20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports? • Hacker News Board

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#731

Post by thepasswordis » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

dmarcos wrote: post #120

bedhead wrote: post #40

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.

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)

>Politicians won’t touch it.

Some politicians won't touch it.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#732

Post by nielsbot » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

extra88 wrote: post #719

jackson1442 wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t have to fingerprint for a passport, but did for a Texas driver’s license with some hand wavy reason I don’t remember.

That was only true for a relatively short period of time. https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-no-longer-collecting-all-10-...

The article you linked says they will collect a single finger print for a driver's license, they no longer collect all 10.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#733

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

bedhead wrote: post #203

titzer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. Should I go on?

We killed 100x more people in Iraq with no evidence that their leadership was culpable.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#734

Post by cannabis_sam » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

Not if we disregard paranoid morons, but that’s apparently not an option, please don’t be a fascist by supporting this garbage.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#735

Post by dreyfan » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

chadlavi wrote: post #713

dreyfan wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> give up all their information past, present, and future for government surveillance Buddy, who do you think issued me the passport, social security card, birth certificate, and driver's license I used to get TSA Precheck?

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.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#736

Post by BoxOfRain » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

throaway46546 wrote: post #679

BoxOfRain wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wo…

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.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#737

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

vowelless wrote: post #674

umvi wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 highest death rate in 2019 is Alaska (TIL) with 24.4 deaths per 100,000 people. The lowest is Massachusetts with 3.4 deaths per 100,000 people.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

There is approx. 393,000,000 firearms owned by civilians in the US. About 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership

Handguns accounted for 91% of firearm homicides.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#738

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

tintor wrote: post #629

GhostVII wrote: post #537

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 thousand…

Tracking how many people die from different causes is easy. Difficulty is tracking how many lives were saved with specific preventive measure.

[deleted]

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#739

Post by void_mint » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

hunterb123 wrote: post #602

_6pvr wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it though if the government is forcing businesses to check it? If you're okay with forcing people to show their medical history to drink, I think you can handle a word being thrown at you. Nazi.

> 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.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#740

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #736

throaway46546 wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.)