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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

> It's like a smoking addiction

It's awesome to watch massive shifts in values and priorities.

Smoking used to be seen as cool, sexy, even healthy. Now it's widely seen as unhealthy and disgusting.

Same thing with high-fructose carbonated beverages.

I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public.

It wasn't long ago that men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable. Now it's outrageous and shameful.

Things change, slowly at first, and then all at once. People are waking up and it will never be the same for Facebook.

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That is a good point. What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking. And many still do it! Adverse effects of technology/social in general wouls be even more difficult to prove. I see technology addicts' rehabilitation centres a reality in near future.

I am pretty certain most of the current younger smokers had a very good idea of the health implications.

Anything that changed from a medical perspective since I am smoking is that we know by now that a 'smokers lung' is not actually that and most never get it. Otherwise all the risks are well known for 15+ years.

Tldr: I don't think people actually care about dying earlier (or more cruel), at least in countries with working or cheap health care.

> What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking.

That isn't really the issue, smokers have been aware of the negative consequences for quite a while. Many are okay with it due to the relief the smoking brings them from stress and other issues, it's a trade-off. Just like alcohol ain't that healthy for you but many people still chose to drink it.

But on the other hand you have massive companies who've spent decades and billions of $ in making tobacco as addictive, and easy to smoke, as possible. So once the customers are hooked it's extremely difficult for them to kick the habit and even when they manage to kick it, many will still get cravings for years, if not decades, to come.

Which could be explained by this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...

For the effect on schizophrenia to explain the people who have difficulty quitting smoking, the population of people who have difficulty quitting smoking would have to be similar in size to (really, smaller than) the population of schizophrenics.

But I would bet that it's much larger.

Afaik schizophrenia is a spectrum, so some are bound to be affected worse than others. I also didn't say it was the only reason for people having trouble kicking the habit, only one of the factors for it, so there's still plenty of room for non-schizophrenics not being able to kick the habit due to tobacco (and the additives tobacco companies add to it) being highly addictive.

What baffles me more is that a ton of people are vaping now, even those that haven't smoked before, because "it's, like, totally not like smoking".

> I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public.

Wrong wrong wrong. They still do these a lot.

I prefer, "You sir, have negotiated with me as would a Gypsy. I am cross."

Seriously though, kids used it all the time when I was growing up — I didn't even know "gyp" was derogatory until I was perhaps in my 30's. If I had to guess, young me would have suspected it was spelled "jip" anyway.

We told Pollack jokes too and I didn't even know it meant someone from Poland.

I was not very cosmopolitan as a kid.

> men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable

When was this?

Fully out in the open? Never, really. Even religion looks down on it.

But covertly? It’s happening even now, all over the world.

Somewhat related: I was wandering YouTube the other day and stumbled upon an old T.V. segment with Hunter S. Thompson and a Hell's Angel sharing the program's stage. The amount of joking about wife beating (and audience approval of said joking) was frankly shocking to watch. Easy enough to search for, I'll leave off the link.

What does "gyp" mean? I googled it but I feel like I'm missing something.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836...

It's a slur against the Roma (gypsies).

Short for “Gypsy”. Many consider it to be a racial slur. Just as some people use “Jew” as a verb in a similar way (more obviously a slur).

Have you ever heard someone say something like "I got gypped out of X" or "what a gyp!". It's slang for something like a scam or getting ripped off. It originally comes from the word "gypsy", which is an actual ethnicity of people in Europe, who have a negative stereotype of theft/dishonesty.

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