We had it all
(midwest.social)
The Picard Maneuver
People TwitterRestrictions on in-flight smoking started in '88, when the oldest boomers were 43 and the youngest were 14. The Greatest Generation were the ones who smoked like chimneys.
The youngest boomers were about 25 not 14 in 1988.
I read an anecdote somewhere recently that the air in planes during flights has more germs in it now than it did in the smoking days because they had to filter the air so much more because of the smoke.
No clue if its actually true or not.
Not sure if it's the bacteria or just having fresh air cycled though the caben. Apparently it saves the airlines millions as they don't have to replace filters and the system runs at a reduced capacity. Good to know someone is benefitting
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.
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
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.
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.
My stepfather was a lifelong smoker. He smoked a full pack of Marlboro reds every day, and my mom smoked a full pack of menthols. I calculated out how much they spent yearly on cigarettes alone and it came to over $5000, and that was in the late 90's; it's probably much higher these days. Both of them had been smoking since the 70's.
When I talked to them about quitting, they both said that they enjoyed smoking too much, it's a stress relief, it's something to do, etc. They were aware of the health risks, but believed the risks were overblown and that emphysema is an "old person's" disease.
Last year he was diagnosed with stage 3 emphysema. The man is a dyed-in-the-wool hard-as-nails army vet boomer, and his obstinate machismo made him ignore years of poor health and lung disease symptoms all to finally end up as an old person with an "old person's" disease. Credit to him though, he did quit cold turkey the day his doctors delivered the diagnosis; the same obstinacy that pushed him to never give up smoking is what pushed him to quit. Me and my family love the hell out of him, and we're glad that he finally quit, but it's so aggravating that there are still so many people out there who discount the risks of smoking.
My mom never quit and died from COPD. My dad did quit back in 1981 but still had congestive heart failure later in kifecand had no chance when he got the 'rona.
Both of my sisters smoke. One sister has already had a heart attack.
In my country there were ads that showed a smoker who had emphysema as part of an anti-smoking campaign.
They described it like taking a deep breath and then exhaling just a small puff, then inhaling that puff and repeating forever until you die.
Sorry for your stepfathers diagnosis.
It's because there's also genetics at play. One person can die young doing everything right and another could be like your stepfather and live just about forever.
Then that gets people think "well how am I different? I'll be just fine too!"
"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!”
It also used to be obscenely more expensive to fly
you weren't getting the equivalent of ryanairs £13 gatwick to holland flights
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 albedo 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.
E/sp
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.
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.
Smoking in flight should be turned mandatory for the whole length of the flight... that would reduce air traffic enough to match ecological needs.
Little packs are so cute
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.
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.
I mean enshittification doesn't just affect software and internet. It works the same way elsewhere too: create demand for a product by making it high quality, once everything is structured around that product so that it can not be easily removed from society, enshittify it by significantly reducing quality while keeping most of the profit because now everything is shaped around your product.
Also, the company is allowed to absorb the competition to the point where no new players can compete for that market
So now we're complaining about the enshittification of everything driven by the need to maximize profit in a capitalist system and blaming it on our grandparents? More divisive intergenerational warfare bullshit. If you want to find who to blame for this shit look at the capitalists demanding more and more profit from airlines, manufacturers, literally every part of the economy. It always comes down to class war.
Thank you. I'm always having to point out that boomers haven't been voting significantly more conservative than liberal, and younger generations haven't been voting significantly more liberal than conservative. It's a stereotype, and an incorrect one. In fact, in 2024, GenX voted more conservative than boomers did.
Yep, the 1% laugh their asses off about us fighting between ourselves.
Exactly, the 1% love it when its race fighting or blaming boomers or anybody else but them. Sad to see as they keep getting away with it.
Is this really enshittification?
Prior to the deregulation of the airlines under Carter, the federal government fixed all domestic airfares. Airlines could not compete against each other on price and could only compete on perks. Flying was insanely expensive. NY to LA was $820 in today's dollars and you couldn't just shop around airlines for a better price, while you can get the same flight for less than $240 now.
It's not like flying got shittier while also getting more expensive. Flying is cheaper than it ever has been. The perks went down, sure. But so did the price. By a LOT.
Not really disagreeing with you, but I was curious if that $240 includes all the crazy fees they tack on now.
Yeah that is all in, fare, fees, and taxes. Flying is dirt cheap lol.
I feel like it should be expensive because of the externalized costs , but I don't have any real data for that
They call them “externalized costs” specifically because they can ignore them. Things like pollution don’t cost a firm money in a measurable way unless they’re carbon taxed or something like that.
long distance calls from airplanes were $5 a minute.
If our grandparents had taken a stand back then and stopped buying shit these corporations would have never gotten so bold. Yeah we should start now (and many are) but we're in a much worse position than they were.
I think its more nuanced than that, you have to remember that we have the internet, while our grandparents did not. Its harder to notice enshittification without it, imo.
I don't need to the internet to see the product I'm looking at in the store is of lesser quality or smaller amount than the previous one.
This post misses two aspects: flying used to be an expensive luxury, only, and smoking on flights was fucking disgusting.
I mean yeah, but those classes do have some demographics associated with them. The average age of the wealthiest Americans is 65-68, the average age of a CEO is 61, and the average age of a member of the Senate is 66 years old.
I don't think that class war precludes intergenerational disputes, it's hard to completely separate class from culture, and culture from the age of the generation.
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
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
Literally everything. You know credit scores were invented by boomers?!
Man it’s almost like as soon as banks were legally required to stop discriminating against women and black folks, they invented backdoor methods of accomplishing it
You know Boomers didn't have credit scores until after they had GenX and Millennials? Boomers didn't grow up with as much red tape as we do
*if they were white
And male
Yeah women didn’t have bank accounts without a “hubby”
So now we see where we went wrong? /s
That TWA branded goes hard
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.
What's the mile high club?
Ask your mum
She's too busy getting fucked in an airplane shitter.
When you engage in coitus at altitude, typically on an aircraft.
It's not a place or group, it's an interval of time. Approximately 15 seconds.
And the average ticket was far more money back then as well. It was an event. You spent all that money so you dressed up for it. That's the difference between a luxury and a commodity.
Prices were also regulated and fixed by the federal government. The federal government through the Civil Aeronautics Board set ALL domestic flight fares based on a fixed distance calculation.
Airlines literally couldn't compete on price, so they competed on perks.
In 1977, just prior to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the average round trip domestic flight was ~$135. That's about $746 today. Round trip NY to LA was $148.20, or $820 today. Just looking at google flights for the next 6 months, The cheapest I can find pretty consistently for the same route is $239, and the highest I see is around Thanksgiving and Christmas for around $540.
Call it enshittification, call it whatever. Flying is so much more accessible and cheaper than ever. And that has its benefits and drawbacks. The drawback is that people now look at price first and foremost and are generally unwilling to pay more for the perks beyond a little more legroom. The benefit is that it's ridiculously easy to just pack a backpack and go on a weekend trip across the country for dirt cheap.
Not disagreeing in general, but under a "fixed distance calculation" a NYC-LAX flight would have been quite expensive but today it's driven more by market efficiency and NYC-LAX is one of the most market-efficient flights so they can charge less per seat. You might get different results comparing something like LAX-Des Moines or NYC-Little Rock. Or maybe not.
The drawback is that people now look at price first and foremost and are generally unwilling to pay more for the perks beyond a little more legroom.
The bigger drawback would be the enviromental damage but I get where you're going.
Well, yeah I'm just talking from a consumer standpoint.
Total global aviation only accounts for 2.5-3% of global CO2 emissions. Energy generation is 74-75% of global CO2 emissions. There are much bigger fish to fry on emissions.
Lead is a helluva drug.
I'll never pass up an opportunity to post this
hey, lead blinds were delicious.
Is that supposed to be a boon? When you were caught in an aluminium can while people around you soaked you in toxic clouds fuming from cancer sticks that where distributed in cute mini boxes? Enshitification has made a lot of things worse, but getting rid from that toxic fire hazard on planes (and trains btw) is definitely not one of them. I witnessed those when it was a thing. I don't miss it a second.
When I used to smoke 1-1,5 pack pet day, I had to endure 15 hours of flight, 3 hours of waiting in an airport and then another 8 hours of flight without a smoke, and I gotta tell you, it's really not as bad as a lot of smokers make it out to be. Smokers are some of the whiniest babies around, who think their choice to smoke is an excuse to polute, be obnoxious and spread disease.
They need to grow a spine and get some self respect. I've had to endure smokers crying like children for not getting 15 minute breaks every hour on a bus ride, inconveniencing everyone else.
Addiction effects different people differently. I know of people who get panic attacks merely thinking about the possibility of not being able to smoke for 3 hours, let alone 11 hours. I don't envy those people.
At the same time, I am done with sitting in toxic clouds because of that. It is not just inconveniencing others, it is actively inflicting harm and illness on others.
fun fact: back in smoking days you'd actually be breathing in more fresh air because they had to vent more. Nowadays you get more "stale" recycled air pumped around.
The "fresh air" that was full of lead and non-purified car pollution, and all those fine by-products of heavy industry, unless you were far off in the countryside. Have you ever been next to an oldtimer from the 80s (or before)? That's all fun and games, now imagine a traffic jammed street full of these and your window above.
drake meme photo
Blame capitalism
Blame Boomers
People smoked inside the aircraft?!
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.
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.
Aircraft mechanics used to be able to tell where the fuselage was cracked because there were usually nicotine stains on it.
When smoking was deemed healthy because the tobacco lobby made studies which somehow proved smoking is not harmful or smth, which is why I don’t trust “““““““““scientific studies“““““““““ and first and foremost trust my gut. Studies can be an indicator.
The bigger a certain industry is and the more reliant a society is based on that branch the more im suspicious.
Things that help and solve root causes of problems don’t bring returning revenue.
A healed patient is a lost customer etc etc
