positive punishment” refers to the addition of an unpleasant factor, “negative reinforcement” refers to the removal or withholding of an unpleasant factor, and “negative punishment” refers to the removal or withholding of a pleasant factor.
This usage is at odds with some non-technical usages of the four term combinations, especially in the case of the term “negative reinforcement”, which is often used to denote what technical parlance would describe as “positive punishment” in that the non-technical usage interprets “reinforcement” as subsuming both reward and punishment and “negative” as referring to the responding operant’s evaluation of the factor being introduced. By contrast, technical parlance would use the term “negative reinforcement” to describe encouragement of a given behavior by creating a scenario in which an unpleasant factor is or will be present but engaging in the behavior results in either escaping from that factor or preventing its occurrence, as in Martin Seligman’s experiment involving dogs learning to avoid electric shocks.
(These paragraphs are one after the other but I can’t figure out proper formatting)
Positive punishment is different from positive reinforcement. Shame is a punishment
negative reinforcement is what punishment for undesired behavior is called.
positive reinforcement is rewarding when the desired behavior is exhibited.
edit: negative reinforcement requires forever conditioning and develops sick and twisted conditioners eventually. positive reinforcement takes longer to work but it doesn’t require forever conditioning. And rarely causes revolutionary acts.
I’m not trying to convince someone to quit; that’s up to them to derive enough motivation to do so on their own.
I’m just pointing out that their disgusting habit affects everyone around them, if it’s not killing them through second-hand smoke.
I say this as someone who used to smoke 1–2 packs a day, and WISH that someone told me that I smelled as bad as I did. To me, smoking was never about impacting other people, so having known that, I would have at least been more mindful.
I 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.
It’s so nasty when you get delivery and the food reeks of cigarettes.
One time it smelled of coppertone sunscreen which was wild and also off putting but in very different ways.
I got a coffee from Dunkin Donuts once that had been prepared by someone who had some kind of topical menthol cream all over their hands. That was the second most disgusting thing I’ve put in my mouth.
I was born with a deviated septum, so I can’t smell much of anything, but cigarette is one thing I can smell… And I can confirm everything in your post.
My dad used to smoke. A lot. I once had to borrow his car for a week or so and couldn’t even drive it without flooding it with febreze and opening all the windows.
I used to have a co-worker who smoked so much that I (and others with more sensitive schnozzes) could tell if he’d been in a room in the past hour or more.
Even if you don’t care about your own health, you shouldn’t smoke for the sake of those around you.
Even more pleasant was being driven around in a car with dad smoking in the front seat while you’re behind him. Getting all that wind, smoke and ash in your face. Mmm. Or if it’s too cold he doesn’t wanna open the window really and basically just hotboxes me and my two brothers with nicotine. (This was 25+ years ago)
My eldest brother had asthma, so my parents were generally careful not to smoke around us. They had a dedicated room in the house for smoking so that the rest of the house would get less contaminated. Fortunately, this meant that they didn’t generally smoke in the car while driving us around. Also, my dad worked and/or commuted thirteen hours a day so I was mostly around my mom, who smoked a lot less.
The car borrowing I mentioned was years after my brother had moved across the country when my dad drove his car almost exclusively alone, so at least no one else (who wasn’t borrowing the car) was engulfed.
I’m sorry you had to suffer through 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).
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.
Didn’t ban them, just restricted who could sell them.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-24/vaping-ban-watered-down-greens-support/104016012
i through they also stopped the sale of cigs to anyone born after a cutoff date?
Lol I’m a school bus driver and a number of my colleagues vape on the fucking buses. They imagine they’re being super-secret about it - they’re somehow oblivious to the giant cloud of smoke each hit creates. Never underestimate the power of nicotine addiction to force people to relentlessly push the boundaries of where and when.
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.”
I liked the no-smoking in bars even when i smoked. But pulling an archived post with 13 points and 100 comments to display prominent opinion is pretty fun times.
I actually started with the Dennis Miller rant on it because that’s what I thought of first, but then I realized Dennis Miller sucks and I don’t want to make people sit through that so I searched for someone else arguing it…
Opposite of how people with allergies changed the market. Sure maybe a group of people are without allergies but a very large group are with various allergies. If you broke them down they’d be smaller groups but it made more sense to just accommodate. And you can’t really tell someone with an allergy to just stop having the allergy. Though some restaurants will deny it should be part of their culture or unheard of.
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?
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.
