This is one reason why it will be hard to get rid of the silly requirement to take shoes off. DHS has a financial interest in keeping the theater going.
Not just financial interest, but also getting a free pass to make people do what authorities want without having to convince them, and to crack down on anyone they don't like for any reason.
Rules like this that don't really have a point and are applied unevenly (like drug laws, many traffic laws, public intoxication...) are just a lazy way to make sure authorities can make anyone or any group they want "fall in line" while not actually preventing favored individuals or groups from doing what they want. It's the most unfair and unequal kind of regulation, and in general people cant6get enough of it, precisely because they know it will be used mostly against groups they don't like, but they dont have to explicitly identify those groups or otherwise acknowledge their prejudice.
Correct, but I think the general escalation of security in airports which caught Richard Reid, was a direct response to 9/11 . Either Way, it is still mainly security theater to make passengers less apprehensive about taking what is still the safest mode of travel per passenger mile( there might be other metrics, but this is the only one I've read recently).
What like his underwear? And now we get to go through full body scanners without our shoes. You're much more likely to be able sneak a firearm through than an explosive device now.
Are you familiar with any recent bomber story at all?
All he needed was some matches and a small amount of plastique.
Someone put an incendiary in his underwear. There are tons of possibilities. If you can't name 3 ways other than shoes and underwear, you might be in the group that thinks the TSA is fine.
I have often noticed policies are different at each airport. Combined with the shoe/belt/imaging policies, I believe it's meant to be a form of confusion. As in, any given security policy/process can be studied for weaknesses. When the policies are differing/changing there is a component of surprise the attacker has to account for that can be difficult to game. However, this is all in my head as I try to understand my observations. Hoping it's all being done intentionally, when chances are it's just local level enforcement picking and choosing what ever they want to enforce any given day depending on who is in charge on that shift.
Ever since the pandemic I seem to have been shadow banned from PreCheck, and reading their FAQ the TSA is quite clear they deliberately randomize security, even to the point that getting a PreCheck on the boarding pass isn’t guaranteed.
It’s so hard to prove either way if TSA/etc are effective. We can count how many people they stop but there’s no way of knowing how many were just scared away.
> Why not? "eww this is propaganda" or "talking about terrorist makes me one?"'
The actual answer is that the page, due to it's dynamic nature, at times consisted of specific details that were probably not relevant to the overall subject.
It's not unreasonable in this day and age to be concerned about what you are linking to. In this case it's Wikipedia, so, "sue me".
thank you for the response, i was actually asking for information; apologies if the tone sounded sarcastic.
This detail seems relevant:
> Yousef smuggled the nitroglycerin on board by putting it inside a small container, reputedly containing contact lens cleaning solution.
if that's the basis of "no liquids on planes" rules then its horseshit. make people shake the bottle at the security checkin.
Almost all the security theater relies on things being to scary for people to think about. Nitroglycerin when liquid is not yer friend. Ricin was never the boogeyman the media made it out to be. And on and on for years now.
The glimpse into the extent of mental corruption necessary to self-motivate oneself to spend so much time and effort, accumulate and apply expertise, all in the name of killing thousands of innocent people do make it difficult to read; even more so considering that the discovery of the plan did not help prevent its later evolution from causing the 9/11—that said, the article is enlightening and I cannot remember reading about this plot before (I guess it is too unsavoury even for unscrupulous mass media to dig up).
Addendum: as much as it pains me to admit, if I were some official feeling responsible for the lives of air travellers in %country% and having a say in the policy, after studying the details of this plot I can imagine myself going “yup, I guess we are banning all liquid then”.
TIL that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of the 9/11 attacks as well as the failed Bojinka plot linked above, had his trial for numerous charges (including 9/11) restarted just yesterday.
I have Nexus, since getting it no more need to take my shoes off or take my laptop/tablet out of my carry-on. You practically get waved through security. Also, at the border in Canada & US, you effectively skip the line and use the Nexus machines allowing you faster entry into the country.
The interesting part to me is that the mode of attack for 9/11 can't easily be repeated. It depended on passengers assuming the plane was being hijacked, and that they would eventually be released.
That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back.
Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't really preventing anything. I do understand this doesn't apply to the shoes (shoe bomber), but that's just one of many things we've put in place.
Any attempt at this, the terrorists will have a game plan of how to convince people on the flight to chill out, that they have no mal-intent towards the passengers, etc etc. I mean it might not work, but I reckon they'd put on a really good act and manipulate people heavily into making it feel like they are actually quite safe and it would be a poor decision to try and overrun them.
Yes, I'd be someone who jumps up to rush the hijackers. Because I'd have nothing to lose. And if all I do is soak up some damage and die, it may give others behind me a chance.
I'm not especially brave or fearless or anything. But if you back me into a corner with no way to survive, then I'll fight back like a caged, starving rat.
So any future attempt requires higher level of competence to pull it off, which means it's probably very unlikely that such an attack will ever happen again.
If we want to prevent hijacking of planes for terrorism purpose, then we'll need to go deeper and fix the root cause of extremism which required tons of focused effort, probably tackling seemly intractable problems. Not spend billions upon billions more on likely ineffectual screening procedure and tools to satisfy the surveillance state.
I don't see any situation where that works. The only variation I can think of that might work is enough hijackers to control the passengers, which seems unlikely outside of a lightly booked flight or small plane.
Absolutely. It's not a 9/11-style attack we need to be worried about. No one will let a plane get commandeered ever again. The 9/11 terrorists took advantage of the "comply with the hijackers" policy in place at the time. That opportunity ended the moment the second plane hit the towers.
The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
I think the nation should make military training/civil service mandatory. The reality is that random attacks will happen in random places and everyone needs to be equipped to handle accordingly.
Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
This would create a tighter bond between citizens and improve communities ability to look after one-another.
If everyone handles those situations steadfastly, terror won’t work.
Another benefit is less reliance on national guard to handle climate crisis like hurricanes, fires, and floods.
It also makes citizens more aware of the cost of war. Had conscription use up so much time of a citizen’s prime years, I think it would be more popular.
It would equip everyone with better skills. But more important would be the sense of community involvement—most attackers have a disease of the mind brought on by isolation and lack of empathy.
You basically just need to make the odds of encountering a trained responder higher than a lone wolf. FWIW, this would be a much better approach to the “well regulated militia” part of the second amendment than what the US has today.
Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”
I Russia, despite a nominal ban, you can buy a gun on the vegetable market, but nobody seem to be going, and shooting people out of a sudden other that 2-3 freak accidents per year.
Being murdered in a banal armed robbery is a by far bigger risk.
“ Most investigations apparently involved veterans, some of whom had unfavorable discharge records.3”
Honestly, you’re going to have bad apples no matter what. But what about the rest of the citizens? How can they respond to disaster scenarios without training?
Domestic terrorism is the same thing as abroad terrorism, except one uses patriotism as an ideology, the other uses religion.
People make a way. When the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down highways, neighborhood workers and residents rescued people from the collapsed structures. The same happened in NYC on 9/11 when the WTC fell.
Im in favor of people concealed carrying for this exact reason...distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public. Obviously this doesnt work for a plane though.
Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
So if I want to create real mayhem I just need to have two suicide attackers starting a firefight in roughly opposite directions in a crowded open place and wait for dozens of bystanders to join in?
I could think of 100 ways you could still do damage to an armed public. Whats your point? Its a deterrent and if someone is doing massive damage they are going to be spotted.
You can name even one law enforcement agency that wants vigilante firearm violence? Because that is literally what it means to desire the general public act as armed first responders.
They teach you this in the course you need to take to concealed carry.
If someone is doing massive damage...cornered people in a restaurant and is shooting them one by one. Someone can respond to that. Youre going to hear it and see it. Not every scenario is going to play out perfectly but at least theres mitigation on the table.
If everyone has a gun, then either you teach this skill to everyone including the bad guys[0], or you don’t teach it to everyone and now a lot of normal people with guns are indistinguishable from bad guys with guns.
[0] because if you actually knew they were bad guys before you gave them such training you could stop them before they fire a single shot
You’re vastly overrating the ability of the common American to make rational decisions. In a stressful situation where a gun may be necessary, without proper and continual training, that ability drops to near 0. Look at the police - they use their guns incorrectly all the time and they’re trained peace officers. An average American, in an argument, maybe mix in some alcohol, with a gun in their pocket…many many senseless murders.
>>distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public
Except that it literally doesn't. We know from public verifiable stats that people who own a gun end up hurting themselves or their family several orders of magnitutde more often than defending against an attacker or actually using it for self defense. It happens, but the numbers clearly point that it's massively ineffective for that purpose.
>>Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
You mean because people on HN frequently believe in the power of statistical analysis and logical thinking when it comes to deciding when something is worth doing or not?
>> military training/civil service mandatory.
>> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities
Those are very different things. Not every soldier is taught hand-to-hand combat. Not every civil service volunteer is taught to handle a weapon. And basic first aid training is almost universal already. More lives could probably be saves by everyone being trained in basic mental health and de-escalation techniques.
But most situations that currently result in someone getting shot can be resolved less violently, as demonstrated by the lack of firearms carried or desired by the majority of UK cops.
A culture shift isn’t an overnight thing, but better worlds are possible.
Among what populations is it near universal? I grew up in an upper-middle class bedroom community, and I only had to get first aid certified in order to be a lifeguard at a local pool. That was just about a decade ago, and I’d be hard-pressed to do anything other than apply a cold compress and perform the Heinrich maneuver now. My father-in-law was a trained physician overseas but became a pharmaceutical researcher when he came to the US, and the last time he was in a situation where he had to perform CPR, he had no idea what to do. I doubt more than 20% of American adults would be useful in a serious casualty situation.
Granted, but the US Army is the only one I have direct experience with. Hand to hand combat seems like such a basic component of combat training that I would be shocked to hear that it is completely absent from any armed forces boot camp.
Maybe additional training in first aid helps in a terrorist attack, maybe it helps when grandpa has a heart attack. At any rate it is hard to see the downside. Maybe, except that if you do this in the US you end up politicizing first aid too.
The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.
For the United States specifically, another good argument for this training to be in place is the importance given to the second amendment, the rationale of which is to have “a well regulated militia”. One would assume that everyone being well trained is part of that.
What made the DC sniper attacks so terrifying was that there was no commonality to the targets, except that it was normal people doing normal everyday things. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself from the sniper except to not go outside (which is in fact what a lot of people did in response to the sniper).
> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
... Military training teaches none of those, so far as I'm aware, except maybe the first. But even then, you're getting training on a rifle, which is not the most likely firearm a civilian would be carrying.
It’s funny how you Americans intellectually masturbate so much about putting in place extreme measures like this to stop terrorist when in reality you’re 10000x more likely to die in traffic. However, implementation traffic calming, lower speed limits, and better public transit to reduce the need for and over all level of risk of personal vehicles, is almost never proposed by your type even though it would save far far more lives.
But I guess actually being effective isn’t as masculine sounding as ‘everyone learn to shoot guns!’ Lol
For a good example of how to make the public safe in a real, non delusional way, look at the infrastructure of the Netherlands, and compare road fatalities to the US.
The annoying thing is that, ok there are easier targets elsewhere, but if for some reason one of those lone wolfs decide to attack planes in particular the long lines created by those useless security measures are the obvious target.
> The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
Fair. Terrorists have likely killed far fewer Americans with their actions.
We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.
100yr ago eugenics proponents were saying the same thing while bemoaning societies unwillingness to fully embrace their solutions. 200yr ago people who wanted to build heavy industry were making the same complaints bemoaning insufficient investment. And so on and so on.
~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.
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.
I initially thought he was claiming the inverse, that mask proponents were extremists. From the perspective of 2019, that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption, but here we are. Today people are advocating using the force of the state, in other words violence against those who do not share their views on mask mandates.
Can we kindly stop using hyperbole like “using the force of the state, in other words violence” as an argument against literally any governmental policy ever?
In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.
To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.
There's a distinction between a voluntary practice and a compulsory practice. The distinction centers around individuals being compelled by violence. The kind thing to do would be to minimize our use of compulsion as much as pragmatically possible.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
Well sure. Plenty of people are willing to invoke the force of the state over pants mandates and shirt mandates too. Masks aren’t really any different.
There are plenty of radicalized people, but valuing your life so little that you'll risk it for the cause and having a cause that wants you to kill random civilians is not very common.
Incels, school shooters, bechildrened fathers, it happens a few times per year in most countries. Given they are ready to die, it’s surprising to me when they kill 1 instead of 100 people.
You're right and the two people who have already replied to you are a great example of how people on the internet love to chime in to "correct" someone about some detail of what they said that misconstrues the point. Obviously when the previous user said "extremely radicalized people" they were talking about the kinds of people radicalized to the point that they're willing to start killing people. You rightly (imo) point out that there aren't that many of them. Then two people chime in to "correct" you.
Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.
Perhaps people are less truly radicalized, and substantially more negotiable, than we've been lead to believe. It certainly benefits both the media and politicians to sell us a story that there are an extreme number of radicalized people out there.
I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.
Throwing your average Joe on screen garners much fewer eyeballs and therefore isn't profitable.
As some who had been lucky enough to live many years in both rural Florida and urban California, I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable, and mostly the same, they are just acting on different priorities, beliefs, and data :)
> I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable
And yet, actual fascist governments have come to power even in nominally democratic countries.
People might only be "reasonable" when left to their own devices but there could always come a day when propaganda, sectarianism and social turmoil gets so out of hand that people don't see so reasonable anymore.
How many people do you encounter? In which parts of the country? How much do you know about their political views? How do you know whether someone is a Nazi if they don't announce it?
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
This is such a terrible argument. 1. You very well might never know you have. People with extreme views don't advertise them everywhere and at all times. 2. There is plenty of video evidence of literal crowds of such people in various places and they quite obviously exist in large enough numbers to draw these crowds (no group has anywhere near 100% participation in events). Your anecdotal experience is irrelevant.
Now you might think the threshold for an "extreme number" is much higher than drawing this type of crowd, but there are enough people for whom that is a big deal, that it makes for compelling news that gets views. Way too many for me, that's for sure.
I happen have a fascist (not neo-fascist, not nazi nor neo-nazi) friend. We do have some common points of view. We both don't believe in meritocrazy. And part of success is cultural and predeterminated (i think 90% is cultural, he think 40% of it is, although this percentage rises after each of our discussions. My communism seems to wear him down /s).
I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.
By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.
>> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
They are extremely common, except the main stream "liberal" media's definition of "radicalized" and "attack" doesnt include the most common incidents. If "radicalized" means brown, yes, it isnt common.
If "radicalized" could be expanded to literally hundreds of incidents of ethno-religious-nationalist crazies who kill with guns -- it is actually really common in the US. Except whenever this happens, people instead just talk about how perps were "deeply disturbed" and needed help, rather than classifying it as "attack" or "terror"
The DC sniper were two people, with a specially built murder car.
So neither lone wolf or low effort.
My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.
> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
The media overreports on how radical these people are. There's very few. However if COVID restrictions keep pushing forward I think that may change. Many people are at their breaking point right now.
I'm fully vaccinated and I've already decided I'm never going to wear a mask again and avoid stores that actually enforce mask rules (most don't, even if they put labels on doors mandated by the state).
Even vaccinated folks can have the virus colonizing their airways, completely symptom free. Intentionally performing acts that could lead to the sickness or death of those around you seems pretty anti-social to me.
> The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month.
Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.
That attack was overhyped by the media, which suggest a way to stop them.
Personally I am far more concerned by the rent/steal truck and mow down pedestrians mode that we have seen in France and Germany. You might be able to do more about gun safety. You can't really prevent a madman from driving up on the sidewalk deliberately and almost any person can rent a van.
Cockpits are now locked by default, so there's no terrorist getting in there anymore, they can threaten anything, all it would do is divert to closest landing spot.
Yes, and this is why crazy pilots suffering from depression can bury their planes in the ground and nobody can do anything about it.
200 people lost their life in the crash of Germanwings 9525 on March 24, 2015, but this is not classified as a terrorist attack so it doesn't really count for anything.
However, it is the direct consequence of the so-called security procedures implemented the world over; those 200 people are victims of "security".
EDIT post downvotes: what I mean is that even without a lock on the cockpit to prevent their copilot from entering, it seems difficult to prevent a determined pilot from crashing a plane.
It's a pretty well known event. The copilot locked the captain out and used the purposefully designed system to also disable the cockpit entry code. Of course the primary cause wasn't the security setup, but it did contribute to the event.
"The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls...The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
> Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion.
This seems like a pretty direct consequence to me. Similar to how an ultra isloated air-gapped environment with only one-way networking[0] would mean that the ops people couldn't easily stop e.g an ransomware attack in its tracks when detected. It's a cost/consequence of having the isolated network in the first place.
(If there was some magic code that always opened the cockpit door, then that could be coerced out of someone, yielding the system almost pointless)
This lead directly to the rule that nobody can be alone in the cockpit. If you're in the front of the plane when a pilot needs to use the toilet you'll see the dance; service cart blocks the aisle, flight attendant goes into the cockpit, then one pilot comes out.
To me this sounds like a risk for service cart/flight attendant/exiting pilot being overcome and entry gained to the cockpit. Even better a hijacker knows exactly when the opportunity arises as the service cart will be moved into place indicating the dance is about to start.
Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?
That might be true, but there is a difference in causing the deaths of passengers somewhere behind the closed doors by crashing the plane — and dealing with flesh and bone co-pilot right here and now.
But a service cart and flight attendant seems like an entirely ineffective obstacle so what's the point? I think I don't know enough about how this "dance" works to comment, so maybe I'll just shut up :)
> Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new regulations that required two authorized personnel in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule.
I don't remember the details, but remember reading that attack wouldn't have worked under US aviation rules, that it took advantage of some EU protocol oversight which was subsequently rectified. Don't quote me on it though.
TK1476 in 2006. Flying from an EU country to Turkey on a major airline.
"Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."
There's procedure to leave a tray on corridor and have cabin crew protect it so people cant just jump in cabin.
Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.
So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.
At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.
I wonder if they should have separate external door for the cockpit and no door from the cabin to the cockpit. Absolutely no chance of hijacking whatsoever.
What about relief pilots on long trips or in the event of incapacity?
We could keep going I think: there are numerous downsides to maintaining an egress unreachable from the cabin and, given the ability to lock down existing doors, few superior benefits to justify it.
If it's alleged el qaeda, and their "billions of dollars in funding" they would've just raised an army, and razed the place.
If someone needs on a principle to have the plane shot out of the sky, there are way dumber, and more sure ways to do that than trying to get a bomber on board.
Al Qaeda was in the middle of losing Afghanistan when the shoe thing happened, it’s not entirely implausible they’d tell some random person to try something dumb.
Yes, but that has rarely happened in history. And to prevent that, we do scan the luggage and make sure that there is no unidentified luggage on the plane.
The shoe scanning is an extension of that, based off of the real threat that someone will pack shoes with explosives. The only reason it didn't work the last time it was tried was that the bomber stayed in their seat as opposed to e.g. using the toilet.
The passengers re-taking the third plane was a stroke of luck. That flight was actually delayed long enough that passengers were making phone calls to friends and family and heard that the first plane (or two) had already crashed, so they knew what was happening. That's when they decided to storm the cockpit. Had they not been delayed, they probably wouldn't have known and not retaken the plane.
edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.
9/11 was such a singular event for Americans that future terrorists don’t have to kill people to be successful, if the goal is to create enmity and get the US to waste billions of dollars. Just an occasional scare will set us off again.
You act as if Afghanistan and Iraq are very happy to have been invaded and considered it a mission-accomplished. If the objective of terror is enrage your adversary then by all means, but the U.S. will only be more and more heartless and effective at those attacks continue.
This kind of argument is honestly a big part of why the theater is still in place. People keep making poorly thought through arguments about why we don't need it. Those arguments are inevitably shot down, and everyone remembers that rather than thinking about it for themselves.
Wishful thinking. Even if passengers assumed there's not path to survive other than fight -- and you're not in a position to say that they assume this -- most people will not do anything about the hijack anyway.
It doesn't take 'most' passengers to overpower some people. All it takes is one hero to move and others will pile on, just one person to break the bystander effect. This is scientifically proven with crowd modelling.
It does seem like that's the right numbering, thanks. I said "3rd" because the flight was hijacked around 9:30am EST. And I assume what they heard was news of the first two planes, rather than the one that hit the Pentagon.
Putting the fate of our airline safety to the collective bravery of humanity seems like a bad idea to me. If I'm getting on a plane, I have no problems taking my shoes off and being scanned to have a better chance of a bad scenario not happening.
Disney Springs in Orlando has new metal detectors that you just walk through, wondering if airports will eventually feature the same. I kind of doubt it though.
There's the body scanners, but I don't know if they can detect anything weird in shoes.
That said, how many shoe bombs have they intercepted? That should be a pretty good indication about whether it's still necessary, and I like to think the policy change (or lack thereof) is data-driven.
I've never liked the argument "how many shoe bombs have been intercepted?" or "how many terrorists have been stopped?" when it comes to TSA-style security. The presence of the security isn't necessarily meant to find people in the act of carrying out terrorism, it's mean to deter it in the first place since you will be found out (well, in theory anyway...). It's impossible to quantify how many plots have been deterred due to this.
I'm no TSA apologist, it's obviously security theater, but is it totally without merit?
In Greece I would sometimes encounter packs of aggressive dogs roaming the streets. If you bend down and reach for the ground like you're about to pick up a stone then they disperse immediately. There doesn't even need to be a stone there.
I've not had the chance to try it with a tiger but if it works with them too then I'm afraid you won't fetch much for your stone.
Isn't hard to plenty of articles like these, so it certainly seems like they'd be ineffective at preventing an actual terrorist:
According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.
“In most cases, they succeeded in getting the banned items through. 17 out of 18 tries by the undercover federal agents saw explosive materials, fake weapons or drugs pass through TSA screening undetected,” KMSP reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the operation.
I try not to fly and this is one of the major reasons I find flying so annoying. I've been through airports where they just use bomb sniffing dogs, why can't that be the norm?
You end up with a large segment of the population who sneezes a little bit, which is sort of annoying but sort of okay.
You end up with a small segment of the population with asthma attacks, anaphylaxis, and other life-threatening conditions.
Universal use of dogs would mean that there would be people who simple cannot travel, ever, anywhere beyond driving distance.
There's a small war between extremist dog-owners (the ones who believe dogs are people too, and sneak them into all sorts of places dogs aren't allowed as "activism") and people with severe allergies.
I have never heard of any life-threatening allergic reaction to any drug or bomb sniffing dog. Has that actually happened? If so...how, when, and where?
Asthma attacks are not uncommon in response to dog dander. Those can be life-threatening, but can be managed with albuterol. 30 seconds with Google will turn up countless documented instances.
Anaphylaxis is a very rare response to animal dander, but there have been a few documented instances:
What's amazing is the number of dog owners who don't believe in dog allergies, or who believe their dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva).
Countless documented instances of asthma induced by the dander of drug/bomb sniffing dogs or just dogs in general? I have asthma and have occasionally reacted to animal dander—but never in an airport or other location due to service animals.
I don't think there is a database of allergic reactions people have had. They just happen and people move on. If the question is narrow enough, e.g., "Has there ever been anaphylaxis in response to a dog named Woofers jumping on a 12-year-old girl in New York's Central Park?" the answer will be "No."
However, there have been plenty of instances of severe asthmatic reactions to dogs in situations in all relevant respects similar to drug/bomb-sniffing animals. And I've seen plenty of allergic reactions to service animals.
People react to different amounts of allergens. For some, it requires direct contact. For others, it's enough to be in vaguely the same room.
Service animals are tougher, since both sides have a disability and medical need. Police dogs should be easier, if not for police generally being power-hungry thugs.
> dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva)
I’ve read the same explanation for cats. But, I find it hard to believe. Pets are constantly licking their fur, and shedding said fur all over the place. It’s very clear to me that more fur = higher chances of allergic reactions.
1) That a lot of allergic reactions come from actually touching a dog or having the dog touch something; they don't need to leave fur behind for that to happen.
2) That licking hair/fur releases the same amount of dander, whether your shedding fur, hair, or neither. Matter is conserved.
Those are fair points, but I’m not convinced that fur doesn’t have an impact.
Anecdotally, I have a mild cat allergy and own a cat. Vacuuming our sofa regularly makes a huge difference, as it gets rid of the fur stuck to it. It goes from feeling scratchy to totally fine.
Maybe clumps of fur are common with super fluffy pets? Ours is a shorthair and shedding leaves single hairs lying around.
Matter is conserved, sure, but fur with dander stuck to it from saliva versus skin with saliva on it, surely makes a difference?
I'm less concerned about fur with dander stuck to it then simply furniture with dander stuck to it.
Three things to consider:
1) You can't see dander.
2) Vacuuming helps with pollens, and with dander from animals without fur too.
3) You have mild allergies. Others have stronger ones. I have no scientific basis for this, but I suspect sometimes, the immune system goes into maximum overdrive.
It's a supply issue from what I've read. Most bomb sniffing dogs are sourced from overseas and there's a high demand for them globally. There simply aren't enough dogs that are capable. Even from a litter, there's a chance none of them will qualify after training, much like legit service dogs. We also use a lot of dogs to sniff for drugs.
For drug-sniffing dogs, generally all that is needed or expected is the dog will indicate where and when its handler wants an indication. For bomb-sniffing dogs you are hoping for a more precise outcome which is much harder to train for and achieve.
>The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector[1] produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometers away. However, it was a scam, and the device was little more than a dowsing rod. The device was sold for up to US$60,000 each, despite costing almost nothing to produce.
If you liked expanded government powers necessitated by the War on Terror, you're going to love the new biosecurity state. Remember, it is for your own safety!
>“I don’t see it changing,” said Lora Ries, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It never seems to be fewer requirements … the direction always seems to be for more.”
>Security screening, he said, will also be expanded to passenger drop-off points and airport and off-airport parking lots, in addition to walkways and tunnels approaching departure and ticket kiosks.
>Security screening, he said, will also be expanded to passenger drop-off points and airport and off-airport parking lots, in addition to walkways and tunnels approaching departure and ticket kiosks.
That's the protocol in Israel. The airport is fairly isolated and before you can even get on the entry road your car is pulled over. Outside the airport entrance there are dogs and officers and then you go through security before you even get to baggage drop off and then another security for some questioning, etc. You are deemed suspicious if you don't arrive a few hours before your flight. Any drinks you buy after security are taken away as your carry on baggage is looked at one more time before you board. I often buy a couple liters of water before long trips and the to have them taken away (and probably put back on the shelves and sold!) before boarding was a bit annoying.
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.
I always though taking off a belt it was bcause if not the metal sensor would trigger, so to avoid it, they just ask to remove your belt in case it contains metal?
In Canada that's the case. But small belts can go through. So it depends on the security guard what exactly they ask you to do. I had purposefully bought a small belt that would not trigger alarm when I flew weekly pre-covid for years. No joy : Half the security guards told me to take it off as a precaution when I tried to go through, half would get upset I'm taking my small belt and delaying everyone - sometimes there's no winning, just say "yes sir/ma'am" to whatever they ask that particular day :-/
"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."
It can differ from airport to airport. I traveled from Ottawa to Toronto often enough for it to be mindless but differences between two national airports in same province of same country on same airline still caught me if I went too much on autopilot.
And then I'd fly to Halifax and all my instincts went out the window :).
Sometimes it'd differ shift to shift. Agents would get mad at me for taking or not taking tablet from my bag. Mentioning "your colleague instructed me otherwise, can you kindly confirm the rule so I can comply in future" only gets you marked as belligerent - the power trip is definitely there :-/
I'd stick with the more conservative measure, taking the tablet out all the time, even if it might not have been required. Also I wouldn't bother verbally responding if they ask me to do something, I'd just do it and keep my lips sealed.
I've been yelled at for taking out things besides a laptop, including a tablet with a keyboard case.
I'm not even clear what the issue was; it was just a general "don't take your tablet out!!" as if it was an obvious rule that anyone with common-sense would understand, and clearly I was a fool the agent had no time for.
Oh I would agree; if being conservative always worked - but my point is I've frequently been berated for taking a tablet out as well as for keeping it on at the same airport.
I kind of understand overall - At a busy airport, being overly conservative (taking out tablets, shoes, belts, coins etc when not needed) can be seen as "wasting people's time". It's the inconsistency of rules and their application that sometimes bugs me - There's no 100% winning strategy.
When I was flying back from Tampa, a TSA agent told me I had to take out my phone and put it through the scanner. I kept telling him I didn't have a phone on me, but he didn't believe me and asked me the same question about three more times. I was surprised he didn't search me haha. Not a big deal or anything, just thought it was funny
It also differs within airports. I flew in LAX a week ago and one of the non-precheck lines only took off shoes, but left liquids and laptops in bags and did a generic metal detector. They didn't even randomly assign people to lines, it was apparently early enough for me to choose to use that line since it was obviously moving faster.
Pre-check screening is the EZPass of the security state. Exchange your privacy for convenience. Submit to a background probe and permanent residence in a government database (and god knows what other consents are required) and you, too, can join the upper tier of society. Leave the filthy plebes and their shoeless drudgery and pat-downs behind you as you ascend into the clear air of the Verified(TM) elite. You pose no threat, quite the opposite! You support and serve the power structure. Welcome aboard!
Aside from the interview, the government already has all the background check data in their databases already. It’s not like you’re applying for a security clearance where agents go around your friends, family and neighbors digging up undocumented dirt.
Do you know for a fact that your background screening does not now or will not ever include calling out to a social media extremist detection service? I'm not so confident.
I’m also not confident in that. But again, if someone has put me in an “extremist detection” database I’m already in the database and the government could already query it.
It's increasingly not even that convenient. The last half-dozen times I've traveled, "PreCheck" turned into me going through the regular security line, carrying a card which they ignored.
How does that even happen? I have pre-check, and it's always been an entirely separate line. They'd have to do a fair amount of work to redirect you over to the 'regular' line.
It used to happen only at smaller airports that didn't have the capacity to handle extra lines. But lately, I've had it happen at bit airports (like ATL), so I'm not really sure.
The answer to your (implicit?) question is that it doesn't work. The staff take the card from you at the start of the process, and once your bag is in the machine, they have no idea if it's yours. So far, every time this has happened, I"ve been singled out for additional security.
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 push it onto the feed belt of the scanner. They have to have a pretty good idea that it belongs to me.
Coincidentally, I just travelled through ATL a few weeks ago. It's never as smooth as my home airport (PDX) because it's a much busier airport, but I don't recall anything out of the ordinary happening.
> 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 first agent tells you will accord some of the PreCheck benefits. As with the OP, these didn't always work in practice in my experience.
The PreCheck line can temporarily be closed in a larger airport that would normally have one, or this may be a more permanent process in a smaller airport that might not have the space.
My local airport is so small that they don't process security until half an hour before boarding. We have one "gate", and the planes we get can hold 50 people when full.
I have Precheck (always marked on the boarding pass and I assume it shows up on their screen when I scan it), and what happens is the person at the podium notes it and lets his colleagues down the line know. I get a card, and show it to the person handling the body scanner, at which point they send me through the metal detector instead. There isn't much difference when it comes to the bag scanning (if any).
Nothing like a government-sponsored system to make life visibly better for those who can afford it. And - since it siphons line-space and machines - harder for everybody else.
Sometimes I think that pre-check, toll-roads, and their ilk will take us all to the guillotine if we keep it up long enough.
At least in Kansas, the toll roads are not using tax money, so that's better than a government-funded TSA wanting more cash from you to make your life easier.
Ugh, you mean that stretch of the Turnpike on 70 that forces you to pay a toll for travel between Topeka and Kansas City? Not exactly an optional tollroad if you're driving across the country on 70, and you can tell they're not using a lot of the money to maintain the roads...
In Europe you're not required to take off your belt because of an arbitrary rule like shoes in the US. They just tell you to take it off because most belts have metal parts so they will likely trigger the metal detector.
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 people moving through, making the security line a bigger target, and forces people to sit down just past security to put their shoes back on. Again, making the security line a much larger target.
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.
>
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.
> The explosive apparently did not detonate due to the delay in the departure of Reid's flight. The rainy weather, along with Reid's foot perspiration, caused the fuse to be too damp to ignite.
Seems his biography was that of a petty criminal whose journey to radicalism began in prison. Pretty sad to think about. One considers an alternate reality in which he would have been rehabilitated beforehand instead. Seems like he might have had some serious problems, though.
Counterpoint, I was once asked to take off my shoes in Germany. I can’t remember if it was Frankfurt or Munich — probably Frankfurt. That was just because I was randomly selected for more screening. All of the other times flying through those airports shoes were left on :-)
The belt thing is supposedly because metal buckles will trigger the metal detector... but they insist I take off mine even though I bought one with a plastic buckle on purpose. So yeah, it now became "a rule" which is followed without much reasoning.
It's a rule because it makes it easier to keep things flowing. You don't have to trust that the person is right about their belt not being able to set off the metal detector.
> 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.
Exactly this. I'm sure to the security people, it feels obvious since it's what they do every day for hours consistently, but I agree that the inconsistency is very frustrating.
Then there’s remembering airports (and flight patterns) that do “one-stop-security” and which don’t.
London Heathrow doesn’t. They re-screen all incoming international passengers, so that 500mL bottle of contact lens solution that the ultra-paranoid Americans allow me to carry-on gets seized by Heathrow when transiting there.
I’d think if the UK disagrees with another country’s rules, they should just ban flights from there.
If it’s safe enough for me to fly in with, it should be safe enough for me to fly out with.
I've had to take my shoes off in a few other places, including in Ethiopia and a few places in S.E. Asia. But I confirm that the US takes things to a level beyond anything anywhere I've been, with some airports being worst than others. Nowadays when I buy plane tickets, I usually try to avoid any transit through LGA or JFK.
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 head at people wasting everyone's time.
When you work at any job you tend toward assuming all people are as knowledgeable about the 'obvious' things, it is a tough skill to remain empathetic. I fly maybe 3 times a year. A security agent will process a few thousand people a shift. We are each bringing a different patience threshold to the interaction.
The Philly airport employees are some of the least hospitable I've encountered traveling, especially their TSA. They come off as actively hostile about everything
Interesting, I have not spent a whole lot of time in Philadelphia but that describes my experience everywhere there, seemed like everyone is always angry and impatient with me before I even start to interact. (Kind of like the NYC stereotype, which I encounter only rarely when I visit NYC.) But TSA in general is tough to deal with, I fly once sometimes twice in a year and the rules are different every time but they're shocked and appalled I'm not up to date.
yup travelling to the US from Canada just to see a comedy show i needed to tell them how much money i have in my bank account and what i do and how much i make... what on earth... they couldn't understand why i would only stay one night...
> 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.
For as much as I complain about security theater and think they’re mostly useless, this is genuinely my biggest issue with TSA. It’s wildly inconsistent, there’s insufficient signage, and they act like you’re an idiot if you haven’t correctly guessed what today’s rules are.
Two weeks ago in San Diego, the security line forked into two conveyor belt lines. I walked past the first option (the second had a shorter line), and as I did, the guy stationed there was loudly shouting to the whole line that all electronic devices bigger than a cell phone must be removed from bags. I proceeded to the second line, where I got scolded for taking my laptop out of my bag. I gestured to the other guy and said "he told us all electronic items bigger than a cell phone should be removed." The response? "That's that line, this is this line."
This is my biggest complaint too. The entire idiotic process would be a lot more efficient if they just had consistent expectations and a consistent process so we could all just comply without having to clarify things or being told we're doing it wrong.
Also, could they please give us a reasonable place to move our stuff to while we put our shoes on so we're not holding up the line?
The TSA is just a huge scam to siphon money and they need to show they are providing value. Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away. We could get out of Afghanistan but will never get rid of the TSA.
It's all incompetent theatre. I remember around 2006 or 2007 snaking through a terribly managed security line in ATL taking off my shoes, doing all the questions and scanning and pat downs and irradiation and getting through and then some random person shouted "did someone drop their passport?" and realizing it was mine and my passport had fallen out of my bag. So I call back "yep, I did" and it gets handed to me by said random person (who hadn't passed screening yet), with nobody in TSA even batting an eyelash or checking to verify that I didn't just grab someone else's passport (or taken something else of security concern.)
Meanwhile I remember flying through Frankfurt in 1994 and opening my (inspected before baggage drop) suitcase briefly to move something and getting pulled politely aside and my items re-inspected. Security policies that made sense and were executed competently by respectful and well-trained staff.
Since 9/11 I just try to avoid flying to or from the US entirely.
Well, just before the pandemic I flew through Frankfurt, Milan and Berlin Tegel forgetting about the Leatherman knife in my backpack's side pocket. I noticed it only when I was back home after my flight back.
I had a friend bring 1L containers of liquid through security in Europe and no one said a word. The limit was 100mL. Nobody was looking at the scanner.
Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.
I think it'd be pretty easy politically, at least from a conservative (i.e. not Republican) standpoint. Argue that DHS is government waste and can't stop shit (point to the numerous studies done over the years of them being able to stop all kinds of shit from going through). Let things go back to the way they were: airports hiring private firms to do security.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
I had a friend fly to a his grandfather's funeral a few years ago, threw all of his kit into a travel bag and ran to the airport. The kit his grandfather passed down to him: kilt, jacket, belt and spooran ...
A 18" dirk from the 1800s ...
Made it through security without anyone saying anything and only remembered when it clanked as he put it into the overhead luggage compartment.
> Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away.
REMOVE_SHOES is one in probably a thousand settings in TSA's airport security makefile. Like all makefiles of any complexity, the trick is separating out the bona fide settings from the mountains of ineffectual ones that disappear somewhere deep in the nasty bowl of bureaucratic spaghetti.
As programmers, we should all inherently understand the value in not touching that goddamned mess unless someone really understands what they are doing. Even then, that almost always involves building a new system that runs in parallel to the spaghetti so that the "no touching" rule is obeyed at all times.
That's not to say TSA isn't a mess. It's just when I imagine what Libertarian International airport security looks like, the one thing I'm certain of is that they have set the RANDOMIZED_SCREENING flag incorrectly.
I wonder what the angle for this article is. They interview a member of the Heritage Foundation, a 'think tank' heavily funded by conservatives and the oil industry whose more controversial efforts are climate change denial, vote fraud claims and opposition of critical race theory.
Isn’t this one of the main aspects of “terrorism” - while tragic, the act itself is merely trigger to induce fear and impact society in more subtle (and long lasting) ways.
e.g we get screened, we fear people who look “suspicious” (even when they are just normal people) etc.
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.
COVID deaths could be entirely amongst 97 year old obese smokers with stage 4 cancer and half the country would still give the same obtuse responses, call you granny-killer, tell you you're selfish for not wanting to wear a mask, say "pandemic" like it's a mic drop, etc etc etc. You'll be stuck in a COVID version of the "This amp goes to 11" conversation.
It turns out that shocking people with a million volts of raw terror does in fact blow a fuse in many people's brains (go figure) causing them to lose all cognitive abilities.
I disagree with you, even in your hypothetical situation. I'd gladly wear a mask to protect 97-year-old obese smokers, if they were a vulnerable group. I feel like you invented this group to distance the vulnerable population from "us", but it just makes it sound like you have no empathy for other humans.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I think wearing a mask is a reasonable accommodation and barely an inconvenience. Same goes for FDA-approved vaccines.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't always work in the real world, so your hazmat scenario just sounds silly.
"Your haz mat argument is silly because I say it is. My argument is not silly because I say it's not."
This absolute state of critical thinking in America...
I can't wait till the media stops covering covid and everyone forgets that covid exists because they're on to the next thing the medium easily manipulates them over.
My point is that your attempt at a logical argument misses a number of externalities. My refusal to engage is because you're acting like a jerk, not because I can't construct a proof.
While you marvel at the "state of critical thinking" I am astounded by your lack of empathy.
Going to gym is barely an inconvenience. Mortality would have been minimal if fat people would jump on a treadmill occasionally and keep the cheeseburgers out of their face.
"What is inconvenient" is subjective and that's the ultimate slippery slope argument.
Your argument and thinking is so so bad, I feel like I'm being trolled.
> In your opinion, how important are the lives of people aged 65 and older?
I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peoples' lives worth less than younger peoples', on average.
Understood, though I'd point out that other insurance schemes will have similar sorts of calculations (either directly or indirectly in the form of premiums/annual limits in the US), so the specificity of the NHS isn't particularly helpful here, as it's one model among many.
Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-..., this particular model evaluates other factors beyond age (such as health history) and is in the context of providing specific treatments for specific conditions rather than broader actions for disease prevention.
But yes, my question was rhetorical, in the sense that I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
> I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
I agree, most people aren’t saying that (my wording was “too much”). I also suspect that the majority of people on all sides are not arguing whether or not to save lives at “all cost” —- this seems to be a partisan distortion of the actual debate that is occurring among serious people (much like the similarly egregious “granny killer” reference elsewhere in these comments).
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
Well said. As for a good place to discuss this stuff, my view is that, to misappropriate the Churchill quote, HN is the worst place I've found for debating COVID matters except for all the other places I've found. At least most people here, being predominantly from scientific and engineering backgrounds, are capable of and willing to remove emotion from debate and assess the biases inherent in arguments on both sides.
I'm tired of people pretending that everyone on the planet is expendable except Americans.
There are elderly people dying in other countries and perfectly healthy Americans are lining up for the vaccines and acting righteous about saving granny when the reality is they're doing it in their own self-interest.
On a reread, I see that my comment is ambiguous and could have suggested that I believe Americans were more worth protecting. Sorry for that, I didn’t intend that reading. >15% of the US population is >=6 age 65. I’m more familiar with US numbers so I used that.
From Covid or with covid (edit: I’m merely asking which stat you’re citing. Source?)? Ie the disease killed them or they tested positive while dying from something else?
There have been clear excess deaths (mortality rate increases) from all causes combined during waves. Most evaluations of excess deaths that I've seen conclude that Covid deaths are undercounted not over counted.
Do we say "death from car accidents" or "death with car accident"? Do we discount terminal cancer patients, diabetics and asthmatics from car accident stats because they had a preexisting condition? In the case of covid as with car accidents, it's a distinction without a difference. Yes people are more predisposed to die from covid because of them, but analyses of all-causes excess mortality do not support the hypothesis that there is a large difference between deaths with covid and deaths from covid.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Methodologies vary, but comparing deaths to any of the previous years, it is clear that they've increased. And the only major change was the new virus.
But of course, never let a good chance go to waste. We'll see an increase in restrictions because of Covid, they're not going away anytime soon.
your point here seems to be that people aren't doing that
who is "they" in your opinion, because plenty of people and organizations do cite excess death stats
are you really so far removed that you need us to provide a citation on excess deaths, this far into things? this reminds me of conversations in May 2020, because this entire conversation was procedurally generated in May 2020. Have you considered the possibility that all your apps marginalized you in this niche where no other information is shown to you everyday for the past year?
The major change, at least in my country, is that healthcare is so focused on COVID that they are neglecting patients with other diseases. So the excess deaths are mostly effect of that.
There is limited capacity to provide care for people. If people are without COVID dying because COVID cases are taking up that capacity, then COVID is a factor in those deaths as well.
One of the earliest fears about the spread of COVID was exactly this issue: too many cases would overwhelm the healthcare system and cause deaths to rise even more. Even if we couldn't stop the spread of the virus, one of the goals was to slow it down to keep the number of simultaneous cases to a minimum.
should they leave the covid patients in the hallways? whats the alternative? people dying from overloaded hospitals has always been the concern, ever since “flatten the curve”
the interesting thing I've found about those circles is that the followup is never discussed. they just stick with the earlier information and make it the hill they want to die on.
over the past 15 months, many organizations (including the CDC) municipalities (including within the US in democrat and republican areas) and countries have revisited old deaths and current death recording practices, in direct response to this observation and criticism
most times they end up finding more COVID deaths, different ones in greater quantity than the incorrectly recorded ones that shouldn't have been counted. sometimes there is a slight temporary downward death count adjustment. and more importantly, the aggregate stats everywhere already account for this. when news reports X-hundred thousand death milestone, its already factored in the corrected numbers.
what seems most important to me is that all ailments, especially respiratory ones, have the same recording and accounting discrepancies. if the aforementioned "those circles" were also the "just the flu" circles, then the gravity of COVID relative to the flu (or anything else) would still be seen from the original flawed recording standard, because all prior year’s flu numbers are polluted the same way. makes it hard to view those circles as a better alternative to listen to, when the flaws of the established authorities still point to an aggregate good enough signal.
It’s not cynical when looking at the incentives. Once a rule is in place for “safety” reasons the political cost to remove is really high (what if something bad happens?). Politicians won’t touch it. That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically (on a date or when a hard condition is met)
I agree fully re: expiration dates. IIRC the patriot act had an expiration date and it took nearly two decades for it to actually expire because it kept being reauthorized. It finally did expire last year and was not reauthorized and I suspect that is because we've actually already slipped far enough down the slope to no longer need that particular set of rules.
So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.
>That’s why I think exceptional measures should expire automatically
I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt".
This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.
I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.
This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones.
There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
> 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 health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government.
> There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us".
Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
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 result of private intrigues in the party's membership and leadership which represents a much smaller fraction of the population and obfuscates everything to the point that the vast majority of us won't hear about what actually happened until years after the fact when memoirs are published. Would there not be far more democracy if it were exercised directly rather than through the distorting lens of a party?
I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
> We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement
In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates.
Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
I'm not American, but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence? Either way, I get that they're regulated in theory as part of the public sphere but that's not the point I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests and as a result I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments where they can be scrutinised more transparently.
> but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence?
Yes, the intense factions that sprang up without parties immediately after adoption of the Constitution formed the nucleus around which the first parties formed. Parties are a symptom, not the source.
> the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests
Yes, elite factions do that whether they are formalized as parties or not.
Banning formalized parties has no effect on that.
> I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments
There is no possible configuration of laws which would produce that effect.
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.
You probably would have to ban entities like corporations, partnerships, and non-profits from endorsing a candidate. It would essentially extend and make permanent the concept of Purdah to those entities. Purdah is the state of affairs during the pre-election period in the UK where entities like local governments and the Civil Service can't say anything that might prejudice the outcome of an election, though I can't argue that it wouldn't be a very draconian policy and doing something completely different to the original intention of the concept.
I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests. However, I do see the other side of the argument in that it would probably open its own can of worms especially in areas like freedom of speech. The whole idea does start to unravel if your conception of free speech applies to entities like corporations as well as individuals. Unsurprisingly I lean towards the idea that it doesn't, but I can also see some very valid arguments for the opposite as well.
It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial (I suspect arguments between friends and family would be less common without the tribal labels backed by billions of dollars of "enrangement is engagement" for example). We can probably get some idea by looking at extant "not-party" political entities like charities, NGOs, and lobby groups to see how effectively they influence elections today.
> You probably would have to ban entities like corporations, partnerships, and non-profits from endorsing a candidate.
This makes it practically impossible in the US; so long as not coordinated with a formal party or candidate committee, it has been ruled a violation of the First Amendment to even limit expenditures on promotion of a candidate by private entities; to outright ban such actions would be a more flagrant violation.
> I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests
You cannot “protect democracy from manipulation by private interests”; the concept is incoherent. Democracy is the aggregate of private interests determining the public interest.
> It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial
We’ve had the absence of formal parties, politics was violently adversarial and formal parties emerged from the adversarial factions.
You cannot alter human nature by abolishing formal parties, which are, again, a symptom not the cause of political factionalism.
Right now most everyone has a sense of what it would be like to go back to normal pre-COVID life. I'm starting to lose a sense of what it would be like to go back to pre-War-On-Terror normalcy.
I agree the parallels are clear. Both narratives rely on fear and mass hysteria. Putting aside the hot potato of 9/11, we can hopefully discuss the issue of Iraqi WMDs in a less inflammatory way.
The mainstream presses never had a reckoning for their role in issuing false rationales for the war in Iraq. Those who believed the propaganda shouted down dissent as "conspiracy nuttery" and anti-Americanism. After the fact, many of those I know simply switched their positions. They denied they ever unfairly dismissed concerns or experts (Hans Blix) which ran counter to prevailing propaganda.
Which brings us back to the present rationales for expanded state power, where dissent is dismissed as conspiracy nuttery and anti-science. Once again, the incentives are ignored.
One of the more interesting parallels I see is how injecting morality into the matter poisoned everything and ensured terrible policy decisions. How many people and politicians got effectively bullied into going along with the idiotic Iraq war because people on the right accused them of not caring about 9/11 victims?
9/11 victims, granny-killer, same side of a different coin.
Hysteria, paranoia, morality, a plan to keep people "safe" - beware of this dangerous pattern.
Above all if everyone is acting in good faith, there should be no taboos about inquiring about ulterior motives. Instead of ridiculing or censoring dissent, coherent and consistent explanations should be provided. If the rationales for hysteria and emergency measures cannot withstand an open debate, that should be illustrative.
Part of the problem in the current situation is that there is a ton of anti-science conspiracy nuttery. If you are going to dissent, you need to do so in a way that doesn't get pattern-matched with people who are clearly being irrational.
Wikipedia lends itself to exactly the kind of cringe worthy coverage I described above. Starting with the reliable source policy which has only become more partisan in recent years. All of those reliable sources were involved in uncritically promoting WMD propaganda.
Yes, there are nutters with nutty concerns. There are also nutters who wear shoes, but we don't conclude that we must go barefoot. The generalization is misleading at best and disinfo at worst.
> The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.
I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing to put up with 3+ hour wait times and tons of other restrictions.
Mass loss of life. Novel way in which people died. People dying randomly (hard to avoid). General hysteria. Paranoia over a minority group. Moral outrage against anyone not falling inline politically. Overreaching government plans to keep people safe. Petty symbolism (freedom fries/masks) to sort the moral from the immoral.
You think masks are petty symbolism? I think that kind of trolling just raises the temperature here, which I'd like to avoid, so no, please, do not go on.
Do we think security theater is symbolism? It has had some positives over the years just as masks have a huge positive health impact during COVID but on both sides of the issue, people treat it as a signal as well, no?
> In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog), with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception.
From Wikipedia. Inflammatory, digressive, and off-topic = trolling.
Endless studies and real-world data showing no efficacy and half the world doesn't care. A new one every week, nobody cares, they're stuck in their religion.
Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.
Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.
Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.
The study you have linked does not support the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. I would recommend reading the “Discussion” sections, where the authors discuss other studies in other areas of the world that contradict theirs, and the impact of various social and density factors on their specific study.
That study seems to have an obvious and unacknowledged flaw: they did not control for the growing prevalence of the delta variant this summer even though the time frame of the study exactly coincides with the spread of delta within the united states.
These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.
Are you still not aware that there are serious people who believe that masks are basically irrelevant in a respiratory pandemic? Accusing others of trolling on this issue is not helpful. It was the consensus in Western medicine for 100 years. This consensus was forged after mask mandates were shown to be ineffective for Spanish Flu.
Here's what a Harvard epidemiologist has to say about the Bangladesh study:
"The Bangladesh mask study does not show a statistically significant difference in the efficacy of cloth masks vs surgical masks. Based on the confidence intervals, both could be around 0% or both could be around 20%."
I think I know a ton of Covid-cautious people who "wear a mask" to restaurants by putting one on as they walk through the door and taking it off as they sit at their table. There are a lot of contexts where masks directly affect transmission, but it seems clear that they're also serving a symbolic role beyond their practical utility.
There are number of marginally useful anti-covid measures. A characteristic of the US public discourse is that some of these measures are ridiculous if not malevolent, while others are worth their weight in gold. The key of decoding which is which is the political beliefs of the reader.
> This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.
What is it that you think you read in this article? What you have said is not supported in any way by the link you have provided.
> Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.
This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.
What are you referring to? The top comment is not mine and also does not make that declaration, it correctly states that the difference is statistically insignificant.
The reduction in infection rates wasn't large enough to qualify as statistically significant. That just means that the reduction that they saw from cloth masks could have been due to chance.
Edit: Since the size of the cloth mask group is half the size of the surgical masl group, the effect in the cloth mask group would have to be comperatively larger than the effect on the surgical masl group to qualify as significant.
Somewhow you take that as evidence cloth masks don't work?
Most people in 2021 would agree that the overzealous response to 9/11 caused untold suffering and misery. At the time though, either you were with us or against us. Good or evil.
Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.
They are pretty different things, at pretty different times. We could make bad analogies all day long and end up at some very weird places. Like imagine that COVID was invisible Arab terrorists armed with a gas who killed 600,000+ Americans. I think the response and fear level would be very different. But it's a silly analogy and a real digression from thinking about 9/11 in its own context.
You mean, invisible Arab terrorists that are disarmed absurdly well by a vaccine. You see, this is exactly why it's a terrible analogy, because people will just twist it to suit their pre-conceived notions about the current divisive topic, bludgeon those they disagree with, and jump right back into the same damn arguments.
I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.
> After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces.
The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.
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.
Ok then what's the target? Eradication of the virus is not achievable and neither is full vaccination of the entire population. I have yet to hear any hard numbers for removal of "safety" measures from any politician when enacting lockdowns/mandates.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
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 disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.
The threat will never go away, but fortunately vaccination cuts the risk of death to virtually zero. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, plus several animal species, so unlike smallpox or polio it can never be eradicated. Obviously we can't keep the safety measures in place forever, so what are the quantitative exit criteria?
>The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures.
Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.
That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.
The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
>I don't know how you don't see that.
Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.
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 give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.
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 have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".
All I'm asking is what the threshold is. Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?
>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).
> That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.
reply
Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?
Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.
All the more reason to keep draconian covid measures in place in perpetuity. Covid passports, lockdowns, masks, forced vax.
Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.
They can go around staying whatever they want. But the fact is they have never had nor will they ever have the statistical basis that covid regulations have. I can, right now, google covid and be presented with all statistics broken down by days, countries, continents etc. We can start comparing TSA and covid when TSA starts presenting their statistics.
I'm not in charge of making public policy, but the target that makes sense to me is hospital capacity.
It seems that since COVID is highly contagious and not going away, we are all going to get exposed to it and have to fight it off with our immune systems eventually.
Being vaccinated to train your immune system before your first bout with COVID seems to greatly improve your outcome. In my state currently COVID is 15x more deadly for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. So it made sense to try to limit the spread as much as possible while we were waiting for vaccines to become available, because the difference between "everybody gets it eventually, with no vaccine" and "everybody gets it eventually, but most were vaccinated first" is a significant number of deaths avoided.
Now that the vaccines are widely available and pretty much everybody who wants to be vaccinated, is, the only reason I see to continue with restrictions is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and can continue to serve everybody who needs medical care (COVID or not). That threshold is being hit in some states in the US, so I can understand why some restrictions are still needed. Eventually I would think we will accumulate enough immunity from vaccination + natural infection that we don't have a hospital capacity problem anymore.
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?
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates (1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition.
Wow, I got to hand it to you! 'communist-aligned socio-economic elites' is the most creative code for 'the Jews' I have heard in quite a while.
Oh, and you confused 'ironic' and 'coincidence' but I guess that hardly matters.
Edit: Oh, the usual. Editing out all the antisemitic stuff once somebody calls you out for it. At least don't run away once someone questions your shitty beliefs.
You don't need to be modest! I thought it was pretty precise. I especially like the part where the white man is the only one able to stand against (((them))) and fight against the pseudo-communist world government.
>The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.
Are they?
Complaints about post-9/11 "security" have mostly been about the ineffectiveness of steps that are clearly security theater, or the boondoggles of things like the x-ray scanners. Input from security experts was widely ignored in favor of, well, dumb ideas.
The COVID remediation steps we've been asked to take -- masks in public, social distancing, taking the vaccine once it's available -- are exactly what epidemiologists would've said were the right steps if asked about a hypothetical pandemic 25, 50, 75, or 100 years ago. They're directly in line with expert advice, and provably effective.
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.
Theater didn't have any value, in fact it has negative vale. How much time, energy, and money is spent waiting in TSA line, and for what?
Taking your shoes off does not decrease the chance of the plane blowing up by 0.0001%. it decreases it by 0%. I am willing to bet that more people have been injured, removing their shoes in the airport than from a shoe bomb. Injuries from falling over while driving shoes to picking up a fungal disease from the dirty floor.
An airport is a sieve, yet we treat it like a secure fortress, due to theater
The only parallels are between COVID conspiracy theorists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Nearly all federal COVID guidance from the CDC has been well-reasoned and carefully balances public health goals with the reality of life in America. State and local measures have been questionable, but all that says is that state and local governments are not really up to the task and should have universally deferred to the CDC.
At Geneva airport they have a separate line with what looks like some new machines that basically require nothing, you just drop your bag full of laptops, tablets and liquids and you go through the metal detector. Can’t wait for it to generalise.
I'll take it a step further. We need a total paradigm redesign of airports.
Imagine and airport designed to the point where you can literally drive up (or be dropped by an autonomous vehicle) 10 minutes before your flight, Throw your luggage onto a belt where a robot auto tags it based on your a facial recognition algorithm, and walk through an unobtrusive security point that's totally AI driven, and walk direct to your plane ready to go. As someone who travels a lot, I say forget shoes, this is the ultimate dream. The "arrive 2 hours before your flight" nonsense should be automated into oblivion on both ends. I think we just accept this paradigm of air travel now and our airports have become these bohemoths of capture to sell you food, beverage and overpriced trinkets with abhorent wait times for the actual flight logistics. Why cant I just be dropped off directly at my gate and bumble on in less then 5 minutes!
This would really only apply for fights where I'm checking in luggage...international flights, for example.
I wouldn't mind a feature where I can drop off my luggage somewhere near my house the day before my flight and it gets tagged, bulked transferred and inspected at the airport.
This would allow me to straight to the gate and not need to check in large luggage or fumble with luggage while rushing for a flight.
This also forces me to pack early and now the night of the flight and be sleep deprived.
I'm half-surprised we don't already have this. The airlines already use some sort of uber-like self-employed contractors to deliver lost luggage. They could offer the same service in the other direction.
This already exists in some cities. Though I would love this to be available in all major cities myself. Here in Vienna for example we have the CAT (City Airport Train) [0]
Its an express train taking you from a city center railway station directly to the airport in about 15 minutes and also allows you to check in and drop off your luggage up to 24h before departure.
It's criticized by locals as too expensive compared to the S-Bahn serving the same connection (just slower/with more stops) but especially for visitors it of course gives you the huge benefit of not having to deal with any luggage on the last day when you already had to check out of your hotel.
What bugs me is how every airport is a completely custom design.
Somehow, no two airports are ever alike, and I have a hard time understanding how that happened. There’s no clones at all.
Like, I understand they each have their own geographical constraints, but so does a McDonalds or a Walmart, and somehow I can walk into any of those on the planet without feeling too confused.
Every airport is a multi-billion dollar project designed anew from the ground up. Even when it’s a greenfield build. Dunno why they can’t just pick an existing airport design and say “build that”.
Even roller-coasters will have their clones at different parks (authorized or unauthorized).
I mean you pretty much can do this depending on the airport. I generally show up half an hour before boarding. If it's a weird time or an airport that never has a security line it'll be 10. I don't check bags and use my phone ticket so other than an abnormally long security line there's no reason to show up more than half an hour early.
This reminds me of "portal travel." It's a half-joke, based on the vision of walking through a portal and showing up at your destination. Of course that's impossible, but...
Imagine a portal showing up outside your house, maybe on the back of a truck. It's got all the theater: the wavy green lights, smoke, the whole deal. You wave good bye to your family, walk in, and then you get chloroformed and pass out. Your body is loaded into a standardized life support container and driven to the airport. Then, you get revived 6 hours later at your hotel so you can take a shower.
Ok, so there are some details to work out but the point is that the typical air travel experience is so terrible it would be better to be unconscious for most of it. Portal travel!
belt off in London, shoes off in NY.
If you're an unfit middle aged male flying between London and New York will make you consider flying private sooner rather than later. That's my hypothesis anyway.
It's amazing that we still have to take our shoes off in airports 20 years after 9/11, yet we still don't have mandatory paid sick leave in the US despite Covid killing 20 times the amount of people.
And of course everybody ignores trains, they don't even look at you...like the 300 souls aboard a train don't matter.
Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It ain't about safety from ill-intentioned people...it's about protecting the POTUS from having to give the order to open fire on an hijacked civilian plane.
That's the reason why every administration is so concerned with planes and so lax about trains and buses and cruise ships.
I was very surprised by a recent shooting at Chicago Union Station: Amtrak finds out this murderer on the run is taking a train across the country arriving in Chicago. They don’t tell anyone on the train this, they don’t intercept the train in the middle of the night in a small town - they wait until the guy detrains at one of the busiest stations in the country before chasing him and shooting him. Bizarre.
Some years ago I wrote a conference paper [0] pointing to the clear difference in security screening for a flight from Lyon to Paris, and the same journey taken by TGV. The train would have more people on board but no screening of passengers, and only a friendly warning that you had to have a ticket to ride the train (in practice, you could buy one on the way or not buy one at all if you got lucky). The ticket could be bought from a machine or counter without ever showing an ID, and anyone could load baggage onto the train even without later boarding. It seemed to me to be an obvious target for a terrorist who wanted to cause some havoc in the French transport sector, and a compelling one now that the flights were so locked down and difficult to board with ill intentions.
> And of course everybody ignores trains, they don't even look at you...like the 300 souls aboard a train don't matter.
In trains with a separate locomotive, passengers cannot even get to the driver compartment. In any electrified rail scenario, a runaway/commandeered train can be stopped by removing the power supply and then diverting the train onto catch points. Not to mention that running a red light triggers an automated immediate brake in many rail systems.
Of course, breaking into a parked locomotive, starting it and overriding the safety systems (deadman switch, red light detector) is possible, but it requires a lot of training you won't find online, and without the cooperation of someone at the control center all you're going to do is to derail the engine (as usually, there is a catch point switch at the entry of every branch onto the main track, that is by default pointing to the catch point).
> Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Agreed, but bomb/poison threat is a risk at every large building.
> Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It's incredibly difficult to pull off a fatal attack using a commandeered (cruise) ship as a weapon - wannabe pirates would need to control the entire bridge and the machine room as well as any auxiliary control points (e.g. for guides) that allow a remote shutdown of the engines. And even assuming attackers do gain control of a ship... a ship is slow, and cost guard will intervene if they notice you on a dangerous collision course.
Again your message proves that you think about the people outside the vehicle as A-class citizens and those aboard as B-class citizens.
There are 300+ people on a train and 4000+ on a cruise ship, those things don't need to be used as a weapon to cause a very sad day for the whole Nation in terms of human lives lost.
It is extraordinarily difficult to kill or maim people on land using a ship as a weapon - it will simply run aground, and there are guides aboard on ships big enough to cause damage when they are near the shore, as an additional defensive measure against incompetence and hijackings (insert obligatory Ever Given meme here).
For trains, the situation is similar. Even if you manage to bomb a train, it's unlikely to cause a major, deadly disaster. Rail infrastructure is built with the assumption that trains will get out of control, and the industry has nearly 200 years of experience.
Trains, ships and airplanes are ineffective weapons that need a lot of knowledge to turn into an actual weapon. A truck is way more effective: easy to acquire, easy to use, and even right in the middle of an attack people will assume that the driver has lost control or has medical issues instead of being a terrorist.
I would rather compare the train/cruise ship to a packed theater/stadium, rather than a commandeered aircraft used as a kinetic weapon. You have potentially thousands of vulnerable people in an enclosed space with no realistic means of escape. The idea that a bombed train isn't going to be a major disaster is baffling to me. Train derailments invariably cause massive casualties to those on board. Heck, lock the doors and start a fire.
If I can get a train to go from A to B, I usually take the train. You can arrive at the train station 5 minutes before departure and make it to the train. It's just an overall more comfy experience, mostly thanks to the seamless process of getting on it, not having to worry about the water bottle in your backpack and arriving almost directly in the city center with just a few minutes to get off the train and train station.
You can't hijack a train or a boat and make it crash wherever you want. I also assume it's much easier to respond to a train or cruise ship hijack and avoid having to kill everyone on board.
The most they will do with a train is hit it against another and i bet the speed is capped anyhow to make turns within the system. Much more effective to load a van with bombs and leave it someplace. A plane is a cruise missile in comparison and can destroy anything you point it at.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadRules like this that don't really have a point and are applied unevenly (like drug laws, many traffic laws, public intoxication...) are just a lazy way to make sure authorities can make anyone or any group they want "fall in line" while not actually preventing favored individuals or groups from doing what they want. It's the most unfair and unequal kind of regulation, and in general people cant6get enough of it, precisely because they know it will be used mostly against groups they don't like, but they dont have to explicitly identify those groups or otherwise acknowledge their prejudice.
Man I had no idea this even happened, I either forgot or never heard of it cause it seems to have been an open and shut event.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
Eh? But he wasn't caught due to airport security. He got onto the plane and tried to set off the bomb during the flight.
He would have been caught if someone had looked at his shoes.
But anyway - the point was 'general escalation of security in airports which caught the Richard Reid' is a provably false statement.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/30/saudi.arabia.a...
Are you familiar with any recent bomber story at all? All he needed was some matches and a small amount of plastique.
Someone put an incendiary in his underwear. There are tons of possibilities. If you can't name 3 ways other than shoes and underwear, you might be in the group that thinks the TSA is fine.
I have often noticed policies are different at each airport. Combined with the shoe/belt/imaging policies, I believe it's meant to be a form of confusion. As in, any given security policy/process can be studied for weaknesses. When the policies are differing/changing there is a component of surprise the attacker has to account for that can be difficult to game. However, this is all in my head as I try to understand my observations. Hoping it's all being done intentionally, when chances are it's just local level enforcement picking and choosing what ever they want to enforce any given day depending on who is in charge on that shift.
To be honest I don't feel comfortable even linking to this stuff but it's Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot
Why not? "eww this is propaganda" or "talking about terrorist makes me one?"
The actual answer is that the page, due to it's dynamic nature, at times consisted of specific details that were probably not relevant to the overall subject.
It's not unreasonable in this day and age to be concerned about what you are linking to. In this case it's Wikipedia, so, "sue me".
This detail seems relevant:
> Yousef smuggled the nitroglycerin on board by putting it inside a small container, reputedly containing contact lens cleaning solution.
if that's the basis of "no liquids on planes" rules then its horseshit. make people shake the bottle at the security checkin.
Almost all the security theater relies on things being to scary for people to think about. Nitroglycerin when liquid is not yer friend. Ricin was never the boogeyman the media made it out to be. And on and on for years now.
Addendum: as much as it pains me to admit, if I were some official feeling responsible for the lives of air travellers in %country% and having a say in the policy, after studying the details of this plot I can imagine myself going “yup, I guess we are banning all liquid then”.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/trial-of-ac...
That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back.
Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't really preventing anything. I do understand this doesn't apply to the shoes (shoe bomber), but that's just one of many things we've put in place.
My sense is that there is nothing they could say. Hijack a plane, a bunch of men are going to attack you. That's it.
I'm not especially brave or fearless or anything. But if you back me into a corner with no way to survive, then I'll fight back like a caged, starving rat.
If we want to prevent hijacking of planes for terrorism purpose, then we'll need to go deeper and fix the root cause of extremism which required tons of focused effort, probably tackling seemly intractable problems. Not spend billions upon billions more on likely ineffectual screening procedure and tools to satisfy the surveillance state.
The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
This would create a tighter bond between citizens and improve communities ability to look after one-another.
If everyone handles those situations steadfastly, terror won’t work.
Another benefit is less reliance on national guard to handle climate crisis like hurricanes, fires, and floods.
Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”
I Russia, despite a nominal ban, you can buy a gun on the vegetable market, but nobody seem to be going, and shooting people out of a sudden other that 2-3 freak accidents per year.
Being murdered in a banal armed robbery is a by far bigger risk.
Honestly, you’re going to have bad apples no matter what. But what about the rest of the citizens? How can they respond to disaster scenarios without training?
Domestic terrorism is the same thing as abroad terrorism, except one uses patriotism as an ideology, the other uses religion.
Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
If someone is doing massive damage...cornered people in a restaurant and is shooting them one by one. Someone can respond to that. Youre going to hear it and see it. Not every scenario is going to play out perfectly but at least theres mitigation on the table.
[0] because if you actually knew they were bad guys before you gave them such training you could stop them before they fire a single shot
I was thinking it absolutely does, unless everyone from more than 3ft away starts shooting.
Doubly so if we're talking knives or other sidearms.
Sikh logic, wildly underrated.
Except that it literally doesn't. We know from public verifiable stats that people who own a gun end up hurting themselves or their family several orders of magnitutde more often than defending against an attacker or actually using it for self defense. It happens, but the numbers clearly point that it's massively ineffective for that purpose.
>>Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
You mean because people on HN frequently believe in the power of statistical analysis and logical thinking when it comes to deciding when something is worth doing or not?
Those are very different things. Not every soldier is taught hand-to-hand combat. Not every civil service volunteer is taught to handle a weapon. And basic first aid training is almost universal already. More lives could probably be saves by everyone being trained in basic mental health and de-escalation techniques.
But most situations that currently result in someone getting shot can be resolved less violently, as demonstrated by the lack of firearms carried or desired by the majority of UK cops.
A culture shift isn’t an overnight thing, but better worlds are possible.
And 99% of those would fear lawsuit.
You didn't answer the question by the way.
The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.
> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
... Military training teaches none of those, so far as I'm aware, except maybe the first. But even then, you're getting training on a rifle, which is not the most likely firearm a civilian would be carrying.
As a non-car driver, it stood out to me at the time that all the events occurred on the road, though of course I had no idea of the actual mechanism.
If your response to terrorism is a year of forced military training I can assure you the terror already won.
What if its a 20 year community involvement?
Keep voting.
(And yes, the card works for US too, but there is no Canada-only option, and that’s primarily why I got it).
Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
Maybe because your base assumption is wrong: there are not many of them.
edit: Votes on this one have been a wild ride.
We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.
~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.
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).
Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:
Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.
In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.
To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
That's a fallacy in itself, however I think there's definitely some merit to both sides here.
Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.
I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.
As some who had been lucky enough to live many years in both rural Florida and urban California, I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable, and mostly the same, they are just acting on different priorities, beliefs, and data :)
And yet, actual fascist governments have come to power even in nominally democratic countries.
People might only be "reasonable" when left to their own devices but there could always come a day when propaganda, sectarianism and social turmoil gets so out of hand that people don't see so reasonable anymore.
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
Now you might think the threshold for an "extreme number" is much higher than drawing this type of crowd, but there are enough people for whom that is a big deal, that it makes for compelling news that gets views. Way too many for me, that's for sure.
I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.
By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.
They are extremely common, except the main stream "liberal" media's definition of "radicalized" and "attack" doesnt include the most common incidents. If "radicalized" means brown, yes, it isnt common.
If "radicalized" could be expanded to literally hundreds of incidents of ethno-religious-nationalist crazies who kill with guns -- it is actually really common in the US. Except whenever this happens, people instead just talk about how perps were "deeply disturbed" and needed help, rather than classifying it as "attack" or "terror"
So neither lone wolf or low effort.
My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.
The media overreports on how radical these people are. There's very few. However if COVID restrictions keep pushing forward I think that may change. Many people are at their breaking point right now.
I'm fully vaccinated and I've already decided I'm never going to wear a mask again and avoid stores that actually enforce mask rules (most don't, even if they put labels on doors mandated by the state).
Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.
Personally I am far more concerned by the rent/steal truck and mow down pedestrians mode that we have seen in France and Germany. You might be able to do more about gun safety. You can't really prevent a madman from driving up on the sidewalk deliberately and almost any person can rent a van.
But why kill? Why not attach several 20W lasers to a drone and fire them up on a busy bridge/road? Living in suffering is a worse fate.
Won't do much good when the controls are hijacked from terra. This narrative on 9/11 being played on this thread is poppycock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zj1fnGtjk
200 people lost their life in the crash of Germanwings 9525 on March 24, 2015, but this is not classified as a terrorist attack so it doesn't really count for anything.
However, it is the direct consequence of the so-called security procedures implemented the world over; those 200 people are victims of "security".
EDIT post downvotes: what I mean is that even without a lock on the cockpit to prevent their copilot from entering, it seems difficult to prevent a determined pilot from crashing a plane.
"The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls...The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
> Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion.
This seems like a pretty direct consequence to me. Similar to how an ultra isloated air-gapped environment with only one-way networking[0] would mean that the ops people couldn't easily stop e.g an ransomware attack in its tracks when detected. It's a cost/consequence of having the isolated network in the first place.
(If there was some magic code that always opened the cockpit door, then that could be coerced out of someone, yielding the system almost pointless)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?
What’s to stop anyone from murdering anyone anywhere?
happy?
"Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."
Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.
So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.
At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.
With a bathroom on their side of the door, and a packed lunch.
We could keep going I think: there are numerous downsides to maintaining an egress unreachable from the cabin and, given the ability to lock down existing doors, few superior benefits to justify it.
Well try to use your imagination - them and their sleeping compartment would also be in there.
> or in the event of incapacity?
Etc.
If it's alleged el qaeda, and their "billions of dollars in funding" they would've just raised an army, and razed the place.
If someone needs on a principle to have the plane shot out of the sky, there are way dumber, and more sure ways to do that than trying to get a bomber on board.
edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.
The shoe bomber FAILED because it's pretty fucking obvious if someone is trying to light a shoe on fire.
We don't need the security theater of taking our shoes off. It needs to stop.
This kind of argument is honestly a big part of why the theater is still in place. People keep making poorly thought through arguments about why we don't need it. Those arguments are inevitably shot down, and everyone remembers that rather than thinking about it for themselves.
You don't need most.
Flight 93 demonstrates that the "sit down and be quiet while the hostage negotiators work" approach is dead for a while.
The underwear bomber was tackled and subdued by fellow passengers.
4th plane. The third plane hit the Pentagon.
At some point, the cost-benefit ratio falls apart.
That said, how many shoe bombs have they intercepted? That should be a pretty good indication about whether it's still necessary, and I like to think the policy change (or lack thereof) is data-driven.
I'm no TSA apologist, it's obviously security theater, but is it totally without merit?
I've not had the chance to try it with a tiger but if it works with them too then I'm afraid you won't fetch much for your stone.
According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
“In most cases, they succeeded in getting the banned items through. 17 out of 18 tries by the undercover federal agents saw explosive materials, fake weapons or drugs pass through TSA screening undetected,” KMSP reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the operation.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/6/tsa-failed-det...
You end up with a large segment of the population who sneezes a little bit, which is sort of annoying but sort of okay.
You end up with a small segment of the population with asthma attacks, anaphylaxis, and other life-threatening conditions.
Universal use of dogs would mean that there would be people who simple cannot travel, ever, anywhere beyond driving distance.
There's a small war between extremist dog-owners (the ones who believe dogs are people too, and sneak them into all sorts of places dogs aren't allowed as "activism") and people with severe allergies.
Anaphylaxis is a very rare response to animal dander, but there have been a few documented instances:
https://www.petful.com/misc/can-pet-allergies-kill-me/
What's amazing is the number of dog owners who don't believe in dog allergies, or who believe their dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva).
However, there have been plenty of instances of severe asthmatic reactions to dogs in situations in all relevant respects similar to drug/bomb-sniffing animals. And I've seen plenty of allergic reactions to service animals.
People react to different amounts of allergens. For some, it requires direct contact. For others, it's enough to be in vaguely the same room.
Service animals are tougher, since both sides have a disability and medical need. Police dogs should be easier, if not for police generally being power-hungry thugs.
I’ve read the same explanation for cats. But, I find it hard to believe. Pets are constantly licking their fur, and shedding said fur all over the place. It’s very clear to me that more fur = higher chances of allergic reactions.
What am I missing?
2) That licking hair/fur releases the same amount of dander, whether your shedding fur, hair, or neither. Matter is conserved.
3) That clumps of fur are easy to avoid.
Anecdotally, I have a mild cat allergy and own a cat. Vacuuming our sofa regularly makes a huge difference, as it gets rid of the fur stuck to it. It goes from feeling scratchy to totally fine.
Maybe clumps of fur are common with super fluffy pets? Ours is a shorthair and shedding leaves single hairs lying around.
Matter is conserved, sure, but fur with dander stuck to it from saliva versus skin with saliva on it, surely makes a difference?
Three things to consider:
1) You can't see dander.
2) Vacuuming helps with pollens, and with dander from animals without fur too.
3) You have mild allergies. Others have stronger ones. I have no scientific basis for this, but I suspect sometimes, the immune system goes into maximum overdrive.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...
>The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector[1] produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometers away. However, it was a scam, and the device was little more than a dowsing rod. The device was sold for up to US$60,000 each, despite costing almost nothing to produce.
https://reason.com/video/2014/09/16/dog/
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
>“I don’t see it changing,” said Lora Ries, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It never seems to be fewer requirements … the direction always seems to be for more.”
>Security screening, he said, will also be expanded to passenger drop-off points and airport and off-airport parking lots, in addition to walkways and tunnels approaching departure and ticket kiosks.
That's the protocol in Israel. The airport is fairly isolated and before you can even get on the entry road your car is pulled over. Outside the airport entrance there are dogs and officers and then you go through security before you even get to baggage drop off and then another security for some questioning, etc. You are deemed suspicious if you don't arrive a few hours before your flight. Any drinks you buy after security are taken away as your carry on baggage is looked at one more time before you board. I often buy a couple liters of water before long trips and the to have them taken away (and probably put back on the shelves and sold!) before boarding was a bit annoying.
It can differ from airport to airport. I traveled from Ottawa to Toronto often enough for it to be mindless but differences between two national airports in same province of same country on same airline still caught me if I went too much on autopilot.
And then I'd fly to Halifax and all my instincts went out the window :).
Sometimes it'd differ shift to shift. Agents would get mad at me for taking or not taking tablet from my bag. Mentioning "your colleague instructed me otherwise, can you kindly confirm the rule so I can comply in future" only gets you marked as belligerent - the power trip is definitely there :-/
I'm not even clear what the issue was; it was just a general "don't take your tablet out!!" as if it was an obvious rule that anyone with common-sense would understand, and clearly I was a fool the agent had no time for.
I kind of understand overall - At a busy airport, being overly conservative (taking out tablets, shoes, belts, coins etc when not needed) can be seen as "wasting people's time". It's the inconsistency of rules and their application that sometimes bugs me - There's no 100% winning strategy.
Then they'll most likely bring you to the only employee that's not a contractor.
I just try to look ahead and see what others are doing.
The answer to your (implicit?) question is that it doesn't work. The staff take the card from you at the start of the process, and once your bag is in the machine, they have no idea if it's yours. So far, every time this has happened, I"ve been singled out for additional security.
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 push it onto the feed belt of the scanner. They have to have a pretty good idea that it belongs to me.
Coincidentally, I just travelled through ATL a few weeks ago. It's never as smooth as my home airport (PDX) because it's a much busier airport, but I don't recall anything out of the ordinary happening.
(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 first agent tells you will accord some of the PreCheck benefits. As with the OP, these didn't always work in practice in my experience.
The PreCheck line can temporarily be closed in a larger airport that would normally have one, or this may be a more permanent process in a smaller airport that might not have the space.
I have Precheck (always marked on the boarding pass and I assume it shows up on their screen when I scan it), and what happens is the person at the podium notes it and lets his colleagues down the line know. I get a card, and show it to the person handling the body scanner, at which point they send me through the metal detector instead. There isn't much difference when it comes to the bag scanning (if any).
Nothing like a government-sponsored system to make life visibly better for those who can afford it. And - since it siphons line-space and machines - harder for everybody else.
Sometimes I think that pre-check, toll-roads, and their ilk will take us all to the guillotine if we keep it up long enough.
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 people moving through, making the security line a bigger target, and forces people to sit down just past security to put their shoes back on. Again, making the security line a much larger target.
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.
That or detection dogs.
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.
Hmm, haven't heard that name in a while. I remember all the crazy press about him.
Fascinating details in his Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid :
> The explosive apparently did not detonate due to the delay in the departure of Reid's flight. The rainy weather, along with Reid's foot perspiration, caused the fuse to be too damp to ignite.
Seems his biography was that of a petty criminal whose journey to radicalism began in prison. Pretty sad to think about. One considers an alternate reality in which he would have been rehabilitated beforehand instead. Seems like he might have had some serious problems, though.
Exactly this. I'm sure to the security people, it feels obvious since it's what they do every day for hours consistently, but I agree that the inconsistency is very frustrating.
London Heathrow doesn’t. They re-screen all incoming international passengers, so that 500mL bottle of contact lens solution that the ultra-paranoid Americans allow me to carry-on gets seized by Heathrow when transiting there.
I’d think if the UK disagrees with another country’s rules, they should just ban flights from there.
If it’s safe enough for me to fly in with, it should be safe enough for me to fly out with.
I just take it all in stride and try to remain Zen when I'm flying thinking about a hot shower and a beer at the hotel.
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 head at people wasting everyone's time.
When you work at any job you tend toward assuming all people are as knowledgeable about the 'obvious' things, it is a tough skill to remain empathetic. I fly maybe 3 times a year. A security agent will process a few thousand people a shift. We are each bringing a different patience threshold to the interaction.
For as much as I complain about security theater and think they’re mostly useless, this is genuinely my biggest issue with TSA. It’s wildly inconsistent, there’s insufficient signage, and they act like you’re an idiot if you haven’t correctly guessed what today’s rules are.
This is my biggest complaint too. The entire idiotic process would be a lot more efficient if they just had consistent expectations and a consistent process so we could all just comply without having to clarify things or being told we're doing it wrong.
Also, could they please give us a reasonable place to move our stuff to while we put our shoes on so we're not holding up the line?
Meanwhile I remember flying through Frankfurt in 1994 and opening my (inspected before baggage drop) suitcase briefly to move something and getting pulled politely aside and my items re-inspected. Security policies that made sense and were executed competently by respectful and well-trained staff.
Since 9/11 I just try to avoid flying to or from the US entirely.
I had a friend bring 1L containers of liquid through security in Europe and no one said a word. The limit was 100mL. Nobody was looking at the scanner.
Don’t fool yourself.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
A 18" dirk from the 1800s ...
Made it through security without anyone saying anything and only remembered when it clanked as he put it into the overhead luggage compartment.
REMOVE_SHOES is one in probably a thousand settings in TSA's airport security makefile. Like all makefiles of any complexity, the trick is separating out the bona fide settings from the mountains of ineffectual ones that disappear somewhere deep in the nasty bowl of bureaucratic spaghetti.
As programmers, we should all inherently understand the value in not touching that goddamned mess unless someone really understands what they are doing. Even then, that almost always involves building a new system that runs in parallel to the spaghetti so that the "no touching" rule is obeyed at all times.
That's not to say TSA isn't a mess. It's just when I imagine what Libertarian International airport security looks like, the one thing I'm certain of is that they have set the RANDOMIZED_SCREENING flag incorrectly.
e.g we get screened, we fear people who look “suspicious” (even when they are just normal people) etc.
COVID deaths could be entirely amongst 97 year old obese smokers with stage 4 cancer and half the country would still give the same obtuse responses, call you granny-killer, tell you you're selfish for not wanting to wear a mask, say "pandemic" like it's a mic drop, etc etc etc. You'll be stuck in a COVID version of the "This amp goes to 11" conversation.
It turns out that shocking people with a million volts of raw terror does in fact blow a fuse in many people's brains (go figure) causing them to lose all cognitive abilities.
Why aren't you wearing a full body haz mat suit to protect them?
Do you think people with immune deficiencies lives are worth less and its okay to kill them?
Where do you draw the line where it's okay to kill some people with your bodily diseases but not others?
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't always work in the real world, so your hazmat scenario just sounds silly.
"Your haz mat argument is silly because I say it is. My argument is not silly because I say it's not."
This absolute state of critical thinking in America...
I can't wait till the media stops covering covid and everyone forgets that covid exists because they're on to the next thing the medium easily manipulates them over.
While you marvel at the "state of critical thinking" I am astounded by your lack of empathy.
Its hopeless conversation.
"What is inconvenient" is subjective and that's the ultimate slippery slope argument.
Your argument and thinking is so so bad, I feel like I'm being trolled.
Obesity is not a communicable disease.
I regret feeding the troll.
Fat food directly causes obesity.
Obesity is communicable from fat foods.
By your strange logic we need to ban fat foods because they hurt people.
Also, for death rates being higher in the elderly... isn't that going to be true for most diseases? Pointing this out seems tautological to me.
And what does "very few" actually mean here?
Is death the only negative outcome of COVID-19?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
To put this into perspective... 36,000 people died of car accidents in 2019.
In the under 50 group around 20,000 people died of Covid.
The under 50 age group makes up around 80% of the population.
Interpret that however you want.
I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peoples' lives worth less than younger peoples', on average.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-28983924
Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-..., this particular model evaluates other factors beyond age (such as health history) and is in the context of providing specific treatments for specific conditions rather than broader actions for disease prevention.
But yes, my question was rhetorical, in the sense that I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
It’s hard to find a good discussion nowadays.
There are elderly people dying in other countries and perfectly healthy Americans are lining up for the vaccines and acting righteous about saving granny when the reality is they're doing it in their own self-interest.
No one cares one bit about anyone, except for the people that are close to them.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to gas light you for their own self interest.
What is sensational comparison you present.
Again, you say “covid deaths”. That is not precise.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Does precision matter in this case?
But of course, never let a good chance go to waste. We'll see an increase in restrictions because of Covid, they're not going away anytime soon.
who is "they" in your opinion, because plenty of people and organizations do cite excess death stats
are you really so far removed that you need us to provide a citation on excess deaths, this far into things? this reminds me of conversations in May 2020, because this entire conversation was procedurally generated in May 2020. Have you considered the possibility that all your apps marginalized you in this niche where no other information is shown to you everyday for the past year?
One of the earliest fears about the spread of COVID was exactly this issue: too many cases would overwhelm the healthcare system and cause deaths to rise even more. Even if we couldn't stop the spread of the virus, one of the goals was to slow it down to keep the number of simultaneous cases to a minimum.
over the past 15 months, many organizations (including the CDC) municipalities (including within the US in democrat and republican areas) and countries have revisited old deaths and current death recording practices, in direct response to this observation and criticism
most times they end up finding more COVID deaths, different ones in greater quantity than the incorrectly recorded ones that shouldn't have been counted. sometimes there is a slight temporary downward death count adjustment. and more importantly, the aggregate stats everywhere already account for this. when news reports X-hundred thousand death milestone, its already factored in the corrected numbers.
what seems most important to me is that all ailments, especially respiratory ones, have the same recording and accounting discrepancies. if the aforementioned "those circles" were also the "just the flu" circles, then the gravity of COVID relative to the flu (or anything else) would still be seen from the original flawed recording standard, because all prior year’s flu numbers are polluted the same way. makes it hard to view those circles as a better alternative to listen to, when the flaws of the established authorities still point to an aggregate good enough signal.
So I support the expiration date idea. I just wish there was a way to implement it such that it actually had the desired effect.
I'd go even further than this, I'd argue that all laws that ordinary people are likely to come into contact with in the course of their everyday life should have an expiry date, forcing a debate every x decades as to whether or not they're still fit for purpose. The date could be variable based on the nature of the legislation, but this mechanism would be fantastic for forcibly clearing out a lot of society's "technical debt".
This mechanism in my opinion would have stopped the lingering damage from moronic wars on abstract concepts. There would have to be some exceptions of course, things like fundamental liberties and human rights for example can't ever be negotiable in a civilised society. There's also an awful lot of very sector-specific legislation which probably doesn't need to be directly re-written every couple of decades too, although society at large won't be coming into contact with it much either so it's not really in the scope of the goal which is to stop yesterday's issues leaving nasty remants for today's societies.
There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
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 health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government.
> There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us".
Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates.
Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
Yes, the intense factions that sprang up without parties immediately after adoption of the Constitution formed the nucleus around which the first parties formed. Parties are a symptom, not the source.
> the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests
Yes, elite factions do that whether they are formalized as parties or not.
Banning formalized parties has no effect on that.
> I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments
There is no possible configuration of laws which would produce that effect.
I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests. However, I do see the other side of the argument in that it would probably open its own can of worms especially in areas like freedom of speech. The whole idea does start to unravel if your conception of free speech applies to entities like corporations as well as individuals. Unsurprisingly I lean towards the idea that it doesn't, but I can also see some very valid arguments for the opposite as well.
It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial (I suspect arguments between friends and family would be less common without the tribal labels backed by billions of dollars of "enrangement is engagement" for example). We can probably get some idea by looking at extant "not-party" political entities like charities, NGOs, and lobby groups to see how effectively they influence elections today.
This makes it practically impossible in the US; so long as not coordinated with a formal party or candidate committee, it has been ruled a violation of the First Amendment to even limit expenditures on promotion of a candidate by private entities; to outright ban such actions would be a more flagrant violation.
> I don't think having very strict rules about the relationships between corporations/non-profits and politicians is necessarily a bad thing in itself, in fact many would see it as a good thing that further protects democracy from manipulation by private interests
You cannot “protect democracy from manipulation by private interests”; the concept is incoherent. Democracy is the aggregate of private interests determining the public interest.
> It could well be a moot point however, I'm not sure how well these "not-parties" would do once society had got used to a few elections without parties and experienced the relief that would come from making politics much less adversarial
We’ve had the absence of formal parties, politics was violently adversarial and formal parties emerged from the adversarial factions.
You cannot alter human nature by abolishing formal parties, which are, again, a symptom not the cause of political factionalism.
In each re-authorization things were removed. And finally it expired completely.
Some politicians won't touch it.
The mainstream presses never had a reckoning for their role in issuing false rationales for the war in Iraq. Those who believed the propaganda shouted down dissent as "conspiracy nuttery" and anti-Americanism. After the fact, many of those I know simply switched their positions. They denied they ever unfairly dismissed concerns or experts (Hans Blix) which ran counter to prevailing propaganda.
Which brings us back to the present rationales for expanded state power, where dissent is dismissed as conspiracy nuttery and anti-science. Once again, the incentives are ignored.
9/11 victims, granny-killer, same side of a different coin.
Hysteria, paranoia, morality, a plan to keep people "safe" - beware of this dangerous pattern.
Above all if everyone is acting in good faith, there should be no taboos about inquiring about ulterior motives. Instead of ridiculing or censoring dissent, coherent and consistent explanations should be provided. If the rationales for hysteria and emergency measures cannot withstand an open debate, that should be illustrative.
https://www.corbettreport.com/911-a-conspiracy-theory/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_QFYn_G1lc
Wikipedia lends itself to exactly the kind of cringe worthy coverage I described above. Starting with the reliable source policy which has only become more partisan in recent years. All of those reliable sources were involved in uncritically promoting WMD propaganda.
Yes, there are nutters with nutty concerns. There are also nutters who wear shoes, but we don't conclude that we must go barefoot. The generalization is misleading at best and disinfo at worst.
I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing to put up with 3+ hour wait times and tons of other restrictions.
Should I go on?
From Wikipedia. Inflammatory, digressive, and off-topic = trolling.
Last week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/
Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.
Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.
Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.
These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.
Here's what a Harvard epidemiologist has to say about the Bangladesh study:
"The Bangladesh mask study does not show a statistically significant difference in the efficacy of cloth masks vs surgical masks. Based on the confidence intervals, both could be around 0% or both could be around 20%."
https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/14355739027894640...
Other performative examples would include permanent enclosed "outside" buildings complete with heating, AC and no airflow.
masks: petty symbolism
ivermectin: horse dewormer
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
What is it that you think you read in this article? What you have said is not supported in any way by the link you have provided.
This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.
The reduction in infection rates wasn't large enough to qualify as statistically significant. That just means that the reduction that they saw from cloth masks could have been due to chance.
Edit: Since the size of the cloth mask group is half the size of the surgical masl group, the effect in the cloth mask group would have to be comperatively larger than the effect on the surgical masl group to qualify as significant.
Somewhow you take that as evidence cloth masks don't work?
If anything, this argues that we weren't strict enough on masks. Require not just wearing one, but a good one.
Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.
I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.
The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.
I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.
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 disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.
Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.
That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.
The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
>I don't know how you don't see that.
Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.
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 give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.
It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.
>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 have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".
All I'm asking is what the threshold is. 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).
Do you enjoy repeating yourself and making no headway?
Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.
That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.
Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?
Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.
Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.
It seems that since COVID is highly contagious and not going away, we are all going to get exposed to it and have to fight it off with our immune systems eventually.
Being vaccinated to train your immune system before your first bout with COVID seems to greatly improve your outcome. In my state currently COVID is 15x more deadly for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. So it made sense to try to limit the spread as much as possible while we were waiting for vaccines to become available, because the difference between "everybody gets it eventually, with no vaccine" and "everybody gets it eventually, but most were vaccinated first" is a significant number of deaths avoided.
Now that the vaccines are widely available and pretty much everybody who wants to be vaccinated, is, the only reason I see to continue with restrictions is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and can continue to serve everybody who needs medical care (COVID or not). That threshold is being hit in some states in the US, so I can understand why some restrictions are still needed. Eventually I would think we will accumulate enough immunity from vaccination + natural infection that we don't have a hospital capacity problem anymore.
https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/08/14/most-covid-19-t...
A dialectic method of historical and philosophical progress that postulates (1) a beginning proposition called a thesis, (2) a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and (3) a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition.
Oh, and you confused 'ironic' and 'coincidence' but I guess that hardly matters.
Edit: Oh, the usual. Editing out all the antisemitic stuff once somebody calls you out for it. At least don't run away once someone questions your shitty beliefs.
I deleted it because it was imprecise--
The dialectic switches between communism and capitalism depending on A/B testing of political revolution messaging. They're both.
Are they?
Complaints about post-9/11 "security" have mostly been about the ineffectiveness of steps that are clearly security theater, or the boondoggles of things like the x-ray scanners. Input from security experts was widely ignored in favor of, well, dumb ideas.
The COVID remediation steps we've been asked to take -- masks in public, social distancing, taking the vaccine once it's available -- are exactly what epidemiologists would've said were the right steps if asked about a hypothetical pandemic 25, 50, 75, or 100 years ago. They're directly in line with expert advice, and provably effective.
Imagine and airport designed to the point where you can literally drive up (or be dropped by an autonomous vehicle) 10 minutes before your flight, Throw your luggage onto a belt where a robot auto tags it based on your a facial recognition algorithm, and walk through an unobtrusive security point that's totally AI driven, and walk direct to your plane ready to go. As someone who travels a lot, I say forget shoes, this is the ultimate dream. The "arrive 2 hours before your flight" nonsense should be automated into oblivion on both ends. I think we just accept this paradigm of air travel now and our airports have become these bohemoths of capture to sell you food, beverage and overpriced trinkets with abhorent wait times for the actual flight logistics. Why cant I just be dropped off directly at my gate and bumble on in less then 5 minutes!
I wouldn't mind a feature where I can drop off my luggage somewhere near my house the day before my flight and it gets tagged, bulked transferred and inspected at the airport.
This would allow me to straight to the gate and not need to check in large luggage or fumble with luggage while rushing for a flight.
This also forces me to pack early and now the night of the flight and be sleep deprived.
Its an express train taking you from a city center railway station directly to the airport in about 15 minutes and also allows you to check in and drop off your luggage up to 24h before departure.
It's criticized by locals as too expensive compared to the S-Bahn serving the same connection (just slower/with more stops) but especially for visitors it of course gives you the huge benefit of not having to deal with any luggage on the last day when you already had to check out of your hotel.
[0] https://www.cityairporttrain.com/en/news/unique-in-europe-th...
Somehow, no two airports are ever alike, and I have a hard time understanding how that happened. There’s no clones at all.
Like, I understand they each have their own geographical constraints, but so does a McDonalds or a Walmart, and somehow I can walk into any of those on the planet without feeling too confused.
Every airport is a multi-billion dollar project designed anew from the ground up. Even when it’s a greenfield build. Dunno why they can’t just pick an existing airport design and say “build that”.
Even roller-coasters will have their clones at different parks (authorized or unauthorized).
Presumably because all airports suck, and every designer thinks they could do better?
Imagine a portal showing up outside your house, maybe on the back of a truck. It's got all the theater: the wavy green lights, smoke, the whole deal. You wave good bye to your family, walk in, and then you get chloroformed and pass out. Your body is loaded into a standardized life support container and driven to the airport. Then, you get revived 6 hours later at your hotel so you can take a shower.
Ok, so there are some details to work out but the point is that the typical air travel experience is so terrible it would be better to be unconscious for most of it. Portal travel!
Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It ain't about safety from ill-intentioned people...it's about protecting the POTUS from having to give the order to open fire on an hijacked civilian plane.
That's the reason why every administration is so concerned with planes and so lax about trains and buses and cruise ships.
Oh, and only one of these things will be heading for Congress potentially.
https://abc7chicago.com/union-station-shooting-chicago-shoot...
Plenty of people are harassed by DEA, customs or immigration on Amtrak trains. They don't seem too concerned with terrorism or souls, though.
0: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1621509
That said, there's a lot more (remote, exposed) infrastructure one could target.
In trains with a separate locomotive, passengers cannot even get to the driver compartment. In any electrified rail scenario, a runaway/commandeered train can be stopped by removing the power supply and then diverting the train onto catch points. Not to mention that running a red light triggers an automated immediate brake in many rail systems.
Of course, breaking into a parked locomotive, starting it and overriding the safety systems (deadman switch, red light detector) is possible, but it requires a lot of training you won't find online, and without the cooperation of someone at the control center all you're going to do is to derail the engine (as usually, there is a catch point switch at the entry of every branch onto the main track, that is by default pointing to the catch point).
> Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter.
Agreed, but bomb/poison threat is a risk at every large building.
> Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships.
It's incredibly difficult to pull off a fatal attack using a commandeered (cruise) ship as a weapon - wannabe pirates would need to control the entire bridge and the machine room as well as any auxiliary control points (e.g. for guides) that allow a remote shutdown of the engines. And even assuming attackers do gain control of a ship... a ship is slow, and cost guard will intervene if they notice you on a dangerous collision course.
There are 300+ people on a train and 4000+ on a cruise ship, those things don't need to be used as a weapon to cause a very sad day for the whole Nation in terms of human lives lost.
Even if the thing is not used as a weapon.
For trains, the situation is similar. Even if you manage to bomb a train, it's unlikely to cause a major, deadly disaster. Rail infrastructure is built with the assumption that trains will get out of control, and the industry has nearly 200 years of experience.
Trains, ships and airplanes are ineffective weapons that need a lot of knowledge to turn into an actual weapon. A truck is way more effective: easy to acquire, easy to use, and even right in the middle of an attack people will assume that the driver has lost control or has medical issues instead of being a terrorist.
China takes train security as seriously as the aeroplane security. At least for the high speed trains.
If I can get a train to go from A to B, I usually take the train. You can arrive at the train station 5 minutes before departure and make it to the train. It's just an overall more comfy experience, mostly thanks to the seamless process of getting on it, not having to worry about the water bottle in your backpack and arriving almost directly in the city center with just a few minutes to get off the train and train station.
You can't hijack a train or a boat and make it crash wherever you want. I also assume it's much easier to respond to a train or cruise ship hijack and avoid having to kill everyone on board.
No, but I am astounded by how you are writing off the 300 people on a train and the 4000 on a ship.
You'd be effectively trapped aboard with hijackers who'd not hesitate to off everybody .