People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
Unrelated to what we're talking about, but I still remember briefly switching to Winstons in the 90s because I saw an ad with Frank Zappa smoking one on the back of a rolling stone magazine. I still remember that every time I see Winstons in any context.
It's horrifying how effective that marketing was.
Well I coulda told you that...
Banning smoking on planes is NOT a fumble
Omg yes. I am old enough to remember the tail end of the period when smoking was still allowed on planes and JFC it was awful. They had a smoking "section" but it was still an open cabin so you could smell smoke everywhere. And if you were in the same or next row as a smoker you couldn't escape it for the whole flight. Flying sucks now, but removing smoking is absolutely an upgrade.
People who are too young or, frankly, not thinking hard enough really do romanticise what the world was like when people could smoke fucking everywhere because people really did smoke fucking everywhere. Restaurants and pubs had a visible smog in the air, the odor permiated all flavours and everything was slightly sticky unless it was wiped clean a few minutes before. Being trapped on a bus with a bunch of smokers was nightmarish enough, but being at the back of a plane - the cheap seats - where air was very, very slowly circulated front to back was hell, especially for asthmatics.
I grew up in the 90s and caught the tail end. My god it was nasty. That yellow layer of buildup on everything 🤢
I love how Japan handles it. You can only smoke in designated areas, but a loooot of buildings have dedicated smoking rooms with built in filtration systems, which is more than you can say in the US. I've even seen old traditional ryokan hotels that have an indoor smoking room.
your clothes stunk unless you hung them out the next day. Disgusting addiction.
Now everything smells like Green Apple.
But they gave you something. This could easily be replaced by some soda, or anything else. Meanwhile, leg room is no more, and you're only getting your own thoughts to contend with now.
Most non budget carriers give you a soda and a snack. But you also have to realize that they aren't GIVING you anything - you pay for that, always. It's just marked up and built into your ticket price. Leg room is 100% still available, you just have to pay more. The ticket for that is STILL cheaper (adjusted for inflation) than it was when lots of leg room was standard.
There have been, like, five societal things that have improved since the 90s, and banning smoking in basically all public spaces is one of them.
I can't even imagine air travel before the smoking ban. Mega yuck.
I recall reading that in some ways air quality was better when smoking in airplanes was legal because they had to cycle air through the outside through ventilation systems.
Now they don't so the air is more stagnant and circulates germs etc.
I have no idea if that's actually the case, or if so, if that's actually better. But it was a point I hadn't considered.
In hindsight, it feels like the sort of "study" that a tobacco company would put out. Like a petrol company funding one that says "climate change is good actually!"
I’ve lived through both eras.
Take all the tech companies away from the far-right, raise taxes on the wealthy, break up the media monopolies, overturn citizens united, ensure one full-time income can support a small family, restore actual journalism, make universities places for education and research again….
And you can smoke wherever the fuck you want. Do it in my living room for all I care.
It wasn't pleasant. I was a kid and didn't fly much. but I did experience it.
Because everyone smoked everywhere, you were at least used to it. Airplanes are super well ventilated, not enough to make it pleasant, but enough that you weren't feeling like you were going to die when they all lit up.
I mean there's a huge reason for the loss of luxury on planes that everyone conveniently forgets
Planes were EXPENSIVE, they were a luxury, and around the latter part of the 80s they figured out how to reduce the price. Tickets went from $500 to $50 for the exact same 1 hour flights to the exact same locations.
There's a reason Ryanair became an instant success. People want to pay nothing for services rendered.
It's not just that, they figured out a factory line that made the production cost of planes drastically drop too
They're still not cheap to produce, but they went from exorbitantly expensive, might only have 10-25 flights per day to an airport has 1000s of flights per day
People don't remember that the whole world used to smell like cigarettes.
Ever go to a casino in Las Vegas? Like that, but everywhere all the time.
Blaming Boomers might make you feel better for half a second but the truth is their political leaders mislead them too. There is a reason Trump saying he was going to "drain the swamp" appealed to so many people.
Boomers, lower class citizens, Republicans, Hispanics, whites etc are all people who deserve not to suffer.
If the priority is to minimize suffering then labels stop mattering because people start actually seeing the big picture. When you can't see the big picture you up being mad at a ghost that's been created in your head. You're angry at something you will never be able to actually see or meet because you over-classify a classification.
I agree. You can only track a span of time when referring to a whole generation of people. As in, "something happened during that time". It was not caused by all of the people included in the generalization. Most likely in the past, as it is today, it's the 10% of the greed monkeys in any generation that you can point to, not the whole shebang.
Yeah it would be like blaming millennials for going to war with Iran or the 30% inflation that's happened over the last 6 years or the massive changes that's happened with the government.
Pointing fingers doesn't change anything and if you believe a certain group caused the problems people are seeing today then what are the people today doing to fix it because they are next up to be blamed.
Portable cameras were NOT this good when airlines allowed smoking. You ever see a pic of a ps1/GameCube display at Walmart? This is before THAT.
What are you talking about? https://shootfilmco.com/blogs/shoot-film-co/the-most-popular-cameras-of-the-1970s
There are example shots, e.g. here's one from the Nikon F2, which was introduced in 1971:
Literally everything. You know credit scores were invented by boomers?!
Man it’s almost like as soon as banks were legally required to stop discriminating against women and black folks, they invented backdoor methods of accomplishing it
Not that it should have to be either or, but I'll take less leg room over their gross smoke-filled cabin any day.
So now we're complaining about the enshittification of everything driven by the need to maximize profit in a capitalist system and blaming it on our grandparents? More divisive intergenerational warfare bullshit. If you want to find who to blame for this shit look at the capitalists demanding more and more profit from airlines, manufacturers, literally every part of the economy. It always comes down to class war.
Shit they're on to us. Lets stir up some more infighting.
Lets kill a bunch of innocents and make well meaning people solely responsible by accusing them of letting us do it.
My stepfather was a lifelong smoker. He smoked a full pack of Marlboro reds every day, and my mom smoked a full pack of menthols. I calculated out how much they spent yearly on cigarettes alone and it came to over $5000, and that was in the late 90's; it's probably much higher these days. Both of them had been smoking since the 70's.
When I talked to them about quitting, they both said that they enjoyed smoking too much, it's a stress relief, it's something to do, etc. They were aware of the health risks, but believed the risks were overblown and that emphysema is an "old person's" disease.
Last year he was diagnosed with stage 3 emphysema. The man is a dyed-in-the-wool hard-as-nails army vet boomer, and his obstinate machismo made him ignore years of poor health and lung disease symptoms all to finally end up as an old person with an "old person's" disease. Credit to him though, he did quit cold turkey the day his doctors delivered the diagnosis; the same obstinacy that pushed him to never give up smoking is what pushed him to quit. Me and my family love the hell out of him, and we're glad that he finally quit, but it's so aggravating that there are still so many people out there who discount the risks of smoking.
Flying was also considered a luxury back then, but yeah keep whining about an generational difference while democracy is torn down around you.
I mean enshittification doesn't just affect software and internet. It works the same way elsewhere too: create demand for a product by making it high quality, once everything is structured around that product so that it can not be easily removed from society, enshittify it by significantly reducing quality while keeping most of the profit because now everything is shaped around your product.