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?

#901

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:54 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #851

da_chicken wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it…

> 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

With help from the country with the biggest army and the biggest ongoing beef with the country with the biggest navy.

But, I guess, its still a little surprising, since that part gets minimized in the farmers national mythology.

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

#902

Post by GhostVII » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:58 AM UTC

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.

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.

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

#903

Post by yhoneycomb » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

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

#904

Post by GhostVII » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

shoulderfake wrote: post #816

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…

High speed limits are killing people? Are you ok man? Look at germany and their death tolls on highways compared to america.

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.

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

#905

Post by ryan_lane » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #785

dmwallin wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. Citation needed here. Especially in the south.

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.

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

#906

Post by GhostVII » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

moogly wrote: post #762

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…

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 thing…

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).

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

#907

Post by ubermonkey » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:10 AM UTC

CountDrewku wrote: post #882

ubermonkey wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gi…

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…

>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).

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

#908

Post by Alupis » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

sellyme wrote: post #898

Alupis wrote: post #718

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. 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 unfortu…

> 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…

> 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.

[1] https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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

#909

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

angelzen wrote: post #893

newswasboring wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

TSA doesn't go around saying 'we are here to waste your time and humiliate you'. They are also saving lives. In perpetuity.

A negligible number of lives. All terrorist attacks in US history combined resulted in less than three days worth of COVID-19 deaths.

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

#910

Post by sellyme » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #908

sellyme wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 ra…

> 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.