20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.
The problem is how do we even start to evaluate the cost of prevention. Measures? We have equipment and labour costs, that's easy to measure but the data is not made available. But then what is the opportunity cost on those who are inflicted the measures. A person goes on holiday and can perhaps browse a book while queuing for an hour to go through the security checks, a business traveller is simply standing there, unable to even make a phone call due to lack of privacy.
Also, if we spend 1 trillion usd on say the prevention of terrorism, and we "only" suffered 20 death in the United States during that period, it doesn't mean halving the expense would only double the death toll. We put measures and have no tool to measure their effect, high number of variables, and each of their weight evolve dynamically.
I think we better spend time educating the media industry to somewhat control the increasing rate of fear inducing columns published each second. And if they don't learn, regulate them since we are already regulating countless industries for that matter.
Expensive 'raise arms under arrest' full body scanners aren't advertised as opt-in by TSA, but they are voluntary. I always go through standard metal detector only.
Maybe the masses don't care enough about cost/ benefit and allow career beauracrats to run wild designing 'security'.
Did you know the food store workers near the gates walk around TSA screening at most airports? Crazy.
People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
That is absolutely not true, at least not in the way anyone means.
Humans are "terrible" at remembering numbers. The average-ability human has average ability, obviously, that is tautological. But as a whole, humans are not good at remembering numbers.
A reasonable question is, what does "good" even mean? Well that depends on context. We are worse at remember numbers than computers are. We are worse at remember numbers than the same human, but with pen and paper. We are worse than some animals.
Obviously, there is no objective "good" or "bad". We are better than some animals, etc.
But when someone says that humans are terrible at evaluating risk, they usually imply that we are bad at it as compared to risk evaluation done with real calculations, and that is internally consistent. And that is something that IS somewhat objective, and most humans fail as compared to this objective standard (e.g., lots of contradictions in risk decisions).
>People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
I actually agree with the spirit of the post, it's just that one thing that bothered me.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-...
> If terrorism were a disease, injury, or mental disorder, its DALY would rank in the bottom decile of the 291 diseases and injuries included in the Global Burden of Disease (Murray et al. 2012). Specifically, in Table 7 it is shown that terrorism would rank 266th, i.e., in the bottom 9%. Relative to the diseases that plague mankind, terrorism has limited consequences.
Additionally, it's difficult to measure the cost of in-action when responding to an erratic phenomenon like terrorism.
And, to be clear, the police treat white Americans very poorly as well. It's just that they somehow manage to treat black Americans even worse.
Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much.
https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm
There were 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019.
The number of unarmed black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began.
The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of black homicides.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-ho...
It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties.
The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives.
For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there's a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.
For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats.
"While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."
Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction.
If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust.
Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.
People don’t investigate statements that conform to their biases. And if the statement is something they don’t want to believe, people will deploy the full force of their “critical thinking” toolkit to fight it, while allowing themselves to become vulnerable to all sorts of fallacies and cognitive blinders as long as it only obscures the inconvenient facts.
Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.
Like those lists of "over 500 scientists have signed a document saying 5G is harmful to health so it must be true". When actually half of the people on the list aren't real people and the rest of them are political scientologists, dentists and people who know absolutely nothing about radio waves.
If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.
Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.
Pretty hard to miss the intent.
Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[1][2] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
There is approx. 393,000,000 firearms owned by civilians in the US. About 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership
Handguns accounted for 91% of firearm homicides.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
I'm not sure how anyone can argue that a population with weapons can't hold off a tyrannical government. It is the same reason Marx said that under no means should we disarm the populous. I think people often forget that a government can't just kill all its population. Not only can you not rule over the dead but you also are going to have a hard time interacting in global trade (thanks globalism, but this even held true in the 1700's). It is kinda odd that this sentiment also often comes out of a country where some farmers fought off the country with the biggest navy and had an empire so great that the sun never set on it. Civil wars are extremely costly to countries. Also I'm not sure why everyone thinks that people from the military (including generals and entire battalions) wouldn't defect. That's also pretty common when looking at history.
With help from the country with the biggest army and the biggest ongoing beef with the country with the biggest navy.
But, I guess, its still a little surprising, since that part gets minimized in the farmers national mythology.
Afghanistan was lost because of our tolerance of corruption and intolerance for spending money on a speck of dirt. Oppression of the US will be far more worth the money to a tyranny.
If the second amendment actually said what gun people say it does (literalist/"strict constructionalist"), then I can use these arms as well:
- grenades?
- bazookas?
- artillery?
- explosives?
- chemical weapons?
- biological weapons?
- nuclear/dirtynuke weapons?
Where are you, as an apparently ardent 2nd amendment person likely living in at least a suburban population density comfortable with allowing your fellow Americans to arm themselves with?
At somewhere along that chain, almost all non-crazy 2nd amendment people "nope out" of allowing those arms. Maybe your typical gun rights person would allow grenades, MAYBE bazookas.
Major explosives or anything else? Nope.
But you'd need to get to the chem/bio/nuke arms to have any real deterrent to the US Army.
Your pea shooter militia is a fantasy. The US army has more than cannons, horses, and muskets now.
That's the whole thing. I think the most literal interpretation is that people have a right to bear arms, and you cant infringe that, by telling them they can't bear any arms. Obviously reasonable people will differ here, but I don't think it's fair to say that it unambiguously grants the right to bear any kind of arms at all.
So you've already stated that it isn't reasonable to allow the other "arms". So why is anything more than a single shot barrel-loaded rifle allowed?
Of course the reason is that there is a massive industry in making guns and a rabid source of people that can be scared into buying their wares. The reason the laws are the way they are is because of the economics of the lobby and not any principle.
It's unreasonable to restrict ownership of arms unless you want to restrict violence to the government and organized criminals, which the founders most certainly did not intend.
Police killed more Americans in 2019 than mass shooters, how can you make an argument in favor of the cops and courts controlling weaponry? Did you miss the police brutality protests last summer?
I also don't understand how citizens of the US are meant to protect themselves against police with the weapons they're free to carry. Is the idea that US citizens are going to use their weapons to resist the police from arresting them? Isn't that just going to cause no end of bloodshed?
The vast majority of these incidents happen to hardened criminals that almost no one in their right mind would support. A small fraction of these incidents involve innocent people, or people involved in situations where violence is not the answer and de-escalation would have been a better outcome.
The police have a large amount of support because the people involved in these incidents are, generally speaking, bad people that the majority would prefer to be in prison. Most people don't think the police are an oppressive force that should be fought against with lethal violence.
Certainly the founders—you know, the violent, enlightened revolutionaries who lead the first colonial overthrow in history—wouldn't have favored limiting certain arms to only thugs of a future tyrannical government. Why would they write the first Constitution in history to enable future state-sponsored goons to persecute the people of the United States?
After McDonald v. Chicago, no restrictions on arms appear Constitutional (hence the collapse of intrastate weapon laws over the past decade), except, I suppose, as punishment for a crime due to the 13th.
The founders didn't want a federal military, they wanted each state to run their own military.
The founders didn't want a strong federal government, they wanted to states to be highly sovereign.
The founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.
The government completely changed after the civil war with the 14th amendment. The constitution was written primarily to limit the powers of the federal government. States were free to put, for example, requirements on religion to run for office.
McDonald v. Chicago would have been appalling to the founders, because it's the federal government trampling over the rights of a state government.
I'm mostly going off Jefferson's "tree of liberty" letter [1], maybe there was dissent amongst other founders?
As far as federal vs. state military, I dunno, references? Each state would have their own navy...? Doesn't seem to fit with Jefferson's willingness to launch a preemptive strike on African pirates at the beginning of his presidency [2].
Agreed on strong states, hence the Tenth, and the impact of the Fourteenth, though I'm actually currently trying to get a better handle on that one (e.g. not entirely clear on equal protection yet).
Disagree on McDonald, doesn't seem like the design allows for states to pass laws that take away rights explicitly enumerated in the federal Constitution. States can "exceed" enumerated rights (like California's affirmative right to free speech), but can't cancel them out. Any sources suggesting otherwise?
1. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefffed.html#105
2. https://www.city-journal.org/html/jefferson-versus-muslim-pi...
Depends on which founding father you were talking about. Jeffersonians preferred weak central government and autonomous states while Hamiltonians preferred strong central government. It's what lead to the creation of political parties in Washington's administration.
>The founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.
The Bill of Rights limits both, that's why both state, local and federal laws can be deemed unconstitutional.
> The Bill of Rights limits both
No, it doesn’t.
Guarantees equivalent to most provisions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the States through the 14th Amendment under the Incorporation Doctrine.
https://sixthamendment.org/the-right-to-counsel/history-of-t...
The founders very much didn't at the time of the founding. The framers by the time of the Constitution (a little over a decade later, and many of the same people) had moved quite a bit toward a strong central government based on the immediately-revealed practical problems with the abstract vision at the founding in functioning in the real world. Woth more experience, more practical problems were revealed; the Civil War being a key, but far from the only important, point in that process.
The Solonian Constitution was created by Solon in the early 6th century BC.[1] At the time of Solon the Athenian State was almost falling to pieces in consequence of dissensions between the parties into which the population was divided. Solon wanted to revise or abolish the older laws of Draco. Solon promulgated a code of laws embracing the whole of public and private life, the salutary effects[2] of which lasted long after the end of his constitution.
Under Solon's reforms, all debts were abolished and all debt-slaves were freed. The status of the hectemoroi (the "one-sixth workers"), who farmed in an early form of serfdom, was also abolished. These reforms were known as the Seisachtheia.[3] Solon's constitution reduced the power of the old aristocracy by making wealth rather than birth a criterion for holding political positions, a system called timokratia (timocracy). Citizens were also divided based on their land production: Pentacosiomedimnoi, Hippeis, Zeugitae, and Thetes.[4] The lower assembly was given the right to hear appeals, and Solon also created the higher assembly. Both of these were meant to decrease the power of the Areopagus, the aristocratic council. The only parts of Draco's code that Solon kept were the laws regarding homicide. The constitution was written as poetry, and as soon as it was introduced, Solon went into self-imposed exile for 10 years so he would not be tempted to take power as a tyrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solonian_Constitution
See also Aristotle's "Constitution of Athens", on the constitutions of Athens, Sparta and Thebes, and with a title that makes it clear that "constitution" was an established term at least since Aristotle's times.
Finally see wikipedia's article on pre-modern constitutions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Pre-modern_consti...
Modern constitutions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Modern_constituti...
And (modern) democratic constitutions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Democratic_consti...
For more examples of constitutions before the United States Constitution.
Sort by "date ratified": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions
Absolutely agreed though, it's a very internally inconsistent viewpoint from my perspective.
Why are we comparing to Afghanistan? You can look much closer to home - at America - and see that this specific armed population just spent half a decade doing absolutely jack shit about tyranny.
It's the same thing as the War on Terror. The enemy in the War on Terror is Terror, i.e. Fear. The only way to win the War on Terror is to overcome your fear and not sacrifice your principles because you're afraid.
The British had it in the 20th Century. Stiff upper lip. Or you'll do more damage to yourself than the enemy can.
Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.
Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.
That's interesting! Why would they hide such stats?
The pro-2A response to gun control requests based on crime is often to say "don't ban my guns - just make 'felon in possession of a gun' a life-without-parole offense".
Citation needed here. Especially in the south.
Most of them come from purchases at gun shows (as laws are considerably laxer on private sales). The serial numbers are filed off, then they're hidden in abandoned buildings by a person who rents the guns out to be used in murders. The same illegal guns are typically used in numerous murders, making it more difficult to trace them back to any particular person, if they are found.
It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like "improve mental health" and not "restrict who can buy a gun" or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people "alive" but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable.
But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team's constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> we did not have the ability to control for differences between the two countries including poverty, unemployment, health systems, cultural, or other differences
The authors go on to suggest that they may in fact be underestimating the amount of suicides that could be averted with reduced gun ownership, but there are an awful lot of confounding factors that are simply not addressed in this paper.
I think that this is a poor target. How do you set out directly targeting mental health? What are the biggest causes of mental health issues?
https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm
CDC lists causes such as childhood trauma, trauma from medical issues, biological factors, alcohol or drugs, and loneliness or isolation.
How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation? How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol?
> Use and misuse of alcohol, nicotine, and illicit drugs, and misuse of prescription drugs cost Americans more than $700 billion a year in increased health care costs, crime, and lost productivity.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior...
> Some must cope with the early loss of a parent, violence, or sexual abuse. While not everyone who faces these stresses develops a mood disorder — in fact, most do not — stress plays an important role in depression.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-dep...
This is a big interconnected problem. My point is that just giving directly to mental health resources rings hollow. A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people. Why do people want to kill themselves or others? Why does life suck so much for so many? We have a rotten system and drug addiction/gun violence/suicide are symptoms and not causes.
My 2 rambling cents.
I do agree that therapy and free healthcare would help and are needed, but alone they are not a solution.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11592622/this-is-fine-meme...
On many occasions in the past, I’ve found that doing anything often works better than doing nothing, like the US usually advocates.
Turns out that there are no perfect solutions, but there are a lot of partial solutions that in aggregate add up to the mental health the rest of the developed world has.
I did not say to do nothing. I said it will probably take a holistic approach. Holistic means look at the issue as a whole rather than trying to attack one symptom. A holistic approach would likely implement plenty of small partial solutions.
Politicians generally don't understand this. Average people don't understand this. But it's still true.
For example, before 9/11 the assumption was that hijackers would try to ransom the passengers for money, so it was better not to resist so they didn't hurt anybody. After 9/11, the assumption had to be that they were planning to crash the plane, at which point all the passengers resist and a hundred passengers can easily take on half a dozen hijackers and it's well worth the risk of one or two getting hurt in the process.
So by 9/12, another 9/11 was no longer possible. It was already solved. None of the government action that followed was actually necessary and the TSA is completely pointless.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive, mental health can incorporate a systems approach. It seems patently foolish to ignore lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, sleep or social factors like friends, family, religion & other communal institutions.
Ship 'em to North Korea. A little perspective will work wonders.
Not having your media contributing to hyper-polarization of your populace through algorithm enforced bubbling, or riling them up through fear mongering helps. Lack of public works may also be a contributing factor. One thing I will say for the Great Depression/New Deal generation: they didn't have anywhere near the isolation issues our generation seems to grapple with.
> How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol?
Inability to escape or alter their situation except by altered mental state. Get people something they can constructively do (and fairly pay then for their time) and it's amazing how positive coping skills materialize.
For those with non-economic contributing factors, a big part of it seems to be social enablement, removing them from the stressor, etc... Which a robust framework of social services may help more with as long as you don't start trying to turn reaching out into a life tainting thing (no publically available by default records for info brokers to suck up that would adversely effect future prospects).
Also, unironically, a better justice system, post-release process.
These aren't hard. Just not terribly popular, due to the fact you have to pay people to help other people improve their lot. Or literally just inspect to make sure people are effectively using resources available to get their stuff straight.
The pairing of politics to problem is a challenge in that solving a problem means shifting focus to a different problem set. A different problem set will likely emerge a different politics which is effectively a threat to the people engaged in the current politics.
While I agree with the message I don't think this will sell well. Many people do not even have the faintest idea of what depression is like and understand it as an illness. So they see it as a personal choice and therefore not a thing for the government to solve. Similar to drugs. This is of course despite the connections to environmental causes and government regulations. You greatly decrease rates of depression and drug usage, which are highly correlated, by the same thing. Making life better and less stressful. That even helps non-depressed and non-drug users.
Despite that, I think we should just talk about other types of gun violence. The vast majority of which involve hand guns. Which if you understand this, makes the national conversation seem extremely odd.
I'd encourage everyone to watch Sapolsky's lecture on Depression[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
[0^] My running hypothesis is that the since we have a new fiasco every other day that it causes over stimulation (like a stress response) and causes socio-motor retardation (analogous to psychomotor retardation)
It's important to point out that you can do comparisons between the US and other countries where guns are far more restricted and a lot of the US gun mortality shows up as other forms of suicide.
> because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose
Ineffective measures are actually politically superior: They don't cure their ill, so you can keep using them again and again.
If $random_gun_restriction actually worked passing it would diminish your ability to campaign on gun issues in the future. This bad incentive applies on all sides too, not just pro-gun control. The gun control lobby is one of the single most effective promotional tools of anti-gun-control politicians.
Not saying our focus on mass shootings over suicide necessarily makes sense, but the collective trauma of 20 kids dying in a school shooting is arguably higher than the equivalent number of deaths by suicides.
But we didn't really want to stomach the lifestyle changes that shifting off of petroleum as a fuel would require, so instead we went decided to bomb societies out of supporting terrorism and into democracy.
Even if one doesn't believe climate change is real, that's a pretty good reason to avoid burning petroleum to move around by driving EVs and taking public transit.
If traffics deaths varied by many magnitudes year to year you'd likely see a similar over reactions. I'm not saying I agree with this approach but it's not as simple as people make it out to be.
While I have significant grievances with the US justice and prison system, I'm okay with expending disproportionate resources to ensure that people don't take others' lives just because they want to or feel entitled to.
It's hazy now but I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope math in April 2020 to compare risk of death via SARS-CoV-2 infection vs. other causes. I think what I remember seeing was that if you're age 80+ getting COVID is similar to driving 10 million road miles in the US (NHTSA: 1.5 deaths per 100 million road miles; COVID: 15% mortality for infection in ages 80+). I think I remember being totally unable to evaluate the risk to a kid but maybe COVID infection is similar to driving 3000 road miles? (per upper bound at https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/). This mostly told me that driving was very risky.
Problems with comparing road miles to disease infection:
(1) being infected also means you're infectious; dying in a car crash doesn't spread exponentially to others
(2) I do not know how to reason about the long-term side effects of COVID on quality adjusted life years
> I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.
I do a qualitative analysis of this every couple of years: should I bike to work?
(1) Cardiovascular fitness improves from exercise
(2) You might get hit by a car and die (worrying about this adds stress even if you don't experience it).
The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11.
This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.
The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count, and is #24 out of 223 per capita with just a smidge under 2,000 deaths per million people.
If you think that's "stop[ping] all deaths no matter the cost" I'd love to hear what you think of my state of 1.8 million people with a grand total of 4 deaths.
This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.
The US is the 3rd largest country by population - and the two largest countries either A) Have no feasible way to count accurately or B) Deliberately don't report accurately.
> I'd love to hear what you think of my state
You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails. Los Angeles bulldozed sand into skateboard parks[1] because kids were playing... despite all data at the time (and since then) has showed children are not at severe risk at all. It went well into the "prevent any death, no matter the cost" territory for most of the past year.
Shutdown all the schools - force kids to stay at home in isolation - drive up teen suicide rates... but it doesn't matter because they weren't COVID deaths and the goal was to prevent all COVID deaths. We ignored all consequences of the policies we enacted - because the goal became zero COVID deaths. Goodhart's Law[2] might come into play here.
Self driving cars is another prime example. Spending billions and billions of dollars, countless man hours of research and engineering, selling a promise and vision - negligently killing people along the way - all so we can have some future where nobody dies from a vehicle? That's just not reality. The reality is people will just die from coding errors instead - but it's the pursuit of "zero lives lost" that drives that industry and fantasy right now.
[1] https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-...
Certainly possible that India has more deaths, but given that you've just described their death count as something which there is "no feasible way to count accurately", I'm not sure why you're so confident about the claim being patently false.
> You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails.
Yes. California has had ~1,700 deaths per million people, a solid 723x more per capita than the state I live in (South Australia). So again, I don't really see how you could believe that the COVID response there is being driven by people preventing deaths at all costs. If it was, they wouldn't have such a horrific death count.
> drive up teen suicide rates
Have you got any source for this? Similar claims were made in my country last year during a lockdown (that successfully eradicated the virus), and then when the national mental health organisation released their annual reports it turned out that suicide rates actually went down drastically during lockdown.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives. Going down that route gives us such wonderful things like corporations preferring to pay out damages instead of making product recalls (c.f. the Ford Pinto case). It gets quite cynical. But I guess in the minority here. All my "tech bros" think like that too. It's all about cold, hard statistics.
There is something to be said about "Vision Zero[1]" type projects, but as it stands I don't think the TSA is currently engaging in a deliberate such project.
What about when you measure the costs as lives vs. lives? E.g. spending X dollars on airport security saves Y lives, but spent on highway safety saves Z lives.
I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix.
And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).
Comparing murder to accidences or to fate in case of deathly diseases is inappropriate.
What is truly scary about it, though, are the people who are certain they can quantify those things, and convince others of it, too.
Most people who die in a car crashes would have been saved if we made the speed limit 25mph and enforced it with speed cameras, but that would be inconvenient for everyone else. There are plenty of very rare diseases that kill people each year, we don't spend as much money on them because it isn't worth it to just save a few lives each year relative to what we could be spending it on. Many flu deaths could be prevented each year if we just closed down every nonessential business during flu season, but we are OK with some people dying so we can gather socially, even if we don't have to.
I think doing cost benefit analysis for deaths and lost years of life would be great, and would allow us to make more logical decisions. Of course no one wants their child or family member to die, but the reality is that if you want to setup society to just stop deaths at all cost, you are going to have a pretty miserable population. And if you don't do any cost benefit, you will actually be allowing more people to die by spending money in places where it isn't the most effective.
For starters, we're more interested in the marginal average reduction of mortality per dollar invested rather than point in time risk. Like, the risk of flying on airplanes is fairly low relative to driving. But that's, in part, because we've already invested a huge amount into making air travel safe. It might not make sense to funnel future dollars into making air travel safe as opposed to cars. But if we were to lower that investment going forward, mortality would presumably go up. Because people aren't that irrational: Zooming through the air a mile in the sky, absent safety precautions, really is inherently less safe than driving on the ground.
That's extra true for something like security, where you're dealing with responsive opponents. The odds of a plane blowing up in a terrorist attack are low, but if the bad guys had a 100% successful method for blowing up a plane, they'd probably take it and the odds would go up.
Plus the odds also vary quite a bit based on the denominator too. For instance, the odds of death by flying are lower over the last X years. But if you were looking only at mortality risk from flying on the 737 Max in 2019, maybe that's different.
And then there's the non-mortality cost. Eating healthier food would reduce mortality quite a bit. But people like eating unhealthy things -- at some point, the extra life gained isn't worth it.
None of this is to say that the current degree of security theatre is worth it. Only that relative mortality is probably insufficient a measure.
An entire 9-11 load of deaths in car accidents occurs EVERY MONTH ever since. The disproportionate response shows up the fraud of the War on Terror, Patriot Act and things like TSA SOPs at airports.
You can compare it to any other cause of death or even merely injury.
Or you would encourage the already-sedentary people to go out even less.
As a silly hypothetical: Imagine that terrorism was really popular but completely thwarted by taking your shoes off at airports. Because its well known that the shoes always come off, the terrorists don't even try. And as a result your dashboard would show lots of money being spent removing shoes but no terrorism. Yet (in this silly example) if the shoe removal spending stopped people would be blowing up left in right, so it's actually a good investment.
Successful measures tend to erase their own effect, especially when applied to intelligent systems.
If you allow observations vs cost to be your guide you risk cutting spending on highly effective measures and preserving spending on measures that do not work (which leave lots of observations around)!
This is one of the reasons that randomized controlled trials are so much better than basic observational science.
The French government tried to tackle this issue. This lead to months of yellow-vest protests, close to a revolution at times. Some dude forced the door of a ministry with a bulldozer. Others set fire to a prefecture. Death threats everywhere. Small Guillotines were built. Etc. The protests were sill rocking after a year, and were put to a temporary stop due to COVID lock-down.
tl;dr: nobody would dare decrease the speed limits again.
It can differ from airport to airport. I traveled from Ottawa to Toronto often enough for it to be mindless but differences between two national airports in same province of same country on same airline still caught me if I went too much on autopilot.
And then I'd fly to Halifax and all my instincts went out the window :).
Sometimes it'd differ shift to shift. Agents would get mad at me for taking or not taking tablet from my bag. Mentioning "your colleague instructed me otherwise, can you kindly confirm the rule so I can comply in future" only gets you marked as belligerent - the power trip is definitely there :-/
I'm not even clear what the issue was; it was just a general "don't take your tablet out!!" as if it was an obvious rule that anyone with common-sense would understand, and clearly I was a fool the agent had no time for.
I kind of understand overall - At a busy airport, being overly conservative (taking out tablets, shoes, belts, coins etc when not needed) can be seen as "wasting people's time". It's the inconsistency of rules and their application that sometimes bugs me - There's no 100% winning strategy.
Then they'll most likely bring you to the only employee that's not a contractor.
I just try to look ahead and see what others are doing.
The answer to your (implicit?) question is that it doesn't work. The staff take the card from you at the start of the process, and once your bag is in the machine, they have no idea if it's yours. So far, every time this has happened, I"ve been singled out for additional security.
If I sound confused, it's because I am :). I don't get a pre-check card, it just shows up as a notation on my boarding pass. I scan it just like normal, then shove my phone into my backpack and toss it on the belt. No removing my shoes, belt, etc.
They also won't touch my bag, and I have to be the one to push it onto the feed belt of the scanner. They have to have a pretty good idea that it belongs to me.
Coincidentally, I just travelled through ATL a few weeks ago. It's never as smooth as my home airport (PDX) because it's a much busier airport, but I don't recall anything out of the ordinary happening.
(Not the person you replied to.)
These are different things. It has nothing to do with you or your eligibility, but the specific time and place.
If you're eligible for PreCheck and have it printed on your boarding pass, at some airports and security lines that don't have a PreCheck lane open, you're given a laminated card that the first agent tells you will accord some of the PreCheck benefits. As with the OP, these didn't always work in practice in my experience.
The PreCheck line can temporarily be closed in a larger airport that would normally have one, or this may be a more permanent process in a smaller airport that might not have the space.
I have Precheck (always marked on the boarding pass and I assume it shows up on their screen when I scan it), and what happens is the person at the podium notes it and lets his colleagues down the line know. I get a card, and show it to the person handling the body scanner, at which point they send me through the metal detector instead. There isn't much difference when it comes to the bag scanning (if any).
Nothing like a government-sponsored system to make life visibly better for those who can afford it. And - since it siphons line-space and machines - harder for everybody else.
Sometimes I think that pre-check, toll-roads, and their ilk will take us all to the guillotine if we keep it up long enough.
I don't think that requirement would have stopped Richard Reid. Maybe someone notices that his shoes look a little odd under the X-ray, but with sports shoes coming with weird air pockets and Heelys existing, it's not that odd.
It also slows down people moving through, making the security line a bigger target, and forces people to sit down just past security to put their shoes back on. Again, making the security line a much larger target.
We'd be better off just forcing everyone to do the hand swabs. One airport I went through had some kind of machine that purportedly could detect trace explosives coming off your clothing or skin. Those would be way better, if they work.
That or detection dogs.
I've gone through that machine six times, in one trip.
Something in my backpack set it off, so they kept running swabs over and over again until the light went green.
It was an utter waste of time for everyone involved. The fools patted me down five times, looked through all my things, ran them through the x-ray machines, and can clearly see that all I have is the clothes on my back, a laptop, and two changes of clothes. But they won't let me through the security line until their magical explosive scanning oracle shows a green light.
As if anything about the risk I pose to a flight fundamentally changed between the first swab and search, and the sixth.
The best part is they were asking me what is causing it to go off. Why are you asking me? I don't know a god-damned thing about your magical black box.
Hmm, haven't heard that name in a while. I remember all the crazy press about him.
Fascinating details in his Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid :
> The explosive apparently did not detonate due to the delay in the departure of Reid's flight. The rainy weather, along with Reid's foot perspiration, caused the fuse to be too damp to ignite.
Seems his biography was that of a petty criminal whose journey to radicalism began in prison. Pretty sad to think about. One considers an alternate reality in which he would have been rehabilitated beforehand instead. Seems like he might have had some serious problems, though.
Exactly this. I'm sure to the security people, it feels obvious since it's what they do every day for hours consistently, but I agree that the inconsistency is very frustrating.
London Heathrow doesn’t. They re-screen all incoming international passengers, so that 500mL bottle of contact lens solution that the ultra-paranoid Americans allow me to carry-on gets seized by Heathrow when transiting there.
I’d think if the UK disagrees with another country’s rules, they should just ban flights from there.
If it’s safe enough for me to fly in with, it should be safe enough for me to fly out with.
I just take it all in stride and try to remain Zen when I'm flying thinking about a hot shower and a beer at the hotel.
Flying out of Philly Airport, the TSA yelled at everyone to take off their belt and shoes, shaking their head in disbelief at people that didn't know the rules, wasting everyone's time.
A few months later, same airport, new rules, now the TSA yelled at people taking off their belts and shoes because that's not a rule, shaking their head at people wasting everyone's time.
When you work at any job you tend toward assuming all people are as knowledgeable about the 'obvious' things, it is a tough skill to remain empathetic. I fly maybe 3 times a year. A security agent will process a few thousand people a shift. We are each bringing a different patience threshold to the interaction.
For as much as I complain about security theater and think they’re mostly useless, this is genuinely my biggest issue with TSA. It’s wildly inconsistent, there’s insufficient signage, and they act like you’re an idiot if you haven’t correctly guessed what today’s rules are.
This is my biggest complaint too. The entire idiotic process would be a lot more efficient if they just had consistent expectations and a consistent process so we could all just comply without having to clarify things or being told we're doing it wrong.
Also, could they please give us a reasonable place to move our stuff to while we put our shoes on so we're not holding up the line?
Because apparently verifying my ID before arrival at the airport makes me less of a threat.
Or maybe it's the $80 they get every few years that makes me less of a threat...
That is, you're paying them for the privilege of reducing their attack surface a little bit.
I agree on Nexus, they basically do the entry interview ahead of time and then assume the answers are the same until they aren't (I have that too). That one actually makes sense.
Having a unique ID number tied to other information about you (like your license ID number or passport number or SSN) allows for a more in depth check, no doubt in ways you probably don't even explicitly consent to.
If they did have your ssn or passport number from the airline at ticket purchase time then sure, that would allow for the same thing. But they don't. And if they did it'd be pretty expensive to do it for everyone. So, the current solution is basically just to make (some) people pay for their own background check.
They have been trying to bump that requirement to RealID for years but a lot of states still don't issue it as their default license/ID so less than half of IDs in the US are compliant with the RealID standards. It's been pushed back for years maybe a decade by now? I wonder how long it'll be until it actually gets implemented.
After a few big delays, the deadline for having a compliant id for domestic air travel is 2023-05-03.
I personally had a bad experience attempting to get a compliant id when I lived in Arizona. At the time you could select if you wanted a compliant id or a non-compliant id. My wife and I both selected on the form to get compliant driver's license. Unfortunately when the physical licenses came in the mail they had they weren't compliant and had text indicating they weren't valid for federal identification.
We tried to get them to change this and they refused. Friends had experienced the same issue at the time, but I've been told they now have valid ones that you can get more easily.
I just recently refreshed my ID and got a RealID pretty easily at least. The trickiest piece was making sure I had all my documents, had to print out a cable bill because all my bills are paperless now and mortgage papers (one of the few I've kept paper bills on for) didn't count on their list.
Pretty much if you're a US citizen they already have your fingerprints.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
As far as I know that isn't a requirement for a standard US Passport (maybe a Diplomatic/Government/Service passport?).
Who even would take the fingerprints? I went to the USPS, and they just checked the form, stamped it a few times, and shipped it along with my supporting documents off.
> also when I was in elementary school they fingerprinted everyone.
That also isn't standard/normal.
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-no-longer-collecting-all-10-...
False. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...
My spouse and I renewed our passports in the last 10 years, and got our kids passports for the first time. We did not provide fingerprints.
I am a U.S. citizen. I went through an SF86 clearance in the early 2000s and don't recall even that requiring my fingerprints (but I could be wrong about that). I only recall giving up my fingerprints twice:
1. To unlock my Apple devices, safely locked in a secure enclave. 2. For TSA Pre.
Search this for fingerprint: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/california-driver-handboo...
You may just not remember because it's electronic.
Ah, you’re right. I just found some correspondence related to the clearance and I did indeed provide fingerprints. The company I was working for at the time apparently was working with the NSA. I have almost no recollection of this. Maybe the MIB wiped my mind.
> finger prints may not be available to regular LEO for dragnets to reduce the chance of leaking out the personal information of every cleared individual to foreign agents that have infiltrated law enforcement.
I don’t know how far back this leak went, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my info was part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
I don't think fingerprinting kids is universal or even the norm. I haven't found anything that says it's required anywhere. I have found information about parents having their child's fingerprints in their own records and examples of programs emphasizing that only the family has the record, they're not kept by local government, let alone in a federal system.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
https://www.pcsdma.org/fingerprint.html
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2006/july/idk...
Yes, they put it on your permanent record which any govt official can access using a simple zoom and enhance.
Some High Schools allow you to request your permanent record when you graduate, most just destroy them.
But yes, a government official can get a copy with a warrant just like any other record.
So far, searches haven't turned up authoritative information (on a current, relevant federal or state sites) on Real ID requiring any biometrics. I believe it, I just haven't found an official source confirming it.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/occu...
It's in there a few times.
Buddy, who do you think issued me the passport, social security card, birth certificate, and driver's license I used to get TSA Precheck?
Most of the political solutions I see tossed around are bandages on wounds inflicted by current policies. Nobody ever suggests removing the policy that is actually causing the problem in the first place.
I often hear it referred to as "TSA Pre" and it seems to be the case here too. I agree that the signage is unclear but I don't think it's intended to be called "TSA Pre".
Also, for death rates being higher in the elderly... isn't that going to be true for most diseases? Pointing this out seems tautological to me.
And what does "very few" actually mean here?
Is death the only negative outcome of COVID-19?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
To put this into perspective... 36,000 people died of car accidents in 2019.
In the under 50 group around 20,000 people died of Covid.
The under 50 age group makes up around 80% of the population.
Interpret that however you want.
I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peoples' lives worth less than younger peoples', on average.
Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-..., this particular model evaluates other factors beyond age (such as health history) and is in the context of providing specific treatments for specific conditions rather than broader actions for disease prevention.
But yes, my question was rhetorical, in the sense that I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
It’s hard to find a good discussion nowadays.
There are elderly people dying in other countries and perfectly healthy Americans are lining up for the vaccines and acting righteous about saving granny when the reality is they're doing it in their own self-interest.
No one cares one bit about anyone, except for the people that are close to them.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to gas light you for their own self interest.
Again, you say “covid deaths”. That is not precise.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Does precision matter in this case?
But of course, never let a good chance go to waste. We'll see an increase in restrictions because of Covid, they're not going away anytime soon.
who is "they" in your opinion, because plenty of people and organizations do cite excess death stats
are you really so far removed that you need us to provide a citation on excess deaths, this far into things? this reminds me of conversations in May 2020, because this entire conversation was procedurally generated in May 2020. Have you considered the possibility that all your apps marginalized you in this niche where no other information is shown to you everyday for the past year?
One of the earliest fears about the spread of COVID was exactly this issue: too many cases would overwhelm the healthcare system and cause deaths to rise even more. Even if we couldn't stop the spread of the virus, one of the goals was to slow it down to keep the number of simultaneous cases to a minimum.
over the past 15 months, many organizations (including the CDC) municipalities (including within the US in democrat and republican areas) and countries have revisited old deaths and current death recording practices, in direct response to this observation and criticism
most times they end up finding more COVID deaths, different ones in greater quantity than the incorrectly recorded ones that shouldn't have been counted. sometimes there is a slight temporary downward death count adjustment. and more importantly, the aggregate stats everywhere already account for this. when news reports X-hundred thousand death milestone, its already factored in the corrected numbers.
what seems most important to me is that all ailments, especially respiratory ones, have the same recording and accounting discrepancies. if the aforementioned "those circles" were also the "just the flu" circles, then the gravity of COVID relative to the flu (or anything else) would still be seen from the original flawed recording standard, because all prior year’s flu numbers are polluted the same way. makes it hard to view those circles as a better alternative to listen to, when the flaws of the established authorities still point to an aggregate good enough signal.
So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.
I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt".
This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.
There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting.
There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government.
> There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us".
Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates.
Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
Yes, the intense factions that sprang up without parties immediately after adoption of the Constitution formed the nucleus around which the first parties formed. Parties are a symptom, not the source.
> the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests
Yes, elite factions do that whether they are formalized as parties or not.
Banning formalized parties has no effect on that.
> I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments
There is no possible configuration of laws which would produce that effect.
I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests. However, I do see the other side of the argument in that it would probably open its own can of worms especially in areas like freedom of speech. The whole idea does start to unravel if your conception of free speech applies to entities like corporations as well as individuals. Unsurprisingly I lean towards the idea that it doesn't, but I can also see some very valid arguments for the opposite as well.
It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial (I suspect arguments between friends and family would be less common without the tribal labels backed by billions of dollars of "enrangement is engagement" for example). We can probably get some idea by looking at extant "not-party" political entities like charities, NGOs, and lobby groups to see how effectively they influence elections today.
This makes it practically impossible in the US; so long as not coordinated with a formal party or candidate committee, it has been ruled a violation of the First Amendment to even limit expenditures on promotion of a candidate by private entities; to outright ban such actions would be a more flagrant violation.
> I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests
You cannot “protect democracy from manipulation by private interests”; the concept is incoherent. Democracy is the aggregate of private interests determining the public interest.
> It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial
We’ve had the absence of formal parties, politics was violently adversarial and formal parties emerged from the adversarial factions.
You cannot alter human nature by abolishing formal parties, which are, again, a symptom not the cause of political factionalism.
In each re-authorization things were removed. And finally it expired completely.
Some politicians won't touch it.
The mainstream presses never had a reckoning for their role in issuing false rationales for the war in Iraq. Those who believed the propaganda shouted down dissent as "conspiracy nuttery" and anti-Americanism. After the fact, many of those I know simply switched their positions. They denied they ever unfairly dismissed concerns or experts (Hans Blix) which ran counter to prevailing propaganda.
Which brings us back to the present rationales for expanded state power, where dissent is dismissed as conspiracy nuttery and anti-science. Once again, the incentives are ignored.
9/11 victims, granny-killer, same side of a different coin.
Hysteria, paranoia, morality, a plan to keep people "safe" - beware of this dangerous pattern.
Above all if everyone is acting in good faith, there should be no taboos about inquiring about ulterior motives. Instead of ridiculing or censoring dissent, coherent and consistent explanations should be provided. If the rationales for hysteria and emergency measures cannot withstand an open debate, that should be illustrative.
https://www.corbettreport.com/911-a-conspiracy-theory/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_QFYn_G1lc
Wikipedia lends itself to exactly the kind of cringe worthy coverage I described above. Starting with the reliable source policy which has only become more partisan in recent years. All of those reliable sources were involved in uncritically promoting WMD propaganda.
Yes, there are nutters with nutty concerns. There are also nutters who wear shoes, but we don't conclude that we must go barefoot. The generalization is misleading at best and disinfo at worst.
I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing to put up with 3+ hour wait times and tons of other restrictions.
Should I go on?
Last week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/
Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.
Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.
Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.
These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.
Here's what a Harvard epidemiologist has to say about the Bangladesh study:
"The Bangladesh mask study does not show a statistically significant difference in the efficacy of cloth masks vs surgical masks. Based on the confidence intervals, both could be around 0% or both could be around 20%."
https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/14355739027894640...
Other performative examples would include permanent enclosed "outside" buildings complete with heating, AC and no airflow.
masks: petty symbolism
ivermectin: horse dewormer
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
What is it that you think you read in this article? What you have said is not supported in any way by the link you have provided.
This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.
The reduction in infection rates wasn't large enough to qualify as statistically significant. That just means that the reduction that they saw from cloth masks could have been due to chance.
Edit: Since the size of the cloth mask group is half the size of the surgical masl group, the effect in the cloth mask group would have to be comperatively larger than the effect on the surgical masl group to qualify as significant.
Somewhow you take that as evidence cloth masks don't work?
If anything, this argues that we weren't strict enough on masks. Require not just wearing one, but a good one.
Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.
I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.
The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.
Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.
That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.
The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
>I don't know how you don't see that.
Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.
What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat. It's best to work to counteract that threat using the best tools we have available, which are pretty simple: masks, distance, and vaccination.
>The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.
>What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat.
>You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here.
While you're at it stop with the strawman and ad-hominem attacks. What it looks like is you have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".
All I'm asking is what the threshold is. Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?
Very much so. That much was clear from your first comment, when you equated the knee-jerk acceptance of insane and ineffective security theater post-9/11 with the entirely rational measures we've taken in the face of a novel pandemic for which there is no existent immunity.
Your tirades here demanding someone tell you the threshold at which point we can dispense with masks and distancing are ridiculously off base. As long as ICUs are packed, and as long as regular care is rationed because of antivaxxers flooding hospitals with COVID or Ivermectin ODs, we'll have to keep doing what we're doing to keep ourselves and those we love safe(r).
Do you enjoy repeating yourself and making no headway?
Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.
That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.
Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?
Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.
Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.
It seems that since COVID is highly contagious and not going away, we are all going to get exposed to it and have to fight it off with our immune systems eventually.
Being vaccinated to train your immune system before your first bout with COVID seems to greatly improve your outcome. In my state currently COVID is 15x more deadly for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. So it made sense to try to limit the spread as much as possible while we were waiting for vaccines to become available, because the difference between "everybody gets it eventually, with no vaccine" and "everybody gets it eventually, but most were vaccinated first" is a significant number of deaths avoided.
Now that the vaccines are widely available and pretty much everybody who wants to be vaccinated, is, the only reason I see to continue with restrictions is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and can continue to serve everybody who needs medical care (COVID or not). That threshold is being hit in some states in the US, so I can understand why some restrictions are still needed. Eventually I would think we will accumulate enough immunity from vaccination + natural infection that we don't have a hospital capacity problem anymore.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/08/14/most-covid-19-t...
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates (1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition.
Oh, and you confused 'ironic' and 'coincidence' but I guess that hardly matters.
Edit: Oh, the usual. Editing out all the antisemitic stuff once somebody calls you out for it. At least don't run away once someone questions your shitty beliefs.
I deleted it because it was imprecise--
The dialectic switches between communism and capitalism depending on A/B testing of political revolution messaging. They're both.
Are they?
Complaints about post-9/11 "security" have mostly been about the ineffectiveness of steps that are clearly security theater, or the boondoggles of things like the x-ray scanners. Input from security experts was widely ignored in favor of, well, dumb ideas.
The COVID remediation steps we've been asked to take -- masks in public, social distancing, taking the vaccine once it's available -- are exactly what epidemiologists would've said were the right steps if asked about a hypothetical pandemic 25, 50, 75, or 100 years ago. They're directly in line with expert advice, and provably effective.
It's interesting to note that we have had this in software development too. Prior to CI/CD, organizations that had QA departments (responsible for testing) had a lot of incentive to hold up releases because they were blamed if a bug escaped into production. When developers test, they are responsible for both delivery and defects so there is balance.
It's hard to see how something like this could be applied for security. Making the TSA responsible for wait times seems like a good idea but there's always going to be an asymmetry when life hangs in the balance.
After the IRA bombings, train platforms didn't have trash bins for decades. Eventually some showed up with transparent bags so that the contents could be seen. The half-life of fear is long.
I attend college football games. Everyone goes through security. Outside security we pack up in masses of humanity outside the gates waiting to get through the inevitably slow security.
It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity there where there is no security ... than in the stadium where people are actually more spread out.
If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity, and I don't think anyone is bothering with that ...
I used to wheel my grandfather into games on a wheelchair... they didn't check anything, just waved you through. A wheel chair sized bomb would be easy to bring in, but you don't even have to bring it in.
We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...
In the US we don't have mass terrorist events that any of this would prevent.
Why do we keep subjecting non-terrorists to these systems?
What are we doing this for?
I dont think they can easily ban that.
edit:// OP clarified this was meant for sports games.
I kinda miss it too, and it's a bit of a shock seeing it happen in old movies now, but I already struggle to find seating at the gate. Even if the security concerns went away entirely in a magical world, I'd bet this restriction would stay.
That's not a thing at games I've been to.
Lots of drunken folks, but fights are exceptionally rare.
No longer high on the list of priorities for politicians, so insufficient benefit for risking being seen as the politician that wants to make life easier (regardless that this is not true) for terrorists.
I think we are doing these mostly useless things in order to signal that as a society we're somewhat careful in order to reassure people. I feel our best security defense is that most people are not terrorists?
To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love?
It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms and makes their lives worse for more "security".
Now we can go in to various conspiracies from “Bush planned 9.11 as a false flag” to “Bush ignored intelligence reports so he could launch the war on terror,” but those are mostly just unproven conspiracies unrelated to what al-Qaeda wanted.
States can, have, and do engage in terrorism.
Do we have a word for "imperialist government uses violence against people to achieve political goals"?
Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
Yes, we call this "war".
> Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
No, it's not. Nobody is trying to dogde the bad aspects of the word, it's just that terrorism specifically is, by definition, not from a state.
There seems to be a trend of calling every terrifying event “terrorism.” People sometimes colloquially refer to even non-political mass shootings as terrorism.
I believe it’s important to separate different types of mass violence. For example a gang-related mass shooting might be de-escalated by a mediator engaging the belligerents, whereas a war crime should be sent to international criminal court and a terrorist should be dealt with in a manner to minimize the earned media attention.
Huh. Do we call operation condor a war crime?
Note that the word "terror" appears 34 times in that Wikipedia article.
How many Americans even know Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan for years after 11/9?
When I first seen 9/11 on TV as an 11 year old, I instantly thought that Ryadh will be turned into a crater within a few hours.
I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. It made zero sense. I kept on watching the satellite TV at my neighbour's house, and was hoping that it was my knowledge of English failing me. It didn't.
You're being more than a little disingenuous ignoring the fact that we invaded Afghanistan specifically to go after the extremist group that was responsible for 9/11 about 2yr prior to invading Iraq, which was done for different reasons and "harboring terrorists" took a back seat to WMDs on that list of reasons.
There is a memo from Rumsfeld around then. [1]
The fact that all the terrorists were Saudi, that Bin Laden was Saudi, that Iraq was an enemy of the Saud regime, that Iraq was a "buffer" between the rest of the Middle East and Iran, all of that was ignored.
The war in Iraq was the US worst foreign affairs decision in the last 50 years.
All of the "WMD" and then "bringing democracy" was retconning the original desire to finish the first Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...
There are many possible motives for terrorism but I highly doubt this is one of them, even though people love to repeat it for some reason.
The US had at least 3 major responses to 9/11:
1) seek revenge (invade Afghanistan, kill Bin Laden),
2) armor up (Dept. of Homeland Security), and
3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere).
step 1: have big terrorist attack on American civilians
step 2: American civilians ask "why me?", his words not mine btw.
step 3: civilians find out what US gov has been doing in the middle east and call for change.
In hindsight its an incredibly naïve plan. And I think it ironically shows a lack of knowing your enemy on his part. Americans don't take well to being attacked or intimidated. If you want them to leave you alone the worst thing you can do is provoke them to action.
The stated goal of the attacks was to show Americans that their continuous war and support for secular dictators in the Muslim world would come with high cost, and to force the American government to retreat from the Middle East.
This of course backfired spectacularly. Revenge is certainly a primary motivation, too, but I really don't think there is much room on the interpretation for the initial motivation because Al Qaeda was always very open and clear about it.
We fracked our way back to being the worlds largest oil producer. That, and our transition to a greener economy is bad news for middle eastern oil producers. We're much more willing to leave the entire region to their own miserable devices.
Biden is getting a lot of flack for pulling out of Afghanistan, and yes, he completely dropped the ball on the organization of the withdrawal, but if it means that not one more drop of american blood is shed, it's worth it.
The US has abandoned Syria, Iraq, Kurds. It still has some sway with Saudi Arabia and Israel, none in Egypt or Libya.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.
The neo-conservative response to Al Qaeda was exactly what was needed to provoke this collapse over 20 years.
The purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to get the American public to demand the US withdraws support to Israel and Saudi Arabia. This has clearly failed.
It wasn’t much involved in any of those (and indeed had already abandoned the Kurds after the conflict which motivated the formation of al-Qaeda) when al-Qaeda actually got organized. It got reinvolved with them largely enabled by the political fallout from 9/11.
> The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.
Again, that's mostly a reversion to the status quo ante.
No, this was not his goal, and no it did not fail. His stated goal was to recreate the mujahedeen success against the Soviet Union, where they used low cost guerrilla fighting to draw out a costly and unpopular war until it bankrupted the Soviets and then they retreated from Afghanistan. It is debatable how much effect the cost of the Afghan war had on the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the key is that Bin Laden believed it.
His goal was to drive out the Americans eventually. There is no evidence or reason to believe he thought that 9/11 would directly lead to American withdrawal from the Greater Middle East.
>”We—with Allah's help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.” Osama Bin Laden’s 1998 Fatwa [1]
Even in 2004, we knew that Al Qaeda propaganda fueled by US invasions of Muslim countries was strengthening, not weakening, Al Qaeda.
“Any assessment that the global terror movement has been rolled back or that even one component, Al Qaeda, is on the run is optimistic and most certainly incorrect. Bin Laden's doctrines are now playing themselves out all over the world. Destroying Al Qaeda will not resolve the problem.” 2004 M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank [2]
And in his own words, what Bin Laden wanted out of the Afghan war, in 2004. Russia lasted 10 years before they were “forced to withdraw in defeat”. The US made almost made it to 20.
>”Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred”
>”All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”
>”This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” Bin Laden Interview in 2004 [3]
[1] https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm
[2] https://www.globalissues.org/article/512/the-new-face-of-al-...
[3] https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/september-11th/911-ac...
People flying flags everywhere weren't a thing in the 80s or 90s?
Suggestions that we shouldn't overreact because it plays right into their hands and that we shouldn't give up rights to the government out of simple fear that we'd just regret later didn't just go unheeded, they were vehemently attacked. It was worse polarization by far then we're seeing now, and it wasn't a more-or-less 50/50 split and didn't follow party lines.
I don't think that makes sense.
If say terrorist actions resulted in the opposite, say a nation providing less security / fewer restrictions:
We would then logic it out and say the goal of terrorism is to restrict fewer freedoms and thus allow the terrorists more freedom to do whatever it is they wanted.... including more terrorism.
But that's obviously also not the point of terrorism.
Terrorists are pushing their own political agenda via violence, that's it, the result isn't necessarily some intent / scheme. If they don't get what they ultimately want, I don't think they give a damn about security or etc.
Terrorists do what they do for many reasons. Some are political, some are due to sectarianism. Sometimes its because they are crazy and have irrational motivations.
Rarely is it the goal of the terrorist to force a society into tyranny.
Timothy McVeigh was seeking revenge.
Bin Laden was trying to force the US to change its foreign policy.
ISIS was trying to conquer the middle east.
Aum Shinrikyo were a doomsday cult.
So on and so on.
Terrorism is killing a lot of innocent civilians in order to incite terror in a population to bend to your demands. They have an agenda and feel they are justified.
Terrorism is a tactic and wars on Nouns (Terror, Drugs, etc) never make sense.
No it isn't. Not any more than it is the goal of burglars to get people to invest in home security. The goal of terrorism is to use attacks on civilians to achieve political goals, like getting Northern Ireland out of the UK or get the US out of the Middle East.
Why would terrorists care how much the enemy restricts their own freedom? Just because something hurt your enemy does not mean it helps you get closer to your goal.
I think that's a good general observation, but a key assumption of terrorism is that hurting your enemy /will/ pressure them to do what you want.
Terrorism is all about out unconventional ways of bringing pain to your enemy, rather than just defeating their military in combat. So I think terrorism can definitely be intended to sow fear, paranoia, overreaction, internal division, etc within the enemy civil society.
Not as the end goal, but as part of the strategy of inflicting paint to pressure them to capitulate.
We have to be careful to not assign whatever motivation or outcome we don’t like as “the goal of terrorism.” You can justify anything that way, and people do. “If you do the thing I don’t like, the terrorists win” can cut both ways.
Terrorists have specific goals they are trying to achieve with violence, usually ideological or political or both. Bin Laden thought his ideology would have room to grow if he could scare the U.S. into leaving. He was wrong about that. The fact that we still have to take shoes off at the airport (annoying as it is) does not mean he won.
At college football games this is all done to drive up the price of concessions.
If I'm being charitable, it might also be about protecting the buildings that planes can crash into.
But sure, let's forget about morals for a second (lives lost and all that) and be very cold and cynical about the pricing. Still - reputational damage, political outcry, people suing the company/government for "failing to do even basic security checks like belts and shoes" - $100 million is nothing.
Secure ID is designed so people on various no fly lists won’t be allowed to fly should they acquire a fake ID. How well this works in practice remains to be seen, but it’s the theory at least.
Maybe it is about shifting the blame. If something happens outside, it's the police failure but if something happens inside it is venue management failure.
Anyway, I completely agree that we have given up way too much in the name of security. If it's not the terrorist, then it is "think of the children" scare and we are about to get our personal devices scanning our personal files and report us to the authorities. For now it is CSAM material but I don't see any reason why the same devices wouldn't be scanning for other stuff once the system is in place.
I totally expect our devices to start checking on us for "betrayal" patterns once the conflict with China intensifies, for example. Once you become a "human resource" and nothing more in the eyes of the political structures, you will need to be managed and in 2020s the tools for it are plenty and powerful.
When I was in college, campus security already banned a range of items at sports games. In 1989, they made national news for adding marshmallows to the list of banned objects: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/26/sports/michigan-to-ban-ma...
That suggests to me that college stadium security is mainly about policing mundane behavior at college stadiums, and very little to do with terrorism.
Theres a mass of people, but few cameras. Much worse cost/benefit ratio in terms of whatever craziness terrorists would supposedly consider benefit.
(feel free to spend the rest of your day thinking up silly wordplay involving "bang for the buck", I wish you were alone in this if you do)
Doing it at the gates is not going to be seen live by millions. Having it seen by the masses in real time and without warning is far more effective than having it merely reported.
The "Homeland Security" apparatus is hungry and must grow.
It's about jobs, power, and money for these bureaucrats.
The "Homeland Security" apparatus is the most powerful political force in America, and is more dominant than either political party.
Another term for this is the police-military-industrial complex.
They killed 17 people in a pair of suicide bombings there and injured many more, which were followed up by a similar attack on the Metro. There were enough cameras and coverage that the terrorists achieved their objective (publicity).
Some have likened it to a jobs program that both increases the surveillance capability of the government as well as provides political creds for the representatives in those districts where airports exist, similar to the Military Industrial Complex.
Eh? But he wasn't caught due to airport security. He got onto the plane and tried to set off the bomb during the flight.
He would have been caught if someone had looked at his shoes.
But anyway - the point was 'general escalation of security in airports which caught the Richard Reid' is a provably false statement.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/30/saudi.arabia.a...
Are you familiar with any recent bomber story at all? All he needed was some matches and a small amount of plastique.
Someone put an incendiary in his underwear. There are tons of possibilities. If you can't name 3 ways other than shoes and underwear, you might be in the group that thinks the TSA is fine.
I have often noticed policies are different at each airport. Combined with the shoe/belt/imaging policies, I believe it's meant to be a form of confusion. As in, any given security policy/process can be studied for weaknesses. When the policies are differing/changing there is a component of surprise the attacker has to account for that can be difficult to game. However, this is all in my head as I try to understand my observations. Hoping it's all being done intentionally, when chances are it's just local level enforcement picking and choosing what ever they want to enforce any given day depending on who is in charge on that shift.
To be honest I don't feel comfortable even linking to this stuff but it's Wikipedia.
Why not? "eww this is propaganda" or "talking about terrorist makes me one?"
The actual answer is that the page, due to it's dynamic nature, at times consisted of specific details that were probably not relevant to the overall subject.
It's not unreasonable in this day and age to be concerned about what you are linking to. In this case it's Wikipedia, so, "sue me".
This detail seems relevant:
> Yousef smuggled the nitroglycerin on board by putting it inside a small container, reputedly containing contact lens cleaning solution.
if that's the basis of "no liquids on planes" rules then its horseshit. make people shake the bottle at the security checkin.
Almost all the security theater relies on things being to scary for people to think about. Nitroglycerin when liquid is not yer friend. Ricin was never the boogeyman the media made it out to be. And on and on for years now.
Addendum: as much as it pains me to admit, if I were some official feeling responsible for the lives of air travellers in %country% and having a say in the policy, after studying the details of this plot I can imagine myself going “yup, I guess we are banning all liquid then”.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/trial-of-ac...
Imagine and airport designed to the point where you can literally drive up (or be dropped by an autonomous vehicle) 10 minutes before your flight, Throw your luggage onto a belt where a robot auto tags it based on your a facial recognition algorithm, and walk through an unobtrusive security point that's totally AI driven, and walk direct to your plane ready to go. As someone who travels a lot, I say forget shoes, this is the ultimate dream. The "arrive 2 hours before your flight" nonsense should be automated into oblivion on both ends. I think we just accept this paradigm of air travel now and our airports have become these bohemoths of capture to sell you food, beverage and overpriced trinkets with abhorent wait times for the actual flight logistics. Why cant I just be dropped off directly at my gate and bumble on in less then 5 minutes!
I wouldn't mind a feature where I can drop off my luggage somewhere near my house the day before my flight and it gets tagged, bulked transferred and inspected at the airport.
This would allow me to straight to the gate and not need to check in large luggage or fumble with luggage while rushing for a flight.
This also forces me to pack early and now the night of the flight and be sleep deprived.
Its an express train taking you from a city center railway station directly to the airport in about 15 minutes and also allows you to check in and drop off your luggage up to 24h before departure.
It's criticized by locals as too expensive compared to the S-Bahn serving the same connection (just slower/with more stops) but especially for visitors it of course gives you the huge benefit of not having to deal with any luggage on the last day when you already had to check out of your hotel.
[0] https://www.cityairporttrain.com/en/news/unique-in-europe-th...
Somehow, no two airports are ever alike, and I have a hard time understanding how that happened. There’s no clones at all.
Like, I understand they each have their own geographical constraints, but so does a McDonalds or a Walmart, and somehow I can walk into any of those on the planet without feeling too confused.
Every airport is a multi-billion dollar project designed anew from the ground up. Even when it’s a greenfield build. Dunno why they can’t just pick an existing airport design and say “build that”.
Even roller-coasters will have their clones at different parks (authorized or unauthorized).
Presumably because all airports suck, and every designer thinks they could do better?
Imagine a portal showing up outside your house, maybe on the back of a truck. It's got all the theater: the wavy green lights, smoke, the whole deal. You wave good bye to your family, walk in, and then you get chloroformed and pass out. Your body is loaded into a standardized life support container and driven to the airport. Then, you get revived 6 hours later at your hotel so you can take a shower.
Ok, so there are some details to work out but the point is that the typical air travel experience is so terrible it would be better to be unconscious for most of it. Portal travel!
People who were paying attention back then knew this. This kind of intrusion is a ratcheting function.
I feel like HN is a sort of older crowd, so a good chunk of those who can read this probably remember pre-9/11 travel, but for those that don't:
I have, nearly every day of my adult life, carried a Swiss Army Knife. It's insanely handy, and not at all something that would be parsed as a weapon. (Even in 2021, the models I favor are legal for personal everyday carry in the UK, which is at this point somewhat notorious for restrictive knife laws.)
Before 9/11, I carried it on the plane, in my pocket. I was also through security in mere moments -- sure, we still emptied our pockets, and took off big belt buckles (not me, but I live in Texas, so I saw it often) or chunky jewelry that might set off the metal detector, but security was a very very quick process.
Nobody cared how much liquid you had in your carry-on.
And we were almost exactly as safe then as we are now. Security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out repeatedly that the only things that REALLY made a difference post-9/11 were (1) the reinforced cockpit door and (2) the now universal understanding that passengers must resist.
Everything else is bullshit theater. *And in point of fact TSA is very, very bad at their job, and has NEVER prevented an attack.*
* Family would stay together basically right up to the gate. Eating dinner together, possibly, before a flight was had, or picking people up right from the plane, in situations where half the family flies away and the other half stays.
The other thing the airlines pushed in under the guise of "security" was insisting that everyone have photo ID matching their ticket name. Prior to that, they couldn't insist on this.
As a result, a secondary market for tickets existed. You'd see "for sale, male DFW to JFK" for such-and-such a flight in these forums -- which, of course, only existed because the airlines (then as now) charged EXTORTIONATE fees to change a ticket.
The airlines hated this, and so because "9/11" they pushed through the ID requirement and killed this market. Even though, it bears noting, that 100% of the 9/11 hijackers had valid ID.
Sorry, but no. The DHS performed a study on the TSA's effectiveness[0], finding that the TSA missed concealed weapons, explosives, and other contraband 95% of the time. The reason the shoe bomber[1], underwear bomber[2], and the UA 93 hijacking[3] were unsuccessful was because of the passengers and crew on the flight. The TSA did nothing.
A TSA tactic that isn't as well known is the TSA SPOT program[4]. Basically, TSA agents stand around in the airport looking for "suspicious" activity which naturally leads to profiling (particularly for those of Middle Eastern descent). A score card from the program has been leaked[5], and with the sort of criteria on it, it would be easy to justify searching anyone at the airport.
This is speculation, but I suspect that giving passengers a false sense of security would make them less likely to notice an attempted hijacking, bombing, or whatever else. But at least they'll be more comfortable, right?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_attempt
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_253
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPOT_(TSA_program)
[5] https://www.papersplease.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/s...
But, the less obvious reasons surely include maintaining the function of the huge TSA security apparatus put in place after 9/11. The stated function of the TSA is to protect passengers from attack. The unstated (and unacknowledged function) that has perpetuated the practice despite every traveler hating it (and its obvious futility), is to intimidate travelers and provide a convenient mechanism of crowd-control. Step out of line (literally) and you will be treated as a potential criminal. There needn't be an official policy to do so, the benefits of the system ensure its continuance via other (stated) motives, not least the profit motive of the supporting economic interests. The upshot is that travelling via plane in the past 20 years is one of the many small lessons for living in the security/surveillance state. You must obey. Moreover, we see the logic of the security/surveillance state incorporating this convenient control mechanism by now restricting (or implicitly threatening to restrict, which is even better) the travel of domestic antagonists of power. If we had discontinued taking off our shoes, the symbolic effect of dispiriting and weakening the public (literally making us vulnerable in our unshod feet) would be unavailable now. Why would the administration willingly relinquish such a useful tool for managing the population? Of course it wouldn't. It would we more amazing if it had.
Now, we will likely add further controls on travel in the form of digital health passports with infinitely more possibility for government mischief. When/if the pandemic ends, do you believe the passports will be discontinued?
How do you see digital health passports as having infinitely more possibility for govt mischief? Right now TSA has the ability to treat you like a criminal if they think you looked at them funny.
The health passport "mischief" seems more along the lines of "you don't have vaccine X, so you can't board the plane." While potentially problematic, that's kind of the end of it. It becomes a no-fly list, but one where you can actually control your status on it.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/michigan-father-wrongly-...
However the comparison to TSA is not apt. TSA threat model is: One "terrorist" (though I'd call them "premeditated mass murderers") executing its plan is the total failure. For the vaccine requirements, the threat model is much different. Even if you just don't bother with any of this stuff on %5 of flights, it will still have a great impact in reducing the frequency of aerospace super-spreader events.
Sars-CoV-2 infects a lot of people every day, whereas there are many, many days in a row where no terrorists bother to board a domestic flight.
Putting that aside, it's fairly obvious given the human taboos concerning disease that if you have a mechanism for flagging a person as non-compliant with a health policy, that person is effectively tagged as diseased by implication. This is a convenient way to unperson members of a political class who are non-compliant with the policy (e.g., for personal/political/scientific/ethical/religious reasons). You needn't eliminate the enemy when their opposition to your power is embodied in their non-compliance. You merely need to make them compliant to eliminate their opposition.
I think you're misguided here. I certainly do understand the viewpoint that this security theater is harmful (and agree, actually). But lets be honest: The TSA has nothing to do with "Scaring the sheep" and everything to do with "Politically acceptable jobs program".
Way too many soldiers coming home from our senseless oversea wars? Great - put them to work "Guarding" our airports. Super convenient that all states have airports that will "need" these jobs, so it's easier to pass than targeted jobs programs that would actually be useful.
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/features/2015/12/01/tsa-looks...
I do know that the job requirements are basically:
1. US citizen
2. High school diploma
3. 18+ years old
4. Pass drug/background screening
For the pay, the job requirements are very low. They also follow the "Veterans preference" practice during hiring. This is actually pretty typical across many government jobs (See https://www.usajobs.gov/).
My experience with trying to apply to these jobs (admittedly second hand, watching my wife apply to meet grant-related conditions) is that if you're an honorably discharged veteran, your resume goes into bucket #1, and if they can fill the position from that bucket, they won't even look at bucket #2, which is public applications.
By the way, shepherds don't scare sheep, wolves do. Shepherds corral sheep. Sheepdogs harass sheep, triggering their herd instincts by raising the specter of the wolf in their minds. Sheepdogs are used by shepherds in order to herd sheep to where the shepherd wants them 'for their own protection' and his use.
But to make the point less metaphorically, the intention isn't to scare people, but the effect is to herd people efficiently, by reassuring them through fear. The fear we feel when we have our hands in the air like criminals to be screened is transferred to the fear we assume those who would harm us must feel and we assume the deterrent affects them, too. The dog that nips our heels will surely chase off the wolf. That effect (efficient management) is itself desirable and so the preservation of that effect becomes another motivation of the system.
Who is this administration?
I am also a bit skeptical that the much more complex new scanning machines are actually more effective at catching things than metal detectors.
Meanwhile, we have to acknowledge the serious threats introduced by inefficient processes. The one that scares me is the unbelievable crowd sizes that now form at virtually every major airport. There is simply nothing secure about a giant crowd and it is ridiculous when the insecure crowd exists because of “security”!
It's worth noting that 9/11 introduced a new threat that people hadn't really considered before: using planes as weapons. If you want to kill a bunch of people in the US there's lots of places with big crowds. A commercial airline r is a significant force multiplier: the OKC bombing killed "only" 168 people and the Las Vegas shooting only 68. 9/11 was an order of magnitude over that.
e.g we get screened, we fear people who look “suspicious” (even when they are just normal people) etc.
You end up with a large segment of the population who sneezes a little bit, which is sort of annoying but sort of okay.
You end up with a small segment of the population with asthma attacks, anaphylaxis, and other life-threatening conditions.
Universal use of dogs would mean that there would be people who simple cannot travel, ever, anywhere beyond driving distance.
There's a small war between extremist dog-owners (the ones who believe dogs are people too, and sneak them into all sorts of places dogs aren't allowed as "activism") and people with severe allergies.
Anaphylaxis is a very rare response to animal dander, but there have been a few documented instances:
https://www.petful.com/misc/can-pet-allergies-kill-me/
What's amazing is the number of dog owners who don't believe in dog allergies, or who believe their dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva).
However, there have been plenty of instances of severe asthmatic reactions to dogs in situations in all relevant respects similar to drug/bomb-sniffing animals. And I've seen plenty of allergic reactions to service animals.
People react to different amounts of allergens. For some, it requires direct contact. For others, it's enough to be in vaguely the same room.
Service animals are tougher, since both sides have a disability and medical need. Police dogs should be easier, if not for police generally being power-hungry thugs.
I’ve read the same explanation for cats. But, I find it hard to believe. Pets are constantly licking their fur, and shedding said fur all over the place. It’s very clear to me that more fur = higher chances of allergic reactions.
What am I missing?
2) That licking hair/fur releases the same amount of dander, whether your shedding fur, hair, or neither. Matter is conserved.
3) That clumps of fur are easy to avoid.
Anecdotally, I have a mild cat allergy and own a cat. Vacuuming our sofa regularly makes a huge difference, as it gets rid of the fur stuck to it. It goes from feeling scratchy to totally fine.
Maybe clumps of fur are common with super fluffy pets? Ours is a shorthair and shedding leaves single hairs lying around.
Matter is conserved, sure, but fur with dander stuck to it from saliva versus skin with saliva on it, surely makes a difference?
Three things to consider:
1) You can't see dander.
2) Vacuuming helps with pollens, and with dander from animals without fur too.
3) You have mild allergies. Others have stronger ones. I have no scientific basis for this, but I suspect sometimes, the immune system goes into maximum overdrive.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...
>The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector[1] produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometers away. However, it was a scam, and the device was little more than a dowsing rod. The device was sold for up to US$60,000 each, despite costing almost nothing to produce.
https://reason.com/video/2014/09/16/dog/
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
Everyone knows its a joke but we will keep doing it.
So we'd still have TSA agents in some places, but for example SFO already opts out of TSA agents. If they could opt out of the shoes off rule they probably would. At that point you've effectively eliminated the TSA without making a big deal about it.
- 9/11 was a one-time thing, it only worked because the passengers would assume that as long as they cooperate they would get out alive. Without that "cooperation" 9/11 would have not happened (remember the 4th plane that was brought down because the passengers learned what happened)
- Liquids. There was the potential that someone could mix together some liquids to make an explosive. It never actually happened, and the possibility was solidly debunked later. Yet, our lotion is still taken from us... And dumped right in the garbage near the most populous location in an airport.
- Shoes. One failed attempt. One. Years, later we still need to take our shoes off.
It's a security theater. Some of it obviously necessary, some of it just to make us feel safe.
Meanwhile way more people die on their drive to the airport than from any flight related incidents.
That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back.
Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't really preventing anything. I do understand this doesn't apply to the shoes (shoe bomber), but that's just one of many things we've put in place.
My sense is that there is nothing they could say. Hijack a plane, a bunch of men are going to attack you. That's it.
I'm not especially brave or fearless or anything. But if you back me into a corner with no way to survive, then I'll fight back like a caged, starving rat.
If we want to prevent hijacking of planes for terrorism purpose, then we'll need to go deeper and fix the root cause of extremism which required tons of focused effort, probably tackling seemly intractable problems. Not spend billions upon billions more on likely ineffectual screening procedure and tools to satisfy the surveillance state.
The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
This would create a tighter bond between citizens and improve communities ability to look after one-another.
If everyone handles those situations steadfastly, terror won’t work.
Another benefit is less reliance on national guard to handle climate crisis like hurricanes, fires, and floods.
Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”
I Russia, despite a nominal ban, you can buy a gun on the vegetable market, but nobody seem to be going, and shooting people out of a sudden other that 2-3 freak accidents per year.
Being murdered in a banal armed robbery is a by far bigger risk.
Honestly, you’re going to have bad apples no matter what. But what about the rest of the citizens? How can they respond to disaster scenarios without training?
Domestic terrorism is the same thing as abroad terrorism, except one uses patriotism as an ideology, the other uses religion.
Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
If someone is doing massive damage...cornered people in a restaurant and is shooting them one by one. Someone can respond to that. Youre going to hear it and see it. Not every scenario is going to play out perfectly but at least theres mitigation on the table.
[0] because if you actually knew they were bad guys before you gave them such training you could stop them before they fire a single shot
I was thinking it absolutely does, unless everyone from more than 3ft away starts shooting.
Doubly so if we're talking knives or other sidearms.
Sikh logic, wildly underrated.
Except that it literally doesn't. We know from public verifiable stats that people who own a gun end up hurting themselves or their family several orders of magnitutde more often than defending against an attacker or actually using it for self defense. It happens, but the numbers clearly point that it's massively ineffective for that purpose.
>>Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
You mean because people on HN frequently believe in the power of statistical analysis and logical thinking when it comes to deciding when something is worth doing or not?
Those are very different things. Not every soldier is taught hand-to-hand combat. Not every civil service volunteer is taught to handle a weapon. And basic first aid training is almost universal already. More lives could probably be saves by everyone being trained in basic mental health and de-escalation techniques.
But most situations that currently result in someone getting shot can be resolved less violently, as demonstrated by the lack of firearms carried or desired by the majority of UK cops.
A culture shift isn’t an overnight thing, but better worlds are possible.
And 99% of those would fear lawsuit.
You didn't answer the question by the way.
The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.
> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
... Military training teaches none of those, so far as I'm aware, except maybe the first. But even then, you're getting training on a rifle, which is not the most likely firearm a civilian would be carrying.
As a non-car driver, it stood out to me at the time that all the events occurred on the road, though of course I had no idea of the actual mechanism.
If your response to terrorism is a year of forced military training I can assure you the terror already won.
What if its a 20 year community involvement?
Keep voting.
(And yes, the card works for US too, but there is no Canada-only option, and that’s primarily why I got it).
Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
Maybe because your base assumption is wrong: there are not many of them.
edit: Votes on this one have been a wild ride.
We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.
~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.
In any case, you're either missing the overarching point (the charitable assumption) or you don't want to fight my point head on so you're nitpicking that my examples aren't good enough (the less charitable assumption).
Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:
Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.
In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.
To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
That's a fallacy in itself, however I think there's definitely some merit to both sides here.
Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.
I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.
As some who had been lucky enough to live many years in both rural Florida and urban California, I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable, and mostly the same, they are just acting on different priorities, beliefs, and data :)
And yet, actual fascist governments have come to power even in nominally democratic countries.
People might only be "reasonable" when left to their own devices but there could always come a day when propaganda, sectarianism and social turmoil gets so out of hand that people don't see so reasonable anymore.
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
Now you might think the threshold for an "extreme number" is much higher than drawing this type of crowd, but there are enough people for whom that is a big deal, that it makes for compelling news that gets views. Way too many for me, that's for sure.
I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.
By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.
They are extremely common, except the main stream "liberal" media's definition of "radicalized" and "attack" doesnt include the most common incidents. If "radicalized" means brown, yes, it isnt common.
If "radicalized" could be expanded to literally hundreds of incidents of ethno-religious-nationalist crazies who kill with guns -- it is actually really common in the US. Except whenever this happens, people instead just talk about how perps were "deeply disturbed" and needed help, rather than classifying it as "attack" or "terror"
So neither lone wolf or low effort.
My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.
The media overreports on how radical these people are. There's very few. However if COVID restrictions keep pushing forward I think that may change. Many people are at their breaking point right now.
I'm fully vaccinated and I've already decided I'm never going to wear a mask again and avoid stores that actually enforce mask rules (most don't, even if they put labels on doors mandated by the state).
Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.
Personally I am far more concerned by the rent/steal truck and mow down pedestrians mode that we have seen in France and Germany. You might be able to do more about gun safety. You can't really prevent a madman from driving up on the sidewalk deliberately and almost any person can rent a van.
But why kill? Why not attach several 20W lasers to a drone and fire them up on a busy bridge/road? Living in suffering is a worse fate.
Won't do much good when the controls are hijacked from terra. This narrative on 9/11 being played on this thread is poppycock.
200 people lost their life in the crash of Germanwings 9525 on March 24, 2015, but this is not classified as a terrorist attack so it doesn't really count for anything.
However, it is the direct consequence of the so-called security procedures implemented the world over; those 200 people are victims of "security".
EDIT post downvotes: what I mean is that even without a lock on the cockpit to prevent their copilot from entering, it seems difficult to prevent a determined pilot from crashing a plane.
"The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls...The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
> Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion.
This seems like a pretty direct consequence to me. Similar to how an ultra isloated air-gapped environment with only one-way networking[0] would mean that the ops people couldn't easily stop e.g an ransomware attack in its tracks when detected. It's a cost/consequence of having the isolated network in the first place.
(If there was some magic code that always opened the cockpit door, then that could be coerced out of someone, yielding the system almost pointless)
Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?
What’s to stop anyone from murdering anyone anywhere?
happy?
"Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."
Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.
So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.
At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.
With a bathroom on their side of the door, and a packed lunch.
We could keep going I think: there are numerous downsides to maintaining an egress unreachable from the cabin and, given the ability to lock down existing doors, few superior benefits to justify it.
Well try to use your imagination - them and their sleeping compartment would also be in there.
> or in the event of incapacity?
Etc.
If it's alleged el qaeda, and their "billions of dollars in funding" they would've just raised an army, and razed the place.
If someone needs on a principle to have the plane shot out of the sky, there are way dumber, and more sure ways to do that than trying to get a bomber on board.
edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.
The shoe bomber FAILED because it's pretty fucking obvious if someone is trying to light a shoe on fire.
We don't need the security theater of taking our shoes off. It needs to stop.
This kind of argument is honestly a big part of why the theater is still in place. People keep making poorly thought through arguments about why we don't need it. Those arguments are inevitably shot down, and everyone remembers that rather than thinking about it for themselves.
You don't need most.
Flight 93 demonstrates that the "sit down and be quiet while the hostage negotiators work" approach is dead for a while.
The underwear bomber was tackled and subdued by fellow passengers.
4th plane. The third plane hit the Pentagon.
At some point, the cost-benefit ratio falls apart.
>“I don’t see it changing,” said Lora Ries, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It never seems to be fewer requirements … the direction always seems to be for more.”
>Security screening, he said, will also be expanded to passenger drop-off points and airport and off-airport parking lots, in addition to walkways and tunnels approaching departure and ticket kiosks.
That's the protocol in Israel. The airport is fairly isolated and before you can even get on the entry road your car is pulled over. Outside the airport entrance there are dogs and officers and then you go through security before you even get to baggage drop off and then another security for some questioning, etc. You are deemed suspicious if you don't arrive a few hours before your flight. Any drinks you buy after security are taken away as your carry on baggage is looked at one more time before you board. I often buy a couple liters of water before long trips and the to have them taken away (and probably put back on the shelves and sold!) before boarding was a bit annoying.
So why are we worried about possible plane hijackings when a lot of people don't seem to be overly worried about something that's many times more risky.
[1] https://findanyanswer.com/what-are-the-chances-of-a-plane-ge...
Rules like this that don't really have a point and are applied unevenly (like drug laws, many traffic laws, public intoxication...) are just a lazy way to make sure authorities can make anyone or any group they want "fall in line" while not actually preventing favored individuals or groups from doing what they want. It's the most unfair and unequal kind of regulation, and in general people cant6get enough of it, precisely because they know it will be used mostly against groups they don't like, but they dont have to explicitly identify those groups or otherwise acknowledge their prejudice.
The spamdemic was never about Public Health,
When I think about it, that's a crazy policy to have since it only happened once (and it didn't even work).
If we follow that sort of logic we should be wearing masks every time we fly. It's just a bizarre policy.
We do wear masks every time we fly nowadays. Or maybe that was your point?
But all this is actually necessary and not security theater. We promise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab
Most of this screening is to avoid profiling. It would be considered politically not correct if we were to just screen Muslims so Grand Pa who received the Medal of Honor in WWII, has to be stripped searched after they get him out of the wheel chair.
Firstly, we already profile Muslims extensively. Secondly, a non Muslim person with guns, usually motivated by GOP/church/nation regularly commits atrocities, there is a news article like every other week.
Apologists like you like to look the other way.
If the 911 bombers started fist fights in the airport lobby instead of hijacking airplanes, I'm sure we wouldn't be living with the heighten security apparatus we have today. Can you list the race or religion of all the terrorists who tried to bring down an aircraft 911 to present day, just curious? I think you're the apologist in this case.
Relatedly, I want someone to write a dark comedy set like 20 years hence where a bunch of airline execs, worried about their shrinking industry and some shiny new rail, band together to pay off some terrorist to blow up a moving train so train stations gets TSA security theater.
Without the movie, I worry due to some stupid accident the rail TSA might actually happen!
Man I had no idea this even happened, I either forgot or never heard of it cause it seems to have been an open and shut event.
The problem is we created a monetary incentive to keep the current policy in place.
It's by design that it's annoyingly slow to get through airport security. It prevents people from rushing into the airport and rushing onto a plane unnoticed. What may look like incompetence is actually very meticulously structured.
I really don't think it's that big of a deal. Besides, as airports are going through remodeling they are getting more and more comfortable to hang out in.
To work, it has to be invasive enough that people still notice it. It has to be cheap enough that they don't, mostly. So, we will have it for as long as people feel like something, anything at all, needs to be done, no matter whether any good ever comes of it.
Are we still concerned with shoes at airports?
However, despite being the much "fresher" events, I don't know the weekday my grandparents and parents passed away, let alone what I did back then.
My memory is... interesting.
For me, it's the Challenger disaster, 9/11, Columbia.
[0] Challenger, OKC, 9/11, even the first WTC attacks and princess Diana & OJ fit this category in terms of memory imprinting. I'm too young for JFK, but that was a big one too. My uncle says he can remember everyone being very sad and glued to the TV, he was 3.
> It consumed the nation for a fair bit of time.
Now I'm European, and I remember that our teachers back in school spend the whole day explaining what happened, and maybe why. (It was late afternoon here, when the attacks started, so I'm talking about the next day). But everyone was in disbelief, and also afraid of the response.
But why don't you have to take them off before entering a high speed train?
https://transweb.sjsu.edu/research/SP0520-Terrorist-Attacks-...
TSA isn't about security or safety, it's about control and power.
But the ability for anyone on HN to even begin this conversation is basically impossible.
They lost mine once and I basically have to found it myself. Eventually found someone throw the bag in an corner...
That said, how many shoe bombs have they intercepted? That should be a pretty good indication about whether it's still necessary, and I like to think the policy change (or lack thereof) is data-driven.
I'm no TSA apologist, it's obviously security theater, but is it totally without merit?
I've not had the chance to try it with a tiger but if it works with them too then I'm afraid you won't fetch much for your stone.
According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
“In most cases, they succeeded in getting the banned items through. 17 out of 18 tries by the undercover federal agents saw explosive materials, fake weapons or drugs pass through TSA screening undetected,” KMSP reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the operation.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/6/tsa-failed-det...
It's all quite silly.
Sometimes people say the quiet parts out loud.
Meanwhile I remember flying through Frankfurt in 1994 and opening my (inspected before baggage drop) suitcase briefly to move something and getting pulled politely aside and my items re-inspected. Security policies that made sense and were executed competently by respectful and well-trained staff.
Since 9/11 I just try to avoid flying to or from the US entirely.
I had a friend bring 1L containers of liquid through security in Europe and no one said a word. The limit was 100mL. Nobody was looking at the scanner.
Don’t fool yourself.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
A 18" dirk from the 1800s ...
Made it through security without anyone saying anything and only remembered when it clanked as he put it into the overhead luggage compartment.
REMOVE_SHOES is one in probably a thousand settings in TSA's airport security makefile. Like all makefiles of any complexity, the trick is separating out the bona fide settings from the mountains of ineffectual ones that disappear somewhere deep in the nasty bowl of bureaucratic spaghetti.
As programmers, we should all inherently understand the value in not touching that goddamned mess unless someone really understands what they are doing. Even then, that almost always involves building a new system that runs in parallel to the spaghetti so that the "no touching" rule is obeyed at all times.
That's not to say TSA isn't a mess. It's just when I imagine what Libertarian International airport security looks like, the one thing I'm certain of is that they have set the RANDOMIZED_SCREENING flag incorrectly.
-Or-
Pay to skip the line
Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It ain't about safety from ill-intentioned people...it's about protecting the POTUS from having to give the order to open fire on an hijacked civilian plane.
That's the reason why every administration is so concerned with planes and so lax about trains and buses and cruise ships.
Oh, and only one of these things will be heading for Congress potentially.
https://abc7chicago.com/union-station-shooting-chicago-shoot...
Plenty of people are harassed by DEA, customs or immigration on Amtrak trains. They don't seem too concerned with terrorism or souls, though.
0: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1621509
That said, there's a lot more (remote, exposed) infrastructure one could target.
In trains with a separate locomotive, passengers cannot even get to the driver compartment. In any electrified rail scenario, a runaway/commandeered train can be stopped by removing the power supply and then diverting the train onto catch points. Not to mention that running a red light triggers an automated immediate brake in many rail systems.
Of course, breaking into a parked locomotive, starting it and overriding the safety systems (deadman switch, red light detector) is possible, but it requires a lot of training you won't find online, and without the cooperation of someone at the control center all you're going to do is to derail the engine (as usually, there is a catch point switch at the entry of every branch onto the main track, that is by default pointing to the catch point).
> Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Agreed, but bomb/poison threat is a risk at every large building.
> Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It's incredibly difficult to pull off a fatal attack using a commandeered (cruise) ship as a weapon - wannabe pirates would need to control the entire bridge and the machine room as well as any auxiliary control points (e.g. for guides) that allow a remote shutdown of the engines. And even assuming attackers do gain control of a ship... a ship is slow, and cost guard will intervene if they notice you on a dangerous collision course.
There are 300+ people on a train and 4000+ on a cruise ship, those things don't need to be used as a weapon to cause a very sad day for the whole Nation in terms of human lives lost.
Even if the thing is not used as a weapon.
For trains, the situation is similar. Even if you manage to bomb a train, it's unlikely to cause a major, deadly disaster. Rail infrastructure is built with the assumption that trains will get out of control, and the industry has nearly 200 years of experience.
Trains, ships and airplanes are ineffective weapons that need a lot of knowledge to turn into an actual weapon. A truck is way more effective: easy to acquire, easy to use, and even right in the middle of an attack people will assume that the driver has lost control or has medical issues instead of being a terrorist.
China takes train security as seriously as the aeroplane security. At least for the high speed trains.
If I can get a train to go from A to B, I usually take the train. You can arrive at the train station 5 minutes before departure and make it to the train. It's just an overall more comfy experience, mostly thanks to the seamless process of getting on it, not having to worry about the water bottle in your backpack and arriving almost directly in the city center with just a few minutes to get off the train and train station.
You can't hijack a train or a boat and make it crash wherever you want. I also assume it's much easier to respond to a train or cruise ship hijack and avoid having to kill everyone on board.
No, but I am astounded by how you are writing off the 300 people on a train and the 4000 on a ship.
You'd be effectively trapped aboard with hijackers who'd not hesitate to off everybody .
Honestly, I don't know why everyone doesn't pay for TSA PreCheck and GlobalEntry.