Looks like you're about 25 years younger than me. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a nonsmoking section. Of course you could smoke, anywhere!
Us kids didn't get real tobacco cigarettes, but we always had candy cigarettes so we could "smoke" along with the grown-ups.
I remember the first time I took an airline flight after they introduced a non-smoking section at the back of the plane. I got seated in the front row of non-smoking, right behind the last row of smoking.
As soon as the no smoking light went off, everyone in the row ahead of me lit up!
Man, chocolate cigarettes. I remember those. Bizarre to think back to that. I'd never consider giving them to my children, but despite the fact that my parents didn't smoke and didn't want us to smoke, I still got these on occasion. And as a young kid, I definitely thought they were cool.
But as I got a bit older, certainly as a teenager, when almost all of my friends started to smoke, I've always considered smoking disgusting and was never even tempted to try it myself. I was happy to be the only non-smoker of the group, and was always careful to stay upwind of the group.
In retrospect, it's ridiculous that as a kid, I'd make clay ashtrays in school for my non-smoking parents. I'm not sad to see ashtrays disappear at all. They may have been pretty, but we could also make other things prettier. Why don't we do that?
Smoking on planes is absolutely something I can't wrap my head around in any possible way. How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?
It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s.
Today I know of people who can't fly at all (because they can't stop smoking long enough.) even short flights of a couple hours are out of reach. (I was once on a 2 hour flight that took 6 hours for reasons, and some of the passengers fairly sprinted in the destination airport to get to a smoking area at 1am)
So banning smoking when air travel was in its infancy would have killed it.
> It's hard to imagine flying passengers as being a "startup", but it really only dates from around the 60s.
It’s more than 30 years older. The first commercial airline opened around the start of WW1, and most major airlines (western at least) were founded in the 20s.
I don't disagree but prior to ww2's investment into R&D, infrastructure and labor force the economics of the industry were fundamentally different. The 1950s and early 1960s were to airlines what the 1990s were for computing.
Pan American Airlines built out a huge amount of infrastructure before WW2 to fly across the Pacific to Australia. They had fueling stops at Wake Island, Guam, Midway, and of course Hawaii. And they also pioneered routes to Latin America. The power and prestige PanAm had is really remarkable.
Go read about Pan Am in the 1920s and 1930s & you will think differently. They were busy building global transportation routes with whatever technology they could get their hands on.
Yes, commercial flight goes back before the 60s. And sure there were the flying boats and so on. But that era of commercial flight was very limited, it was expensive, there were very limited schedules and so on.
Today I can get a flight to pretty much anywhere in the world, with maybe a day's lead time, and perhaps 36 hours of travel. Anywhere. In the world.
So, I think we can say air travel is no longer in "startup" phase. It is heavily regulated and very organised. (there are still startups in aviation, but they need a hook different to flying-you-there)
In the same way computers existed before 1960,and PCs were available in the 70's,but arguably its not till Windows 95 that it goes "main stream", and its not until the iPhone/Android era that "everyone has a computing device".
So my point is that the era of commercial aviation aimed at the masses kicks off in the 60s,not that the 60s is the first instance of commercial aviation.
No, he's right. Air travel was a luxury thing and super expensive until the 60s.
Only a very small percentage of the population in rich countries would do it.
Now people from Cambodia can fly for a large amount of money for them, but still, they are able to. In the past they just wouldn't be able to afford any kind of flight. Or even worse, they just wouldn't have flights or a publicly accessible airport.
You still can get away with it fairly easy. I quit this last year but when on flights I often would go into the bathroom and just hold the vape until it was gone. Then again I wasn’t one of those that blew room filling clouds
You can definitely buy pouches of tobacco to be used like snus in the UK (and I'm almost certain that was the case before Brexit, too). Unless "snus" has some specific definition that's illegal and the UK sells an alternative? Not sure, last time I tried snus was in Finland over a decade ago.
Uh, this is bit weird topic for me to "well actually", but you're not correct about where snus goes [1]. It goes between the upper lip and gum, you don't inhale it. That would be "snuff" in English.
You could put snus in your nose, I think some old curmudgeons did that when I was a small kid. But it's unusual. The "snuff" in English is also "snus" in Swedish. (Etymology wise, it must be the same word.)
Snus refers to Swedish pouches with boiled (or somehow sanitized, can’t remember exactly) tobacco, as opposed to other kinds. Snuff can refer to stuff you put under your lip or up yer nose.
Hm. That would be 'Schnupftabak' here. Aeons ago I actually used the white powdered menthol variants in ways which could be mistaken for something else. Made for some hilarious situations :-)
I see it's still legal in .de, and according to wikipedia has no tobacco-taxes on it since 1993! The real stuff, not only that white grapesugar/menthol stuff.
How is snus different from snuff? Cursory google seems to suggest you can buy snuff in the UK, which is also powdered tobacco that you put up your nose
Since there’s a lot of wrong info in the responses… snus is the word for snuff in Sweden and traditionally had an extra sanitization step (boiling IIRC), which was different enough that it became it’s own term, because quality was better. Snus is almost universally used under the lip, but I think used to be used nasally too.
Snuff is just the English name, and can refer to nasal snuff, dip, pouches. Just means it’s ground up tobacco and isn’t anymore specific than that. Regionally it means whatever way of using it is most common.
Basically it’s confusing in the same way if you ask and American or European about football. Technically the word is not specific but it has very strong regional definitions
Snuff is probably culturally significant. Despite never knowing anyone who takes snuff you still read about snuff and snuff boxes. In fact I seem to recall that some people still call the webbing between your thumb and index finger the "snuff box" because that's where people would put the snuff before insufflating it.
I would imagine snuff boxes / accessories now days are bought more by people who snort illegal drugs than tobacco and the name remains as a PR thing (shops, even head shops with weed art in the window, don't want to advertise things like "cocaine snorter"). But I've no idea how many people still exist that use actual snuff.
I'm actually not aware of any studies that separate nasal and oral snuff usage that show that nasal snuff is correlated with cancers.
I mean... intuitively, it seems like it should be, as the membranes there aren't substantially different - but it's odd that it's not been studied in particular.
> You could smoke on the Hindenberg. Yes. On a dirigible held aloft by hydrogen, they had a smoking room
Seems insane, but I guess they didn't want homicidal nicotine-starved passengers. The article does however go on to say "The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room, and the smoking room was separated from the rest of the passenger section by a double-door airlock." So the designers seem to at least have been aware of the risks.
“The accident caused 35 fatalities (13 passengers and 22 crewmen) from the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), and an additional fatality on the ground.”
Data on hydrogen filled dirigibles is hard to come by, but I think modern commercial airliners crash less often than them.
Certainly, the 1930s ones do not look good. The first Graf Zeppelin made 590 flights before being scrapped, the second 30, and Hindenburg crashed on its 63th flight. That’s a crash in less than 1000 flights.
For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747 says “The 747SR had an economic design life objective of 52,000 flights during 20 years of operation, compared to 24,600 flights in 20 years for the standard 747.”, so I assume Boeing thinks there’s a good chance those airplanes will live that long.
# of airships vs # of Airplanes, over various time periods, various safety improvements (hydrogen to helium for airships, plastics instead of steel vs self-flying & landing planes and propellers to jet engines, things like that)
The one thing planes have over airships is speed. The faster airships topped out at 80-90mph at the same time planes were pulling 200mph.
Now planes can be supersonic while I can't really imagine dirigibles going more than 150-200 mph max.
I worked at a place where a floor of an office building was converted to a data center starting in the 70s. In doing so, they built a false wall in front of the windows.
Early in my career I worked in backups, and we had a dedicated fiber network, which ran in the space between the windows and fake wall. I had to do some maintenance back there and it was shocking - the windows were coated in this nasty yellow residue and smelled vaguely like cigarettes, even after almost 20 years.
The old timers laughed at my horror and said that people would sit at their desks and smoke packs of cigarettes, every day. At one point there was an employee who would wheel a cart around collecting ashes. The ubiquity of smoking was shocking to me - I’m glad it’s behind us.
"the windows were coated in this nasty yellow residue and smelled vaguely like cigarettes"
I painted a room in my parent's home after decades of smoking that occurred long before and after I was born. First step was to wash the thick layer of nicotine and tar off of the walls using Trisodium Phosphate or other strong cleaner. A stain blocking primer, typically used for smoke damage from fires, was then applied, and then you can paint. Even then, you could still detect the faint odor of cigarettes. Nasty stuff.
What about smoking in restaurants? You're trying to enjoy the taste of delicious food, and suddenly the tobacco smoke from the next table wafts into your nostrils. Bizarre that that was ever considered normal.
I wouldn't stand it right now, but it was everywhere so it wasn't annoying. I think smell adjusts to certain things not just temporarily but also on some longer periods. As a kid I wouldn't notice which friends parents smoked at home and which didn't, even though I came from a non-smoking home. And most of them lived in small apartments, so it must have been reeking.
I don’t smoke, but my mom smokes heavily. Whenever my wife (whose parents did not smoke) and I visit my parents, she always remarks afterwards on how terrible the smell was but I never really notice it at all despite having lived on my own for 15+ years now.
I really think it’s just something your brain blocks out, it doesn’t smell like much to me.
When I was an intern in the 1990's, I was on a team of old unix greybeards. Every 20 minutes or so, someone would have to go outside for a smoke break and they invited me along because that's where all the good design discussions would happen. Even today, I immediately recognize the smell of Marlboro Lights if I walk past a group of folks smoking outside.
I grew up in a town with a lot of feedlots, and I still don’t notice the smell when I visit. I definitely think your brain will block out background smells you grow up with.
I wonder if that’s how people were able to live in medieval towns without sewers.
I was in morocco last month. everyone smokes there. I'd just be minding my own business whne randos would start lighting up next to me indoors. absolutely zero consideration for how nonsmokers feel about it.
It was like this on trains in the UK until fairly recently. The smoking carriage was generally pretty empty, but was frequented by those that needed to get their hit who then returned to the cleaner coaches.
Others have designated smoking as a medical condition owing to its physiological addictive qualities. Taking that stance I would just note that the United States Navy bans from operating certain equipment all sorts of people with medical conditions. For example the USN wouldn’t let me, with my 20/400 vision uncorrected anywhere near an F-35C. So I can see banning active smokers from submarines.
As an ex-smoker, I'd ask you to consider it as about the most addictive thing going.
Think of something you really, really like doing. Something that calms or pleases you every time you do it. Like, playing a game, or reading a book, or eating your favourite food. Now imagine someone telling you that you don't have to do that, it's just a choice. Imagine being deprived of it and being guilt-tripped into it.
Sure you can wean yourself off it, but it'll take effort - uncomfortable, painful effort - and you might fail.
And meanwhile some idiot on the internet is saying it's all just a choice.
It is an addiction that was designed to be addictive by the manufacturers. It has never been a "mere choice". That first cigarette or two, maybe, but addiction is awful and horrible and doesn't deserve to be denigrated and reduced by flippancy.
I mean, unless as a child you had abusive parents who forced you to smoke, it’s absolutely a choice.
There are people who can’t stop doing stupid stuff for attention (like breaking electronics for YouTube views or whatever), and we don’t blame “idiots” commenting online for their habits. There are people who refuse to eat vegetables and only eat junk food and we also don’t blame “idiots.”
Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.
Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit. There are loads of people who are glued to chairs all day and make bad food and exercise decisions and it becomes a lifelong habit that’s borderline impossible to break (doubly so if you face health consequences before you can change), but they don’t get sympathy. People tell them to simply make an effort to change if they actually want to change.
There are countless reasons people make bad choices: peer pressure, to calm anxiety, dealing with depression, and yeah, sometimes, abusive parents.
But you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance and saying "well, sucks to be you", and taking the high ground. Good for you, it must be great up there never having made a bad choice.
The moment somebody makes a poor choice does not mean we should then insist the game is over for them and it's their fault. That doesn't help them make better choices in future.
Quitting smoking is incredibly hard. I've done it multiple times sometimes for years at a time - that's how hard it is - and you will never understand it unless you've personally suffered from addiction yourself.
Do you think the attendees at Alcoholic Anonymous who stand up and say "I'm an alcoholic and haven't had a drink in 25 years" are being absurd, or speaking to a truth about addiction? Why do you think smokers have an easier time of it?
I've not smoked in almost 6 years today. In a poor context, in a poor moment, I could be back in there in a heartbeat.
It's not insufferable - I've suffered it - but you clearly and blatantly will never understand it.
So please, get off the high horse, accept everybody makes poor choices in life, some of those can lead to a very tough addiction, and addiction can lead to poor health outcomes that are incredibly hard to resolve despite wanting to make changes for the better. A little more empathy could serve you well.
I kindly suggest that you google "Is addiction a choice?" and "Is smoking addictive?" and learn a few things before taking such an absolutely absurd high-ground devoid of empathy or experience of either subject from the perspective of the person addicted to smoking.
If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit. All humans make poor choices, and for all sorts of reasons. Smoking is just one example that many people - yourself included - seem quick to condemn without understanding.
I'm overly simplifying, but if policy is to not smoke and you can't (or refuse to) follow orders, you're out. Dishonorable discharge.
Adults are not children, much less military personnel. Smoking is a choice and you are responsible for your choices. "It's an addiction." is a lazy, irresponsible excuse and escape.
You're confusing new choices with consequences of previous ones. Taking up smoking when you're fully aware that your job prohibits you from smoking is a choice and you're right - "It's an addiction" would be a poor excuse.
Quoting the context from a few replies ago:
> You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.
Being asked to quit an addiction on demand is completely different, you don't "merely choose" to smoke every day. That's what makes it so difficult to escape addiction, it's not merely a choice like what you're going to have for lunch. Once you're addicted, your body psychologically and physically compels you to do it.
Would you say that giving up your passwords under the threat of being beaten with a $5 wrench is merely a choice? Addiction is like that, but it's your brain holding the $5 wrench.
Please don't shift the goal posts, the argument I was responding to said that continuing to smoke is merely a choice. I'm not arguing that smoking should be allowed on submarines or anything of the sort, just dispelling this one specific falsehood that attempts to paint addicts as lazy or otherwise inferior just because they can't wake up one day and quit their addictive behavior.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I believe someone coming in contact with second hand smoke is a victim of circumstance, but someone doing the actual smoking did so on their own free will.
I'll repeat this again in the hope you'll reflect on it: your statement suggests you do not understand addiction.
Addiction subverts free will.
Smoking is no less a serious form of addiction than any other you can imagine, the only difference is the consequence to other people is curtailed in comparison.
Agree to disagree as much as you want: you come across as plain ignorant in the eyes of anybody who understands the issue.
> Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit.
While smoking is a choice, not all choices are the same. Not all choices are weighted by a chemical addiction, comparing quitting smoking to bad food or exercise choices trivialises it in an unnecessary way.
Breaking an addiction is difficult, but smoking is one of the hardest addictions to break. I would imagine that heroin is more difficult to quit, but I can't think of any other addictions that are as difficult to break as nicotine.
If you have no experience of this (and it seems that you do not so apologies if you do) then a simple way to understand how difficult it is quit is not to think of it as a single choice to make. Imagine making the most difficult choice of your life, against everything that your body and brain is telling you - something that requires an extraordinary act of will and self-faith. The reward for making the correct choice is not an end to the matter - it will push it to one side for about 15-20 seconds. Then another wave of chemical addiction will wash over you, everything in your life will pale into insignificance and you will be faced with exactly the same choice again. This will repeat without end, asleep or awake, until you break the first part of the addiction. It will only take two or three weeks of these constant life changing choices, and you must make the correct choice every single time, but it will feel like an eternity.
If you make it through that initial period then it gets easier, but that sequence of life-changing choices won't really end for about six months, although you will gain more confidence that you are making the right choice through that time.
Several years later you will reach a point where you no longer have to choose and you have genuinely become a non-smoker. It is a long difficult road, but it is possible and many people do it. Believing that is almost impossible while you are still addicted, and find that believe that you personally are mentally strong enough to endure that cycle of choice and longing is the most difficult step of all.
So, yes it is a choice - but that does not make it the same as other things that are a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others, and to put all choices into a single category and assume they are the same is to under-estimate the range of difficulty that exists across different choices.
Food is incredibly addictive. Sugar stimulates the same pathways as opiates and provides instant massive hits of dopamine.
Many people who manage to lose weight end up relapsing. Most people end up gaining all the weight back. [1]
It’s far higher than the relapse rate amongst former smokers. And really, just look at exploding obesity rates around the world.
Yes, smoking is a choice. Yes, people will mock smokers for crying and saying it’s not their fault. Yes, admitting personal responsibility and making personal effort is the best way to overcome it. Smoking is addictive, but so is loads of stuff. It sucks, but most people get through life choosing to never start.
When I was a kid I knew I would drink, from about the age of 8. I don't know why, I just knew - although I didn't start till I was around 13. I never thought I would smoke, even though most of the adults I knew did smoke. As for why I started - I was at a party, around 14 years old, and the host's parents locked the booze away - so I thought "I'll do this instead".
In my experience (and I'm no expert and I'd never want to put words into anyone else's mouth), addiction is a mixture of different factors. There's why you started in the first place, there's a psychological need that is going unfulfilled, there's habit and there's actual physical addiction.
For me:
LSD - not a problem. I had a great night out, thought "that will never be bettered" so never took it again.
MDMA/Ecstasy - again, not a problem. It was entirely situational - go out clubbing, take some pills - and when I stopped clubbing I stopped taking it.
Cannabis - I smoked weed constantly for around 10 years, often rolling one up last thing at night so it was the first thing I did in the morning. I stopped when I actually had to start working for a living and I couldn't afford the lack of time it caused. So I would say it was basically habit and boredom that kept me at it.
Drinking - I used to drink heavily, daily, for many many years. I was never a "hide the vodka in the toilet cistern" type, I just would go out and have a drink and not stop till I fell asleep. Eventually a combination of health issues and being fed up with wondering if I'd made a fool of myself last night made me try to stop. And it was HARD. I never had serious physical symptoms, but alcohol is everywhere. It's changed a bit now, but buying soft drinks when out was frowned upon and so many of my routines involved it. I stopped with the help of reddit (r/stopdrinking is the most wonderful place on earth full of kind and supportive people) and lots of fizzy drinks and ice cream (and yes, I put on weight, but I figured one issue at a time, and now I've lost that weight and am much healthier all round). Definitely habit, social/psychological and physical.
Cocaine - 2 spells using cocaine heavily. Once I used to use it to get me out of bed in the morning, but it was easy to stop. Second time I used it every day for around 18 months. I think this was because I was in a bad way mentally and I just needed to silence the noise in my head. It's actually very difficult to take cocaine like that - it doesn't last long, it hurts, your nose is constantly blocked and it's a pain to prepare. For me, psychological void.
Nicotine - the hardest of the lot to stop. Sort of. I read the Allen Carr book and stopped smoking 20 per day almost immediately. But I just couldn't stop smoking when I went out - it was intrinsically linked with "having a good time" (see why I started). Like cocaine, it's short-lived, but it's so easy to "top up" again, so you gain a series of little "boosts" throughout the day. Of course, you need the boosts because your brain stops functioning as it wears off. So it builds habits and has a physical effect. In the end I got hypnotised which helped me stop when going out - but I still often ask friends if I can hold their cigarettes, just so I've got something in my fingers. This is a mix of all of the factors combined.
Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.
I would say in none of the cases were "effort" and "willpower" part of what made me stop - I had to figure out why it was happening and deal with the underlying causes.
> Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.
I don’t have notable experience with addictive-type substances other than caffeine, but I can chime in there - I went cold-turkey from drinking 4-5 cups of coffee per day, and I was pretty surprised by how awful I felt the first day. Two days later I felt perfectly fine without caffeine.
Now I drink one cup per day, only before noon, often decaf. If I skip a day, I don’t notice any effect.
For me quitting smoking was much easier than certain other things that I haven’t been able to quit yet (eg social media and sugar). Smoking I just decided to stop one day and that was it.
> Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.
We don't trust kids with making contracts/permanent choices for good reasons. And it is easy to get roped into smoking to fit in as a kid. So, I disagree on it being a choice in all situations.
> I mean, unless as a child you had abusive parents who forced you to smoke, it’s absolutely a choice.
My mother started at 11. It's actually very typical for a smoker to start around that young. Many drug addicts are first exposed to the drug before their minds are anywhere nearly developed. They never had a chance to make anything like an informed adult choice. It's one of the saddest aspects of it.
As an ex smoker, I found quitting smoking one of the easiest things to do, just knew and decided it is time to stop now.. so I'm always surprised why is that.
Also recently just going interval fasting for first time in my life because becoming a bit fat, not any problem, at all strangely.
I wonder why that is, I wouldn't think I have a super strong will or just cannot be addicted, if I consider gaming or other procrastination habits..
But what definitely please shouldn't be done here is to put it into a category of "the most addictive thing" where really just heroine, true aclohol addiction, and similar drugs belong. Heroine/alcohol is nearly impossible to fight through with just own willpower. Objectively!
I quit drinking and smoking. Of those drinking was probably harder but neither was very hard for me.
The key is to avoid situations that trigger your addiction. Don’t buy any of the products. Don’t hang around people that use them. Don’t go to places where people use them. And so on. This might mean you need to get new friends. It’s unfortunately the way it is.
That’s why it’s harder to quit more ubiquitous things (like eating sugar). And it probably varies from person to person
Now, perhaps, imagine for one second, your experience is not like other people's.
Objectively, based on actual studies, smoking is incredibly hard to quit.
Please don't try and undermine that because you sit at the edge of the distribution curve. I'm glad that you do, but you are an outlier, and don't get to condemn all the other evidence on the basis of that.
My father smoked for many years before quitting. I have two roommates that are smokers. The difference between him and them is that he wanted to quit, so he did. They continue to smoke because they do not want to quit. It’s as simple as that.
You have to want to change to be able to change. This isn't news.
But even then, different people have different responses to addiction and some people find it easier than others.
Willpower is not evenly distributed across the population. Resilience to uncomfortable situations is a muscle that has to be trained, and you need that before you can tackle addiction, and keep working on it.
I'm pleased for your father, but your roommates are not the same person, and comparing them as if they are entirely equivalent is unfair to them AND your father. Your father had experience, willpower and resilience that your roommates do not yet have, and that's not their fault.
When/if you encounter addiction writ large - drugs, alcohol, gambling - the stuff that gets real crazy real quick, you might see the problem and the difficulties associated it, and the nuance of an addiction that gets at somebody that does not have immediate consequences but delayed consequences. You might then get why your father did very well, and your roommates are relatively blameless in this regard.
Right, so the reason there are thousands of books and methods about quitting smoking isn’t because it’s hard, it’s because people don’t really want to. Or maybe they’re stupid? Got it.
I know several people (including family members) who spent several decades "trying" to quit smoking, but "couldn't"... until they started having health problems and a doctor told them very clearly and in a serious tone that if they didn't quit, they would die.
At that point, they quit literally overnight and never went back. And I'm using "literally" literally here.
So yes, I know it's hard, but I'm pretty sure people who don't manage to quit just don't want to quit hard enough. They "want" to in the same sense that I want to learn martial arts: I've always thought that it would be great to master a martial art, and sometimes fantasize with it, but I know fully well that I'm never going to do it because I'm not willing to do what it takes (the time, the discipline, receiving blows, etc.)
In other words, I don't think wanting to snap a finger and magically never feel like smoking anymore qualifies as wanting to quit smoking.
Nicotine addiction is real, but cigarettes aren’t the only way to administer it. I’d imagine many smokers on a sub use an alternative rather than stop.
Curious, did you start smoking in your teens? I smoked hookah every day for about a year when I was 25 because I vastly preferred it to going out to bars and it seemed to be an acceptable social alternative. Then I quit. I never crave cigarettes, unless I walk by a group of smokers then I might bum one. I’ve probably smoked 5 cigarettes in the last few years.
When I vaped for a little while like five years ago to see if it’d help concentration I wouldn’t crave it exactly, more like if I had it I’d just pull it out absentmindedly and puff on it until it was empty.
Anyway my working theory is when you start has a lot to do with getting addicted.
I started when I was 18. Drunk, social pressure, became hooked immediately. Took me 5 years to give up the second time. After 3 years social pressure led to me taking it up again for 12 years. I've now been a non-smoker for just under 6 years. It's still hard.
I think any addiction is hard to walk away from once it's had you for a while, it's why addiction support groups exist. Alcohol, gambling and drugs can cause real chaos in the very short term whereas smoking can take years to cause serious damage, so people reduce it in terms of impact, but it's no different to any other form of addiction in terms of its difficulty to get away from.
So when people act flippantly towards it, I realise they've had the good fortune of never having to deal with addiction in their lives. Good for them, but I really wish people had an ounce of common human empathy in them when talking about this. It's tough, and they clearly don't understand that.
Some people find It easier to quit, some people just can't do it. Some people manage to smoke one cigarette a day. Some people either quit for good or they get back at smocking two packs a day.
This narrow view of addiction is also missing the fact that smoking has many positive effects. I smoked from age 13 to age 38, and I’m pretty sure smoking made my life better overall.
Besides allowing me to socialize more easily, it’s an incredibly potent stress reliever which allowed me to deal with sensory overload and other stressors (I’m autistic). Nothing comes even close to how quickly it can defuse stressful situations.
The fact that something nudges you to take a break and a few steps every hour is also something I miss tremendously. I always joked that I was the in-house bug hunter and hard problem solver because I’d walk the stairs every hour and would solve the problem on the way back up.
Now that I’ve quit, many things in my life have become much harder. I need to be conscious of my stress level at all times and plan for mitigation through cardio, ear protection, fixed schedules. A 1h run achieves the same result as a 2 minute cigarette break would, and I have to set an alarm to remind me to take breaks. Because of Covid and consequent work from home, this has all become manageable, but I don’t think I could function in normal society very well without picking smoking back up.
I'm confused - the comment you are replying to basically says the Navy can freely ban smoking onboard submarines and end up with no real consequences other than some mildly grumpy sailors. It made no moral judgement about smoking or addiction.
I was replying at that level to echo the other comments. It's reacting to the "they merely chose to do so" part. It might not be the best parent to reply to, but it's what spawned a whole thread I wanted to sibling.
I've got ADHD, and the enforced outdoor smoking gave me the perfect excuse to dip out of any social situation that I found awkward or uncomfortable as well as give me somewhere else to recombobulate. And I agree that it gave you a great break routine that helped productivity, I do miss that a lot.
I wish it was that easy. Smoking is addictive, and I can assure you that quitting requires a lot of effort and in some cases luck too. I was "lucky" enough to be hospitalized for an appendicitis that degenerated into a peritonitis due to a wrong diagnosis just at the right time, that is, in the middle of a local tobacco crisis during a spring in the early 90s when cigarettes were so hard to find that either one knew someone in the black market or had to roll mashed cigar leftovers like I did just before getting ill. Moral of the story, I had been hospitalized for 12 days when I was already smoking a lot less than my usual rate (two full 20 packs/day) and when I was discharged from the hospital I said to myself "it's now or never!" and the rest is history. 30 years have gone and since then I didn't touch any cigarette, cigar, pipe, or anything else because I'm 100% aware that if I'd take a even just single puff for a friend or my girlfriend I'd start again, because I still like that smell unless someone smokes directly in my face.
Exactly. People replying to you are acting like a smoker will literally explode if they don't smoke for a few months. Some of these comments are truly bizzare! We're talking about cigarettes here.
Just like a nonsmoker, smokers are just fine being forced to go without cigarettes while underway. My husband was both a smoker and a submariner at the same time for many years. He couldn't stand vaping or using dip so he was just was forced to go without nicotine for the duration of the underway. Of course he (and the other smokers) were really grumpy about it, but that's it.
I also have smoker relatives who were somewhat frequently hospitalized. You simply can't smoke in a hospital, tough cookies if you want a cigarette. You simply just deal with going without - you can be prescribed nicotine patches is all, which aren't helpful to my family members.
We are talking about people getting annoyed they can't smoke.
I have a friend in Germany who gives up smoking for the entirety of Lent. It always seemed so stupid to me, since if I could have given up for that long, I wouldn't have gone back. I was a smoker for many decades who gave up three months ago, and feel kind of cheated by how easy it was and how little I miss it (wish I had done it far, far earlier).
I think the real thing people are disagreeing about here is whether you're still a smoker when you're deliberately going 6 months without smoking.
Is 'smoker' a permanent status, like some people consider themselves alcoholics even when they haven't drunk alcohol in a decade? If so, you could have a submarine full of smokers very easily!
But if you're only a smoker if you've had at least 1 cigarette in the past week, your submarine would have no smokers after seven days at sea.
That's untrue. You (maybe) choose to start smoking, but once you have started, choice is entirely taken away from you.
Incidentally, that's precisely what helped me quit (a long time ago): I realized I was a slave to the cigarette and the only way to be free again was to stop it altogether. It was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. I stayed in bed for four days trying to think about something else and sleeping it through. And then it wasn't over for a couple of weeks.
I always describe quitting smoking as both the easiest and the hardest thing I have ever done. I wanted to quit for so long and suffered many, many failed attempts. I tried all kings of methods, acupuncture, gum, etc. All to no avail. In hindsight I didn't really want to quit. I wanted to quit for my health, for my morning cough, for my wife, for all kinds of reasons. But not really for me. I liked it, and quitting something you want to do doesn't work.
At some point I read the Alan Carr book. I was skeptical but hey, might as well try it, right? Around that time my wife and I were also thinking about kids and I really wanted to quit before she was pregnant. I finished the book, smoked my last cigarette, went to bed, and lasted about 6 hours after waking up before I was back at it again. That night I re-read the last bit of the book, smoked my last cigarette (again) and went to bed.
I haven't touched a cigarette since and it's been very easy. not a single pang or hankering or anything. I can get drunk without wanting a cig. People can smoke around me and I don't care. I'm not an ex-smoker. I'm a non-smoker. Looking back (4 years now) I find it hard to understand myself why I had so much trouble quitting. It's been soooo easy.
Exactly. The most insidious part of addiction is identifying as an addict. It’s that acceptance of your own addiction as a core part of your identity that makes it impossible to quit. As soon as you change your mind and decide “I am not an addict” you’ll quit instantly.
The addict self-identification is also the reason why people get so defensive about it. People tell them to quit and they treat it like an attack, an injury against their identity, and this cognitive dissonance protects the addiction from being resolved.
I think this is bad idea. Maybe have a special room for smoking?
> Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.
Some people are legitimately addicted. I know for a fact that I am not (I can go for a month without smoking and I won't go crazy) but removing smoking or nicotine will be a major quality of life downgrade for me.
We’re talking about serving on a submarine, in the military. Quality of life takes a back seat to health and safety, performance, and the mission itself. Personal space and weight are extremely limited on board.
What you’re suggesting is that smokers be given special accommodation by having their own room for smoking. Furthermore, they would need to be provided with special equipment to filter the air to remove all of the smoke produced by their smoking, otherwise it would spread throughout the other compartments as soon as they open the door to leave the smoking room.
Is any of this reasonable? I don’t think it is. The only reasonable accommodation I can think of would be to allow smokers to bring a supply of nicotine gum or patches.
Surprisingly this hasn't been answered. Yes, smoking is banned (with probably 3 hours of exception, all at once and in one inconvenient place.) No, smokers aren't banned. They all hate the ban, live with it, and mostly use chewing tobacco. And then they go back to smoking.
They just have to ban the smoking. Pretty hard to smoke if there are no cigarettes on the ship or if the crew runs over to put out the fire any time you light a cigarette.
I read somewhere that banning smoking on planes lead to a lot of deep vein thrombosis cases, as they didn't need to swap the air out as much leading to higher c02 levels.
But stupid shortsightedness aside; it was crazy, they needed to put the smokers (which was me at the time) at the back of the plane as that's the direction of the airflow inside, but the toilets were at the back so everyone had to walk through the smoking section anyway..
BuildsJets here with your aviation trivia. Cabin Air Quality requirements generally have become a lot more stringent since they were first enacted back in December 1964.
Previously, only the crew was required to be supplied with fresh air, the rest of the cabin was required to be "ventilated" but no ventilation rate was specified, so it was frequently turned off to save fuel or increase power. (This is approved and is still done on some older generation aircraft that are still in service, for instance the Boeing 737NG for certain high performance situations, search 737 Packs Off Takeoff) The current requirement is .55 lbs of outside air per minute per passenger minimum, through all phases of flight. Permissible CO2 has been reduced from 3% in 1964 to 0.5%. today. The carbon monoxide requirement is unchanged at 1 part per 20,000. Multiple other requirement changes, but those are the ones that are specific and measurable.
> Previously, only the crew was required to be supplied with fresh air, the rest of the cabin was required to be "ventilated" but no ventilation rate was specified, so it was frequently turned off to save fuel or increase power. (This is approved and is still done on some older generation aircraft that are still in service, for instance the Boeing 737NG for certain high performance situations, search 737 Packs Off Takeoff)
How does that work though? The cabin pressurization requires constant bleed air from the engines because there are intentional leaks. So the air is constantly renewed anyway.
The cabin air pressure requirement (psi) is more or less a constant, but the cabin air flow rate requirement (lbm/min) is a variable which depends on the number of passengers on board, the air temperature conditioning requirements, the cargo being carried, the altitude (outside air pressure), and the age/condition of the aircraft. (Things like rubber door seals are not perfect and develop leakage rates over time. Sometimes you can even hear it if you are near the door.) The engine pressure regulating/shutoff valve and the cabin outflow valve position are regulated by the pilot (legacy aircraft) or by the digital cabin pressure control system (current aircraft) to maintain the required flow and pressure (cabin altitude setting).
In ye olden days before a DCPCS, not only were the flow requirements not as stringent, but there was culture of "cheating the chart" when manually setting the system. More airflow = more fuel burn, and at one time pilots were compensated for minimizing fuel burn. Anyone can see that this is a perverse incentive from a safety standpoint, just look at what former astronaut Hoot Gibson did to the passengers on his 727 trying to save a buck and playing flight test pilot with paying passengers onboard.
I can't find the original article, but from Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_vein_thrombosis) [inflammation has been identified as playing a clear causal role] and studies(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20387988/) ironically tobacco studies, of 5% CO2 show an inflammatory response. Another poster here cited 3% was be the safe limit, so its feasible that turning the system off to save money could put the CO2 over 5% quite quickly. Also the concentration of oxygen is listed on Wikipedia as a direct cause of DVT, which would obviously be affected.
That's talking about lack of oxygen in your blood, not in the air.
I have a lot of experience working long days in a high CO2 environment (did my PhD working in volcanic ice caves). IIRC OSHA rules say 5000ppm (0.5%) is the limit for a 40 hr work week (that's more than 10x atmospheric). There is no way CO2 on planes is getting over 1%--- that would cause a lot of health problems. DVT would not be one of them.
I remember reading closer to the time they banned smoking on planes of engineers complaining that when people stopped smoking on planes it made it much harder to inspect for hairline cracks! The smoke would highlight the cracks yellow.
Can't find any first hand sources now but this article touches on it:
Admirial Cloudberg covered at least one crash caused by fire caused by a cigarette. The response from the industry: smoke alarms. Banning smoking too was unthinkable!
I think you misremember. The cause of the fire on Air Canada flight 797 was never conclusively determined; a cigarette could not be completely ruled out, but was deemed very unlikely.
Smoking culture was a contributing cause since it made fires in trash bins so common that the pilots didn't react with urgency to a fire that looked like that (but in that case was definitely not).
Having smoke alarms was absolutely the correct response, because smoking is by no means the only cause of fires on airplanes. In fact, I'm not even sure there has been a single fatal crash involving fire that has been definitely caused by smoking, but there are many that are known to have been caused by other things, such as Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, Swissair flight 111, ValuJet flight 592 and China Airlines Flight 120.
Brand new aircraft still include fixtures to stub out cigarettes in the bathrooms, because it doesn't matter if you declare that something's forbidden, people will do it anyway and you need to do what you can to minimise harm.
The ashtray is required equipment, and you can't legally dispatch the airplane if it is inoperative, unless you disable that lavatory. Truth! 14 CFR 25.853 (g)
Yes. The person triggering the alarm will still likely look for a place to extinguish the cigarette, and pretend they've done nothing wrong. The ashtray thing is there because otherwise those idiots will put the burning cigarette in the trash or in the tank with chemicals in which it might just cause a pile-up of debris and clogs.
I'd put this a bit differently, though with the same general idea:
- The alarm will alert flight attendants to the situation, allow them to identify the violator of the non-smoking regulation, of the potentially hazardous situation (open flame in an aircraft), and if necessary bar the person from future flights.
- The ashtray will likely prevent a lit cigarette from burning down the aircraft in flight if improperly disposed of with, say, dry paper trash.
A smouldering cigarette in a rubbish bin could imperil the entire flight, passenger manifest, and crew.
Commercial aviation in the 60's was quite safe. Of course there were plenty of issues but the truly dangerous era was the preceding decades. The 747 dates from the very late 60's for example and that's an extremely safe plane. Conversely the 50's was a much scarier decade as commercial jet engines were in a fairly experimental decade.
Fair enough. I was thinking purely of the jet era, since that's what we're still in, of course, and where the most passengers could be disturbed by smokers. Since you meant the real early days of aviation, I would of course agree that the concerns of passengers back then were much greater than someone smoking.
The first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, debuted in 1952, though it was retired shortly after due to mulltiple airframe losses due to structural fatigue.
The Boeing 707 entered service in 1957, and is probably most associated with the start of the jet age.
Most commercial flights were likely propeller-driven aircraft through the 1950s, but some jet travel had begun by the end of the decade.
Edit: I've spent some time trying to find stats on flights / passenger miles by aircraft type for the 1950s & 1960s without luck. That'd be an interesting add to this thread if anyone has the information.
As of 1960, both categories were effectively nil. Passenger travel hit 1,000 billion passenger-km around 1980, the pre-2020 peak was about 8,500 billion passenger-km. Data based on IATA.
Not sure if it's still allowed in Japan, but I still recall walking through a smoking car on a bullet train on my way to my non-smoking car about 20 years ago and my god, I'm pretty sure there was zero ventilation with the whole car smoking. I had to hold my breath from one end to the other, it was so intense. I can't fathom how people could survive a whole train ride in there while also smoking themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if this is still allowed as smoking is still quite ubiquitous in Japan. They even smoked inside at work. Being from North America, it was like stepping back in time 20 years.
I took the Shinkansen on my last trip to Japan in 2016 and I didn't see any smoking cars, but there were closed-off smoking rooms available on the train with really good ventilation systems.
"How the hell someone EVER thought it would be a good idea to let people smoke while packed inside a flying metal cylinder?"
Quite some smokers still think, it is not bad for them, so it can't be bad for others, so why care? I mean, if it would be really unhealthy, they wouldn't do it to themself. Cognitive dissonance is real.
As unhealthy and disgusting as smokers' clouds are, that wasn't the truly dangerous thing.
What was and still is dangerous are the open flames and high temperatures involved with smoking and other flammables. A fire aboard an aircraft can quickly lead to a crash, so the less flammables there are the better.
Sure, but - statistically/historically - how many fires were recorded in airplanes due to smoking (or to the use of lighter or matches)?
Mind you, I do smoke but still find a good idea to ban smoke on board of aircrafts, though I don't think it has ever been a relevant risk (compared to all the risks implied in flights).
BTW (and AFAIK) the real issue (money) was the cost to the companies of cleaning/replacing the filters of the air circulation that mainly drove - as soon as it could be socially accepted - companies to ban smoking in aircrafts.
The 2016 EgyptAir plane crash of flight MS804 which had been, at the time, attributed by Egyptian authorities to terrorism, was eventually found to have been caused by the pilot smoking a cigarette in the cockpit, French investigators have concluded.
In-flight air quality measurements in approximately 250 aircraft, generalised by models, indicate that when smoking was permitted aloft, 95% of the harmful respirable suspended particle (RSP) air pollution in the smoking sections and 85% of that in the non-smoking sections of aircraft cabins was caused by SHS (Second Hand Smoke).
Typical levels of SHS-RSP on aircraft violated current (PM(2.5)) federal air quality standards approximately threefold for flight attendants, and exceeded SHS irritation thresholds by 10 to 100 times.
From cotinine dosimetry, SHS exposure of typical flight attendants in aircraft cabins is estimated to have been >6-fold that of the average US worker and approximately 14-fold that of the average person.
Flying the smoky skies: secondhand smoke exposure of flight attendants
Yep, but I was talking of the fire risk only, not of the presumed health ones.
One case (BTW of a cigarette lighted near an open oxigen respirator) doesn't make smoking on board a fire safety risk.
As said, I find a good idea to ban smoking on board (for a number of reasons, including passengers and personnel health ) but not because it is a relevant/meaningful fire hazard.
I don't think an accident ever occurred because of smoking in the cabin? (Possibly one because of smoking in the lavatory, and I'm not even sure).
For smokers, going 4, 6 or 9 hours without smoking is just unthinkable; I know it was for me. So glad I quit (a very long time ago), but I don't know how smokers deal with it today.
There are plenty of reasons why people shouldn't be flying planes. Being unable to not smoke is not really any different from being unable to resist getting drunk or falling asleep, as far as safety people have to be concerned. It fundamentally doesn't matter if it's "your fault" or "addiction" or a "medical reason"...
I quit smoking the old-fashioned way so I don't have a first-hand experience in that matter, but I was thinking a lot about this once. I belive patches and gums may not work in every instance. Please let me provide some context.
I was smoking for around 7 years, from my late teens (jus a couple smokes per day) to my early 20' (1.5–2 packs per day). I haven't smoked in quite a few years, I think it's close to 10 years, I don't count anymore.
I have never felt addicted to nicotine. To cigarettes, yes. I was addicted to all those little smoking rituals, gestures, and to all that social behaviour around smoking. I liked going out on the balcony in the morning in my bathrobe just to smoke. Or go out to the garden with another smoker after a party and have a conversation that wouldn't otherwise happen. Hell, I even liked the gesture of shaking the ashes off a cigarette.
Smoking was also a way to deal with boredom for me, a bit like a smartphone now. I'm waiting for a bus that won't arrive for 15 minutes? That's a great time to smoke a cigarette or two.
To the point: would nicotine patch help me to quit smoking? Probably yes, on the long run. Would gum / snuff / snus limit my craving to cigarettes to the point where I could work in a completely smoke-free place? I do not think so.
I find they do not work. I suspect it's because there are two components to continued smoking. The first is the nicotine addiction. The second is the sensory experience. The act of smoking becomes such an ingrained habit it's hard to stop even when you don't feel cravings. And smoking is pleasurable and relaxing in a way patches and gum aren't. Plus, the gums taste foul and make your throat feel weird.
> In other words, the air on the plane was quite a bit cleaner when there were ashtrays next to the seats.
That doesn't follow from what you wrote.
Anyway, it is easy to look at actual research on cabin air quality and see your claim is false.
"Typical levels of SHS-RSP on aircraft violated current (PM(2.5)) federal air quality standards approximately threefold for flight attendants, and exceeded SHS irritation thresholds by 10 to 100 times. From cotinine dosimetry, SHS exposure of typical flight attendants in aircraft cabins is estimated to have been >6-fold that of the average US worker and approximately 14-fold that of the average person. Thus, ventilation systems massively failed to control SHS air pollution in aircraft cabins."
The decrease in particles with the smoking ban doesn't prove or disprove what I'm asserting, which is that (a) bleed air into the cabin was reduced and (b) filters were replaced less often, after the tobacco ban. In fact, what I'm saying is that the airlines leveraged the tobacco ban and commensurate reduction in measurable PM(2.5) as a legal excuse to reduce filtration of air five-fold, resulting in much higher levels of viral particles recirculating.
As a non smoker, I’d much rather breathe on a plane today than potentially next to someone smoking.
How do you know if the reduction in filters / bleed air causes more people to get sick? Filters would naturally require less replacement since they don’t have to take away as many toxins. Couldn’t that allow filters to free up more viral particles?
Replacing filters that aren’t near end of life doesn’t result in higher air quality, any more than me replacing my pasta strainer more often would result in better pasta.
Your inference from the data is flawed. They changed the filters more often because they clogged more often. Filters clog up and reduce their airflow over time, they don't allow more particles through over time. So the air was 3x dirtier.
> If I lit a cigarette as I'd like to, their parents might attack me for shaving a few theoretical seconds off their lives.
Many things are not harmful if just done one, but you are not alone. I understand that if you are allowed to smoke many other people would also, and it would have a noticeable detriment in peoples live quality.
If everyone is allowed to take their coughing children on airplanes, it's a detriment to my life quality. What's the difference? Why are ten coughing children without masks less lethal than ten adults smoking cigarettes?
The difference is hyperbole. You make it sound like you’re being personally harassed by a minimum of 10 children, possibly taking shift coverage to make sure to infect you 24x7.
And you’re comparing that with actual smokers who would actually light up at every opportunity.
Oh it’s “just one cigarette” that you would smoke right? Just one. Why are these unreasonable people persecuting you unreasonably for just one. Of course you wouldn’t smoke a second. Of course no one else would smoke one after seeing you.
Children light up at every opportunity. If you've ever been in a row with a few of them, they have no control over the contents of their lungs. Smokers do, actually, ask in most cases.
In terms ten second-hand cigarettes damaging you on a flight, or ten coughing children, I don't understand how you think the smoke would be more dangerous. Cancer risk from smoke is cumulative, whereas risk from contagious diseases is immediate.
I take it you didn't live through the era of unrestricted tobacco smoking then. Smokers absolutely do not ask whether they can smoke unless they know they really shouldn't, but hope they'll be allowed to anyway.
Aside from that, it is obviously ridiculous to compare disease (which is rarely something one gets willingly, and cannot be stopped at will) with smoking (a wilful decision, and something that can be stopped at will).
I'm sorry that you may have encountered smokers who didn't ask your permission. But I have never encountered a parent who asked my permission before their child coughed in my face. I'm comparing the thoughtless spreading of diseases with the, relatively, under the circumstances, thoughtful manner in which most smokers exhale their poison. And, relative to the immediate toxicity of the poisons in question, there's no doubt that the parents of children should be asking permission.
How far removed from real life must you be to complain that parents aren't asking you for permission before... allowing their children to be sick? Allowing their sick children to cough?
Disease is an unavoidable fact of human life and children are a necessary piece of society, but tobacco is entirely unneeded.
I'm just saying that it's hardly more of a burden on society for someone to burn some dry leaves than for someone to create a new human or several of them, with all the burden that places on our ecosystem and our society. Having children is a wildly antisocial and narcissistic act in the modern world. It's hilarious and ironic that the people who defend it are the same ones who care whether I smoke a cigarette from time to time, or who whinge about global warming. The worst thing you can possibly do to the planet is to have a child. It outweighs every personal measure you might take against carbon emissions, tenfold, for reasons that are too obvious to explain. Yet this, and the imposition of said children on me, is somehow justifiable whereas my having a cigarette on an airplane would be unimaginable. I think the modern word for the perspective of parents who believe they have a natural right to take up more resources than their own bodies require, solely because they did something any animal can do - ie. reproduced - is "privilege".
This line of reasoning troubles me. Calling swaths of people narcissistic and antisocial isn’t productive and comes off as really hateful and bitter. IDK. Maybe hacker news isn’t a healthy place for me to be. Perhaps I need to take a break from the Internet.
I think it's important to point out that I didn't "call" any swath of people anything; I flipped the accusation of engaging in antisocial behavior that's routinely leveled at childless, hedonistic smokers on its head, and made the counter-argument that our impact is relatively small compared to people who willingly have children. That is definitely an unpopular view, and I'm proud to state it. You can totally consider it unproductive and debate it on the merits. As to the feelings my point of view engenders, 1. my comments don't really matter and you are free to ignore them; 2. you're free to discuss or debate them; 3. you don't need to take them personally, because I'm just one person with my own opinion. As unpopular as it is. You can't expect everyone to only write things you love and agree with, especially those who aren't directly responding to you or didn't know you existed until moments ago. I'm sorry if my thoughts hurt your feelings.
[edit] Taking a break from the internet is never a bad idea, though. I could probably use one myself. I could use another trip. I do wish the alternative to staying home wasn't getting on a plane with everyone else's children... only slightly kidding.
That's not my experience, at all. In places where they are allowed to smoke, which used to be everywhere, they either take it for granted that they can smoke and just do it; or they 'ask' with something like "surely you don't mind" while already lighting their cigarette. And some of them do the same even in places where they're not allowed to, but fortunately that's a shrinking minority.
Stop for a minute and think about the psychology of what you’ve just written.
Instead of getting angry at aviation corporations who save money and maximize profits by degrading the quality of the very air you breath, you direct your anger towards other passengers and their kids. As they would against you.
That said, you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke and masks should be mandatory on planes still in my opinion.
> That said, you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke and masks should be mandatory on planes still in my opinion.
That is a very reasonable approach. We are billions of humans living in close quarters. Let's make a little effort to offer high quality spaces to everybody. This happened with seat belts in cars, many people were offended by the idea but it is saving many lives each day.
Covid exists, it always will at this rate, and the rest of us won't be suffering for your insecurity about your own immune system. You wear a mask if you like. If it works, you have nothing to worry about.
You misspelled "can't be bothered to contribute to the wellbeing of the people around us". Incidentally, you think wearing a rated mask for a couple hours qualifies as "suffering"? When did notionally adult humans get this soft? Try working 10 hours straight in a tyvek bunny suit and full face respiratory PPE. We'd be carting you off my jobsite in a wheelbarrow after 30 minutes.
I do contribute to the wellbeing of the 95+% of the people who choose not to wear a mask and want to engage in human connection with the full range of emotional and facial expressiveness we were blessed with for that purpose, by not focusing on the irrational belief that wearing PPE 24/7 is even remotely possible or desirable, and accepting the statistical reality that in 2023, the vast majority of the population have been exposed to several strains of Covid. No amount of hiding from it prevents the acquisition of it. But plenty of warmth and light is lost in the world from the social constraints imposed by mask-wearing.
The discussion was about wearing a mask when on a plane, not about wearing 24/7. Nobody asked for that so don't straw man it.
In some Asian countries it was already common courtesy to wear a mask if you even suspect you might have a respiratory disease before Covid. Saying everyone suspecting a respiratory disease should stay at home is fine but detached from reality, people need to go places.
Ergo, wearing a mask in closed spaces is a compromise between being grounded and being an a** h***.
Edit:
About this
> I do contribute to the wellbeing of the 95+% of the people who choose not to wear a mask and want to engage in human connection with the full range of emotional and facial expressiveness we were blessed with for that purpose
What exactly is the benefit strangers in a closed space (like public transportation) get from seeing your facial expressions? What kind of human connection do you expect with strangers on public transportation? Believing the viewing of your face to be to the benefit of the public is narcissism unlike any other.
That's a lot of words, all utterly self-serving, for being a self-absorbed prick with a wildly inflated notion of how desirable your interaction is for random-ass strangers. Shove the 24 hour strawman where the sun doesn't shine, we're talking about not being an ass in enclosed spaces solely because you're too delicate to handle even the most basic respiratory PPE for any length of time.
So, I also think politesse is really a critical skill and function in society. I've never smoked in close proximity to anyone without asking them if they minded if I lit up first. I also have never coughed on an airplane. Never. Not once. I've flown upwards of 200,000 miles in my life. I don't understand this urge people have to spread their germs as soon as they get seated and buckled in. I know the air is dry; control yourself. Really, try to control yourself.
So what you write is really the basic truth: Try to contribute to the wellbeing of people around you. That shouldn't be so hard.
It's a basic courtesy to wear a mask if you know you have a respiratory issue (whether it's a cold, the flu, or Covid doesn't really matter). Masks work much much better when the sick person is wearing them.
I think it should also be something that cabin attendants can force you to do - if they notice you have cold/flu/Covid symptoms, and you are not wearing a mask, they should be allowed to bring a mask to you and ask you to wear it, and you shouldn't be allowed to say no.
No, it's a basic courtesy to stay home if you are sick. Airborne diseases cannot be prevented by mask wearing between sips of your courtesy peanuts and soda.
And plenty is lost about a society that focuses more about preventing illness than just staying generally healthy. Smiling is good for you, engaging with your fellow humans, with full facial expressions available for communication and connection, are absolutely essential to a happy and fulfilling life.
So you expect people who have planned an expensive vacation and booked a flight to cancel everything if they get the sniffles? Should they also self-isolate and avoid grocery shopping, all public transport etc for 5-10 days after their first sore throat? And note, I'm saying this as someone who has just renounced a week-long vacation and two non-refundable flights because I tested positive for Covid, even though I barely had any symptoms, because I do believe the risk to others is too great. Not so for a cold.
While masks are far from 100% efficiency, they are still much much much better than doing nothing, while self-isolation for minor illnesses like a common cold is not in any way realistic.
Also, I'm explicitly not saying that we should always wear masks - the dangers of un-treatable, un-vaccinatable Covid (that 100% justified universal mask wearing) have passed. But, when you're sick and for various reasons have to be in closed spaces with others, wear a mask.
Yes, actually. If you know you've got the flu or some other mild-but-still-serious illness, you don't go outside your home unless it's absolutely necessary (eg: going to the hospital, buying essential groceries).
And before you say "I don't care if I pass my flu around.": Stay home /for your own sake/. What the fuck do you think is going to happen if your mild illness takes a turn for the worst right when you're overseas? I hope you have good traveller's insurance, or otherwise sufficient savings to afford medical and emergency care out of pocket.
Winter in the Midwest, especially if you have kids, is an unending parade of mild cold symptoms. It's not reasonable to ask everyone to seal themselves inside forever.
What about some common cold? That's still very spreadable, but it is far from a serious illness.
Also, if you have mild respiratory symptoms (say, you're sniffling and your throat is a little sore), do you immediately go and run various tests to see what specific pathogen it is, or do you take some symptomatic treatment and go about your life? Why not add "and wear a mask outside" to that?
Once upon a time, air travel was only available to people who needed to go somewhere or had the means to do so. We're in a little gap right now where first class is diminished to almost steerage, but private jets are a little too expensive. It's probably a reflection of the widening rich/poor gap. There used to be a way for people who earned in the top 20% to travel without having to subject themselves to the other 80%. Now you really have to be in the top 0.1% to travel without the garbage.
The irony is that the top 0.1% and the bottom 80% both have shit manners, and only when you make the top 20% act well and put on their shoes do you have something resembling civilization.
You can’t kick them off, you’re not going to get violent with them and coerce them so the only answer is turning the plane around if they don’t and how do you think the other passengers will react to that.
End of the day the rest of the world has moved on and no longer consider all this an issue and would rather just get on with their lives without inconvenience and yeah we can imagine a world where they have a bit more empathy for those that haven’t but I just don’t see how you can imagine that scenario playing out.
You explain to them nicely that they will be arrested and/or put on a no-fly list once they arrive at the next airport. It's the same with anyone breaking other rules on an airplane mid-flight - such as smoking, vaping, spritzing perfume or various other activities that are normal in other situations but illegal on an airplane.
How do you think the mask mandates were enforced mid-flight when they were universal?
Also, everything in saying is already common practice in much of the world, especially in East Asia.
Because regulating microscopic airborne diseases is impossible and beyond dumb. Every country that tried to do so failed to do so, even with the most Draconian laws imaginable.
>> Instead of getting angry at aviation corporations who save money and maximize profits by degrading
Sorry! I skipped over the part where I was disturbed and disgusted at the fact that American had cut their filter expense by 80%. My friend's dad was not a smoker but was also appalled that the airline took that decision once they were free from the particulate strictures imposed by cigarettes, because he believed it made the air in the cabin filthy.
So, overlaying all of my angst about children and anti-smoking zealots, I do understand that we've all been thrown into this arena by corporations who have lowered my standard of living. Those corporations have, to be fair, raised the standard of living of people who fly with 3 sick kids to Hawaii, when from my perspective without massive credit they would be raising those kids in a coal mine. In a way, it's almost socialism.
How are you not understanding that they didn’t “cut filter expense by 80%”, but simply they get 1/5th as dirty?
If not less. My educated guess is they used to get changed more often than required due to clogging, and now they’re just changed based on some minimum required.
Have you ever lived with a smoker? My grandmother’s house used to have to be repainted every other year before her death. Do you think we just “greedily cut painting costs by 80%” because we repainted it once in ten years since, or might it have to do with walls yellowing due to particulate?
They get less visually dirty, but the same amount of human breath passes through them. It's not just that; the airlines cut the fresh air intake as a portion of circulated air. By not being as visually noticeable, they didn't need to change the filters as often; yet that meant that the filters would have 5x the viral load when they were finally changed out. They used the elimination of smoking as an excuse to save money on basic hygiene. Does this make sense?
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Where did you even hear about this specific number in how often they used to change their filters vs now? Do you have any idea what the reasons are for them changing filters, how they decide? What the minimum is? How they measure it?
You seem to not really even understand how air filtration works.
I'm guessing you've been smoking so long, you don't know what it's like to not live in polluted air. When you change an air filter, repaint a house, wash the inside of a car, you can immediately tell whether somebody is a smoker. It's fucking gross, and I suspect that it's not 1/5th, but probably 1/20th as often. "What makes me think that" is plain simple experience.
I don't have the full paper handy (and can't be bothered to look this up just for you) but the highlights should be enough for you on this one:
It’s amazing how backwards you got things there. The mental gymnastics you went through! Do you really think the air was cleaner in planes when people smoked in them? And you think children coughing is worse than smoking? Jesus. By the way, I hope you know there are Covid vaccines now, but I hesitate to ask your opinion on them.
The person you are replying to suggests that covid is higher risk for a 3 hour exposure than second hand smoke, which is the correct risk analysis. Only a covid-denier would suggest differently.
Gosh, it's wonderful to hear anyone besides my clients tell me my risk analysis was correct. We're living in a crazy world, where opinions are cheap. Between what's said online and what's officially declared, you have to be your own man handler and keep your own counsel. On the occasion someone else in this mad world tells you that your analysis is fundamentally logical, you should thank them. So thank you.
I really relish the type of high-and-mighty attitude of folks who bring their children coughing onto an airplane and then have the gall to tell you you shouldn't smoke. That's quite precious. Let's just say we're all allowed to pollute each other's airspace. Hasn't the person with a child on their lap gone further in polluting our entire world with their offspring? That child is taking up twice the oxygen and twice the resources left on the planet. The idea that someone who has a child (or three) should lecture someone who doesn't about what particles they put out in the air is the height of hypocrisy. You don't automatically win the war for the common air because you spawned.
Once at a Farnborough air show many years back there was a display from an aircraft maintenance company with small sections of the skin of old airliners. On those if there was a small imperfection of the metal skin or the seal to the window or a door you could actually see a brown smear of nicotine on the white painted skin. It allowed ground staff to spot problems at an early stage.
Seems you never were on a smoking flight. Planes have excellent air conditions. It was not like the whole plane up in smoke. You could smell it a little on a non smoking seat but it was quite mild.
Hard disagree. I flew lots in the 80s and you could be halfway back in the non-smoking section and still smell it constantly. They had curtains separating the smoking/non-smoking sections but so many people went back/forth that their body movement would “drag” the smoke back down the aisle with them as they walked. Then on top of that the smokers going back to the bathroom would make sure they’d taken a huge puff before heading back, breathing out along the way, because heaven forbid they go a few minutes without a lungful.
Only speaking for myself as a smoker: I can smell it very prominently indoors without powerful ventilation. I don’t like it for me and don’t want to inflict it on others. I either steer clear of people outdoors, or put it out if they’re going to be nearby. The only exception is if they want to interact with me individually while I’m smoking, then I stand as far away as I can for the interaction they invited.
I think this changed with increase in non-smoking areas.
Back a few decades it was normal that cigarette smoke was everywhere. Trains, restaurants, offices, factories, at home, ... it was just normal. Nowadays in many places it is more notable.
Absolutely not so. Smoking on airplanes was exactly as it sounds like - what you get when people smoke inside a metal cylinder packed with people.
I used to fly all the time for work back then, international/intercontinental. It was bad. Very bad. Some airlines even experimented with "smoking zone on the right side, non-smoking on the left side".. what an idea. If this was today I couldn't fly at all, I've become so physically sensitive to tobacco smoke from all the passive exposure over the years. Throat contracts painfully long before I even smell the smoke and I just can't take it.
As for the air inside airplanes.. occasionally an Einstein will enter an airplane using perfume. It's hell. Airplanes have sometimes needed to perform emergency landings just to save the life of other passengers with perfume allergy. As for myself, if someone uses perfume I have to ask to get a seat half a cabin away. I don't get an allergic (breathing) reaction, just physical pain. So much for the supposed excellent air conditions.
I do get breathing reaction, it's not funny. And I start sneezing and coughing so everyone starts looking at me like I have covid, very amusing. The thing is, a smoker can't really smell how bad it is unless they stop smoking for a while. This is very apparent when you get an ex-smoker into an elevator with a heavy smoker. Did this with a working buddy and he was looking sideways at me and then asking "Was I really that bad?". Yes, yes you were my friend. Glad you are off it :-)
Side comment, but the old paper-wrapped bubblegum cigarettes were elegantly designed with some white dust coating the bubblegum keeping it from sticking to the paper. And if you put it in your mouth and blew, it would make a puff of smoke!
The candy design was equally as good as the product was terrible (for all the obvious reasons).
I remember flying to Australia from London as a 9 year old UM (unaccompanied minor) and they plonked me next to a man who Chainsmoked the whole flight there
Im a smoker, and damn the plane story sounds terrifying. In fact Im smoking now, in my bathroom next to a loud exhaust fan because my wife isn't here. A far cry from when my dad used to smoke next to me while I was doing my homework :D
In fact in my city, Hong Kong, they are now under 10% of the population smoking, and on the street, when I smoke at the ashtray reserved for that on top of the public trashes (yeah, it's not a luxury habit anymore), people wave their hands in front of their nose while passing, "loudly" signaling my alien nature, something I had never experienced in France where I come from.
I'm surprised people are so judgmental there. In my experience (having worked a lot with tourists) Chinese people were noticeably inconsiderate in public, like farting, spitting in public etc. Maybe I'm generalizing but there really was a noticeable pattern.
I think it's surprising that this is such a hangup for them especially outdoors.
I've never smoked but I don't mind if people do and I find all the health and safety rules a bit annoying these days. I miss the smokey boozy bars way after closing time. These days everything is so clean and regulated.
I remember in the late 70’s or early 80’s riding my bicycle to the convenience store to buy my mother a carton of cigarettes.
Technically I think you needed to be seventeen to purchase them in Michigan at that time, but I just told the person behind the counter I was buying them for my mother. I was around ten years old.
Good call about candy cigarettes. They were fun as a kid, but demented in retrospect! It makes me think of Saturday Night Live's E. Buzz Miller and his "Bag of Glass" children's toy.
You can still find candy cigarettes on Amazon. They used to have candy/gum cigars as well. Anyone remember big league bubble gum? It came in a package similar to that of shredded chewing tobacco, and the gun itself was shredded. It was popular with kids who would mimic their favorite tobacco chewing baseball player. I recently bought a pack I saw for sale to show my kids and instinctively put a wad in my lip when I was a kid.
I'll never forget the cigarette vending machines that were in the entrance area of every supermarket around here in the 1970s and 1980s. They had very distinctive clear acrylic "knobs" attached to long metal rods, that you would pull to dispense a pack of cigarettes after depositing money. It was a design unlike any other vending machine I've ever seen.
Looks like you're about 25 years younger than me. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a nonsmoking section. Of course you could smoke, anywhere!
Us kids didn't get real tobacco cigarettes, but we always had candy cigarettes so we could "smoke" along with the grown-ups.
https://www.google.com/search?q=candy+cigarette&tbm=isch
One difference from today was that our candy cigarettes had brand names just like the grown-up cigarettes, or a close facsimile:
https://thedieline.com/blog/2019/10/28/the-history-of-the-ca...
"Hey dad, can I bum a smoke?"
I remember the first time I took an airline flight after they introduced a non-smoking section at the back of the plane. I got seated in the front row of non-smoking, right behind the last row of smoking.
As soon as the no smoking light went off, everyone in the row ahead of me lit up!