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.
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
Banning smoking on planes is NOT a fumble
People who are too young or, frankly, not thinking hard enough really do romanticise what the world was like when people could smoke fucking everywhere because people really did smoke fucking everywhere. Restaurants and pubs had a visible smog in the air, the odor permiated all flavours and everything was slightly sticky unless it was wiped clean a few minutes before. Being trapped on a bus with a bunch of smokers was nightmarish enough, but being at the back of a plane - the cheap seats - where air was very, very slowly circulated front to back was hell, especially for asthmatics.
your clothes stunk unless you hung them out the next day. Disgusting addiction.
Now everything smells like Green Apple.
Omg yes. I am old enough to remember the tail end of the period when smoking was still allowed on planes and JFC it was awful. They had a smoking “section” but it was still an open cabin so you could smell smoke everywhere. And if you were in the same or next row as a smoker you couldn’t escape it for the whole flight. Flying sucks now, but removing smoking is absolutely an upgrade.
But they gave you something. This could easily be replaced by some soda, or anything else. Meanwhile, leg room is no more, and you’re only getting your own thoughts to contend with now.
Every flight I’ve been on offers a drink and snack.
I’ve only flown British once. I got two biscuits and a very small water. Otherwise, nothing. Zero.
I worked for an airline for awhile. What you get on the plane is determined by the length of the flight usually. The longer you are on the plane the more things you will get. And of course the class matters.
People don’t remember that the whole world used to smell like cigarettes.
Ever go to a casino in Las Vegas? Like that, but everywhere all the time.
Do they allow smoking inside at Las Vegas? I always wanted to go there. Not anymore if that’s the case
Even their airport smells like cigarettes. Honestly, the LV airport is the nastiest, dirtiest one I’ve ever seen (and not in a good way, lol)
the one thing i remember from the last time i was there was the penny slots at the departure gates… they literally want you to leave every cent you have behind
I was born in Vegas, and yeah, its ain’t just the airport. Like we’d go to Kmart or the laundry mat and there were slot machines. When I was 4 and moved to Phoenix that’s what I thought was so weird about Arizona was no slot machines.
Yeah, your not going to find casino floors (with some minimal exceptions) smoke free in Vegas. Chain smoking slot grannies are like a majority of their revenue.
Not sure, but even if they don’t any more. It might still just smell.
Can’t get that out easily without ripping up every carpet/fabric.
The world used to smell like Easter Europe
Ftfy
Used to? Oh you naive summer child.
Dude I’m 26 and got to smell the dying drag of that era. It doesn’t smell nearly as much like cigarettes, at least in my neck of the woods in SoCal don’t know how much the Finns or Franks smoke so mayhaps it’s different elsewhere.
I’m a few decades older and grew up in Socal, so I got smoking everywhere (including my mom and aunt at home) and horrendous smog.
I don’t miss any of that ghastly nonsense.
I’ve got a dozen years on you and you’re lucky to have only caught the tail end of it. I had to put up with the whole world smelling until I was 18.
Fuck, don’t envy you on that one. I used to work estate sales and holy shit every third house smelt of dust and decades old cigarette smoke, felt like puking the entire time I was working those ones anytime they had a garage I was in there and not the house proper.
Not everywhere are people so polite and kind. EVERYONE here lights up. People smoke in cafe’s, I cant eat in a burger place without smoke forcing me to cough.
They laugh at me for coughing, I’m allergic to the stuff.
It’s not out of kindness, it’s laws that many cities and states passed in the 00s to ban smoking in various places (and eventually everywhere indoors altogether in most places).
I think it’s a state and local level thing here though, so it’s going to vary by location. I’m referring to the US if it wasn’t clear.
I think it’s less so a matter of politeness or kindness and moreso because one of the few great projects within the US over the last 50 years was the war on smoking. From the banning of smoking adverts to the anti-smoking PSAs of the late 00s and 2010s there’s been a consistent push against cigarettes specifically, also it’s expensive with high taxes noone has the cash for that.
Anti spitting laws created to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, get people to switch from chewing tobacco to smoking cigarettes in the USA.
How did this even happen in America of all places anyway? I’d 100% vote for it here.
America used to embrace being woke. ;-)
Saying naive summer child is redundant. Summer child means naive.
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.
The trend is reversing though. Especially on long haul international flights. Airliners are ordering planes with more premium seating and fewer economy seats. Not only does the average margin per passenger increases, but they also have to deal with fewer passengers on the ground which can lower off boarding and on boarding time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Japan’s smoking situation has gotten so much better over the last few decades. Which is good, because it used to be everywhere.
Depends where, and sometimes it varies wildly in the same country.
Hamburg, I didn’t see a single smoker. Berlin, fucking rife with them
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 tried ones similar to these the stevemre way, from Vietnam rations before they got absurdly expensive. They kicked hard like the Ukrainian cigarettes I had, they were both unfiltered. It’s actually kind of funny, the Ukrainian cigarettes inflicted so much pain–I don’t know how my dad smoked them–that I smoked my first cigar like a cigarette thinking this is fine.
stevemre
Let’s get that out onto a tray… Nice.
I fear for his health every time he lights up one of those ancient war ration cigarettes lol
I think he ended up in the hospital twice try rations, and not even old ones lol. One was the Chinese army one lol
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.
Every time sometime says they smoke a pack (if not more) a day, it blows my mind.
That’s twenty cigarettes. I mean Jesus Christ people, like how??
I’ve never been able to make it through a full cigarette before feeling nauseous and putting it out.
I’m aware how tolerance works, but 20 cigarettes every day just seems insane to me.
My mom smoked 2 packs a day until at least her mid 40s, after staring at age 10. I have no idea when she stopped because I went almost no contact after moving out at 17.
She appeared in excellent health until a massive stroke at 77. Barely recovered then died of the flu at 80. This is after years of going vegan and walking 10+ miles per day.
Mind you, she was antivax, trending heavily towards anti medicine and anti science. As a former very well regarded biochemist.
It’s almost an impressive feat… To be able to consistently smoke forty cigarettes per day every day, for decades.
I couldn’t agree more.
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!”
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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.
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
Yeah, women should have gotten their rights much earlier.
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
Restrictions on in-flight smoking started in '88, when the oldest boomers were 43 and the youngest were
1424. The Greatest Generation were the ones who smoked like chimneys.The youngest boomers were about 25 not 14 in 1988.
You’re right, 24. My point still stands though
“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.
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.
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.
Bonus points: they simply wont take you if you are above a certain weight.
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
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.
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.
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.
Am I crazy or does the image you post directly contradict what your comment says? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Like it almost seems like you got the what the red and blue represent swapped entirely in your mind? Like you’ve somehow read it backwards of something.
If you look at the 2024 election numbers there is barely a red margin for boomers (65+). It’s men 50+ that have a significantly larger likelihood to vote Republican.
Boomers are older than 50. They’re included in that group.
The youngest boomers were born in 1964 (the last year of that generation), so they were 60 for the 2024 election. So yes, there a little overlap because the poll age ranges aren’t exactly the same as the generational ones, but the older boomers would be 70, so mostly in that bottom bar.
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.
This post misses two aspects: flying used to be an expensive luxury, only, and smoking on flights was fucking disgusting.
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.
Gen Z is just as hooked with propaganda and brainrot from social media, if not more so. It’s insane how consumerist the younger generations are, falling for scam after scam, I think it’s peptides now.
This generational warfare shit is insane. Many boomers are working at Walmart because they don’t have enough to retire and are also getting fucked over. There are plenty of poor, progressive bloomers, just as there are an astounding number of gen z conservatives and red pill bros.
Let’s admit that no one is immune to propaganda, and unfortunately most people in all generations are quick to fall for right wing bs.
Many boomers are working at Walmart because they don’t have enough to retire and are also getting fucked over
And then they go and vote straight R. Every time. Religiously.
‘If you’re poor and work at Walmart it’s because you’re conservative and voted to suffer’ sure is a great way to kick poor Democrats and drive away poor independents.
Maybe they should stop voting against their interests.
I don’t know what world you’re living in where the venn diagram of boomer Walmart greeters and Fox News viewers isn’t a huge overlap?
Maybe it varies by area and California is full of leftist boomer Walmart greeters, I don’t know.
You know literally nothing about them except that they are poor and work in a Walmart and have decided that means they must be Republicans. I don’t wanna hear shit from you about “why doesn’t the working class support Democrats more??” when this is how you talk about them.
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.
Yes, but what about the hundreds or thousands of products you dont keep track of? Anecdotally speaking, I see way more posts online than if I were to go to the store myself. Collective mind is a powerful thing.
I suppose I wouldn’t recognize the enshittification of those products. The people purchasing them regularly would though. Everyone would have their particular set of products they’d be knowledgeable enough about. All together society as a whole could have stood against this shit and smothered it before it took off rather than us having to deal with the raging inferno it is today.
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.
How do you know that that’s generational rather than, “it takes some time to accumulate wealth, to rise to the position of CEO, or to build a political career enough to become a senator”?
Because the average age of all those positions have gone up significantly for a single generation. Also a lot of the policy and economic theory that makes up the modern economy were pioneered by boomers like Jack Welch while they were first accumulating power. And there’s supplemental evidence such as the projected lifespans of future generations being smaller than the generations before in the first time in modern history.
I’m not claiming just being old automatically makes you greedy, just that if you look at culture the baby boomer generation has implemented policy and an economic attitude that is vastly more selfish than any previous generation.
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
