101–109 of 109 posts
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I've been waiting for backlash against absurd restrictions to close the TSA since 2001. Don't hold your breath.
> Don't hold your breath. Bad news ever since the TSA confiscated my toothpaste.[0] [0] Yeah, it was actually a thing.
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Taking over a plane with box cutters was mostly show as well. It only worked in 2001 because people went along with terrorist theater. If any would be terrorists tried the same tactic from 2001 today they would be mauled in the cockpit. Prior to 2001, passengers assumed they would be hostages and would come out unharmed if they cooperate. Now they assume they are potential collateral damage. That's a huge difference.…
I would hope the passengers on a plane would be so brave, but there is a real collective action problem there for the passengers. Best case scenario, there are enough brave people on board willing to selflessly risk death to -- hopefully -- save lives. Would I? Would you? You don't know what you're made of until the moment comes, and I hope neither you nor I are ever tested in this way. Remember, individually it's "r…
Let's make a terribly naive model in which there are 200 passengers, and the percentage chance of them succeeding in fighting back against hijackers is equal to the number of passengers who fights back. One passenger fights back means 1% chance of success, 50 passengers means 50% chance, 100 means 100% chance, and any more just saturates at 100%. This is wrong since the real-world chances are almost certainly not linear, but I think the basic idea of the chance starting at zero and increasing with the number of passengers fighting is sound.
Now, start with a case where nobody fights back. That means there is a 100% chance that everybody is going to die. Thus nobody has anything to lose. If they fight back, then they have a chance at living. If they don't, they are certain to die. The rational choice is then to fight back.
Now, some people have chosen to fight back. Do you join them, or do you wait? Joining them increases the odds of success, and therefore your risk of death. Not joining them increases your risk of death.
The one complication in this is your chance of being killed in the fighting when the hijackers are defeated. However, I think it's reasonable to suppose that your individual chances of dying go down the more passengers who fight back. If many others are also fighting, your odds of dying are low. If few others are also fighting, your odds of dying in the fight are high, but your odds of dying because they lost the fight are also high. I suspect that the rational course of action is going to be to join them as long as the fighting group is smaller than a pretty large size.
In any case, it's impossible for there to be a rational equilibrium in which nobody fights back, because all actors improve their odds of survival by choosing to fight back in that case, even if they end up acting alone. The equilibrium thus must involve some number of people fighting, and although I'm not sure how many that would be, it seems reasonable to think that it's a lot.
I find it ironic that I'm reading this link from a Las Vegas airport gate waiting for my plane... using their wifi.
The real travesty here is that "General Aviation" flights (private aircraft) face no such TSA screening as we see in "Commercial Aviation" flight terminals. So anyone who has the money to charter a private jet is also able to carry whatever they want onto an aircraft, which illustrates the double standard inherent in most tyrannical systems.
I think it comes down to what people are willing to put up with. Personally, I don't mind any of the TSA stuff a single bit. I've stood in line for hours, missed a flight, and gotten home at 1am due to TSA and other security stuff, but I don't mind because it at the very least acts as a deterrent. However, I think that most of these things could be solved with a second screening. None of these options would pass a se…
I don't mind because it at the very least acts as a deterrent. What evidence do you have for that belief? Here's my evidence to the contrary -- if the TSA really were deterring terrorist attacks, the result would be a shift to other targets. It isn't like a terrorist is going to just give up, go home and forget about causing terror. They are going to pick another easier target. So where are all the other attacks? Sin…
Automatic weapons are extremely easy to come by in this country. Think of the havoc you could create just walking up to an airport security checkpoint at rush hour and opening fire. If you know a few like-minded individuals, then you could synchronize the attacks to happen simultaneously at, say, JFK, Dulles, Reagan, and LAX. The casualties would be immense, and the subsequent panic would be enormous.
There are about a million other possible scenarios you can cook up that take no more than a few semi-intelligent nutcases and a few thousand dollars. Of those million, the current system defends against perhaps ten.
Although, when you look at it objectively, those attacks do happen fairly frequently. Navy Yard, Sandy Hook, Aurora, and many more. But we don't call them "terrorism"... why? Only because it doesn't fit the overly-specific mold that "terrorism" consists of. If they were brown middle-easterners shooting up schools, we'd call it terrorism no problem, but since it's a white dude, we call it something else. And because of that, there is basically no anti-terrorism effort directed at these things, furthering the argument that such efforts are completely useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope the passengers on a plane would be so brave, but there is a real collective action problem there for the passengers. Best case scenario, there are enough brave people on board willing to selflessly risk death to -- hopefully -- save lives. Would I? Would you? You don't know what you're made of until the moment comes, and I hope neither you nor I are ever tested in this way. Remember, individually it's "r…
I don't think your analysis quite works, because the scenario in which nobody acts has the worst possible outcome. Let's make a terribly naive model in which there are 200 passengers, and the percentage chance of them succeeding in fighting back against hijackers is equal to the number of passengers who fights back. One passenger fights back means 1% chance of success, 50 passengers means 50% chance, 100 means 100% c…
Car accidents are always interesting because they often have the same dynamics, those who respond are those who have had even the most rudimentary training to respond. Almost everyone lacking such trainers waits for others to act. As someone trained to act, I've actually been in such a situation first hand as a victim and been the first to respond. I was in a vehicle traveling at ~45mph and another vehicle pulled out without looking. I t-boned her vehicle the moment my car came to a standstill, I whipped out my phone called 911 and immediately after getting off the phone with the 911 operator, I went to check on the other driver.
Trying to analyze people like economists do, considering people to be merely self-interested agents, doesn't paint the whole picture. Many people in society are trained to act in a way contrary to what a simple simulation would suggest. Among 200 people on a plane, the likelihood that there are 2-3 such people trained to respond is pretty high, and at least high enough that a would-be terrorist has no way of knowing if they are lucky enough to have picked the rare plane where no such people trained to respond are present.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
That's nothing: break open many brands of low-quality leather shoe and you'll find a 3-5 inch sharp metal blade [1]. I know this because my shoe fell apart a couple of months ago and one came out: I'd been through multiple airports with this on my feet and I think it's highly likely that a majority of people are incidentally carrying sharp metal blades because of this. [1] http://distilleryimage4.ak.instagram.com/a31…
In court in San Diego women are not permitted to where stiletto heels to court. This is due to an incident when one lawyer took her shoe off, ripped off the heal, revealing a sharpened metal spike, and proceeded to attack the opposing console with it. This was not premeditated, apparently many high heal shoes have metal spike in the heal for support. The spikes are sharpened to make it easier to insert the heal on du…
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Onto any aircraft?
My experience is that many Private Aircraft terminals, such as private jets, private helicopters, etc, don't screen passengers, or their luggage, the way the public is searched in "Commercial Aircraft" pre-flight screening. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/private-... http://www.generalaviationnews.com/2011/01/is-ga-a-menace/ The above links discuss the matter further.