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

Post by BoxOfRain » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #740

BoxOfRain wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Post by seph-reed » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

silverscania wrote: post #743

seph-reed wrote: post #673

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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...…

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.

Post by dmwallin » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #720

umvi wrote: post #658

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> 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…

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.

Post by mayneack » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #57

stoolpigeon wrote: post #18

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…

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

babyshake wrote: post #684

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…

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.