Flying was also considered a luxury back then, but yeah keep whining about an generational difference while democracy is torn down around you.
A flight to France from NYC in 1955 was $310, which is the equivalent of about $3900 today. You can find that same flight for under $300 today.
Las Vegas to Los Angeles was only $13.70 or $171.88 in today’s money, you can find that for less than $50 today.
Even if you include the extra fees and everything today that were part of the base fare in the early days of flight, that only adds another 10% or so to the cost.
The reason that air travel today is so unpleasant is that it has been commodified. Airlines have to compete only on price, and it’s easy to search for the prices. Just 20 years ago it was extremely difficult for anybody except a travel agent to search for airlines prices. Because of that, people often stuck with a favourite airline or with whatever the travel agent recommended. Now, anybody can go to any number of sites and in a few seconds know every airline that flies between two cities with every schedule and every price.
Since every airline wants to make the sale, they make the price shown by the search the lowest one. Then, to get their profit margin back, they add on fees and make things that used to be built into the price.
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.
Used to? Oh you naive summer child.
Dude I’m 26 and got to smell the dying drag of that era. It doesn’t smell nearly as much like cigarettes, at least in my neck of the woods in SoCal don’t know how much the Finns or Franks smoke so mayhaps it’s different elsewhere.
I’ve got a dozen years on you and you’re lucky to have only caught the tail end of it. I had to put up with the whole world smelling until I was 18.
Saying naive summer child is redundant. Summer child means naive.
Banning smoking on planes is NOT a fumble
I tried ones similar to these the stevemre way, from Vietnam rations before they got absurdly expensive. They kicked hard like the Ukrainian cigarettes I had, they were both unfiltered. It’s actually kind of funny, the Ukrainian cigarettes inflicted so much pain–I don’t know how my dad smoked them–that I smoked my first cigar like a cigarette thinking this is fine.
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’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 read an anecdote somewhere recently that the air in planes during flights has more germs in it now than it did in the smoking days because they had to filter the air so much more because of the smoke.
No clue if its actually true or not.
Not sure if it’s the bacteria or just having fresh air cycled though the caben. Apparently it saves the airlines millions as they don’t have to replace filters and the system runs at a reduced capacity. Good to know someone is benefitting
Restrictions on in-flight smoking started in '88, when the oldest boomers were 43 and the youngest were
1424. The Greatest Generation were the ones who smoked like chimneys.The youngest boomers were about 25 not 14 in 1988.
You’re right, 24. My point still stands though
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.
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It’s because there’s also genetics at play. One person can die young doing everything right and another could be like your stepfather and live just about forever.
Then that gets people think “well how am I different? I’ll be just fine too!”
In my country there were ads that showed a smoker who had emphysema as part of an anti-smoking campaign.
They described it like taking a deep breath and then exhaling just a small puff, then inhaling that puff and repeating forever until you die.
Sorry for your stepfathers diagnosis.
“We had it all” is the message some people get from “you could never get away from the bloody cigarette smoke”?
If you were on a plane they had food you didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, they’d even do kosher and vegetarian options. Before that they would just give you something else you usually had to buy. The message is “boomers bitch and moan about how hard they worked when they had it easier than any generation before or since, especially white American boomers-they were handed luxury goods for free!”
It also used to be obscenely more expensive to fly
you weren’t getting the equivalent of ryanairs £13 gatwick to holland flights
Prices to fly seem pretty obscene right now tbf. Transatlantic over $700 per seat round trip at my last look.
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
You know Boomers didn’t have credit scores until after they had GenX and Millennials? Boomers didn’t grow up with as much red tape as we do
*if they were white
And male
Yeah women didn’t have bank accounts without a “hubby”
So now we see where we went wrong? /s
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.
Also, the company is allowed to absorb the competition to the point where no new players can compete for that market
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.
Yep, the 1% laugh their asses off about us fighting between ourselves.
Exactly, the 1% love it when its race fighting or blaming boomers or anybody else but them. Sad to see as they keep getting away with it.
Thank you. I’m always having to point out that boomers haven’t been voting significantly more conservative than liberal, and younger generations haven’t been voting significantly more liberal than conservative. It’s a stereotype, and an incorrect one. In fact, in 2024, GenX voted more conservative than boomers did.
Is this really enshittification?
Prior to the deregulation of the airlines under Carter, the federal government fixed all domestic airfares. Airlines could not compete against each other on price and could only compete on perks. Flying was insanely expensive. NY to LA was $820 in today’s dollars and you couldn’t just shop around airlines for a better price, while you can get the same flight for less than $240 now.
It’s not like flying got shittier while also getting more expensive. Flying is cheaper than it ever has been. The perks went down, sure. But so did the price. By a LOT.
Not really disagreeing with you, but I was curious if that $240 includes all the crazy fees they tack on now.
Yeah that is all in, fare, fees, and taxes. Flying is dirt cheap lol.
I feel like it should be expensive because of the externalized costs , but I don’t have any real data for that
They call them “externalized costs” specifically because they can ignore them. Things like pollution don’t cost a firm money in a measurable way unless they’re carbon taxed or something like that.
long distance calls from airplanes were $5 a minute.
If our grandparents had taken a stand back then and stopped buying shit these corporations would have never gotten so bold. Yeah we should start now (and many are) but we’re in a much worse position than they were.
Gen Z is just as hooked with propaganda and brainrot from social media, if not more so. It’s insane how consumerist the younger generations are, falling for scam after scam, I think it’s peptides now.
This generational warfare shit is insane. Many boomers are working at Walmart because they don’t have enough to retire and are also getting fucked over. There are plenty of poor, progressive bloomers, just as there are an astounding number of gen z conservatives and red pill bros.
Let’s admit that no one is immune to propaganda, and unfortunately most people in all generations are quick to fall for right wing bs.
I think its more nuanced than that, you have to remember that we have the internet, while our grandparents did not. Its harder to notice enshittification without it, imo.
I don’t need to the internet to see the product I’m looking at in the store is of lesser quality or smaller amount than the previous one.
This post misses two aspects: flying used to be an expensive luxury, only, and smoking on flights was fucking disgusting.
I mean yeah, but those classes do have some demographics associated with them. The average age of the wealthiest Americans is 65-68, the average age of a CEO is 61, and the average age of a member of the Senate is 66 years old.
I don’t think that class war precludes intergenerational disputes, it’s hard to completely separate class from culture, and culture from the age of the generation.
Not that it should have to be either or, but I’ll take less leg room over their gross smoke-filled cabin any day.
It’s going to be standing seats before too long. All the airline CEOs have been drooling over those for years.
It’ll probably radically shift to laying down. They’ve wanted to bring this seating arrangement back for a lot longer
Bonus points: they simply wont take you if you are above a certain weight.
Do like the standing roller coasters! Then we can just use AI to fly the planes (no need for high cost/high stressed pilots). If the AI flies like shit, everyone is already secured with metal shoulder thingies to keep from flying (pun intended) all over the cabin.
But how to deal with bathroom breaks? Mandatory catheters! The cost of “sanitizing” between flights surely isn’t that much, and if people refuse - they can be held liable for any accidents.
/s
They’ll sometimes hand you a small off brand clorox wipe to clean of the catheter before you use it
I wonder if there will be a remembrance culture for the mass deaths caused by climate change like there is for germans with the holocaust. Like: “Grandma, why did great grandad not do anything to stop the death of hundreds of millions when everyone knew it was going to happen?”
I think you’re being a wee bit too optimistic about this whole future thing, emmissions are still rising and we’re heading into massive worldwide famines and droughts in the forseeable future.
Yes but humanity wont be wiped out, it will just suffer a lot. Maybe it will be billions of dead even, but we will figure something out as we always do and then we will say “wasnt so bad after all right?” and learn nothing from it.
90% of earths topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030
Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity.
Global carbon emissions are still rising
The world is likely to exceed a key global warming target soon but the earths albedo with the declining sea ice and lack of cloud cover will impact these numbers massively and isn’t being predicted for, which means that 4.5c above the baseline by 2060 is now possible.
Oh and this El Nino is so powerful the fucking graph needed to be made bigger today and all of the above is and will continue to be impacted by this as it progresses.
So yeah, unless we can somehow rapidly evolve physics defying magic to handwave all our problems away before basically everything dies, basically everything will die.
E/sp
You can put quite a lot of nines after the decimal point if more than 99% of people die without humanity reaching its lowest population in history, so the post you’re replying to is right that humans are likely to persevere, and knowing humans, there’s a good chance that if industrial civilisation starts again (which is less likely - you need lots of accessible cheap coal to make it worth putting up with rudimentary steam engines long enough to develop good ones), lessons won’t be learned and we’ll pollute ourselves to death again.
2 people arent enough. Who is going to repopulate the Earth? Elon Musk? With what? His male buddies? They going to invent male pregnancy?
With no soil to grow food in and a climate too hot and unstable to support crop growth, we’re not going to be persevering for very long.
Humans have existed a lot longer than crop growth.
Cool cool, so what are we going to eat then?
With all the pollinators dying off over the next +1.5c, and 90% of the top soil depleted by 2050, and ever more erratic climates world wide, plants will not grow.
The oceans will very soon be so hot and acidic that the phytoplancton at the base of the oceans ecosystem, will dissolve. So sea food isn’t going to be an option either.
Oooh, maybe animals on land, right? Well, yeah no, without crops livestock is unsustainable and considering humans and livestock currently makes up 95% of the worlds mammal biomass and the remaining 5% can’t survive without food… looks like that’s not going to be an option for feeding the ‘persevering’ either.
