We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I'm advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here.
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.
> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation?
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.
A very simple step in the right direction would be to create more places where the exchange of money for goods and services is not a requirement for attendance. It sucks to be too poor to go to the library 8 miles away because you can't afford the bus pass.
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.
In particular, by the time a problem becomes prominent enough to be noticed by politicians, it has often already been solved and the ensuing legislation is nothing but a deadweight loss.
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.
Thank you for making an account to attack a point that I did not make.
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.
It seems like free therapy would help with all of this? Therapy is part of free health care in other countries if I recall. Also free health care would help prevent people from ending up in dire straits.
> 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
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.
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^] 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)
> or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide
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.
> It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem
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 idea that removing a quick and accessible means of suicide can reduce suicide rates, there's a huge caveat on that article.
> 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.
> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings.
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.
The ongoing and ramped up tyrannies don't affect the people with guns, so it's not doing much good so far. When the oppressed arm themselves, people who claim opposition to gun control suddenly become very pro-gun control.
This shouldn't be downvoted - the roots of control in the US are absolutely rooted in this kind of racism, whether it be "modern" gun control as mentioned by parent, or the Sullivan Act over a hundred years ago.
Yup, California was an open carry state until the GOP assemblyman Mulford and GOP Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act into law banning the legal carry of loaded firearms. History is indeed stranger than fiction.
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.
Very pro-2A people agree that gun control is racist though. Mainstream republican party (what people think of as pro-2a) isnt very. Trump implemented bump stock restrictions, hell, reagan signed 86 new machine gun ban. If you talk to very pro-2a people you will hear them agree that armed minorities are harder to oppress; gun control is indeed very racist going back to army/navy laws and other restrictions on former slaves owning arms.
> an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.
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.
We just spent 20 years in Afghanistan proving how effective and potent a modern military is against guerilla tactics. I think it's become pretty clear that if you're not willing to ignore the generally accepted rules of engagement, they will just outlast you.
Not to mention the Vietnam war or any of the other wars we've been involved with in the Middle East. Not to mention drug cartels in Mexico and Latin/South America.
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.
Which has also been common throughout history. Same thing happened during the US civil war, Europe got involved. Of course other countries would get involved. Why would it be different this time?
Pea shooters will allow you to stop the US Army on home soil? They have total information awareness, tanks, space/air power, snipers, GPS bombs, etc.
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.
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
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.
The 18th century "regulated" means "well trained" today. What implies that any restrictions on the type of arms which may be possessed would be Constitutional? Where is the ambiguity outside of misunderstanding the contemporary meaning of "regulated"? "Bearing" doesn't mean using/firing weapons, of course, it's about preventing any authority from monopolizing 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 way the US government works today is VERY different from the government setup by the founders. Trying to divine what they would and wouldn't have wanted (understanding that they were all over the board on opinions) isn't a useful exercise.
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 agree on divining intent, but I'm not aware of any founder endorsing any form of arms control. I'd be interested to see any references suggesting otherwise. Are you aware of any meaningful debate on what became the Second?
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?
>The founders didn't want a strong federal government, they wanted to states to be highly sovereign.
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 founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.
> 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.
> The founders didn't want a strong federal government
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 United States Constitution was not "the first constitution in history". For earlier, famous, instances of actual "constitutions" rather than codes of law (such as that of Urukagina of Lagash) see for example Solon's constitution of ancient Athens:
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.
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:
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'm not a citizen of the US so I don't really have a horse in this race (about "gun rights") but I am curious about your comment. I don't understand how the right to bear arms has kept police from killing any Americans in 2019 and how it will keep them from killing more in 2021. Can you explain?
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?
If you look at police shootings, the bulk are police killing people brandishing guns or other weapons, who express intent to or are in the process of using those weapons on either the police or other people.
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.
The right is codified law. It is not up to citizens to argue this. It is up to to those who need to control others to make these arguments. Yours are hncompelling, and have been swatted away by courts for decades.
The guns that Lewis and Clark used on their expedition were decidedly quite fast firing. Yes, it was short after the 2nd Amendment and certainly in the founders' sites of possible.
Be careful with that reasoning. Its illegal for the CDC to study gun violence as a public health measure. If that happened it might rank on child mortality rates.
It is not, and never has been, illegal for the CDC to study gun violence. One specific part of their budget that had been earmarked for those studies was reallocated once. That's the extent of the so-called "ban" that the politicians keep harping on about.
That re-allocation did happen, but it also came with wording that effectively barred from doing any research until a recent change to the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
It's not entirely unreasonable to regulate on the basis of psychic impact over straight up mortality.
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.
What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns.
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.
Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004. I bet the data is available, but you'd have to comb through court records yourself.
Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.
Because it runs counter to the narrative of gun control advocates. Almost no gun crime is committed with legally obtained guns by previously law-abiding people.
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".
All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.
My neighbor was the spokesman for the New Orleans police department. He gave a pretty detailed explanation of how illegal guns are used, and where they come from.
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.
What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided?
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."
That would be great, but it would be gamed so badly.
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.
I have my doubts. People can learn “critical thinking skills” all they want, it’s the failure to apply them fairly that breaks political discourse at all levels of education.
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.
But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all.
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.
guns have a tendency to escalate violence and harm (vs. say, fists), which is a real problem, but yes, the focus on terrorism and mass shootings is entirely unjustified vis-à-vis guns and gun policy. suicide by gun (20-30K/yr) happens twice as often as homicide (10-15K/yr), and non-fatal injury rates are ~3 times the fatality rate (80-100K/yr). almost none of those involve terrorism or mass shooting (combined, on the order of 100/yr).
Your chances of dying in a mass shooting may be very small, but it doesn't take a large number of shootings to start affecting our lives. For example, events like First Friday in Oakland have been essentially cancelled indefinitely and most public events have large numbers of heavily armed police standing around and getting paid for overtime.
But then the thing causing the damage isn't actually the shootings, it's the reaction to them.
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.
My gut feeling is that if you look at these data they'll tell you "most people should focus on eating well and getting good amounts of exercise." They might also tell you "kids should learn water safety skills and comply with car seat safety rules scrupulously".
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).
> 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.
Whilst I think airport security is indeed just security theater, roll my eyes every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, and I disagree with some of the claims in this article that these things work and have kept us safe, I'm not sure that's a great idea.
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.
You MUST do cost benefit analysis. A lot of people say "well if TSA saves one life..." But at what cost? A billion dollars? A trillion? A quadrillion? You may argue that it may never cost that much, but it can if you don't do those analysis.
And what about non monetary costs? How many lives are you willing to forfeit to save just one? A lot of people claimed to take to the roads after TSA was formed. Yet car travel, per mile is deadlier than air. So theoretically it cost more lives to save just that one.
I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now.
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).
>I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives
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.
As someone else wrote in this thread, there's absolutely no way to know how many were saved from potential harm, so that's a useless contradistinction.
There's a dynamic aspect to this that's difficult to capture in terms of straight up mortality risk.
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.
I've definitely considered this regarding COVID. It seems commonplace where I live that many people feel it is irresponsible to not wear a mask when doing something like hiking on an almost empty nature trail, but will drive recklessly on the highway without a second thought.
In my opinion, this is just statistics worship, and is not unlike a form of utilitarianism. Murder rates are low, but we spend an incredible amount of resources preventing, investigating, prosecuting, imprisoning and executing murderers, even those who have murdered just one person.
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.
While I agree with your conclusion, the metric you suggest isn't a good one.
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.
People are just fine at evaluating risk. It's just that the prioritization of the population is different than the prioritization of HN/Reddit/whatever. "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true.
People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
> "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true.
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).
> while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year.
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.
The CDC collects these statistics. You would find, for instance, that more black people die each year from falling out of bed than they do at the hands of cops while unarmed (Unironically, provably true; look it up before you downvote... ideally no innocent person would die during police interactions). Clearly, whatever motivates policy and politics has no resemblance to a proportional risk-based assessment.
I went ahead and looked it up. According to google, in the US 650 die falling out of bed per year[1], while about 1000 are killed by police, about 20-25% of those police victims being black (while the US black population is around 14%).[2]
Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much.
The other problem overlooked in this analogy is that the killings are the most extreme symptom of a tyrannical police force that terrorizes (black) American citizens at an incredibly high rate, from harassment to physical abuse. Protests against the police are using killings as an example of the problem, not the complete summary.
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.
An engineer friend, at VW, told me more people fall to their deaths from ladders than die on the autobahn. In DE, of course. He's one of those engineerz that evaluates the moral consequences of the companies processes, writ large. And you need an engineer for moral calculus. Sadly, this is still new territory for large companies.
> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths
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.
> 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.
> The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count
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.
> This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.
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.
It's bizarrely myopic. It not only ignores any cost benefit analysis, but also larger preventable causes of death and poor health outcomes. Obesity being the proverbial elephant in the room.
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.
Those are risks that are stable from year to year. Deaths from terrorism, COVID and small wars are defined by power laws where they can quickly spiral out of control. You could argue people intuitively understand this and overreact in an attempt to get them under "control".
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.
Of course high speed limits aren't the only factor in traffic deaths. But if we set every speed limit to 25mph and enforced it, I'm pretty confident we would see a significant drop. Obviously we shouldn't do that, but the point is that we are allowing some people to die so we can get places faster.
20 years later, the commodity that both financed and motivated 9/11 style terrorism and religious radicalization in the middle east and beyond - petroleum - still does that. It's also the same industry that provides a lot of revenue for the international arms industry.
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.
Actually we are but actuaries aren't, maybe politicians should start using some actuarial expertise rather than jumping from one supposed crisis to the next to get votes. People, especially mobs, are ruled far more by fear than by facts.
I get $100 from my health insurer for getting flu shots, I imagine similar incentives are coming for covid vaccines. 2021 premiums were set before vaccines came out, so maybe they have had time to price it in by now.
We are pretty good at death counts, it's easy. All the data is there. Tied to anonymised health condition as aggregates.
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.
Strong door to flight deck, and policy change to keep door closed and locked, eliminated hijacking risk. Everything else is an expensive show which air travellers apparently enjoy. They keep paying for it.
They don't enjoy it. It's mandated, and the cost isn't itemised on the ticket fare.
If each and every traveller knew the cost of airport security measures put on them, more would complain, the most drastic airports may start to be avoided on principle. But we aren't in a capitalist regime where transparency and obligation to inform accurately is enforced. It's authoritarian capitalism. Pay up, or find yourself excluded from the show.
Good points on tax transparency. Add-ons are itemized on air tickets in USA, though things like airport remodeling costs are opaque.
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.
While true, I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the war on terror and its intrusions in our domestic lives have to do with risk assessment? Don't think I have to say it out loud but it's about literal trillions of dollars that have flowed to MIC, expanded bureaucracy, surveillance, gov contractors, natural resource industries, foreign allies, and a whole lot more that could be noted.
Count of total death is just a 'metric' and something that can be 'optimised' and done 'cost benefit analysis' upon, unless it is your child or family member who is the casualty.
I would like to understand how okay anybody would be when told that their daughter died because the government felt it was a waste of money to prevent it.
But we make those choices every single day, gathering data about it doesn't change that fact.
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.
Big difference between labeling it a "waste of money" to having to prioritize whilst being constrained to a limited budget. I mean there's no words that will console a parent that lost their daughter anyways, not really a metric that should determine policy.
Not sure how you make such a dashboard when the expensive prevention measures affect the number of deaths. I think you are looking for number of deaths if the prevention measures weren't in place, but i'm not sure how you could arrive to that number accurately.
> 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.
Or you would encourage the already-sedentary people to go out even less.
We could just start with people dying from starvation or wars globally. My guts tell me, if we can reduce this number, we will reduce the number of terrorist attacks as well.
This is actually a logical fallacy. Heart disease, accidents etc: They happen. Terrorism: Someone wants them to happen. Big difference, think about it.
The US is the only place I think I've had to remove shoes for flight security in years. But in Europe taking off a belt is often required while in the US it is not. In Budapest they stopped having us remove laptops from bags a bit ago. My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.
"My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way."
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 :-/
When I was flying back from Tampa, a TSA agent told me I had to take out my phone and put it through the scanner. I kept telling him I didn't have a phone on me, but he didn't believe me and asked me the same question about three more times. I was surprised he didn't search me haha. Not a big deal or anything, just thought it was funny
I'd stick with the more conservative measure, taking the tablet out all the time, even if it might not have been required. Also I wouldn't bother verbally responding if they ask me to do something, I'd just do it and keep my lips sealed.
I've been yelled at for taking out things besides a laptop, including a tablet with a keyboard case.
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.
Oh I would agree; if being conservative always worked - but my point is I've frequently been berated for taking a tablet out as well as for keeping it on at the same airport.
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.
It also differs within airports. I flew in LAX a week ago and one of the non-precheck lines only took off shoes, but left liquids and laptops in bags and did a generic metal detector. They didn't even randomly assign people to lines, it was apparently early enough for me to choose to use that line since it was obviously moving faster.
There is an impatience mismatch between the average traveler and airport security.
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.
The Philly airport employees are some of the least hospitable I've encountered traveling, especially their TSA. They come off as actively hostile about everything
Interesting, I have not spent a whole lot of time in Philadelphia but that describes my experience everywhere there, seemed like everyone is always angry and impatient with me before I even start to interact. (Kind of like the NYC stereotype, which I encounter only rarely when I visit NYC.) But TSA in general is tough to deal with, I fly once sometimes twice in a year and the rules are different every time but they're shocked and appalled I'm not up to date.
yup travelling to the US from Canada just to see a comedy show i needed to tell them how much money i have in my bank account and what i do and how much i make... what on earth... they couldn't understand why i would only stay one night...
Then there’s remembering airports (and flight patterns) that do “one-stop-security” and which don’t.
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.
In Europe you're not required to take off your belt because of an arbitrary rule like shoes in the US. They just tell you to take it off because most belts have metal parts so they will likely trigger the metal detector.
> 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.
It's arbitrary because all they do is X-ray them. X-rays can't tell you whether there are explosives in the shoe, all you can do is look for signs the shoe has been altered.
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.
>
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.
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.
> My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.
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.
Two weeks ago in San Diego, the security line forked into two conveyor belt lines. I walked past the first option (the second had a shorter line), and as I did, the guy stationed there was loudly shouting to the whole line that all electronic devices bigger than a cell phone must be removed from bags. I proceeded to the second line, where I got scolded for taking my laptop out of my bag. I gestured to the other guy and said "he told us all electronic items bigger than a cell phone should be removed." The response? "That's that line, this is this line."
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?
> My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.
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.
The belt thing is supposedly because metal buckles will trigger the metal detector... but they insist I take off mine even though I bought one with a plastic buckle on purpose. So yeah, it now became "a rule" which is followed without much reasoning.
It's a rule because it makes it easier to keep things flowing. You don't have to trust that the person is right about their belt not being able to set off the metal detector.
Pre-check screening is the EZPass of the security state. Exchange your privacy for convenience. Submit to a background probe and permanent residence in a government database (and god knows what other consents are required) and you, too, can join the upper tier of society. Leave the filthy plebes and their shoeless drudgery and pat-downs behind you as you ascend into the clear air of the Verified(TM) elite. You pose no threat, quite the opposite! You support and serve the power structure. Welcome aboard!
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.
At least in Kansas, the toll roads are not using tax money, so that's better than a government-funded TSA wanting more cash from you to make your life easier.
Ugh, you mean that stretch of the Turnpike on 70 that forces you to pay a toll for travel between Topeka and Kansas City? Not exactly an optional tollroad if you're driving across the country on 70, and you can tell they're not using a lot of the money to maintain the roads...
Aside from the interview, the government already has all the background check data in their databases already. It’s not like you’re applying for a security clearance where agents go around your friends, family and neighbors digging up undocumented dirt.
Do you know for a fact that your background screening does not now or will not ever include calling out to a social media extremist detection service? I'm not so confident.
I’m also not confident in that. But again, if someone has put me in an “extremist detection” database I’m already in the database and the government could already query it.
It's increasingly not even that convenient. The last half-dozen times I've traveled, "PreCheck" turned into me going through the regular security line, carrying a card which they ignored.
How does that even happen? I have pre-check, and it's always been an entirely separate line. They'd have to do a fair amount of work to redirect you over to the 'regular' line.
It used to happen only at smaller airports that didn't have the capacity to handle extra lines. But lately, I've had it happen at bit airports (like ATL), so I'm not really sure.
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.
So after you already start the x-ray process, they take you aside and make you do the shoes, belt, and the rest?
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.
> I don't get a pre-check card, it just shows up as a notation on my boarding pass.
(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.
My local airport is so small that they don't process security until half an hour before boarding. We have one "gate", and the planes we get can hold 50 people when full.
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).
I always though taking off a belt it was bcause if not the metal sensor would trigger, so to avoid it, they just ask to remove your belt in case it contains metal?
In Canada that's the case. But small belts can go through. So it depends on the security guard what exactly they ask you to do. I had purposefully bought a small belt that would not trigger alarm when I flew weekly pre-covid for years. No joy : Half the security guards told me to take it off as a precaution when I tried to go through, half would get upset I'm taking my small belt and delaying everyone - sometimes there's no winning, just say "yes sir/ma'am" to whatever they ask that particular day :-/
I've had to take my shoes off in a few other places, including in Ethiopia and a few places in S.E. Asia. But I confirm that the US takes things to a level beyond anything anywhere I've been, with some airports being worst than others. Nowadays when I buy plane tickets, I usually try to avoid any transit through LGA or JFK.
Counterpoint, I was once asked to take off my shoes in Germany. I can’t remember if it was Frankfurt or Munich — probably Frankfurt. That was just because I was randomly selected for more screening. All of the other times flying through those airports shoes were left on :-)
The way you know it is all security theater is TSA pre. I haven't taken my shoes off, my laptop out, or gone through the hands-on-your-head scanner in years, because the TSA pre-check line doesn't require any of that.
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...
Pre seems like a nice service for terrorist groups, too: sign up your deep-cover types and have them make some benign flights. If the TSA is on to your group, you'll get a notification in the mail that your Pre status has been revoked.
Aside: when I talk about this program, I refer to it as "T-S-A precheck" because it's depicted as "TSA Pre <checkmark>".
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".
Until this specific thread I've never seen or heard it referred to as "TSA Pre". It has always been precheck. I suppose now I'll start to notice people doing it.
Hmm. So it's a deliberate abbreviation? I'd always assumed that folks who referred to it that way didn't know the actual name because of the icon in place of 'check'.
The rollout of TSA Pre confirmed my belief that TSA is a worthless hinderance on travel. But, it is par for the course with anything remotely political. Create a solution to a problem that is outsized for the risk. This solution creates a new problem. Offer a workaround for the newly created problem instead of removing the previous solution.
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.
TSA Pre requires fingerprinting and a background check. You definitely give up some privacy in signing up for it. I mean you can unlock some computer devices with fingerprints.
The government already has my fingerprints, because I had to give them to get a passport (edit: I've been informed this was only because I also did Global Entry) and also when I was in elementary school they fingerprinted everyone and also when I got my driver's license.
Pretty much if you're a US citizen they already have your fingerprints.
U.S. passports do not require getting fingerprinted. U.S. Visas require fingerprinting.
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.
I had this happen too. We put our fingerprints onto an "ID" card we got to keep. As far as I remember the fingerprints didn't actually go anywhere else.
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.
There are multiple clearances with different requirements, so it is possible that certain types require finger prints while others do not. However, AFAIK everybody who gets a clearance also has their fingerprints taken. The 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.
> However, AFAIK everybody who gets a clearance also has their fingerprints taken.
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.
Where on earth would people accept such an encroachment on their privacy and right to unreasonable search and seizure just to obtain proof they have passed an examination? Soviet Russia? The DDR? Orwell's Oceania?
It isn't just proof you passed an exam -- it's also your ID card. The fingerprints are part of your government ID. Here in California you have to give a thumbprint or fingerprint to get both a license and a state issued ID card. The license serves as both proof of passing and as an ID so you don't need two cards.
I got my license in California in 1993 and it was required then too. I remember because we made fun of how the driver handbook said, "you must provide your thumbprint, or your fingerprint if you have no thumbs".
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.
You joke but the permanent record is a real thing. My wife taught elementary school for many years, and at the end of the year she had to update all the permanent records and then pass them on to the next teacher. The records moved with you from school to school.
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.
Oh, good to know! I thought so, my wife had hers taken when she got her passport. Maybe because it was at an embassy? Either way, thanks for the clarification.
I'm having trouble finding any state where a standard drivers license currently requires being fingerprinted. Texas did it for a little while but stopped in 2015. Some specialty licenses require it, like a commercial license to carry hazardous materials.
I've seen second-hand references to that but only find references to prints being taken for occupational licenses on authoritative sites, like this one:
"Soon" being May 3, 2023 at the moment. I've lost count how many times the requirement for Real ID to fly has been delayed.
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.
It's 100% this. Artificial inconveniences created to convince people to willingly give up all their information past, present, and future for government surveillance. That they additionally convinced us to pay $80 for that is just perfection.
The government is utterly terrible at any sort of cross-division or state vs federal information sharing. TSA is a relatively new agency (homeland) and needed to
build up that data mostly from scratch.
I mean, I agree in general but it is also likely that they're performing at least some kind of background check on you when you participate in Pre. They definitely do with Nexus. It does make a certain degree of sense as a program if you believe in the premise of the entire security theatre apparatus to begin with. Especially within the US where domestic air travel has traditionally required very weak identification (driver's license).
That is, you're paying them for the privilege of reducing their attack surface a little bit.
They run a background check on you whenever you buy an airline ticket. The airline submits their manifest to the TSA to cross check with the no-fly list. The only thing that TSA pre does is give you a number that is unique to you (as opposed to a name that you may share with someone else). They could easily solve this by having you submit your SSN or Passport number whenever you buy an airline ticket.
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.
The no-fly list isn't really a background check. It's just a simple name match, and it catches people who aren't on it because of that. An interview (like nexus or customs) also isn't a background check. These are three separate things. Everyone gets a check on the no-fly list, some people get advance background checks (Pre and programs like it I'd expect), and fewer still get an actual interview (international travellers who also have to supply a passport).
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.
> domestic air travel has traditionally required very weak identification (driver's license).
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.
Real ID has been implemented in every state and most territories. Not all share their databases with each other, but that isn't a requirement for usage for using the ids for air travel in the US.
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.
Yeah they all offer it but at least in my state it's an additional cost which means a lot of people will choose the cheaper easier option. Also that deadline has been changed many many times and I bet it will again in/before 2023 if adoption rates don't increase a lot.
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.
See my sibling comment, the TSA does a background check on everyone who flies already. The difference is that with Pre you have a unique number instead of a possibly non-unique name.
Cross checking against no-fly is different than a full background check. My guess is they're running a very light check but Pre digs deeper into your history.
Exactly, it will never go away for the same reason the unskippable ads in between turns on the hottest new mobile game will never go away. It's the torture designed to get you to pay up.
Things like this are why I'm so cynical about COVID stuff. We have an unconditional commitment to stupid reactive policies that elevate symbolism far above sensibility, and boy does it have a lot of inertia. The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.
> The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.
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.
Mass loss of life. Novel way in which people died. People dying randomly (hard to avoid). General hysteria. Paranoia over a minority group. Moral outrage against anyone not falling inline politically. Overreaching government plans to keep people safe. Petty symbolism (freedom fries/masks) to sort the moral from the immoral.
You think masks are petty symbolism? I think that kind of trolling just raises the temperature here, which I'd like to avoid, so no, please, do not go on.
Endless studies and real-world data showing no efficacy and half the world doesn't care. A new one every week, nobody cares, they're stuck in their religion.
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.
The study you have linked does not support the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. I would recommend reading the “Discussion” sections, where the authors discuss other studies in other areas of the world that contradict theirs, and the impact of various social and density factors on their specific study.
That study seems to have an obvious and unacknowledged flaw: they did not control for the growing prevalence of the delta variant this summer even though the time frame of the study exactly coincides with the spread of delta within the united states.
These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.
I think I know a ton of Covid-cautious people who "wear a mask" to restaurants by putting one on as they walk through the door and taking it off as they sit at their table. There are a lot of contexts where masks directly affect transmission, but it seems clear that they're also serving a symbolic role beyond their practical utility.
There are number of marginally useful anti-covid measures. A characteristic of the US public discourse is that some of these measures are ridiculous if not malevolent, while others are worth their weight in gold. The key of decoding which is which is the political beliefs of the reader.
Do we think security theater is symbolism? It has had some positives over the years just as masks have a huge positive health impact during COVID but on both sides of the issue, people treat it as a signal as well, no?
Are you still not aware that there are serious people who believe that masks are basically irrelevant in a respiratory pandemic? Accusing others of trolling on this issue is not helpful. It was the consensus in Western medicine for 100 years. This consensus was forged after mask mandates were shown to be ineffective for Spanish Flu.
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%."
Most people in 2021 would agree that the overzealous response to 9/11 caused untold suffering and misery. At the time though, either you were with us or against us. Good or evil.
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.
They are pretty different things, at pretty different times. We could make bad analogies all day long and end up at some very weird places. Like imagine that COVID was invisible Arab terrorists armed with a gas who killed 600,000+ Americans. I think the response and fear level would be very different. But it's a silly analogy and a real digression from thinking about 9/11 in its own context.
You mean, invisible Arab terrorists that are disarmed absurdly well by a vaccine. You see, this is exactly why it's a terrible analogy, because people will just twist it to suit their pre-conceived notions about the current divisive topic, bludgeon those they disagree with, and jump right back into the same damn arguments.
I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.
> This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.
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.
> Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.
This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.
What are you referring to? The top comment is not mine and also does not make that declaration, it correctly states that the difference is statistically insignificant.
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?
> 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.
The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.
It’s not cynical when looking at the incentives. Once a rule is in place for “safety” reasons the political cost to remove is really high (what if something bad happens?). Politicians won’t touch it. That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically (on a date or when a hard condition is met)
>That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically
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.
I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.
This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones.
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.
> We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents
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.)
We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement. I just think it's insanity to let essentially private and unaccountable organisations have this much power over ordinary people's lives. Laws should be made as part of an authentically democratic process that at least tries to involve the whole socio-economic makeup of the country, not as a result of private intrigues in the party's membership and leadership which represents a much smaller fraction of the population and obfuscates everything to the point that the vast majority of us won't hear about what actually happened until years after the fact when memoirs are published. Would there not be far more democracy if it were exercised directly rather than through the distorting lens of a party?
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.
> We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement
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.
I'm not American, but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence? Either way, I get that they're regulated in theory as part of the public sphere but that's not the point I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests and as a result I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments where they can be scrutinised more transparently.
> but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence?
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.
How would you prevent someone from creating a Democratic Non-party and Republican Non-party that endorse "non partisan" candidates? Would you ban the endorsements of candidates outright? That would seem to cause it's own issues.
You probably would have to ban entities like corporations, partnerships, and non-profits from endorsing a candidate. It would essentially extend and make permanent the concept of Purdah to those entities. Purdah is the state of affairs during the pre-election period in the UK where entities like local governments and the Civil Service can't say anything that might prejudice the outcome of an election, though I can't argue that it wouldn't be a very draconian policy and doing something completely different to the original intention of the concept.
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.
> You probably would have to ban entities like corporations, partnerships, and non-profits from endorsing a candidate.
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.
I agree fully re: expiration dates. IIRC the patriot act had an expiration date and it took nearly two decades for it to actually expire because it kept being reauthorized. It finally did expire last year and was not reauthorized and I suspect that is because we've actually already slipped far enough down the slope to no longer need that particular set of rules.
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.
Right now most everyone has a sense of what it would be like to go back to normal pre-COVID life. I'm starting to lose a sense of what it would be like to go back to pre-War-On-Terror normalcy.
There is a mountain worth of difference. The policies enacted for COVID have a very specific target, has been shown to work repeatedly, and deviating from them caused decline in the KPI its trying to maintain. Its nothing like TSA.
Ok then what's the target? Eradication of the virus is not achievable and neither is full vaccination of the entire population. I have yet to hear any hard numbers for removal of "safety" measures from any politician when enacting lockdowns/mandates.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
I'm not in charge of making public policy, but the target that makes sense to me is hospital capacity.
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.
The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures. And covid measures have always been dynamic. Safety measures have been removed or reintroduced based up on very hard statistics man. I don't know how you don't see that.
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.
All the more reason to keep draconian covid measures in place in perpetuity. Covid passports, lockdowns, masks, forced vax.
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.
They can go around staying whatever they want. But the fact is they have never had nor will they ever have the statistical basis that covid regulations have. I can, right now, google covid and be presented with all statistics broken down by days, countries, continents etc. We can start comparing TSA and covid when TSA starts presenting their statistics.
> That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.
reply
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.
>The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures.
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.
You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here. Others have explained why you are way off base.
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.
Give me the numbers and the objective measurement of what we need to meet for this to happen. Why is this hard for you?
>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?
>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).
The threat will never go away, but fortunately vaccination cuts the risk of death to virtually zero. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, plus several animal species, so unlike smallpox or polio it can never be eradicated. Obviously we can't keep the safety measures in place forever, so what are the quantitative exit criteria?
This feels potentially disingenuous. Why are all the graphs only until mid-April/May? Of course states with higher density populations are going to see more spread/death/hospitalizations. Counts per 100k people don't show the whole picure. How does this site clearly demonstrate that restrictions don't work? How can you know what might have happened without restrictions?
From Covid or with covid (edit: I’m merely asking which stat you’re citing. Source?)? Ie the disease killed them or they tested positive while dying from something else?
There have been clear excess deaths (mortality rate increases) from all causes combined during waves. Most evaluations of excess deaths that I've seen conclude that Covid deaths are undercounted not over counted.
Do we say "death from car accidents" or "death with car accident"? Do we discount terminal cancer patients, diabetics and asthmatics from car accident stats because they had a preexisting condition? In the case of covid as with car accidents, it's a distinction without a difference. Yes people are more predisposed to die from covid because of them, but analyses of all-causes excess mortality do not support the hypothesis that there is a large difference between deaths with covid and deaths from covid.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
the interesting thing I've found about those circles is that the followup is never discussed. they just stick with the earlier information and make it the hill they want to die on.
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.
Methodologies vary, but comparing deaths to any of the previous years, it is clear that they've increased. And the only major change was the new virus.
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.
The major change, at least in my country, is that healthcare is so focused on COVID that they are neglecting patients with other diseases. So the excess deaths are mostly effect of that.
There is limited capacity to provide care for people. If people are without COVID dying because COVID cases are taking up that capacity, then COVID is a factor in those deaths as well.
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.
should they leave the covid patients in the hallways? whats the alternative? people dying from overloaded hospitals has always been the concern, ever since “flatten the curve”
your point here seems to be that people aren't doing that
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?
> In your opinion, how important are the lives of people aged 65 and older?
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.
Understood, though I'd point out that other insurance schemes will have similar sorts of calculations (either directly or indirectly in the form of premiums/annual limits in the US), so the specificity of the NHS isn't particularly helpful here, as it's one model among many.
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'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.
I agree, most people aren’t saying that (my wording was “too much”). I also suspect that the majority of people on all sides are not arguing whether or not to save lives at “all cost” —- this seems to be a partisan distortion of the actual debate that is occurring among serious people (much like the similarly egregious “granny killer” reference elsewhere in these comments).
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.
Well said. As for a good place to discuss this stuff, my view is that, to misappropriate the Churchill quote, HN is the worst place I've found for debating COVID matters except for all the other places I've found. At least most people here, being predominantly from scientific and engineering backgrounds, are capable of and willing to remove emotion from debate and assess the biases inherent in arguments on both sides.
I'm tired of people pretending that everyone on the planet is expendable except Americans.
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.
On a reread, I see that my comment is ambiguous and could have suggested that I believe Americans were more worth protecting. Sorry for that, I didn’t intend that reading. >15% of the US population is >=6 age 65. I’m more familiar with US numbers so I used that.
I disagree with you, even in your hypothetical situation. I'd gladly wear a mask to protect 97-year-old obese smokers, if they were a vulnerable group. I feel like you invented this group to distance the vulnerable population from "us", but it just makes it sound like you have no empathy for other humans.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I think wearing a mask is a reasonable accommodation and barely an inconvenience. Same goes for FDA-approved vaccines.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't always work in the real world, so your hazmat scenario just sounds silly.
Going to gym is barely an inconvenience. Mortality would have been minimal if fat people would jump on a treadmill occasionally and keep the cheeseburgers out of their face.
"What is inconvenient" is subjective and that's the ultimate slippery slope argument.
Your argument and thinking is so so bad, I feel like I'm being trolled.
"Your haz mat argument is silly because I say it is. My argument is not silly because I say it's not."
This absolute state of critical thinking in America...
I can't wait till the media stops covering covid and everyone forgets that covid exists because they're on to the next thing the medium easily manipulates them over.
My point is that your attempt at a logical argument misses a number of externalities. My refusal to engage is because you're acting like a jerk, not because I can't construct a proof.
While you marvel at the "state of critical thinking" I am astounded by your lack of empathy.
I agree the parallels are clear. Both narratives rely on fear and mass hysteria. Putting aside the hot potato of 9/11, we can hopefully discuss the issue of Iraqi WMDs in a less inflammatory way.
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.
One of the more interesting parallels I see is how injecting morality into the matter poisoned everything and ensured terrible policy decisions. How many people and politicians got effectively bullied into going along with the idiotic Iraq war because people on the right accused them of not caring about 9/11 victims?
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.
Part of the problem in the current situation is that there is a ton of anti-science conspiracy nuttery. If you are going to dissent, you need to do so in a way that doesn't get pattern-matched with people who are clearly being irrational.
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 was thinking the opposite. If taking off my shoes results in a 0.0001% decrease in the chance of a plane blowing up, then why not? It's not really inconvenient. Same with masking. It's not inconvenient so why not? Even if it's all theater, theater has some value.
Theater didn't have any value, in fact it has negative vale. How much time, energy, and money is spent waiting in TSA line, and for what?
Taking your shoes off does not decrease the chance of the plane blowing up by 0.0001%. it decreases it by 0%. I am willing to bet that more people have been injured, removing their shoes in the airport than from a shoe bomb. Injuries from falling over while driving shoes to picking up a fungal disease from the dirty floor.
An airport is a sieve, yet we treat it like a secure fortress, due to theater
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.
Wow, I got to hand it to you! 'communist-aligned socio-economic elites' is the most creative code for 'the Jews' I have heard in quite a while.
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.
You don't need to be modest! I thought it was pretty precise. I especially like the part where the white man is the only one able to stand against (((them))) and fight against the pseudo-communist world government.
>The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.
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.
The only parallels are between COVID conspiracy theorists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Nearly all federal COVID guidance from the CDC has been well-reasoned and carefully balances public health goals with the reality of life in America. State and local measures have been questionable, but all that says is that state and local governments are not really up to the task and should have universally deferred to the CDC.
This is a lesson in incentives. The reason any of these procedures are not eradicated is that no one wants to be the person who does that and then have the next terrorist attack use a technique that would've been caught.
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?
> It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity
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.
Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
I live in a pretty liberal area, so I assume we are taking stronger measures than your average area, and I have to say that nothing surrounding any covid precautions even approaches what it takes to get on a flight. Wear a mask indoors? Get the jab that most people wanted anyway? I'm just not seeing this Orwellian oppression that some people seem to be suffering under right now.
NYC is the most strict, but they are also the most densely populated. Beyond that, I just don't feel like I've given up any rights.
Can't say the same about a shoeless, invasive patdown where a stranger runs their hand down your butt crack after having waited in line for an hour and gone through a nude scanner.
your comment sounds like what someone who doesnt fly might have said after 9/11. its not hard to think of some examples that apply to the covid security theatre. for example, there are fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of movement, that turn out not to be so fundamental after all. safety first.
I live in Moscow, Russia, and there was a brief time when I was stripped of rights to enter a restaurant, cafe, gym, theater, concert or sports venue. There was talking about requirement of vaccination to use public transit and even a taxi.
Fortunately, those restrictions were cancelled after 3 weeks, because you know, voting day is coming and we don't need angry citizens to vote against ruling party. But the infrastructure is there and it may be used again any time now.
It's not the same. Covid is clearly causing a significant increase in mortality. Even if you don't believe the covid-reporting numbers, you can simply look at excess deaths.
It's very difficult to falsify death stats on a mass-scale especially in a country like the US.
the threats are legitimate and every death counts but it also makes sense to prioritize and focus our limited attention to areas where it has the most impact.
Terrorism kills something like 28k/year whereas Covid has killed 5 million.
The majority of the ~5 million that covid killed would have been dead of old age, heart disease, etc. in 5-10 years anyway. Covid just shaved off a few years of life expectancy; the same people would have shown up in CDC death counts as heart disease or natural causes statistics a few years later. With the 28k killed by terrorism, not so much. You have a lot more young and healthy dying with decades of life expectancy remaining.
Same with comparing covid deaths to WWI deaths. On the one hand you have thousands of healthy 18-year-olds dying, and on the other you have thousands of elderly, obese, and sickly people dying. Not quite a fair comparison.
> No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer.
Isn’t this economic policy, not lockdown policy? Any government could decide to pay laborers 100% of their salary to stay out of work. They could decide “essential workers” would be paid on top of their salary as compensation for the risk and danger. They could deice that corporate profit during a shutdown would go to support laborers. Lockdowns only hurt the middle class and help the rich because the government chooses to force the middle class to stay home while not forcing the rich to stop profiteering off it.
The lockdowns didn't work because people pushed back against them causing the measures to be half-assed as a way to appease those people.
This happens all the time in politics and it's infuriating.
You can't judge the effectiveness of a plan if the plan is modified as a shitty compromise or just plain ignored. But people do judge them, which makes those compromises an effective form of sabotage.
The last state lockdown orders expired in June 2020. Most lasted on the order of a few weeks.
The economy is not destroyed. Assets are appreciating, GDP is growing faster than it has in a decade and employers are desperate to find workers. The unemployment rate is near 5%.
If there is a weak spot in the economy, it is that rising case numbers of the Delta variant are causing people to voluntarily limit their in-person activities. When you ask business leaders what can help the economy, they say “more people getting vaccinated” because it’s the fastest way to reduce new COVID cases.
In my neighborhood several small businesses are still intact. The businesses that relied primarily on commuters are gone, but the staples catering to the people who live here are still intact. My favorite local bar, coffee shop, drycleaner, and bookstores are still going. I'm a bit sad about my pho place closing down, but they're a small chain, and they have another one a bit further away from me that I can still go to.
Talk to your local lockdown provider if you are not happy with the results.
Done properly, of course a lockdown would be effective. Why? Because of the Germ theory. The viruses exist and they don't teleport.
If anything, I would have much preferred if we had a month of global lockdown instead of years of slow burn battle. We wouldn't have had to convince people for vaccination too. It worked for Wuhan.
I am all in for spreading the population sparsely under the sun for a month(I'll take the Greece beaches or the French Riviera). We can make the immunes ones prepare the food and bring the beer.
Well that's a large swing in the other direction, but I enjoy the hyperbole. You do realize lockdowns are the far other direction though? Do you see my point why lockdowns were bad?
Allowing and encouraging people to go outside is the happy medium.
The idea is to separate people from each other for long enough for the virus to die off. Could be done in many ways. Accommodating people in small separate groups for a month under the sun has it's practicality issues but if someone can pull it off the results would be exactly the same.
do you know what would happen if everybody on earth gave themselves 6 feet of space from each other for 14 days? the same thing that would happen if you teleported the virus to the moon. why didnt anyone think of that!
Both have theater aspects and let me propose something: that's good.
When you approach airport security (theater) you wonder what their capabilities are _today_. Are they sniffing the air at large with their GCMS? Is there going to be a dog today? Its intimidating to think of it as a theoretical attacker because of its large and multifaceted apparatus, which is part of its deterrent power.
Masks are somewhat similar, they have a vanishingly small chance of actually intercepting a virus particle/droplet that was going to infect you on a case by case basis BUT they make people approach you differently. They say "stand back".
No actually required :-). I didn't say masks were not effective, I said part of their effectiveness is the making-conscious of transmission vectors. E.g. when you wear a mask and see others do it you are more likely to wash your hands or stand back.
When you wear a mask (as I do) in addition to blocking some particles you signal to others "lets play the not kill eachother game by limiting virus vectors!"
When you approaching airport or train station security theater, you slowing down due to limited throughput. And then bang! - a terrorist blows up in the crowd right in front of security gate.
> Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
There absolutely are red-team exercises against airport security. Sometimes the TSA has fared very poorly[0]. In the face of decreased air travel during this pandemic their "catch rate" has gotten better[1].
Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
Edit: Since some HN commenters want to play disingenuous games and insert words into my mouth, I’ll clarify my specific problem is with these apps having zero standards. If my state makes its own app or devises a law to prosecute this kind of use of private data, I would have less of a problem with it as a temporary measure.
when I got my first vaccine, they gave me a paper card, and they put stickers on it to record which vaccines I got, and I put it in my wallet where it's been ever since. I haven't (yet, I guess) had to show a "digital vaccine record", I just show my paper card and they stare at it for a bit and then wave me through.
if you did not get that option, that sucks, and it sounds a bit inconvenient, but, uh, yeah, over 600,000 people in the US have died so far, i don't think that's a "scare", that sounds like a valid concern to me.
also your data is almost assuredly at 20 different marketing analytics firms already, regardless of how secure or open-source the digital vaccine record is.
You don’t know where my data is. And regardless, that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be okay with another vector that I cannot opt out of for potentially selling my data.
> Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
If you think vaccine passports are bad just wait until you hear about all phones...
Sorry bud, I can turn off my phone. I can leave my phone at home. My phone carrier doesn’t sell my location, they just give it to the police if I commit a murder.
I don’t really see what this has to do with vaccine passports (Louisana has a nice app for it, digital drivers license, proof of vaccination checked against a state database) but phone carriers do sell real-time location data to third parties. They were fined a pittance for it: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...
> when discussing homeless people being told to move somewhere cheaper.
What an absolutely insane whataboutism. This has nothing to do with what we're discussing and you look like a joke. You're asserting that vaccine passports infringe upon your freedoms. Just don't go to those bars. Jesus.
What rights? Businesses have the right to refuse service. Governments have always required vaccine verification. This is just whining. There are no rights implications here.
Also calling me a nazi isn't really appropriate, I don't think.
> If you're okay with forcing people to show their medical history to drink,
This is the obvious troll. You're not forced to show anything _to drink_. You're forced to comply with a business's requirements as per their rights, to be allowed to drink _in their establishment_.
Also please go back to reddit if you cannot resist the urge to call names.
I'm fully vaccinated, but that was a choice I made. It was a risk assessment. "How likely am I to get covid and have a bad go of it?" vs "How likely am I to have a bad reaction from the vaccine?" That's a risk assessment that varies from person to person based on where they live, what medical conditions they might have, their age, and other things.
The mRNA vaccines are especially worrisome to some because they are relatively new and aren't fully approved in the US (where I live).
I have a co-morbidity and by the time I was eligible to get vaccinated it looked obvious to me that I'd be better off getting it based on how well they were performing and how low the risk appeared. Things could have turned out wildly different with vaccines that turned out to be both mostly ineffective and potentially dangerous, causing me to assess things differently.
I encourage my friends who aren't vaccinated to get jabbed, but I have no wish to have the government force them to get a medical procedure they specifically don't want.
The reason is to help protect and care for your fellow human beings.
"It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk. Forgoing the vaccine without a solid medical reason is putting others at risk.
By your logic, you should be able to punch anyone in the face at any time, because your fist is part of your body, and "it's your body".
> "It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk.
Not according to pro-abortion stances.
If you want to get the vaccine, it should protect you. If you can't there are therapeutics. You don't need to force others to inject mRNA shots into them.
Your analogy was awful. Such a false equivalency, there's nothing even remotely the same about that example.
The point of vaccines is to help protect society at large, not so much you specifically. Failing to take reasonable steps that help keep your friends and neighbors safe is simply reprehensible.
I don't understand "natural immunity" as a reason. I think I don't know what it actually means.
As far as I know, natural immunity is conferred if and only if you've recovered from the virus. And one of the goals of the vaccine is to avoid getting it in the first place. But to get natural immunity, you have to be infected first. It seems a bit like burning down your house to prevent arson from a stranger. Have I misunderstood "natural immunity"?
Likewise, yelling at people to get the vaccine makes no sense.
If you don't want to catch the virus, get the vaccine. Don't worry about others.
They will get the virus and then get natural immunity. People will have adverse reactions to both covid and the vaccine. Let them weigh the risk to which one.
> They will get the virus and then get natural immunity
Only if they, y'know, survive, and only after being a nuisance to the healthcare system that the rest of rely on
You've got a point that verifiable natural immunity as of _now_ should probably be acceptable in lieu of vaccination (though efficacy against variants is worth considering) for mandates.
Offering 'natural immunity' as an option to the currently un-vaccinated un-infected population is just crazy. People will assume the risk, get sick, got to hospital, and die. Just ignoring those 'others' isn't an option for public-health since the downside costs of the risk they assume are borne by everyone in the form of healthcare burden. 'They' still expect to be a priority when they get sick...
You're talking about "aren't thinking" but most of your posts just involve nebulous throw away phrases like "People have immunity"... clearly you know that phrase doesn't mean anything right?
In the meantime we can all see for ourselves actual impact, real things, in areas where vaccination rates are low. These aren't nebulous concepts like your phrases, they're real.
Can you just go to r/nursing and read the 100x stories of nurses saying "I'm actually not an ICU nurse but my floor has been converted to an ICU floor" or "We have 4 nurses for 30 covid patients and I want to scream"?
Maybe go to your local hospital and ask then among their own nursing social circles? They're the people who would have first-hand understanding of how full the ICUs are.
I'm not saying I believe everything I read on Reddit, but I know r/nursing is a longtime subreddit of mostly medical people and has a history of being as such for a long time. If I wanted to know what the actual medical field is dealing with day to day, I think a community with a history of being where healthcare people talk about what they're dealing with day to day is a pretty good bet.
> The curve is flattened, the goal posts have been moved out of the stadium.
How are you quantifying that? The original intent of flattening the curve was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system and here we are... overwhelming the healthcare system(s) again. A quick check of capacity of ICU beds in the SE USA shows that on average, hospitals are running 92% capacity(1). Obviously you want right-sized ICU capacity, but I doubt 92% is a comfortable margin.
I got vaccinated to protect myself, not fan of natural immunity through suffocating. 2 days pain in the shoulder, 1 day of a mild fever and affectionate feelings towards Bill Gates is a great bargain.
I wouldn't know why those who already have immunity would get the vaccine. There are studies showing that a shot post Covid-19 greatly increases the immune response agains variants, so there could be reasons.
In Europe getting the decease and beating it is considered good enough for immunity. Talk to your local authorities if you are not happy with your local practices.
You can always chase people who sneeze on the streets(hang around a hospital maybe?), get your covid, test positive, quarantine yourself for 2 weeks and hope for the best as an immuniser or a natural booster.
The vaccines on the other hand are much more practical and safer. They seem to lose some efficacy over time against getting covid but the results against getting seriously ill are very promising. Which probably means, if you get Covid-19 naturally later on, it would be a natural booster with much lower risk compared to a non-vaxxed person.
You've already posted 22 times in this discussion, including COVID denial and downplaying, hyperbole about "freedom loss", labeling someone a Nazi, sea-lioning for hospital stats, and spreading vaccine FUD. What are you trying to accomplish? Have you ever stepped back from the keyboard for a brief moment, reflected on why everything you post is grayed out, and come to a conclusion that doesn't involve groupthink and a massive conspiratorial campaign against "the truth"?
There's a name for it: Security Theater [1]. "Security theater is the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it."
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.
I guess another reason for the security theater is to keep the powerful safe. If a bunch of random fans get hurt going to a concert or sporting event, it's nbd, but if someone "important" gets hurt it's a much bigger deal. Maybe a pessimistic view.
"If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates" - this has already happened in Russia (Volgograd, 2013). A suicide bomber blowed himself up in front of a security gate at the main train station. Between 37 and 50 injured, 16 dead as the result.
> 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
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)
It worked in Paris a few years ago. Two suicide bombers were stopped at security and detonated their suicide vests - no other people were killed besides the terrorists.
I have my doubts that the cost of hiring that much security makes them much of anything. I didn't see anyone bringing picnics to the game ... at all even before the events.
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 have global entry & precheck (ironically, global entry is often slower than just using their app when you arrive). It's nice, for sure, but it's not pre-9/11 security. It's close, I guess, for just the traveller. But I miss the days when family could come to the gate. Maybe airports are too busy for that anyway, now, but I can dream.
> But I miss the days when family could come to the gate. Maybe airports are too busy for that anyway, now, but I can dream.
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.
Most of the time (100% for me so far) you just have to have pre-check for whomever is buying the tickets. As long as they're all on the same reservation ID, the pre-check will get applied to the entire group. That's how I got my first taste of pre-check, when my sister-in-law bought tickets for our entire family. I ended up buying it for myself, and now my wife & kids get the stamp as well when we're traveling together.
They'll tell you it's not guaranteed (and it's technically not even guaranteed that you'll get PreCheck even if you've got PreCheck yourself) but I've also had a 100% success rate with buying tickets and having PreCheck applied to all of them.
Too much money in alcohol to ban it.
Due to the behaviour of people on planes now, some airline have temporarily stopped serving it but passengers could still get it at a bar at the airport or buy a bottle of alcohol at a duty free store and drink themselves stupid before boarding the plane.
I dont think they can easily ban that.
edit:// OP clarified this was meant for sports games.
I think what he's mentioning has nothing to do with 9/11 though, right? He's talking about football hooligans. I only know that there are such scenes in soccer here in Europe and it can get pretty rough when they clash.
Tell me about it. I got to lay on top of the families suitcases in the back of the station wagon on road trips. It’s so much easier to sleep like that.
Which is exactly why my everyone in my car wears their seat belts. But that doesn't change the fact that it was easier to sleep when laying down in the back of the station wagon.
Re: attacking outside security, radical Islamist terrorists did exactly that in the departures hall of Brussels Airport, 2016.
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).
> nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity,
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.
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?
Compared to lives lost $100 is not expensive at all.
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.
This is why I believe the TSA wasn’t made to protect citizens it was only made to prevent airplanes from being used as projectiles against the government/military.
just like the police doesn't exist to serve and protect the public. but to protect private property. it's all doublespeak as george orwell would've called it.
> We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...
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.
I'll agree that most stadium security seems to be mostly theatre, but people are definitely not more spread out once inside the stadium. At least not at any large stadium I've ever been in which at least a dozen entrances with people going in over the course of several hours.
I like those checks though. It won't stop a guy trying to do a mass killing. It will stop a guy prone to getting drunk and casually carrying a gun who might be fine cheating the system if they're not checking, but not if they are checking.
But in the college football game example, there's no discouragement right at the gates, no security, and they don't even bother with hitting an unsecured target at the same venue.
The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
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".
To quibble: terrorism is using dramatic violence to achieve political ends. It just so happens that the victimized society often wants to increase security.
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).
It's pretty easy to imagine a timeline where some or none of those happened.
In the case of 9/11 the most likely motive was retaliation. If you could ask the terrorists, they would tell you that America terrorized them first (I'm not saying that's accurate).
We actually know their motivations because Bin Laden didn't hide his agenda. He wrote a fair bit on the topic. He wanted to force a change in US foreign policy to stop supporting Israel specifically and to leave the middle east in general. He saw himself as an Islamic anti-imperialist. It was actually pretty straight forward.
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.
There's nothing hypothetical about it. I'm actually baffled at the fact that people here infer random motivations when Usama bin Laden gave interviews as far back as the early 90s and held multiple speeches after 9/11.
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.
It's funny, but in a way, he accomplished his goal of getting us out of the middle east. Our weariness with our involvement in the middle east has caused a big push for energy independence.
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.
Anand Gopal’s article in the New Yorker this month shows how the Afghan Army (including the media darling Sami Sadat) was wasting civilians in Helmand using the vaunted Black Hawks we gave them and calling it progress.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the US did not have bases in in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. Bin Laden was complaining about US presence in Saudi Arabia and Israel. So even with recent withdrawals, the US presence is only back at the level at the tine of the attacks. I don't see how this can in any way be construed as successful?
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.
Yes, but that took 20 years. Before, they got a war and permanent drone terror plus a massive amount of ground troops. I doubt 9/11 has anything to do with them retreating now; in fact, it's probably helping that the scars heal.
>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.
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]
The part of our response that disappointed me the most was the way people ostracized any other way of thinking during that time period.
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.
Not as much and not as rabid. Combination of the Gringrich bullshit "culture issues" of the 90s and the initially patriotic and then nationalistic response to 9/11.
This actually isn’t the goal of terrorism. I’ve studied terrorism and the definition is essentially non-state actors using violence for political means.
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.
This is either war or war crimes depending on what exactly happened.
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.
Rather than convenient conspiracy strawmen, how about "The military industrial surveillance complex was a main beneficiary of 9.11, and is symbiotic with the groups it purports to defend us against."
I was talking in the context of 9/11, not all the yellowcake stuff. IIRC the 9/11 commission report shows some evidence that intelligence was aware of a possible attack, but the administration didn’t act. Some people took this to mean the intel was deliberately ignored, which is the part that seems conspiratorial.
Saudi Arabia's decades long record of cultivating extremist outfits, and "influence operations" is, thought, not a conspiracy theory, but a fact.
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.
>I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy.
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.
The attack in Afghanistan was initially to attack Al Quada directly. It turned into a war against the Taliban when they refused to give him up. That went on for a year or so, but the drum beat of war against Iraq started on 9/12.
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.
That doesn't change his main point. Saudi Arabia was one of the primary financiers of the taliban and Al Qaida, but instead of going after the Saudis some of the only non military flights to be allowed to fly just after 9/11 were private jets that flew Saudi Royal family members out of the country.
>The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
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.
> The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
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.
> 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.
Osama bin Laden did not care about our freedoms, he wanted the U.S. out of the Middle East and believed based on Somalia that dramatically attacking us would lead to that result. This is well documented.
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.
"Terrorism" in the broad sense of the act does not have a goal. Because it is a means to an end, not an end itself.
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.
No that's still an agenda. Nobody becomes a terrorist just because. There is always a motivation and goal. You say retaliation makes it an end to itself but I give as a counter Timothy McVeigh. He was seeking revenge and sending a message. Terrorism is a tactic used to achieve a specific goal.
No that's an oversimplification. I can ride a bike because I want to ride a bike. But terrorism by definition describes a type of tactic used to reach a stated goal. It is not simply killing people. That's called murder. And murder can be an end to itself. There have certainly been murderers who had a compulsion to just kill.
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.
Correct, but I think the general escalation of security in airports which caught Richard Reid, was a direct response to 9/11 . Either Way, it is still mainly security theater to make passengers less apprehensive about taking what is still the safest mode of travel per passenger mile( there might be other metrics, but this is the only one I've read recently).
What like his underwear? And now we get to go through full body scanners without our shoes. You're much more likely to be able sneak a firearm through than an explosive device now.
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.
Ever since the pandemic I seem to have been shadow banned from PreCheck, and reading their FAQ the TSA is quite clear they deliberately randomize security, even to the point that getting a PreCheck on the boarding pass isn’t guaranteed.
It’s so hard to prove either way if TSA/etc are effective. We can count how many people they stop but there’s no way of knowing how many were just scared away.
TIL that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of the 9/11 attacks as well as the failed Bojinka plot linked above, had his trial for numerous charges (including 9/11) restarted just yesterday.
The glimpse into the extent of mental corruption necessary to self-motivate oneself to spend so much time and effort, accumulate and apply expertise, all in the name of killing thousands of innocent people do make it difficult to read; even more so considering that the discovery of the plan did not help prevent its later evolution from causing the 9/11—that said, the article is enlightening and I cannot remember reading about this plot before (I guess it is too unsavoury even for unscrupulous mass media to dig up).
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”.
> 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".
thank you for the response, i was actually asking for information; apologies if the tone sounded sarcastic.
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.
I'll take it a step further. We need a total paradigm redesign of airports.
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!
This reminds me of "portal travel." It's a half-joke, based on the vision of walking through a portal and showing up at your destination. Of course that's impossible, but...
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!
This would really only apply for fights where I'm checking in luggage...international flights, for example.
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.
This already exists in some cities. Though I would love this to be available in all major cities myself. Here in Vienna for example we have the CAT (City Airport Train) [0]
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.
I'm half-surprised we don't already have this. The airlines already use some sort of uber-like self-employed contractors to deliver lost luggage. They could offer the same service in the other direction.
What bugs me is how every airport is a completely custom design.
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).
I mean you pretty much can do this depending on the airport. I generally show up half an hour before boarding. If it's a weird time or an airport that never has a security line it'll be 10. I don't check bags and use my phone ticket so other than an abnormally long security line there's no reason to show up more than half an hour early.
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.*
And one big thing that used to happen that doesn't anymore:
* 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.
Yeah, for sure. "Picking someone up at the airport" also meant YOU would park somewhere, and then possibly even meet them AT THE GATE.
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.
> The safety protocols have managed to protect airports and planes from further attack...
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?
It's amazing that we still have to take our shoes off in airports 20 years after 9/11, yet we still don't have mandatory paid sick leave in the US despite Covid killing 20 times the amount of people.
The obvious purpose of removing shoes at airports has long been more about security theater than safety. The authorities must be seen to be doing something to protect travelers or the industry might not survive the customer's perception of danger.
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?
> 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.
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.
I looked and I can't actually find a good answer to that.
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.
TSA is a manifestation of the totalizing technocratic State and all that that implies. The motivations are manifold and they evolve and are discovered over time; I wouldn't argue that there is only one reason. Being also a 'jobs program' in no way invalidates my point.
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.
> Now, we will likely add further controls on travel in the form of digital health passports with infinitely more possibility for government mischief.
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.
Well, YOU may not have a problem complying with every government mandated health intervention required of you to travel, but others might. Oddly, lots of people on HN seem not to view compulsion as a form of force when it's cloaked in paternalism, while at the same time believing the most indirect forms of social influence as oppressive forms of institutional violence if the 'right' people are impacted.
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.
The nature of the informal implementation of this stuff renders it so toothless, enforcement in whatever form we may see will be pretty permeable. The current CDC cards are trivial to print out on basically any laser printer. ("I have a heart condition so I can't", "heres a picture on my phone"). If you don't have a vaccine you probably just will need to have a test and a temp. screening for the most part.
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.
Is it under your control? Say you do have the vaccines but get to the airport and find out you are on a no fly list. Is that issue trivially easy to fix? From some of the post I've read here, it's a black box system with very little standard process to help you get out of it. Filing law suite isn't easy[0].
It certainly may be, but it doesn't inherently have to be. Kids need vaccinations to go to school (I mean pre-Wakefield and that blond lady from Playboy who married a Backstreet Boy whose name escapes me), the way you proved it was to show your documents that you got from your doctor.
Remember that airport security was not the only thing that changed. When they note that there have been fewer incidents, etc., we have to factor in things like reinforced cockpit doors, crew retraining, etc. and not just whatever procedures pass for “security” at the airport.
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”!
The new scanning machines will see things like paper or plastic in your pocket, so they can definitely see a lot more than metal detectors. You may think that's irrelevant, but it's not nothing.
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.
Or you can pay a fee and bypass the lines, not remove your clothing, whiz through the diplomatic lane at JFK. I think most of the screening is less about security and more about selling convenience.
I was tempted for a moment to agree. Maybe for the flight companies and airports it could be true. But since many of those measures became law, then it is a political problem. It would bring bad reputation to any politician trying to remove the law. So it is a much bigger issue now.
Isn’t this one of the main aspects of “terrorism” - while tragic, the act itself is merely trigger to induce fear and impact society in more subtle (and long lasting) ways.
e.g we get screened, we fear people who look “suspicious” (even when they are just normal people) etc.
I try not to fly and this is one of the major reasons I find flying so annoying. I've been through airports where they just use bomb sniffing dogs, why can't that be the norm?
It's a supply issue from what I've read. Most bomb sniffing dogs are sourced from overseas and there's a high demand for them globally. There simply aren't enough dogs that are capable. Even from a litter, there's a chance none of them will qualify after training, much like legit service dogs. We also use a lot of dogs to sniff for drugs.
For drug-sniffing dogs, generally all that is needed or expected is the dog will indicate where and when its handler wants an indication. For bomb-sniffing dogs you are hoping for a more precise outcome which is much harder to train for and achieve.
>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.
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.
I have never heard of any life-threatening allergic reaction to any drug or bomb sniffing dog. Has that actually happened? If so...how, when, and where?
Asthma attacks are not uncommon in response to dog dander. Those can be life-threatening, but can be managed with albuterol. 30 seconds with Google will turn up countless documented instances.
Anaphylaxis is a very rare response to animal dander, but there have been a few documented instances:
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).
> dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva)
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.
1) That a lot of allergic reactions come from actually touching a dog or having the dog touch something; they don't need to leave fur behind for that to happen.
2) That licking hair/fur releases the same amount of dander, whether your shedding fur, hair, or neither. Matter is conserved.
Those are fair points, but I’m not convinced that fur doesn’t have an impact.
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?
I'm less concerned about fur with dander stuck to it then simply furniture with dander stuck to it.
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.
Countless documented instances of asthma induced by the dander of drug/bomb sniffing dogs or just dogs in general? I have asthma and have occasionally reacted to animal dander—but never in an airport or other location due to service animals.
I don't think there is a database of allergic reactions people have had. They just happen and people move on. If the question is narrow enough, e.g., "Has there ever been anaphylaxis in response to a dog named Woofers jumping on a 12-year-old girl in New York's Central Park?" the answer will be "No."
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.
TSA jobs cant go away now that they exist. They probably never will. It will look bad for whatever president that does it because they will eliminate jobs and "national security" checks.
Everyone knows its a joke but we will keep doing it.
They could easily phase it out. They already have. There is already a rule that an airport can hire a private security company as long as it's approved by the TSA. They could make a small rule change that allows the private security to make their own rules, or just make some of the rules optional, like shoes off.
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.
The interesting part to me is that the mode of attack for 9/11 can't easily be repeated. It depended on passengers assuming the plane was being hijacked, and that they would eventually be released.
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.
Absolutely. It's not a 9/11-style attack we need to be worried about. No one will let a plane get commandeered ever again. The 9/11 terrorists took advantage of the "comply with the hijackers" policy in place at the time. That opportunity ended the moment the second plane hit the towers.
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
> 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
Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
There are plenty of radicalized people, but valuing your life so little that you'll risk it for the cause and having a cause that wants you to kill random civilians is not very common.
Incels, school shooters, bechildrened fathers, it happens a few times per year in most countries. Given they are ready to die, it’s surprising to me when they kill 1 instead of 100 people.
You're right and the two people who have already replied to you are a great example of how people on the internet love to chime in to "correct" someone about some detail of what they said that misconstrues the point. Obviously when the previous user said "extremely radicalized people" they were talking about the kinds of people radicalized to the point that they're willing to start killing people. You rightly (imo) point out that there aren't that many of them. Then two people chime in to "correct" you.
Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.
Fair. Terrorists have likely killed far fewer Americans with their actions.
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.
100yr ago eugenics proponents were saying the same thing while bemoaning societies unwillingness to fully embrace their solutions. 200yr ago people who wanted to build heavy industry were making the same complaints bemoaning insufficient investment. And so on and so on.
~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.
If you can suggest some other ~100yo example of something a lot of people believed would solve a lot of societal problems I'd be happy to edit my comment.
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).
> If you can suggest some other ~100yo example of something a lot of people believed would solve a lot of societal problems I'd be happy to edit my comment.
Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:
Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.
I initially thought he was claiming the inverse, that mask proponents were extremists. From the perspective of 2019, that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption, but here we are. Today people are advocating using the force of the state, in other words violence against those who do not share their views on mask mandates.
Can we kindly stop using hyperbole like “using the force of the state, in other words violence” as an argument against literally any governmental policy ever?
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.
There's a distinction between a voluntary practice and a compulsory practice. The distinction centers around individuals being compelled by violence. The kind thing to do would be to minimize our use of compulsion as much as pragmatically possible.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
Well sure. Plenty of people are willing to invoke the force of the state over pants mandates and shirt mandates too. Masks aren’t really any different.
Perhaps people are less truly radicalized, and substantially more negotiable, than we've been lead to believe. It certainly benefits both the media and politicians to sell us a story that there are an extreme number of radicalized people out there.
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.
Throwing your average Joe on screen garners much fewer eyeballs and therefore isn't profitable.
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 :)
> I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable
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.
This is such a terrible argument. 1. You very well might never know you have. People with extreme views don't advertise them everywhere and at all times. 2. There is plenty of video evidence of literal crowds of such people in various places and they quite obviously exist in large enough numbers to draw these crowds (no group has anywhere near 100% participation in events). Your anecdotal experience is irrelevant.
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 happen have a fascist (not neo-fascist, not nazi nor neo-nazi) friend. We do have some common points of view. We both don't believe in meritocrazy. And part of success is cultural and predeterminated (i think 90% is cultural, he think 40% of it is, although this percentage rises after each of our discussions. My communism seems to wear him down /s).
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.
How many people do you encounter? In which parts of the country? How much do you know about their political views? How do you know whether someone is a Nazi if they don't announce it?
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
The DC sniper were two people, with a specially built murder car.
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.
> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
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).
Even vaccinated folks can have the virus colonizing their airways, completely symptom free. Intentionally performing acts that could lead to the sickness or death of those around you seems pretty anti-social to me.
>> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
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"
The annoying thing is that, ok there are easier targets elsewhere, but if for some reason one of those lone wolfs decide to attack planes in particular the long lines created by those useless security measures are the obvious target.
> 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.
Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.
That attack was overhyped by the media, which suggest a way to stop them.
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.
I think the nation should make military training/civil service mandatory. The reality is that random attacks will happen in random places and everyone needs to be equipped to handle accordingly.
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.
>> military training/civil service mandatory.
>> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities
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.
Among what populations is it near universal? I grew up in an upper-middle class bedroom community, and I only had to get first aid certified in order to be a lifeguard at a local pool. That was just about a decade ago, and I’d be hard-pressed to do anything other than apply a cold compress and perform the Heinrich maneuver now. My father-in-law was a trained physician overseas but became a pharmaceutical researcher when he came to the US, and the last time he was in a situation where he had to perform CPR, he had no idea what to do. I doubt more than 20% of American adults would be useful in a serious casualty situation.
Maybe additional training in first aid helps in a terrorist attack, maybe it helps when grandpa has a heart attack. At any rate it is hard to see the downside. Maybe, except that if you do this in the US you end up politicizing first aid too.
The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.
Granted, but the US Army is the only one I have direct experience with. Hand to hand combat seems like such a basic component of combat training that I would be shocked to hear that it is completely absent from any armed forces boot camp.
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.
You basically just need to make the odds of encountering a trained responder higher than a lone wolf. FWIW, this would be a much better approach to the “well regulated militia” part of the second amendment than what the US has today.
Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”
It would equip everyone with better skills. But more important would be the sense of community involvement—most attackers have a disease of the mind brought on by isolation and lack of empathy.
“ Most investigations apparently involved veterans, some of whom had unfavorable discharge records.3”
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.
People make a way. When the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down highways, neighborhood workers and residents rescued people from the collapsed structures. The same happened in NYC on 9/11 when the WTC fell.
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.
For the United States specifically, another good argument for this training to be in place is the importance given to the second amendment, the rationale of which is to have “a well regulated militia”. One would assume that everyone being well trained is part of that.
What made the DC sniper attacks so terrifying was that there was no commonality to the targets, except that it was normal people doing normal everyday things. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself from the sniper except to not go outside (which is in fact what a lot of people did in response to the sniper).
> 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.
It also makes citizens more aware of the cost of war. Had conscription use up so much time of a citizen’s prime years, I think it would be more popular.
Im in favor of people concealed carrying for this exact reason...distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public. Obviously this doesnt work for a plane though.
Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
>>distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public
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?
So if I want to create real mayhem I just need to have two suicide attackers starting a firefight in roughly opposite directions in a crowded open place and wait for dozens of bystanders to join in?
I could think of 100 ways you could still do damage to an armed public. Whats your point? Its a deterrent and if someone is doing massive damage they are going to be spotted.
They teach you this in the course you need to take to concealed carry.
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.
If everyone has a gun, then either you teach this skill to everyone including the bad guys[0], or you don’t teach it to everyone and now a lot of normal people with guns are indistinguishable from bad guys with guns.
[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
You’re vastly overrating the ability of the common American to make rational decisions. In a stressful situation where a gun may be necessary, without proper and continual training, that ability drops to near 0. Look at the police - they use their guns incorrectly all the time and they’re trained peace officers. An average American, in an argument, maybe mix in some alcohol, with a gun in their pocket…many many senseless murders.
You can name even one law enforcement agency that wants vigilante firearm violence? Because that is literally what it means to desire the general public act as armed first responders.
Cockpits are now locked by default, so there's no terrorist getting in there anymore, they can threaten anything, all it would do is divert to closest landing spot.
TK1476 in 2006. Flying from an EU country to Turkey on a major airline.
"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."
There's procedure to leave a tray on corridor and have cabin crew protect it so people cant just jump in cabin.
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.
Yes, and this is why crazy pilots suffering from depression can bury their planes in the ground and nobody can do anything about it.
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".
This lead directly to the rule that nobody can be alone in the cockpit. If you're in the front of the plane when a pilot needs to use the toilet you'll see the dance; service cart blocks the aisle, flight attendant goes into the cockpit, then one pilot comes out.
To me this sounds like a risk for service cart/flight attendant/exiting pilot being overcome and entry gained to the cockpit. Even better a hijacker knows exactly when the opportunity arises as the service cart will be moved into place indicating the dance is about to start.
Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?
That might be true, but there is a difference in causing the deaths of passengers somewhere behind the closed doors by crashing the plane — and dealing with flesh and bone co-pilot right here and now.
> Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new regulations that required two authorized personnel in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule.
But a service cart and flight attendant seems like an entirely ineffective obstacle so what's the point? I think I don't know enough about how this "dance" works to comment, so maybe I'll just shut up :)
I don't remember the details, but remember reading that attack wouldn't have worked under US aviation rules, that it took advantage of some EU protocol oversight which was subsequently rectified. Don't quote me on it though.
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.
It's a pretty well known event. The copilot locked the captain out and used the purposefully designed system to also disable the cockpit entry code. Of course the primary cause wasn't the security setup, but it did contribute to the event.
"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)
I wonder if they should have separate external door for the cockpit and no door from the cabin to the cockpit. Absolutely no chance of hijacking whatsoever.
What about relief pilots on long trips or in the event of incapacity?
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.
9/11 was such a singular event for Americans that future terrorists don’t have to kill people to be successful, if the goal is to create enmity and get the US to waste billions of dollars. Just an occasional scare will set us off again.
You act as if Afghanistan and Iraq are very happy to have been invaded and considered it a mission-accomplished. If the objective of terror is enrage your adversary then by all means, but the U.S. will only be more and more heartless and effective at those attacks continue.
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.
The passengers re-taking the third plane was a stroke of luck. That flight was actually delayed long enough that passengers were making phone calls to friends and family and heard that the first plane (or two) had already crashed, so they knew what was happening. That's when they decided to storm the cockpit. Had they not been delayed, they probably wouldn't have known and not retaken the plane.
edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.
It does seem like that's the right numbering, thanks. I said "3rd" because the flight was hijacked around 9:30am EST. And I assume what they heard was news of the first two planes, rather than the one that hit the Pentagon.
Putting the fate of our airline safety to the collective bravery of humanity seems like a bad idea to me. If I'm getting on a plane, I have no problems taking my shoes off and being scanned to have a better chance of a bad scenario not happening.
Yes, but that has rarely happened in history. And to prevent that, we do scan the luggage and make sure that there is no unidentified luggage on the plane.
The shoe scanning is an extension of that, based off of the real threat that someone will pack shoes with explosives. The only reason it didn't work the last time it was tried was that the bomber stayed in their seat as opposed to e.g. using the toilet.
Wishful thinking. Even if passengers assumed there's not path to survive other than fight -- and you're not in a position to say that they assume this -- most people will not do anything about the hijack anyway.
It doesn't take 'most' passengers to overpower some people. All it takes is one hero to move and others will pile on, just one person to break the bystander effect. This is scientifically proven with crowd modelling.
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.
Al Qaeda was in the middle of losing Afghanistan when the shoe thing happened, it’s not entirely implausible they’d tell some random person to try something dumb.
Any attempt at this, the terrorists will have a game plan of how to convince people on the flight to chill out, that they have no mal-intent towards the passengers, etc etc. I mean it might not work, but I reckon they'd put on a really good act and manipulate people heavily into making it feel like they are actually quite safe and it would be a poor decision to try and overrun them.
So any future attempt requires higher level of competence to pull it off, which means it's probably very unlikely that such an attack will ever happen again.
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.
Yes, I'd be someone who jumps up to rush the hijackers. Because I'd have nothing to lose. And if all I do is soak up some damage and die, it may give others behind me a chance.
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.
I don't see any situation where that works. The only variation I can think of that might work is enough hijackers to control the passengers, which seems unlikely outside of a lightly booked flight or small plane.
If you liked expanded government powers necessitated by the War on Terror, you're going to love the new biosecurity state. Remember, it is for your own safety!
>“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.
>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.
After the number of deaths and economic impact that resulted from the pandemic, I would be perfectly fine if we completely eliminated any type of security check associated with air travel. I would rather air travel be much like traveling by train, bus, or taxi instead of what it is now.
Reinforced cockpit doors with strict policies in place for when the pilots can open it, which is what we do now (in the U.S. at least) even with all of the TSA stuff.
This source[1] claims that the probability of getting hijacked while on a commercial flight is 0.000004%. On the other hand, the case fatality rate of covid-19 is around 2% based on what I'm able to find.
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.
This is one reason why it will be hard to get rid of the silly requirement to take shoes off. DHS has a financial interest in keeping the theater going.
Not just financial interest, but also getting a free pass to make people do what authorities want without having to convince them, and to crack down on anyone they don't like for any reason.
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 TSA was never about Security. It's about lucrative gov't contracts, conditioning people to accept further invasions of privacy, and a jobs program for unemployable dregs of society.
When I was last traveling, the person in front of me asked TSA agent "Why do we have to take our shoes off?" He replied, "Have you heard of the shoe bomber?"
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.
Just pay the government a $100 bribe^W 'application processing fee' for Precheck or Global Entry, and no more taking off your shoes. Or taking out your laptops or liquids, or having a government employee look you over in the nudie scanner. Also, shorter, faster lines.
But all this is actually necessary and not security theater. We promise.
Some people say that the Taliban have won after the inevitable defeat in Afghanistan. I think they won 20 years ago when we introduced a massive billion dollar security theatre while cutting down our liberties some people hate so much, terrorists and domestic actors alike. That was an incredible victory.
I used to think security theater (like taking off your shoes) was the dumbest thing ever. Then I realized that Terrorism is "Insecurity theater". Its designed to make you feel unsafe. It is statistically not at likely to hurt you, and the people who do it are rare, you but its designed to scare you in to thinking you are under some massive threat by an army of people who can and do strike at anytime. Its psychological warfare. So how do you fight against that? You make people go through security theater to make them think they are safe! We beat the terrorists, not when there are no terror incidents, but when no one is afraid of them. Fear is the enemy. If forcing people to taking off their shoes makes some people feel safe flying, then it is an effective anti terrorist measure.
Who is empowered when the masses are swallowed by fear? It is not some hooded maniac rubbing his hands together in his basement. It is the state, which maintains control. Control is maintained by fear; fear is engineered through psychological warfare. When did the state ever insruct us to stop fearing "terror"? Machiavelli wrote all about this.
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.
Ummm yeah, so guys like these can get into the airport?
https://youtu.be/NWNyxDUSriA?t=40
This just happened last week. It probably happens every week. Since the attacker is white, we dont classify it as terror. If the person were Muslim, he'd be in prison already.
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.
Ummm, there is a big difference between raging and trying to blow up an aircraft.
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.
Honestly, I am ok with bullshit TSA because it will help make long distance train travel more attractive in the US.
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!
I saw a documentary on border controls in afghanistan where they used a pretty ingenious idea. they frisk a guy and check his pulse at the same time. so a guy holds two fingers to the guys jugular vein, and the other one checks him. any increase in pulse and its an indicator they should keep searching.
Our best shot at ending the TSA security theater was when the Covid biosecurity theater started -- TSA lines seem optimized for contagion. We didn't then, so I don't think we ever will.
Since we can't realistically ask everyone to succumb to background checks we at least have to put in some safety checks along the way.
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.
Honestly, if any politician managed to get rid of TSA checkpoints in airports I would vote for him every day of the rest of my life. They are just so pointless and intrusive.
Anyone who thinks this mask crap is going to end any time soon is deluding themselves. This right here is why our politicians are so emboldened. We are nation of sheep :p
And what about the stupid ban on liquids? This is even more nonsensical… Sure the airports shops are happy though. IIRC is related to a Heathrow 2006 attack…
It never had a purpose when it was new, beyond making people feel like "something is being done".
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.
We have to wear a sign of obedience on our faces anywhere we go for more than a year now. In some countries periodic anal swabs are mandatory and even diplomatic status is not an excuse to skip one. Not taking about mandatory periodic injection of an unknown substance combined with regular mandatory DNA material harvesting.
Totally unrelated, but I still remember what I did on 9/11. I was in my teens. I know the date, I know the weekday, I know everything I did in the 24 hours it happened.
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.
I'm a bit older and have experienced a handful of 9/11-like events [0]. They always stand out more vividly as a shared global/national experience whereas things like family members passing is highly localized to your family. You could easily escape the mourning by talking to friends/coworkers/etc that had no idea your family member passed and the conversation would give you a sense of normalcy. During/following 9/11, there was nobody to talk to that wasn't thinking about the events that just occurred. It consumed the nation for a fair bit of time.
[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.
Yeah... Thinking about it, I remember my mum watching the funeral for Lady Diana back in 1997.
> 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.
Memory in general is very capricious, but world-changing, emotional events tend to do that. Before 9/11 the most common one I heard people talking about was JFK's assassination.
For me, it's the Challenger disaster, 9/11, Columbia.
Yes.. Thinking about it, before 9/11 I had the TV pictures of the Berlin Wall being torn down by an excavator in my mind. But I was way too young at this age to understand it.
At Geneva airport they have a separate line with what looks like some new machines that basically require nothing, you just drop your bag full of laptops, tablets and liquids and you go through the metal detector. Can’t wait for it to generalise.
I just finished Islamic imperialism: a history. The fact that one man could change everyone’s lives like this is really amazing. It doesn’t seem like these measures are going to be necessary forever though.
I lost my passport between security and the gate once (the security staff inexplicably moved it into a new tray, so when I picked up my stuff from my two trays I missed the passport in the third tray). Losing your passport at this point turns out to be very complicated, but I was lucky that they held up the whole plane while I ran back to security to fetch it.
Disney Springs in Orlando has new metal detectors that you just walk through, wondering if airports will eventually feature the same. I kind of doubt it though.
There's the body scanners, but I don't know if they can detect anything weird in shoes.
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've never liked the argument "how many shoe bombs have been intercepted?" or "how many terrorists have been stopped?" when it comes to TSA-style security. The presence of the security isn't necessarily meant to find people in the act of carrying out terrorism, it's mean to deter it in the first place since you will be found out (well, in theory anyway...). It's impossible to quantify how many plots have been deterred due to this.
I'm no TSA apologist, it's obviously security theater, but is it totally without merit?
Isn't hard to plenty of articles like these, so it certainly seems like they'd be ineffective at preventing an actual terrorist:
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.
“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.
In Greece I would sometimes encounter packs of aggressive dogs roaming the streets. If you bend down and reach for the ground like you're about to pick up a stone then they disperse immediately. There doesn't even need to be a stone there.
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.
belt off in London, shoes off in NY.
If you're an unfit middle aged male flying between London and New York will make you consider flying private sooner rather than later. That's my hypothesis anyway.
Topics like this is why I'm against domestic vaccine passports like the Canadian provinces are suggesting we use. Temporary measures that become perm and dramatically change our way of lives - especially with poor risk / reward evaluation.
The TSA is just a huge scam to siphon money and they need to show they are providing value. Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away. We could get out of Afghanistan but will never get rid of the TSA.
It's all incompetent theatre. I remember around 2006 or 2007 snaking through a terribly managed security line in ATL taking off my shoes, doing all the questions and scanning and pat downs and irradiation and getting through and then some random person shouted "did someone drop their passport?" and realizing it was mine and my passport had fallen out of my bag. So I call back "yep, I did" and it gets handed to me by said random person (who hadn't passed screening yet), with nobody in TSA even batting an eyelash or checking to verify that I didn't just grab someone else's passport (or taken something else of security concern.)
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.
Well, just before the pandemic I flew through Frankfurt, Milan and Berlin Tegel forgetting about the Leatherman knife in my backpack's side pocket. I noticed it only when I was back home after my flight back.
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.
Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though.
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.
I think it'd be pretty easy politically, at least from a conservative (i.e. not Republican) standpoint. Argue that DHS is government waste and can't stop shit (point to the numerous studies done over the years of them being able to stop all kinds of shit from going through). Let things go back to the way they were: airports hiring private firms to do security.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
I had a friend fly to a his grandfather's funeral a few years ago, threw all of his kit into a travel bag and ran to the airport. The kit his grandfather passed down to him: kilt, jacket, belt and spooran ...
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.
> Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away.
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.
Shoes off.
Belt off
Backpack ready for search
Full body genital scan
Mask scanner with RFID chip reader
Vaccine passport
Passport/drivers license or state ID
Credit or bank card only
Social media must be free of x/y posts
I have Nexus, since getting it no more need to take my shoes off or take my laptop/tablet out of my carry-on. You practically get waved through security. Also, at the border in Canada & US, you effectively skip the line and use the Nexus machines allowing you faster entry into the country.
And of course everybody ignores trains, they don't even look at you...like the 300 souls aboard a train don't matter.
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.
Some years ago I wrote a conference paper [0] pointing to the clear difference in security screening for a flight from Lyon to Paris, and the same journey taken by TGV. The train would have more people on board but no screening of passengers, and only a friendly warning that you had to have a ticket to ride the train (in practice, you could buy one on the way or not buy one at all if you got lucky). The ticket could be bought from a machine or counter without ever showing an ID, and anyone could load baggage onto the train even without later boarding. It seemed to me to be an obvious target for a terrorist who wanted to cause some havoc in the French transport sector, and a compelling one now that the flights were so locked down and difficult to board with ill intentions.
> And of course everybody ignores trains, they don't even look at you...like the 300 souls aboard a train don't matter.
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.
Again your message proves that you think about the people outside the vehicle as A-class citizens and those aboard as B-class citizens.
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.
It is extraordinarily difficult to kill or maim people on land using a ship as a weapon - it will simply run aground, and there are guides aboard on ships big enough to cause damage when they are near the shore, as an additional defensive measure against incompetence and hijackings (insert obligatory Ever Given meme here).
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.
I would rather compare the train/cruise ship to a packed theater/stadium, rather than a commandeered aircraft used as a kinetic weapon. You have potentially thousands of vulnerable people in an enclosed space with no realistic means of escape. The idea that a bombed train isn't going to be a major disaster is baffling to me. Train derailments invariably cause massive casualties to those on board. Heck, lock the doors and start a fire.
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.
I was very surprised by a recent shooting at Chicago Union Station: Amtrak finds out this murderer on the run is taking a train across the country arriving in Chicago. They don’t tell anyone on the train this, they don’t intercept the train in the middle of the night in a small town - they wait until the guy detrains at one of the busiest stations in the country before chasing him and shooting him. Bizarre.
The most they will do with a train is hit it against another and i bet the speed is capped anyhow to make turns within the system. Much more effective to load a van with bombs and leave it someplace. A plane is a cruise missile in comparison and can destroy anything you point it at.
I don't have to take my shoes off airports. A govt contractor looked at my birth certificate and driver's license and charged me $78, and then gave me a special number to put on my boarding pass. Now a man at security gives me a little red flag that says I don't have to take my shoes off.
Honestly, I don't know why everyone doesn't pay for TSA PreCheck and GlobalEntry.
I wonder what the angle for this article is. They interview a member of the Heritage Foundation, a 'think tank' heavily funded by conservatives and the oil industry whose more controversial efforts are climate change denial, vote fraud claims and opposition of critical race theory.
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.