Posted by crescit_eundo 3 days ago
Today we're used to being on plans for short periods of time. We get on, sit down, wait, and then arrive at our destination. Airships came about when long distance travel meant you were spending multiple days in a vehicle, either a train or boat.
An airship was a place that was set up for you to spend a few days on it, so it was set up more like a boat, with a place to stay, lounge, and eat; than a plane where you don't stay on it for an extended time.
We sometimes see this in new technologies where someone holds onto assumptions of the past.
There is also slow rail travel, with pretty trains, sleeper car and restaurant. I think Europe has sleeper trains too. I am also interested to go to Europe once by the trans Siberian railway.
Europe has sleeping boats too: you can go from, say, south east of France to the Baelaric island (like Ibiza) in 12 hours overnight.
When EVs can reliably (including charging infrastructure) do charging as fast as ICE refuels, with 300 miles/500 km between 20-80%, they will win with most people in the US and Canada. Otherwise, we just drive too far, too often. It’s not far off. But until then, it’s not truly a replacement for ICE. Yes, I really do drive for 4-5 hours without stopping, several times a year.
I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.
> (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
ha. i always thought they were remnants from old airplane plans that were too much effort to update to remove them. thanks for that
A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
It's enormously expensive for an airframe manufacturer to deal with the fallout of a crash.
There aren't any engineers in an airframe manufacturer willing to sign off on a faulty design. Some good engineers are so worried about that they get shifted to working on conceptual projects.
I took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings.
this plane did not crash, it made an emergency landing 2 miles from the airport in an onion field. Only 10 crew and 1 passenger survived. The other 123 souls aboard died of smoke/CO inhalation from the fire.
the sole surviving passenger, 21-year-old Ricardo Trajano, disobeyed the instructions to remain in his seat.
More than ‘a while’. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/:
“In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward.
[…]
In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines”
That paper also says:
“In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”
It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.
The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
and it's not harmless, sure, but it's definitely less harmful than inhaling combustion products of pulverized tobacco waste glued together with a mix of a hundred mystery chemicals.
I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.
Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all.
Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.
As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html
Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe?
This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.
Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.
The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.
they erode your gums
and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand
I had been using the pouches for a couple of years now, and the unbearable anxiety from its nonstop use caused me to slow it way down. I went from a can a day to less than a can a week. I had already quit all other forms of nicotine before the pouches. What a wild ride.
Because the anxiety is unlikely to just be from nicotine alone, I also got myself into somewhat better shape to cope. Maybe some anxiety is healthy if it drives better choices, but it still feels awful. I'm now glad with my current state, but I would not recommend this path to here.
I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking.
When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.
There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk.
I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.
Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.
Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.
My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere.
Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers.
Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation.
As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping.
Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.
My dad, as navigator, flew 32 missions in B-17s over Germany. Many of his buddies were chain smokers. The problem was, you could not keep a cigarette lit at 30,000 feet. The crew all wore oxygen masks, as they'd die without one.
So what the smokers would do is, take a deep breath and unhook the mask. Then blow on the cigarette while lighting it. The cigarette would burn like a torch. Then take a deep puff on the cigarette. Put the mask back on and take another deep breath, while the cigarette sputtered and threatened to go out. Take the mask off and then blow on the cigarette to get it going again (like a torch).
My dad would laugh and laugh while he relayed this desperate dance to smoke.
I've never seen this story in books/movies about B-17s. So here it is for posterity!
As a boomer, I say "baloney".
For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool".
In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking.
But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific.
Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy.
All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
dying in your 60s was par for the course until second half of the 20th century.
lead petrol, cigs, war, asbestos, lead paint in children bedroom
Dying young drags "life expectancy" figures (especially those calculated "from birth") but doesn't necessarily impact the likelihood of dying (say) "within the next 5 years" if you're already (say) 55.
Eg. Many people that survived war in the early 20th Cent still managed to live to a ripe old age past their 60s.
I grew up mostly in a rural town, unwittingly away from lead gasoline fumes.
It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.
If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.
And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
If nearly everyone smoked, then even nonsmokers were constantly getting a fair amount of secondhand smoke.
This would raise the background rate of cancer, making it appear that smoking raises your risk by less than it actually does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death
If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.
No, that's where you're wrong.
You are only interested in that independent risk.
I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk.
Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to.
But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.
What did it for me was watching my uncle have a rather painful death in his 50s because he couldn't stop drinking and smoking. (He went into alcohol withdrawal in the hospital after lung surgery.)
That being said, I did smoke a few when I was in my early 30s. Something about nicotine just put weird thoughts in my head a few days after smoking a cigarette: One day I was biking home and the thought "it would be a good idea to have a cigarette before making dinner" popped into my head. I never touched cigarettes after that.
Cigarettes are more addictive than people who've never tried them realize. It's not just a matter of will power, something about nicotine manipulates your motivations in a very subconscious way.
But there are a couple photos of me "smoking" as I was trying to look cool.
> The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room
I haven't yet played any other game where air pressure in a room relative to the rooms surrounding it could mean the difference between life and death. Without really meaning to I gained an intuitive understanding of physics by just trying not to asphyxiate my dupes. Gold standard for edutainment.
I assure you pressure differentials will be life or death!
>The smoking room was perhaps the most popular room on the ship, which is not surprising at a time when so many people smoked, but its popularity was no doubt enhanced because it was also the location of the [Hindenburg’s bar](link).
That’s how you keep a reader on the site!
/j