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

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

#821

Post by tootie »

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.

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.

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

#822

Post by makecheck »

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”!

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

#823

Post by andrewfong »

umvi wrote: post #658
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…

> 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…

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.

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

#824

Post by elwell »

hermannj314 wrote: post #410
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.

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 hea…

I flew out of philly recently and witnessed an older gentleman in a wheelchair and an ID checker playing tug-of-war with plane ticket amidst yelling.

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

#825

Post by godelski »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #759
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…

> 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 fire…

> suicides

While I agree with the message I don't think this will sell well. Many people do not even have the faintest idea of what depression is like and understand it as an illness. So they see it as a personal choice and therefore not a thing for the government to solve. Similar to drugs. This is of course despite the connections to environmental causes and government regulations. You greatly decrease rates of depression and drug usage, which are highly correlated, by the same thing. Making life better and less stressful. That even helps non-depressed and non-drug users.

Despite that, I think we should just talk about other types of gun violence. The vast majority of which involve hand guns. Which if you understand this, makes the national conversation seem extremely odd.

I'd encourage everyone to watch Sapolsky's lecture on Depression[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

[0^] My running hypothesis is that the since we have a new fiasco every other day that it causes over stimulation (like a stress response) and causes socio-motor retardation (analogous to psychomotor retardation)

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

#827

Post by recursive »

hunterb123 wrote: post #530
recursive wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 misu…

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.

Thanks for the advice, but that's already exactly what I'm doing.

One downside of this though, is that ICU beds are full. I'll also hope I don't need one. I very rarely have before, so I'll probably be ok.

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

#828

Post by vkou »

curryst wrote: post #392
dsauerbrun wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the shoes being taken off wasn't arbitrary. I thought it was because of the shoe bomber(Richard Reed)

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…

> 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.

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

#829

Post by heavyset_go »

MrCybertooth wrote: post #800
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…

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.

This is the core of my problem with utilitarian metrics like this, as they rely on quantifying the unquantifiable.

What is truly scary about it, though, are the people who are certain they can quantify those things, and convince others of it, too.

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

#830

Post by likpok »

makecheck wrote: post #822

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.…

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.

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