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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

The 60s is the effective start of the jet age.

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.

I also wonder how much WW2 forcing people into planes helped to kill some of the fear of it.

I doubt flying in planes doing WW2 decreased fear of flying

The fear you speak of doesn’t come from the flying bit. It definitely let people know the flying tech is fairly safe.

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.

There's a really good docudrama on Amazon, Across the Pacific, that covers the early days of Pan Am:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0888MFZR2/

(Using a smile link while I still can... Change it to www if it doesn't work in the future.)

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.

You're confusing "air travel" with "jet travel". Jet travel was obviously a startup in the 60s.

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.

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.

Remember Odyssey 2001? The Orion III Space Clipper to the rotating space station had a PanAm logo on it.

There was some commercial air travel prior to the ... 1980s ... but it was niche. Prior to 1960 was effectively nil.

Really, widespread air travel is that recent:

<https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...>

1980: ~1,000 billion passenger/km.

2019: ~8,500 billion passenger/km.

Global population's increased, but by less than 2x.

If you go back to 1960, the chart is stuck to the floor.

I've had a call out for further stats with no responses yet:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34499787>

I have heard of people using nicotine gum, patch, or lozenge for situations like this.

You can vape up your sleeve on a plane, but snus is the best way.

Snus isn't actually legal in a lot of places. As in - it's legal to have, but you can't buy it anywhere(most of EU and UK I believe).

it's quite a shame, because it's much cleaner and less dangerous than other ways of taking up nicotine.

I agree, but also know what a Swedish school looks like, with such pouches stuck in various places, ceiling etc.

My uk school had chewing gum in those places rather than nic pouches.

The nic pouches are probably a LOT easier to cleanup than chewing gum.

Pretty much only better than actually smoking, right?

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.

Actual snus(powdered tabbaco sold and advertised as a product you put up your nose) isn't legal for sale in the UK:

https://www.buynicotinepouches.co.uk/blogs/news/buying-snus-...

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

Uhm, frankly I'm not sure. Quick Google reveals a few differences but I'm not sure why one is banned while the other one isn't.

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.

Snus comes in pouches (like a teabag?), intended to be placed between your gum + inside of your lip AFAIK.

Snus is something you put between your gum and lip.

everyones talking biscuits vs cookies. I love it.

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

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.

Source: am Swedish, but not a tobacco user.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus

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.)

Nasal snuff is absolutely legal to sell in UK: https://www.mcchrystals.co.uk/news/nasal-snuff

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.

In the US, the major airlines prohibit use of e-cigarettes onboard. Do not vape on a commercial airliner.

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

Imagine risking a federal offense for a fuckin' vape.

When air travel was in its infancy, banning smoking was just not something anyone would have even thought about. It was everywhere.

Can't they get their 'fix' by applying a nicotine patch to their neck, or something?

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.

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