Hindenburg’s Smoking Room | Hacker News Reader

Hindenburg’s Smoking Room

airships.net

230 pointscrescit_eundo210 comments

One interesting lesson from airships is about disruption and how people take old assumptions into new paradigms.

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.

The eastward trips took 53 to 78 hours, it resembled more boat or train trip than flight.

I felt a bit similar about electric cars with a trunk in the front where the engine would sit in an ICE car. But that's more about esthetic expectations, like the first cars looked similar to horse carriages.

VW Beetle?

But here the space also have the role of serving as a crumple zone in case of frontal collisions

If you can put something in it it doesn't count as crumple zone and the car has to be engineered with a separate crumple zone anyway.

Collapsing trunks have been a thing since the 90s.

There's no regulatory requirement for crumple zones. There's regulatory requirements for performance. The cheapest/easiest way to meet these is crumple zones.

Your luggage and golf clubs aren't gonna do squat in a collision. The regulators don't care that about the one in a million chance that someone gets into an accident a) where crumple zones matter b) while hauling objects so solid they don't just round to "no effect" because they have bigger fish to fry and if you create a "standard loading" for the test the OEMs will simply design to that and basically create a bunch of work and expense for marginal benefit.

Yeah, but not many people have the habit of hauling solid I-beams of steel in their "frunks".

I don't really believe the average groceries load will add that much rigidity to this space as deny its function as a crumple zone.

I've lost count of the number of people who I've had to explain that, on long trips, you don't "stop to charge." You charge where you stop to poop.

I don’t dislike electric cars, but I don’t poop every 3 hours, and it doesn’t take 30 minutes to do so.

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 don’t dislike electric cars, but I don’t poop every 3 hours, and it doesn’t take 30 minutes to do so.

Clearly you don't eat enough fiber!

Do you really find you can reliably sustain your full attention that long?

My EV can do 3 – 5 hours on the motorway between charges (depending on weather conditions and speed), but to avoid fatigue I always want a break within 3 hours or so.

And by the time I've parked, gone inside, queued up for and drunk a tea or coffee, used the facilities, and checked the next leg of my trip, that's half an hour and the car is ready to go again.

> parked, gone inside, queued up for and drunk a tea or coffee, used the facilities, and checked the next leg of my trip

You and I have very, very different approaches to driving long distances. I don’t get drinks, I don’t eat. So except for once, a couple of hours after departure, no bathroom breaks.l

5 hours between charges at a steady 75-80 mph (120-130 km/h) would be impressive range, though.

Yes. I used to make a 750km trip fairly regularly without stopping.

The exceptions were bad weather days. Stop, check in, fuel up, etc. Never know when the storm will get bad and you’ll be sleeping in the car.

Well, you clearly have no sense of humor. In all seriousness, all you need to do is take bathroom breaks at chargers. That's all it takes, and you can't hold it for 300 miles.

Eh, my response was about as funny as the original joke.

Seriously, though, don’t drink anything and you won’t have to pee. That’s only 4 hours.

There’s usually one stop an hour or two after leaving, but after that? I typically don’t eat or drink anything if there’s distance to cover. Refuel, get back on the road. I can eat when I get there.

> Seriously, though, don’t drink anything and you won’t have to pee. That’s only 4 hours.

That's not healthy. General road safety is that you need to stop every ~2 hours.

“General road safety”? I’m curious where you get this idea. I’m not accusing you of making it up, just wondering where it comes from.

As for health, it’s fine as long as you aren’t chronically dehydrated. Your kidneys won’t fail if you don’t urinate every two hours every day.

These places still exist, but you need to look for them. Here in Japan, some remote islands, you can travel overnight boat. I love those. There might be a speed boat or plane, but I love boarding the boat in the evening, everyone feels like having a party, sleeping in a bed and arriving fresh in the morning. (If you are in Tokyo, the nearest is Oshima Island).

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.

> I think Europe has sleeper trains too.

Europe has sleeping boats too: you can go from, say, south east of France to the Baelaric island (like Ibiza) in 12 hours overnight.

The Baltic has a bunch of overnight ferry routes too. Most of them are not very luxurious, but its a nice way to get both travel and sleep done in one go.

I've taken the ferry from southern Italy(bari) to Croatia and back multiple times. It's a great way to travel. There's a camaraderie on a boat you just don't get on an airplane. Also helps that I can bring my car with me!

I remember as a child using a sleeper ferry to get between Jersey and the British mainland. Politically Jersey is ours (it's not technically part of the UK but it's a crown dependency), but geographically it's basically in France. Seems like these days there is no overnight option but the long slow ferry from up the coast does take like half a day to get there and you can book a room so you can get some sleep.

Yeah - I regularly go to Corsica from Italy or France, overnight. It's nice when you have to drive several hours to the port, but if I lived near the port, I would definitely go for day travel — it's much faster and way cheaper.

You’d love Canada and the US. Nothing but slow travel on trains.

No one takes the train in the US because they don't go anywhere you need to go and aren't nice to be on.

They are also simply too expensive that's why no one takes them imo.

Why spend $2,500-$5,000 and your trip takes ~30+ hours when you can spend $650 and get there in a few hours via flying

it's expensive but it's $500.

you dont have to go first CLass.

Indeed, a few years ago I spent a couple hundred bucks to travel from DC to LA (in a seat, not a cabin). It took 3 days and was only a little cheaper than a flight that would have taken five hours, but it was something I always wanted to do. But if it were competing on price and/or convenience, long range train travel in the US almost always loses to flights except for in the Northeast corridor (and even then its at best a tossup)

Flying a turboprop from Yakushima to Kagoshima on my way back to Tokyo was a highlight of my trip. Especially the domestic airport lounge with shoe-less tatami mat areas to hang out.

I think you miss the point. Think of the movie Titanic, where people were on the boat for a very long time, as opposed to merely an overnight trip.

That is similar to how some of these boats look like, just more modern. Here is an example with pictures https://www.ferry-sunflower.co.jp/en/ (disclaimer, I never went that route, the ones I went with were less glamorous, more modern, but still nice) But yeah, it is mostly one night, because the distance is within Japan.

There are good overnight ferries from England to France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Cheap too.

We live in France and often spend the summer visiting family in the north of England. For a family of four, it works out about the same price to take the Rotterdam to Hull night ferry (outside cabin, meals and all) as it would to go through Calais and spend the night in a hotel instead.

And then it’s 2 hours of driving instead of 8 at the end.

Even when plans take us south, we’ll often take a night ferry from Portsmouth instead of the tunnel, just because it’s a better experience for roughly the same price.

Spain, Shetland, Channel Islands too. Sadly the old overnights to Denmark and Norway no longer run.

Loads in the Baltic and Mederteranian too, Spain to the Canaries and Mallorca, Sicily to Naples, Venice and many other Italian ports to Greece, several in Greece. Alas no longer a ferry from Greece to Cyprus/Israel/Egypt.

Bulgaria to Georgia too [0], cross the caspian sea [1].

[0] https://horizonhunt.com/en/a-slightly-differen-cruise-ferry-...

[1] https://www.madornomad.com/caspian-sea-ferry/

I really wish the ferry over to Norway still ran, but the one I just missed by a couple of years ran from Denmark up to Shetland, then to Faroe and Iceland. I had wanted to ride up to Shetland and then take the bike up further. I think you can still do it as a foot passenger, but there is no vehicle service.

> Here in Japan, some remote islands, you can travel overnight boat.

I'm sure there are many overnight ferries all over the world and I can't say I have traveled with many, but one I can recommend is the overnight ferry from Ziguinchor/Senegal to Dakar – it's reasonably priced (for a foreigner), and the cabins are very comfortable and even include a shower!

Meanwhile, the 3-day ferry from Puerto Montt (central Chile) to Puerto Natales (Patagonia) is very expensive (> 500 USD per person for the most basic cabin) and very unreliable (expect last-minute cancelations).

Corsica to Marseilles has an overnight ferry, at least back in 2000, but I don't think it's has sleeper cabins, more set up like an overnight flight, but a big cruise ship form factor. Instead of cabins they had space for cars. They had the option of getting a ticket without a seat so you just roam around the boat and find an open space, including outside on the decks.

> with a place to stay, lounge, and eat

As clearly seen in the Indiana Jones movie number 3, with Sean Connery. Loved these scenes!

Long-distance trains in Russia are still like that. They often have a dedicated restaurant carriage.

Though I don't know who would want to spend a week traveling from Moscow to Vladivostok on a train when you can just fly, and that'll be cheaper as well.

It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.

Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above.

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.

I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it.

Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.

Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.

Air isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft

50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.

That statistic doesn’t mean much.

The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.

Fun fact, the air quality on aeroplanes got worse after they banned smoking, because they could cut costs by re-circulating the same air for longer.

Recirculated air is still a thousand times cleaner than air with cigarette smoke in it.

You are naively assuming the only really dangerous part of recirculated air is nicotine byproducts.

Bacteria and virus loads are far more dangerous. Cigarettes take longer than a couple weeks to kill.

Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.

That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes

In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome.

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.

I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable.

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).

I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too.

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?

What adverse health implications from vaping are there?

Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default.

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.

The vast majority of that CDC information page is about the health effects of nicotine itself. There's a relative lack of specific information about the health risks of the vapor. "Cancer-causing chemicals" is vague (I live in California, I see prop 65 signs all over the place, I ignore them like every good Californian). "Heavy metals" is also vague - is the amount of tin that I might inhale via vaping actually a problem? Is it significantly more than if I lived in an area with a tin mine or something?

I'm not claiming that vaping is safe in some absolute sense, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some meaningful health risks. I personally do not vape myself because the times I've tried it, I've found getting the vapor into my lungs to be very uncomfortable. But it does seem like it's a strict health improvement over tobacco smoke, given that the CDC can't articulate a specific harm to the lungs caused by vaping.

Did you scroll down at all? I’m counting at least 5 risks that are not nicotine.

vapor has been used for medicine delivery for a long time, especially for patients who can't swallow pills.

Also gov regulation is not the only form of regulation. Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.

> Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.

Not really:

https://mjalterlaw.com/the-ford-pinto-memo-the-cost-to-repai...

I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect.

Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/

No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.

Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.

That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed.

While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all.

This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.

But without the inordinately deleterious effects of smoking, why is it a bad thing? Nicotine is a powerful nootropic and enhances cognitive function. If there was a healthy way to get it into the body, it would be celebrated as a good thing. The comparison to look at is caffeine and coffee. Is a coffee addict someone we look down on, and hope they would quit?

I'm not arguing that vaping is healthy, just that, culturally, we should examine how much the argument against vaping is because of the history of smoking and the culture surrounding it, rather than an objective consideration of the benefits and consequences of the activity.

(Ftr, imo disposable vapes are absolutely the worst.)

I don’t really think it’s fair to compare vaping to drinking coffee. But there are plenty of people who have given up coffee for health reasons. And it’s much easier to cut down on drinking coffee than vaping (from a dependency standpoint)

Alcohol and alcoholism is probably a better comparison here.

But the thing that worries me the most about vaping is:

1. The frequency in which people vape. It’s almost never just a couple of puffs a day to help with concentration. It’s usually just as heavy as when people smoked. And it’s much easier to lose track of how much you vape compared with drinking coffee (I had a friend who, for months, didn’t even realise he was vaping the equivalent of 40 packs of cigarettes a day because he just bought the same solution each time without thinking about it’s concentration)

2. The fact that you’re pulling hot gas into your lungs. Yeah it’s significantly better than smoking but we don’t really know the long term effect this might cause. And by long term, I mean people who vape heavily for years.

We could all be walking ourselves into another health crisis in 20 or 40 years but “it’s ok because it isn’t as bad as smoking”.

I hear stories all the time about people trying to hack their diet, or brain, or whatever biological. And it so often ends up going wrong. From people adding caffeine to their protein drinks and accidentally ODing, to other people having serious side effects for “herbal remedies”. It’s all just nuts when we’ve already known for millennia what a healthy diet and exercise looks like.

And this is my complaint about vaping. When it’s used to help people from quitting smoking then I’m all for them vaping. But when it’s used as just another recreational drug but sold as a “healthy alternative”, well that’s when I’m going to take issue.

If fentanyl had 1/100th the death rate of heroin we absolutely would be celebrating it. That’s what we’re discussing here. I don’t think you understand how bad smoking is.

I understand it just well. And if people only used vaping as a substitute for smoking then I’d be in your camp too.

But that isn’t what’s happening. New people who never smoked are vaping too. And we don’t know what the long term (30+ year effects) of vaping is. So we could still be complacently walking ourselves into a major health crisis.

So we have to ask ourselves: should we really be encouraging people to vape? And by that, I don’t mean to smokers who are trying to quit. I mean to everyone including those who have never smoked.

People in this very thread have literally talked about vaping like it’s a healthy lifestyle choice. And that’s entirely the wrong messaging.

We don’t actually know the lung cancer rates of vaping yet because the population of people who have been doing it for 30+ years is zero.

I’m not even advocating for banning vapes, just maybe not having free market capitalism for new potentially harmful product categories by default.

There are populations of people that have been exposed to fog machines daily for that duration of time as part of their jobs. This isn’t a complete unknown.

Also vaping isn’t even new at this point. We’re at probably 20 years now of the first vape pens hitting the US mainstream (the ones they made look like cigarettes).

Basically, you’re saying “we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Vaping and smoking are two essentially separate health concerns. Why can’t we focus on both at the same time? Are we cognitively impaired as a society and public health apparatus?

The fact that the reduction in smoking usage and lung cancer rates is commendable is not mutually exclusive from having a desire not to grow a whole new form of nicotine addiction in a new generation.

If you look at usage graphs, smoking was already declining, and then vaping exploded in popularity in just the last 4 years or so. Smokers have largely not been replacing their smoking with vaping. The majority of picking up vapes are new users who have never smoked.

Citation needed.

There are now vaping bans that have pushed people to pouches.

The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.

And unlike cigarette butts, they stick to the parking lot. Lovely!

The pouches are great, a clean way to get Nic with very few adverse health problems as a result.

Yeah, but nicotine itself can still be problematic for mental health. It really depends on what you consider an "adverse problem".

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.

absolutely not true

they erode your gums

and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand

proof?

Nicotine has both positive and negative effects but the impact on hypertension can cause pretty serious adverse health problems for some heavy users.

on the contrary, I strongly believe that tobacco companies are the driving force behind the attempts to equate vaping and smoking. idk about the current year, but tobacco companies had little to no influence over the vaping market during its early years. the hardware was 5% American from small companies and 95% Chinese, the nicotine fluid had local producers everywhere because of how cheap and easy it is to make. almost all early adopters were people who wanted to quit smoking, and a lot of them succeeded.

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.

Vaping has its share of mystery chemicals too, though

the flavorants are fairly mysterious, yeah. we know diacetyl is bad to inhale, we don't know how many others are. but if you DIY, only propylene glycol and nicotine are strictly required. vegetable glycerin and flavorants are optional.

I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.

Or, maybe do neither?

if you aren't already a smoker? yes, absolutely. but if you are, and you are not the one in ten who has the iron will to quit cold turkey and never relapse, you're better off getting your nicotine fix delivered by ANY medium other than toxic smoke.

Which comes back to my original complaint: vaping has grown so exponentially that there are people vaping who were never old enough to have started smoking.

Flavorless VG is pretty much mystery free. At that point you only need to worry about what’s coming off the actual coils.

I think the argument is that vaping is far more addictive for young people because of exactly what you say. Does not feel harmful and they end up very addicted at higher doses of nicotine than cigarettes

so let it only be sold to adults, sure. I'm just saying that equating vaping to smoking is absurd, because it's not nicotine that breaks your heart and your dick and gives you cancer, it's the smoke.

Vaping is still objectively horrible for the lungs.[0] And I would be slower to argue about the cancer. Do we know yet? It is a young vice.

[0]https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/evali

> Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while.

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”

My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized.

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.

I bet some individuals would bring back smoking in submarines in a heartbeat, if offered suitable sponsoring...

Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?"

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.

It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms:

> (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.

what makes an inoperable ashtray? full? holes in the bottom?

I suppose the idea makes sense but the wording is amusing - I think of ashtrays as a static object, I can't imagine myself "operating" an ashtray

They are typically a V shaped receptacle that is flush with the wall and flips out.

The hinge jamming or becoming detached would make it inoperable.

Ok now thats wild!

If you're wealthy enough $250 is just the price of smoking (especially for someone that can afford a 1st class seat). I wonder why they don't have escalating non-monetary punishments?

Jim Simons got so tired of paying these, he bought a private plane to save money. To say he was a prolific smoker is an understatement.

Gross.

I assumed you were talking about who I know as james Simons, but just googled him to make sure there wasn't someone else, and yeah - first pic on Google is him with a cigarette. Also learned it was lung cancer that took him out, though he did make it to 86 which isn't bad.

Then there's George Harrison, who died of lung cancer way too young.

Jim Simons, mathematician and hedge fund manager (1938–2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons

You'd think they'd just ban repeat offenders.

> ash trays give them a safe place to put it out

ha. i always thought they were remnants from old airplane plans that were too much effort to update to remove them. thanks for that

Amazing that lighters are allowed in the cabin

They're hardly more dangerous than a lithium battery!

Can a flick of the thumb create a flame with the kinds of lithium-ion batteries allowed on planes?

Mate, are you joking?

Do you seriously think a fag lighter with a self extinguishing flame is more dangerous than a burning lithium battery.

Seriously?

I seriously think that the kinds of batteries (intentionally) allowed on planes are designed to avoid bursting into flame. Even if such batteries store more potential energy than common pocket lighters.

I.e. a lighter is likely more dangerous in practice.

It's counterintuitive, but I've heard an explanation that the alternative - they decide to dispose their cigarette into the bin full of flammable paper waste - is much worse.

Possibly also: in toilets antifreeze such as methanol diluted in water can be used for freeze protection at low concentrations but is flammable and hazardous at higher concentrations.

The ashtrays are there, even today, because it is suspected that this flight [0] went down when someone disposed a cigarette butt in the lavatory trash, causing a fire.

A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_820

> 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.

> took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings

I don't believe they convinced the FAA twin is safer, just that it meets the necessary safety margins. Airlines want them to meet that regulation for fuel efficiency, but I'd want a source that they're actually safe-er, instead of simply safe enough

Boeing proved it safer. The reason is the increased complexity of more engines increased the risk of a major problem.

My source is I was told this by the engineers who where involved.

Now see, the worst part is, I believe you. Your username pops up frequently enough, and is recognizable enough, that I consider you a reasonable, thoughtful person. And the rationale makes sense - juggling multiple engines is extremely complex

But now way in hell can I, in good conscience, repeat that without a source

> But now way in hell can I, in good conscience, repeat that without a source

googling "why are twin engine jets safer than quad engine jets?" should provide the needed information.

Not necessarily safer but safe enough. A modern 4 engine jet should still be safer than the 2 engine equivalent

tldr for the wikipedia article:

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.

Obligatory Admiral Cloudberg blog link (they're strangely hard to google): https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-crash-of-varig-fligh...

Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.

It's also very dependent on where you live I think.

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.

Check the ancient shows Sex and the City and The nanny ... and you will see a different NY.

Yes, its incredible how much the culture around smoking changed in 25 years

It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon.

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.

I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst.

Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.

> adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon

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.

> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke.

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 parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad.

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.

it also did not seem to impact lifespan for them

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

The boomers quit smoking decades ago.

I grew up mostly in a rural town, unwittingly away from lead gasoline fumes.

In the first half of the 20th Century war was the leading cause of a great many men and some women dying in their 20s and 30s .. and to a lesser degree at later ages (if in occupied territories, etc).

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.

Kids today may think they're smarter than boomers because they don't smoke. But instead they smoke marijuana. There's nothing smart about that.

Combusted cannabis doesn’t have the cancer outcomes associated with combusting with nicotine. Same for second hand smoke.

Cannabis is not laced with perfumes and additives as a rule, as commercial cigarettes are. Cannabis has properties that pair well with physical and cardiovascular activity, unlike cigarettes, even when smoked.

Cannabis habits in youth are also displacing booze and associated lifestyle risks and lifelong impacts (early and unplanned kids from intoxicated hookups, drunk driving, among others).

There is a spectrum of outcomes, moving towards outcomes that are less harmful and provocative of third parties symptoms is better for everyone involved (hospitals & taxpayers too). That’s about being more informed and empowered not smarter. Perfect is nigh impossible, harm mitigation and outcome maximization is what we’re doing, refining the window over time.

yeah its awesome, the only side effect is mental illness and dementia

It’s a little bit smarter because cannabis smoke airs out in a relatively short period of time, compared to tar from cigarette smoke permanently ruining basically everything it touches.

If cannabis smoking also offsets alcohol or other drug use, that seems like a win. I have never seen a person get violent after smoking cannabis, much the opposite.

A fun smoking story.

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!

Endurance, a documentary novel about the Shackleton adventure, detailed a list of horrible things they endured: their leather clothes and sleeping bags rotting, subsistence on penguin meat cooked over penguin-fat-fueled stoves, frequent visits to the borderlines of hypothermia and frostbite...

But it seemed like The Day The Tobacco Ran Out was the hardest of all for them to endure.

I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it.

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.

It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's. Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests. Nobody gave it a second thought. Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects.

One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum. The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.

Yeah, that was my first thought too - why not just ban smoking on the airship altogether? But then again, before smoke detectors were invented, it was better to provide a place where people could smoke under monitored conditions than have them smoke clandestinely somewhere where it might be dangerous...

The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...

When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.

I remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.

As was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.

Elementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day.

If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.

Yeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.

I vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now).

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.

Think these bins persisted on some aircraft until fairly recently. Maybe 10 yrs ago?

Ha my first ceramic project in elementary school art class was an ashtray. Smoking was everywhere.

I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.

It makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.

I would expect it to be the other way around.

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.

Non smokers did get lung cancer [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death

Yes, exactly my point.

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.

this agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.

> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.

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%.

About 1/2 of all people who ever died from smoking-related causes were non-smokers.

Cite?

Yeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes.

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.

I remember flying in the 80s (and early nineties in parts of Europe) and always got 'air-sick' which made flying awful. Only after smoking was banned did I realise I wasn't motion sickness but it was instead poisoning from the smokers around me. My parents would book non-smoking seats and we'd be 1 row in front of the smokers...wild times

So true. My parents would bring out ashtrays when we had guests.

I don’t know if it would help anyone else, but personally, watching the movie The Insider kind of permanently put me off from smoking. Jeffrey Wigand is/was an incredibly inspiring figure and I think of him every time I see cigarettes.

https://youtu.be/MGOb29aePyc?is=CKyo1UM-dkiRHdWa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand

Even though may parents didn't smoke, and there was a lot of anti-smoking education around me, I grew up around a lot of smokers.

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.

I never smoked because I knew I'd like it.

But there are a couple photos of me "smoking" as I was trying to look cool.

This story reminds me of the game Oxygen Not Included.

> 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.