People smoked inside the aircraft?!
Yes. In old planes every seat has an ashtray.
In the US the restrooms on planes still have an ashtray. Even though it’s a serious crime to smoke on a plane, it’s better to have a safe place to extinguish a butt rather than risk a trashcan fire at 10,000 ft.
Same in Europe (Ryanair), but it’s right next to a scary notice about smoke detectors being installed and criminal responsibility for endangering the flight.
I was in a plane where an idiot apparently triggered the smoke alarm. I don’t know if it had any consequences but they made a very cryptic and like a threat sounding announcement afterwards and put the toilet out of order.
Cuba’s national carrier was apparently the last sizable airline to ban smoking, in 2014.
You could book a smoking or non-smoking seat. Air France (for a while in the 90s at least) had alternating smoking and non-smoking rows, so non-smokers were completely fucked.
Aircraft mechanics used to be able to tell where the fuselage was cracked because there were usually nicotine stains on it.
Flying was also considered a luxury back then, but yeah keep whining about an generational difference while democracy is torn down around you.
A flight to France from NYC in 1955 was $310, which is the equivalent of about $3900 today. You can find that same flight for under $300 today.
Las Vegas to Los Angeles was only $13.70 or $171.88 in today’s money, you can find that for less than $50 today.
Even if you include the extra fees and everything today that were part of the base fare in the early days of flight, that only adds another 10% or so to the cost.
The reason that air travel today is so unpleasant is that it has been commodified. Airlines have to compete only on price, and it’s easy to search for the prices. Just 20 years ago it was extremely difficult for anybody except a travel agent to search for airlines prices. Because of that, people often stuck with a favourite airline or with whatever the travel agent recommended. Now, anybody can go to any number of sites and in a few seconds know every airline that flies between two cities with every schedule and every price.
Since every airline wants to make the sale, they make the price shown by the search the lowest one. Then, to get their profit margin back, they add on fees and make things that used to be built into the price.
It also used to be obscenely more expensive to fly
you weren’t getting the equivalent of ryanairs £13 gatwick to holland flights
Prices to fly seem pretty obscene right now tbf. Transatlantic over $700 per seat round trip at my last look.
Blaming Boomers might make you feel better for half a second but the truth is their political leaders mislead them too. There is a reason Trump saying he was going to “drain the swamp” appealed to so many people.
Boomers, lower class citizens, Republicans, Hispanics, whites etc are all people who deserve not to suffer.
If the priority is to minimize suffering then labels stop mattering because people start actually seeing the big picture. When you can’t see the big picture you up being mad at a ghost that’s been created in your head. You’re angry at something you will never be able to actually see or meet because you over-classify a classification.
I agree. You can only track a span of time when referring to a whole generation of people. As in, “something happened during that time”. It was not caused by all of the people included in the generalization. Most likely in the past, as it is today, it’s the 10% of the greed monkeys in any generation that you can point to, not the whole shebang.
Yeah it would be like blaming millennials for going to war with Iran or the 30% inflation that’s happened over the last 6 years or the massive changes that’s happened with the government.
Pointing fingers doesn’t change anything and if you believe a certain group caused the problems people are seeing today then what are the people today doing to fix it because they are next up to be blamed.
drake meme photo
Blame capitalism
Blame Boomers
“We had it all” is the message some people get from “you could never get away from the bloody cigarette smoke”?
If you were on a plane they had food you didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, they’d even do kosher and vegetarian options. Before that they would just give you something else you usually had to buy. The message is “boomers bitch and moan about how hard they worked when they had it easier than any generation before or since, especially white American boomers-they were handed luxury goods for free!”
No, you did have to pay an arm and a leg before entering the plane instead, and then you couldn’t even opt out of the toxic smoke that OP is finding so great.
All the post does is glorifying the past, like many boomers also like to do.
There have been, like, five societal things that have improved since the 90s, and banning smoking in basically all public spaces is one of them.
I can’t even imagine air travel before the smoking ban. Mega yuck.
It wasn’t pleasant. I was a kid and didn’t fly much. but I did experience it.
Because everyone smoked everywhere, you were at least used to it. Airplanes are super well ventilated, not enough to make it pleasant, but enough that you weren’t feeling like you were going to die when they all lit up.
It wasn’t pleasant.
Once hitched a ride and the driver and his wife where heavy smokers that they even had the air on recycle instead of taking in fresh air. 2nd worst ride ever, I got out as quick as I could.
what was the 1st worst?
I’ve lived through both eras.
Take all the tech companies away from the far-right, raise taxes on the wealthy, break up the media monopolies, overturn citizens united, ensure one full-time income can support a small family, restore actual journalism, make universities places for education and research again….
And you can smoke wherever the fuck you want. Do it in my living room for all I care.
Sorry, but this is a really ableist take. Not everyone is healthy enough to tolerate secondhand smoke; I would rather live in a literal 1984-style dictatorship than somewhere that smoking everywhere was normalized. There’s not a political system out there worse than feeling like you have the flu every day for the rest of your life.
RIGHT, your comfort is what’s most important. Blocked. 😀
Okay then.
Are you perchance a race and gender that hasn’t historically been persecuted under fascism? There are a few things worse than a flu.
I think you’re underestimating the flu a bit there. Pretty hard to fight the power when you struggle to remain upright. At least if you’re healthy under fascism there’s, like, a chance things will get better. I can’t imagine a fate worse than being sick all the time and unable to do anything about it because, ya know, you’re too sick to do anything about it.
Also smoking bans are so usa centric. Going to Europe is insane because they are so insanely rude with how they smoke compared to the usa
Not just US. A few years back japan banned it in restaurants (but not bars) and public buildings unless there’s an actual smoking room in them.
Depends where, and sometimes it varies wildly in the same country.
Hamburg, I didn’t see a single smoker. Berlin, fucking rife with them
Wiiiide variety over Europe. You gotta specify
I’ve been in a good few European countries and it hadn’t differed in any.
Oh I guess that covers all of 'em then.
The UK has very little smoking in public.
Germany had a shit-ton, though it has decreased quite a bit.
Continental Europe maybe but as a Briton it’s pretty shit to be a smoker here. Extremely expensive unless you go black market, you have to stand outside in the pissing rain in virtually all cases, and people can be very judging about it.
Source: ex smoker
I remember flying into Germany in '06 and being able to light up anywhere in the airport, went back in '13 or '14 and they had little booths.
I was in Germany in the early 00s and I hard associated the Frankfurt airport with the smell of smoke. Went back a few years ago and I almost didn’t recall things because that olfactory link wasn’t there anymore.
I recall reading that in some ways air quality was better when smoking in airplanes was legal because they had to cycle air through the outside through ventilation systems.
Now they don’t so the air is more stagnant and circulates germs etc.
I have no idea if that’s actually the case, or if so, if that’s actually better. But it was a point I hadn’t considered.
In hindsight, it feels like the sort of “study” that a tobacco company would put out. Like a petrol company funding one that says “climate change is good actually!”
It’s not like anything was stopping the airlines from continuing to run the ventilation systems even after smoking was banned on flights.
But think about poor old $$$
Portable cameras were NOT this good when airlines allowed smoking. You ever see a pic of a ps1/GameCube display at Walmart? This is before THAT.
What are you talking about? https://shootfilmco.com/blogs/shoot-film-co/the-most-popular-cameras-of-the-1970s
There are example shots, e.g. here’s one from the Nikon F2, which was introduced in 1971:
Well it’s a 747 and United flew those from 1970 to 2017. Not sure when they stopped allowing smoking on board, but I’m guessing it was allowed in the 70s?
its was on some airlines through the mid 90s.
I mean there’s a huge reason for the loss of luxury on planes that everyone conveniently forgets
Planes were EXPENSIVE, they were a luxury, and around the latter part of the 80s they figured out how to reduce the price. Tickets went from $500 to $50 for the exact same 1 hour flights to the exact same locations.
There’s a reason Ryanair became an instant success. People want to pay nothing for services rendered.
It’s not just that, they figured out a factory line that made the production cost of planes drastically drop too
They’re still not cheap to produce, but they went from exorbitantly expensive, might only have 10-25 flights per day to an airport has 1000s of flights per day
I wonder if there will be a remembrance culture for the mass deaths caused by climate change like there is for germans with the holocaust. Like: “Grandma, why did great grandad not do anything to stop the death of hundreds of millions when everyone knew it was going to happen?”
I think you’re being a wee bit too optimistic about this whole future thing, emmissions are still rising and we’re heading into massive worldwide famines and droughts in the forseeable future.
Yes but humanity wont be wiped out, it will just suffer a lot. Maybe it will be billions of dead even, but we will figure something out as we always do and then we will say “wasnt so bad after all right?” and learn nothing from it.
90% of earths topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030
Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity.
Global carbon emissions are still rising
The world is likely to exceed a key global warming target soon but the earths alebedo with the declining sea ice and lack of cloud cover will impact these numbers massively and isn’t being predicted for, which means that 4.5c above the baseline by 2060 is now possible.
Oh and this El Nino is so powerful the fucking graph needed to be made bigger today and all of the above is and will continue to be impacted by this as it progresses.
So yeah, unless we can somehow rapidly evolve physics defying magic to handwave all our problems away before basically everything dies, basically everything will die.
You can put quite a lot of nines after the decimal point if more than 99% of people die without humanity reaching its lowest population in history, so the post you’re replying to is right that humans are likely to persevere, and knowing humans, there’s a good chance that if industrial civilisation starts again (which is less likely - you need lots of accessible cheap coal to make it worth putting up with rudimentary steam engines long enough to develop good ones), lessons won’t be learned and we’ll pollute ourselves to death again.
2 people arent enough. Who is going to repopulate the Earth? Elon Musk? With what? His male buddies? They going to invent male pregnancy?
2 isn’t.
You’d need about 50 for a healthy diversity of genes.
But that is still only 0.00000055% of the current population
With no soil to grow food in and a climate too hot and unstable to support crop growth, we’re not going to be persevering for very long.
Humans have existed a lot longer than crop growth.
Cool cool, so what are we going to eat then?
With all the pollinators dying off over the next +1.5c, and 90% of the top soil depleted by 2050, and ever more erratic climates world wide, plants will not grow.
The oceans will very soon be so hot and acidic that the phytoplancton at the base of the oceans ecosystem, will dissolve. So sea food isn’t going to be an option either.
Oooh, maybe animals on land, right? Well, yeah no, without crops livestock is unsustainable and considering humans and livestock currently makes up 95% of the worlds mammal biomass and the remaining 5% can’t survive without food… looks like that’s not going to be an option for feeding the ‘persevering’ either.
Little packs are so cute
theyre super similar looking to a lot of the legal packs of joints you can get in Canada now!
they’re called “straight roll” joints - i prefer them because they’re a better amount for one person imo.
Okay like I quit smoking anyway, so whatever. But it would have been easier to quit if I could have bought little packs like this rather than a full 20 every time I wanted 1.
Why on Lemmy were is so much hate and only hate for boomers?
Because the rich want to distract us from the real class war by redirecting anger at old people. Old people who lived in quite possibly the easiest lives with the most generous minimum living conditions and social safety nets that have existed, and were tricked by the rich to give it all up so they’re kids wouldn’t have it, because most of them have brain damage from lead in fuel.
Because the rich want to distract us from the real class war by redirecting anger at old people.
Part of it is just demographics and survivorship bias. The majority of boomers who are still around are the ones who didn’t have to break their bodies to make a living. The average age of billionaires, senators, and CEO are all in their late 60s, so it’s easy to look at the group and wonder what the hell is wrong with the generation.
were tricked by the rich to give it all up so they’re kids wouldn’t have it
I think to accept this as the answer it requires a plastering of cognitive dissonance. The rich themselves are old, they are from the same generation and are the people who voted for trickle down economics and empowered neo conservative policy. I don’t think this generation was tricked, moreso I think they were bribed and were happy to prioritize their own wellbeing over others.
because most of them have brain damage from lead in fuel.
This is mostly an artifact of pop science. GenX is actually the generation that was exposed to the highest levels of lead. I think a more important explanation of why boomers are the way they are is simply socioeconomics. They were really the first generation to be fully reared by modernity and the age of the atomic family. Where family units moved away from their extended families to pursue better economic mobility. Meaning instead of being raised by a community of family, they were often raised by an isolated mother, and a father afflicted by suppressed PTSD from war.
There are two reasons, one ageism is one of the remaining forms of discrimination that’s still socially permitted, and two some of them deserve it. I don’t know if it’s unsaid or forgotten but most Boomers have way more in common with Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta because it’s actually a class war. It’s just that the number of boomers in the wealthy classes are disproportionately larger than the other generations. Still most Boomers are not wealthy, they’re just wealthier than younger people.
Also generations are bullshit. They’re used by politicians and marketers to segmentize the population to make it easier to sell you on voting for them or selling you a product. The real solidarity is in class solidarity.
Smoking in flight should be turned mandatory for the whole length of the flight… that would reduce air traffic enough to match ecological needs.
How much do the kids have to smoke? I assume it’s proportional to carry on allowance?
They can smoke as adults, anyway, on a 10 hours flight in confined air with hundreds of passengers lighting a new cigaret with the previous one, the air would be that charged in second hand smoke that the filter of the cigaret may allow to breath better… not sure… Also, you would not wonder why the babies cry, and we would probably soon agree that their answer to the situation is the correct one (even if it is very hard to smoke while crying).
They used to have a lounge with a bar on the airplane. With smoking inside. Would you even notice a 6 hour flight? 2 martinis and a stop by the mile high club and you’re already at LAX
This still existed on domestic flights in China up until 2020. Now the only people who have this much freedom are the few older Chinese pilots who got medical exemptions and can still smoke until they retire.
Wait what? Chinese commercial airline pilots can get a “medical exemption” (from whom???) that says they’re allowed to smoke in the cockpit of the commercial flight they’re piloting?
What?? What possible medical condition would a doctor ever recommend this for??
This cannot possibly be true right?
What’s the mile high club?
Ask your mum
She’s too busy getting fucked in an airplane shitter.
It’s not a place or group, it’s an interval of time. Approximately 15 seconds.
When you engage in coitus at altitude, typically on an aircraft.
Snoop Doggs private jet.
Not that it should have to be either or, but I’ll take less leg room over their gross smoke-filled cabin any day.
It’s going to be standing seats before too long. All the airline CEOs have been drooling over those for years.
It’ll probably radically shift to laying down. They’ve wanted to bring this seating arrangement back for a lot longer
A Canadian comedy site on CBC radio had a fake story about how flights could get cheaper if people stood for the entire flight.
Hundreds of listeners from Alberta and Western Canada called in to support the idea.
Bonus points: they simply wont take you if you are above a certain weight.
I remember being shown pictures like this in school as a kid and the images have never left my mind.
Fully crossing a fucking ocean like that.
Humans are the fucking worst.
We should ship them accross the ocean and pack them in like sardines. That will teach them.
I want to punch the person that came up with this idea and forced the engineers to design it
Do like the standing roller coasters! Then we can just use AI to fly the planes (no need for high cost/high stressed pilots). If the AI flies like shit, everyone is already secured with metal shoulder thingies to keep from flying (pun intended) all over the cabin.
But how to deal with bathroom breaks? Mandatory catheters! The cost of “sanitizing” between flights surely isn’t that much, and if people refuse - they can be held liable for any accidents.
/s
They’ll sometimes hand you a small off brand clorox wipe to clean of the catheter before you use it
