751–760 of 969 posts
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I had to give up my fingerprints to maintain a drivers license, but that doesn't get me TSA Pre.
I'm having trouble finding any state where a standard drivers license currently requires being fingerprinted. Texas did it for a little while but stopped in 2015. Some specialty licenses require it, like a commercial license to carry hazardous materials.
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The CDC collects these statistics. You would find, for instance, that more black people die each year from falling out of bed than they do at the hands of cops while unarmed (Unironically, provably true; look it up before you downvote... ideally no innocent person would die during police interactions). Clearly, whatever motivates policy and politics has no resemblance to a proportional risk-based assessment.
I went ahead and looked it up. According to google, in the US 650 die falling out of bed per year[1], while about 1000 are killed by police, about 20-25% of those police victims being black (while the US black population is around 14%).[2] Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much. https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-sho…
There were 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019.
The number of unarmed black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began.
The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of black homicides.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-ho...
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. 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…
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it gets expensive and annoying if you're traveling with your family.
Most of the time (100% for me so far) you just have to have pre-check for whomever is buying the tickets. As long as they're all on the same reservation ID, the pre-check will get applied to the entire group. That's how I got my first taste of pre-check, when my sister-in-law bought tickets for our entire family. I ended up buying it for myself, and now my wife & kids get the stamp as well when we're traveling togeth…
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So after you already start the x-ray process, they take you aside and make you do the shoes, belt, and the rest? If I sound confused, it's because I am :). I don't get a pre-check card, it just shows up as a notation on my boarding pass. I scan it just like normal, then shove my phone into my backpack and toss it on the belt. No removing my shoes, belt, etc. They also won't touch my bag, and I have to be the one to p…
> I don't get a pre-check card, it just shows up as a notation on my boarding pass. (Not the person you replied to.) These are different things. It has nothing to do with you or your eligibility, but the specific time and place. If you're eligible for PreCheck and have it printed on your boarding pass, at some airports and security lines that don't have a PreCheck lane open, you're given a laminated card that the fir…
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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…
> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.
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...
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".
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 also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like "improve mental health" and not "restrict who can buy a gun" or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people "alive" but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable.
But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team's constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.
So much security that not sense. I attend college football games. Everyone goes through security. Outside security we pack up in masses of humanity outside the gates waiting to get through the inevitably slow security. It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity there where there is no security ... than in the stadium where people are actually more spread out. If someon…
"If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates" - this has already happened in Russia (Volgograd, 2013). A suicide bomber blowed himself up in front of a security gate at the main train station. Between 37 and 50 injured, 16 dead as the result.