Live data from Hacker News

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

ocregister.com

771–780 of 969 posts

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

#771
post #658

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…

> 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…

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).

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

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 re…

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.

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

#773
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was all guns rights until the black panthers started arming up, and all the sudden it was "perhaps some sensible limits might be wise" Pretty hard to miss the intent. Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.

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.

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

#774

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...

Aside: when I talk about this program, I refer to it as "T-S-A precheck" because it's depicted as "TSA Pre ". 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".

Right, TSA even refers to it as "TSA PreCheck" on their website: https://www.tsa.gov/precheck

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

#775
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was all guns rights until the black panthers started arming up, and all the sudden it was "perhaps some sensible limits might be wise" Pretty hard to miss the intent. Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.

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.

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

the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[1][2] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

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

#776

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…

There's a fine but substantial difference: Terrorism is murder.

Comparing murder to accidences or to fate in case of deathly diseases is inappropriate.

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

#777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This minor temporary inconvenience I don't like is as bad as eugenics" is its own trope.

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.

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

#778

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…

We sort of have this in the concept of a micromort: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

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

#779

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…

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.

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

#780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For anyone who still believes the non-pharmaceutical interventions are effective, trying taking this quiz: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

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?
Post reply on HN