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.
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
The hinge jamming or becoming detached would make it inoperable.
ha. i always thought they were remnants from old airplane plans that were too much effort to update to remove them. thanks for that
Do you seriously think a fag lighter with a self extinguishing flame is more dangerous than a burning lithium battery.
Seriously?
I.e. a lighter is likely more dangerous in practice.
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.
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
My source is I was told this by the engineers who where involved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
Bacteria and virus loads are far more dangerous. Cigarettes take longer than a couple weeks to kill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really:
https://mjalterlaw.com/the-ford-pinto-memo-the-cost-to-repai...
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”.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I’m not even advocating for banning vapes, just maybe not having free market capitalism for new potentially harmful product categories by default.
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).
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.
The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.
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.
they erode your gums
and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand
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.
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.
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
I grew up mostly in a rural town, unwittingly away from lead gasoline fumes.
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.
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.
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.
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!
But it seemed like The Day The Tobacco Ran Out was the hardest of all for them to endure.
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.
Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.