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

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 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.

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.

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

VW Beetle?

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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

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

Amazing that lighters are allowed in the cabin

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Fyi, you appear to be shadowbanned and it's not clear why. You might consider sending an email to admin to work that out?

There’s a video on the first link of a landing in Belgrade that’s deeply funny. “We departed late and arrived early, A Boeing 737 would never be able to do that”

“Why are you reading out numbers to me like I am an old man”

That's always what I've said too, so I'm now proposing to put all the "want to be murderers" together with folks who want suicide assistance. Make one move, get two results or whatever they say.

> I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human.

Makes sense, "problem" is a human invention and without humans on the planet, there wouldn't really be any problems anymore.

No, the passengers were in a gondola off the bottom of the airship, the lift gas was concentrated at the top of the airship, some 100 feet above, above an asbestos ceiling. The real dangers were:

- being early in the days of flying. One airship disaster (the British R101) was the airship being extended, not tested carefully, and rushed into service for a political deadline. Another had the vents sealed shut so it hit its altitude ceiling. The Graf Zeppelin was one of the safest aircraft ever flown - a million miles without accident in the 1930s when aeroplanes were crashing a lot. Even the Hindenburg disaster killed 35 people, most of its passengers and crew survived.

- Using cow intestines stitched together by hand to make the Hydrogen lift cells. The stitching leaves holes which could let air mix with the lift gas.

- Many airship accidents were related to mooring, and having humans grab onto mooring lines and having humans try to pull a 7 million cubic foot balloon against the wind and that going wrong.

If we can now do high pressure Hydrogen powered cars, tanks of it in gas stations in urban areas and Hydrogen powered aircraft, and people think that can be safe, we ought to be able to achieve room temperature and pressure airship lift gas with it more safely than they could in the 1920s.

What if an irrational person was aboard.

Feels like this may run into a no true scotsman but this is demonstrably false if you look at the number of marijuana smokers in countries where they impose severe penalties (up to life) on them

I believe real problem was the lighters. Not the cigarettes. And hydrogen was not that risky. Problem was more so that the envelop was too burnable.

Link?