Then they should base it on the pound, which of course is 96 Roman drams, which of course is 96 * 32 / 25 Greek drachma, which is of course 96* 32 / 25 * 6 obols, which is of course 96 * 32 / 25 * 6 * 12 grains of barley.
Or maybe, since measurements were originally based on important items of trade, we should modernize that a bit and standardize based on a dozen iPhones.
I differ too greatly with Google at this point philosophically on the killing of the video tag under the guise to move to an open codec,
I often vote with my wallet, too. I was a NY Giants fan until I witnessed a parking attendant hit a squirrel with his truck. I was appalled by such animal cruelty, and have since switched my allegiance to the Philadelphia Eagles.
According to this paper (sorry for the PDF), the results of approval voting and a Condorcet method are almost always the same:
Although it is theoretically possible in close elections that the Condorcet candidate will not be the most approved candidate, it has almost never occurred.
Then in the footnote:
The 1999 election for president of the Social Choice and Welfare Society, which was decided by 2 approval votes among 76 cast, is the only exception we know of: the second-place AV candidate in this election would have defeated the AV winner by 4 votes in a head-to-head contest, based on the hypothetical use of BV, for which voters ranked candidates. Brams and Fishburn (2001) deem this “nail- biting” election essentially a toss-up, whereas Saari (2001a) argues that most positional methods would have chosen the Condorcet candidate (including BC, wherein the Condorcet winner would have defeated the AV winner 60-59); see Laslier (2003a) for more details on voting patterns in this election. Regenwetter and Grofman (1998), using a random-utility model to reconstruct voter preferences in several elections— including some discussed here— show that AV, BV, and Condorcet winners generally coincide. Laslier (2003b) and Laslier and Vander Sraeten (2003) analyze data from a field experiment with AV in the 2002 French presidential election, which involved over 5,000 voters in two French towns, and conclude that AV was easily understood, readily accepted, and provided a more complete picture of the “political space.” Earlier theoretical analyses as well as computer simulations (Brams and Fishburn, 1983; Lijphart and Grofman, 1984; Nurmi, 1987; Merrill, 1988) demonstrate that AV almost always elects a Condorcet winner if there is one. If there is not one, as in the 1985 TIMS election experiment, then proponents of AV argue that AV provides a compelling way to break either a cycle or a tie.
So while I agree that the Schulze Method is closer to the ideal, in practice it probably makes sense to use the simpler method that only breaks down when the result is in the noise anyway.
Seriously, does granny care if you have to pinch and zoom?
And opera mini handles tabled pages by "unwinding" them.
And beyond all of that, you can still use tabled layout AND css. Hide the side-column tables in the mobile and print views.
I'm not defending the old-school for pros - hell, I'm not a "pro", but I have designed commercial websites using only validated xhtml and css (and a little cheatin' javascript for ie6). But someone shouldn't feel bad for laying out a simple site with tables. Hell, someone shouldn't feel bad for using iWeb or Frontpage! It's like duct tape for the web... I won't begrudge a man for using duct tape to hold his bumper on, but I'd be pissed if the dealer did it!
What in the world are you smoking? Granny's web site does not need to be ADA compliant, and she's not likely to "refactor" the layout. Tabled layouts are fine for Granny. Hell, some of the "solutions" to common css problems involve once again mixing layout and content. At that point, who cares if Granny encloses something in a DIV or a TABLE?
Remember that Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time, followed by Titanic.
It's all about bell curves. Hollywood is being very smart by targeting an IQ of 100, because this captures the highest possible audience. Aim too low or too high and your potential audience is much smaller. Add some universally-adored-by-women sappiness and some universally-adored-by-men special effects and you have a hit. James Cameron is a frigging genius, even if his movies aren't "great". Even smart people go just to see what building a 100 million dollar replica of the Titanic and then sinking it gets you. Or what employing thousands of artists to draw blue space monkeys in 3D looks like.
I paid extra to see it at a IMAX theater, and while it wasn't great cinema, it was a fun movie. I'm glad I saw it, even if I found the notion of sex with a blue monkey highly disturbing.
There's something wrong with your math. By this logic if a 2600 pound Focus gets hit by a fully loaded 80,000 pound semi at 5MPH, it's like a 153 MPH collision. Which is clearly wrong.
Yeah, you are right. Acceleration is the killer. I should be calculating velocity change.
So running into an equal-weighted car head-on at 60MPH gives a velocity change of 60MPH. The Focus running into a semi at 5 MPH would experience a velocity change of 2*5*(1-2600/80000) = 9.675 MPH. Your numbers are correct, not mine:)
But my argument remains largely unchanged, just that the problem was overstated.
So it should be that the 2600 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-2600)/7100 = 76MPH collision while the 4500 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-4500)/7100 = 44MPH collision. Sucks for the smaller car, but not necessarily fatal. (Ignoring that whole bumper height thing.)
So here you have many choices. In the system I proposed, you could (a) limit the weight of the Explorer to 4000 lbs, and (b) mandate that the 2600 lbs Focus be designed to handle a collision with a 4000 lbs vehicle at 60 MPH.
You can improve the fuel-efficiency and safety of the vehicles by changing the upper limit or the speed.
Then Joe Sixpack takes his two 400 pound mothers-in-law to the hardware store to buy a dozen 100 pound bags of road salt.
You could limit the gross weight, or you could just accept that most of the time a car carries 1 average adult. Also, I'd be surprised if the weight of passengers are much of an effect in the impulse of the collision. I'd expect much of the violence and sudden change in velocity to be over by the time they connect with a belt or airbag.
Now an event has said: hey queuing up for an hour to get a Rapiscan is an hour YOU COULD DIE!
These passengers were not in a security line. There are plenty of lines to attack at an airport - you are in danger whether you are checking in, getting on the plane, or getting your bags. The security line is only maybe 1/4 of the problem.
I now get to change it to "What if someone in line has a Bword? Can we get this line moving before we all die?! Please?!"
It's still dishonest, and makes you just as bad as dishonest people on the other side. But hey, if "fight fire with fire" is your thing, don't let morality get in the way.
BTW: Am I the only person who noticed those things are called Rapiscans? Do you pronounce it differently maybe?
They could be called "THE BODY VIOLATOR" and it wouldn't change the arguments.
If we are being realistic, there are no other responses that can work.
I'm not as pessimistic as you.
Panicking, shutting down a country's airports, nude scanners and junk pat downs is not an effective response.
Any politician that does not take swift "action" and vow to improve safety is not going to survive. A little revenge won't hurt their prospects, either. In short, you have to accept this response as human nature and work within it, despite it not being the most efficient solution in theory.
People are NOT going to accept zero security at airports because they don't want planes blowing up, no matter how infrequently.
It's not that I disagree with you - I think there probably was a moderate decrease when the speed limit was raised to what people were driving anyway. I was just pointing out that, even on the highway, what you said is not absolutely certain.
You're missing the point. It isn't that we can't spend money to save lives, it's that we have to make it cost effective.
That is EXACTLY the point I was trying to make. People are able to make a fairly rational cost-benefit analysis when dealing with cars, but not with airplanes and other common terrorist targets. The terrorists know this, and use it when selecting targets. The government knows this, and uses it to select which targets to protect.
but the difference isn't as much as most people make out.
I strongly disagree! An explorer hitting a focus is a disaster. If the focus is built to handle a 60 MPH head-on collision, and it hits an Explorer, it is like having a 4500 / 2600 * 60 = 104 MPH collision. Conversely, the people in the Explorer only felt a 35 MPH collision. In other words, the people in the Focus are dead and the people in the Explorer survive.
There are three rational solutions, and they are not mutually exclusive - design all cars such that they can hit a heavy car at a high speed, bring the speeds down, or bring the weight of the heaviest cars down. All have tradeoffs... imagine the increase in weight of a Ford Focus if it had to handle a 100+ MPH collision! Off-highway speeds would have to come down to about 35 MPH in order for a Focus to handle a head-on collision with an Explorer as-designed. Or you could just try to bring cars down to Taurus levels. That would help a little bit, too. Then you could go 40 instead of 35 without killing the occupants of the Focus.
I think in the end you need to pick a speed, and then have an upper weight limit, and then force the smaller cars to improve safety to handle the upper weight limit. Obviously this would increase costs, average weights, and slow everyone down a bit - in short, it would be unpopular with everyone!:)
So since there are terrorist organizations out there, there definitely are conspiracies. But do you think they spontaneously came into being? Well, maybe some did. But I doubt many. Terrorist camps exist though, right?
There are many, many reasons for terrorist groups to spring into existence. Sometimes it's a genuine grass-roots hatred of some real or perceived injustice. Sometimes you have someone like the CIA or a dumb-but rich Saudi Prince lending a hand. I think it varies.
Well, who funds these camps?
Again, it varies. Sometimes it's a dictator like the good Colonial Quadaffi. Sometimes it's a oil prince with more money than education or sense. Sometimes it's the spy agency of your friendly local democracy.
People being fed propaganda are stupid and rabid... but I doubt the people doing the funding are like that.
A counter-example would be the IRA, who were quite successful fund-raising in the greater Boston area from the ethnic Irish population.
Because someone, somewhere, is thinking strategically. Not the bombers themselves, the people with the coin purses.
That's true, but there are ample examples of money not correlating with brains. Sometimes it works splendidly... if one considers the mujahideen to be terrorists, that would be one example. In any event, most of the time I think terrorists are funded as a long-shot hope from a government or individual who either does not want to or cannot otherwise get their hands dirty. They are tools of a proxy war.
Keep in mind that of the anti-US terrorism, very little "real" damage has been done. It's mostly been about stirring up the hornet's nest and making people scared.
I'd argue that this is due to our large military presence in the Middle East. To use a cliche, we've "taken the fight to them". Scared US citizens aren't the only ones susceptible to human nature... I think that would-be suicide bombers are much more attracted to defending their homeland than in overseas adventure.
So if you want to know who the people behind the terrorists are, you probably have to look at who gains from all the stuff you just described.
The stockholders of Lockheed/Boeing? I dunno - that's a pretty big stretch. It certainly is more complex than other explanations, and I'm a big fan of Occam:)
to end of your second paragraph the second paragraph cannot be a separate commentary, but a continuation of your argument that he was building a straw man.
That was an appeal to an honest debate, which I was attempting to start - not an attempt to put words in his mouth.
Anyway, I've apologized and attempted to clarify... can we move on?
Why would they want to do that? Aren't they really happy with how the security theatre is panning out? If you bomb it directly you risk provoking the adoption of real security, and you also risk people realizing that the security doesn't do anything ("if they can bomb the security lines, obviously it does nothing!") and getting rid of it. Both of those are disasters for the terrorist.
Why, other than operationally, would a terrorist care what we do with security? So long as there is a soft yet horrifying target, they will have plenty to do. If we step up security at airports to a point where they simply can't risk an operation there, well, lets just say there are plenty of soft targets for them to choose from.
Of course, I can answer my own question a bit - terrorists see certain targets as more valuable than others. They (and we) are particularly hung-up on planes. No matter how much security you throw at airports, they keep going after the planes rather than picking low-hanging fruit. So of course, we throw even more resources at the preferred target.
Anyway, I think you are giving "terrorists" far too much credit for strategic thinking...
Timothy McVeigh thought that he could incite a popular revolution, and instead he's best remembered for killing a bunch of preschoolers.
Bin Laden wants us out of the Middle East, yet his actions so far have drawn us further in.
Ramzi Yousef wants - at the very least - a Palestinian state and uses terrorism to further that cause, which has not exactly panned out.
My point is that they aren't, as a class, the best strategic thinkers. In fact, they usually hurt their cause - so much so that it fuels conspiracy theories. George Bush would never have had the political capital to invade two Middle Eastern countries without the 9/11 attacks. Chechnya is more locked down and less independent than ever, and Russia is now largely an autocracy. And this North Caucasus stuff has some Russians so whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy that ordinary Muslims are just attacked for daring to exist.
That may be true on highways where it seemed to improve things by a few percent, but in London the traffic fatalities were reduced by over 40% when they reduced the speed limit to 20 MPH.
Indeed - just as people are comfortable going fast at the expense of lives, they are comfortable making money at the expense of lives.
if they would just make "trucks" (SUVs) meet the same safety standards as passenger vehicles.
We just have to get them off the road - they are far too heavy. Actually, anyone with any sense of self-preservation drives a heavier car with a good safety rating. Most people illogically choose fuel economy, style, or some other metric rather than safety. But basic physics is not in your corner with a light car. In an ideal situation (from a purely safety standpoint), all cars would weight about the same. Of course, this makes no sense in practical terms, as the needs of cars are too varied.
If terrorist can hold a nation hostage and cause them to fear everything then they do win. If you man-up and just get on with your lives showing little change then it devalues their attack which is a good thing.
I don't think Russian's increasing willingness to empower the central government for reasons of security is a good example here.
The only way to defeat the terrorists is to refuse to be terrorized.
???
"Terrorists" aren't an entity to be defeated - terrorism is a tactic. And yes, if you ignore human nature and tell everyone just to not be scared, that would destroy the effectiveness of the tactic.
But, c'mon, be realistic... that ain't going to happen. Instead, people will look to leaders who promise - realistic or not - to keep them safe. It also won't hurt if the leader also appeals to human nature in the form of revenge. That people in Russia are somewhat used to terrorism does not change the fact that they have empowered some pretty scary men to do whatever the hell they want in order to keep Russians safe.
I'd argue that preventing (or at least reducing the severity of) the attacks is the only *realistic* way to keep the knee-jerking to a minimum. And by "severity", I mean the propaganda value. An airplane (and by extension an airport) is a big propaganda target. I can already see the central government getting stronger in Russia.:)
It's easy to say, but much harder to do. Human instincts can be quite powerful things - I could not, for instance, step out on the glass at the CN Tower without getting down on the floor and slowly scooting over, despite my logical engineer brain KNOWING it was perfectly safe.
You have to account for human nature when proposing policy, and the simple fact is that our brains are not very optimized for normal city life. We can handle hundreds of thousands of deaths every year from automobile accidents, but a few planes getting hijacked will bring everything to a standstill.
You can fight that, if you wish. But IMHO it is better to understand it and try to take action while taking this into account. You'll get labeled a kook if you suggest we lower our speed limits for safety reasons, despite it saving thousands of lives.
No, I was making an accusation. If I wasn't explicit enough, I apologize. To be more clear, I was accusing him of trying to undermine the argument for gate screening by asserting that a more vulnerable target is created in the process of screening.
While true that a line (and thus an additional target) is created, there are already at least three other places with very large and dense lines. The first is the most obvious - when 100+ people are crowded in a jetway. The second is check-in, which is so large and snaking at times that it can overflow the lobby of the airport. The third is baggage claim.
All of those can rival any security line that I've seen, depending of course on the day and time.
The second paragraph of my post is what you call a "straw man", and I can't imagine how you get there. Surely I can continue the discussion by adding my own on-topic commentary? I thought I addressed his two-sentence post adequately in my first paragraph.
This is a straw man. There will be lines at the airport, with or without "security theater". They can just as easily blow you up in a crowded jetway.
No one is selling the airport gate screening as a way to make the airport safer - they are selling as a way to make the plane (and potential targets on the ground) safer. We can argue whether or not this is effective, but there's no reason to set up a bogus argument.
Here we'd have closed the airport for days to make it look like we were doing something.
Don't you think that has just a little to do with them being "used" to terrorism? The British didn't stop everything when the IRA was blowing stuff up, either.
I don't think I'm on board that our skin needs to be as thick as the Russians. It is admirable that they can move past such an event, but it's actually quite sad as well.
That's true, but how many live somewhere with access to an outlet? I was 35 before I owned my house, and prior to that it was street parking at an apartment complex. I'm lucky enough now to have not only a driveway, but an actual garage... but right up the street the properties are too small and everyone has to park at the curb.
So I don't see the need for just one solution. Maybe in a few years I will buy one of these new electric cars. But for apartment dwellers or long-range drivers, if someone can close the carbon cycle (and the buying from people who want to kill us cycle) with some synthetic gasoline... why the hell not? Whatever works for each individual - the whole gasoline infrastructure is there, so it seems like low-hanging fruit to me.
Slashdot Mirror
What's going too happen when a Philly parking attendant shoots down an Eagle?
That would be like if Microsoft ever impeded open source!
Then they should base it on the pound, which of course is 96 Roman drams, which of course is 96 * 32 / 25 Greek drachma, which is of course 96* 32 / 25 * 6 obols, which is of course 96 * 32 / 25 * 6 * 12 grains of barley.
Or maybe, since measurements were originally based on important items of trade, we should modernize that a bit and standardize based on a dozen iPhones.
I differ too greatly with Google at this point philosophically on the killing of the video tag under the guise to move to an open codec,
I often vote with my wallet, too. I was a NY Giants fan until I witnessed a parking attendant hit a squirrel with his truck. I was appalled by such animal cruelty, and have since switched my allegiance to the Philadelphia Eagles.
According to this paper (sorry for the PDF), the results of approval voting and a Condorcet method are almost always the same:
Then in the footnote:
So while I agree that the Schulze Method is closer to the ideal, in practice it probably makes sense to use the simpler method that only breaks down when the result is in the noise anyway.
Granny... don't... care.
Seriously, does granny care if you have to pinch and zoom?
And opera mini handles tabled pages by "unwinding" them.
And beyond all of that, you can still use tabled layout AND css. Hide the side-column tables in the mobile and print views.
I'm not defending the old-school for pros - hell, I'm not a "pro", but I have designed commercial websites using only validated xhtml and css (and a little cheatin' javascript for ie6). But someone shouldn't feel bad for laying out a simple site with tables. Hell, someone shouldn't feel bad for using iWeb or Frontpage! It's like duct tape for the web... I won't begrudge a man for using duct tape to hold his bumper on, but I'd be pissed if the dealer did it!
What in the world are you smoking? Granny's web site does not need to be ADA compliant, and she's not likely to "refactor" the layout. Tabled layouts are fine for Granny. Hell, some of the "solutions" to common css problems involve once again mixing layout and content. At that point, who cares if Granny encloses something in a DIV or a TABLE?
Remember that Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time, followed by Titanic.
It's all about bell curves. Hollywood is being very smart by targeting an IQ of 100, because this captures the highest possible audience. Aim too low or too high and your potential audience is much smaller. Add some universally-adored-by-women sappiness and some universally-adored-by-men special effects and you have a hit. James Cameron is a frigging genius, even if his movies aren't "great". Even smart people go just to see what building a 100 million dollar replica of the Titanic and then sinking it gets you. Or what employing thousands of artists to draw blue space monkeys in 3D looks like.
It's to fuck with future civilizations. Though, to be truly effective, you need an ominous and arbitrary end date as well.
It worked for the Mayans!
I paid extra to see it at a IMAX theater, and while it wasn't great cinema, it was a fun movie. I'm glad I saw it, even if I found the notion of sex with a blue monkey highly disturbing.
There's something wrong with your math. By this logic if a 2600 pound Focus gets hit by a fully loaded 80,000 pound semi at 5MPH, it's like a 153 MPH collision. Which is clearly wrong.
Yeah, you are right. Acceleration is the killer. I should be calculating velocity change.
So running into an equal-weighted car head-on at 60MPH gives a velocity change of 60MPH. The Focus running into a semi at 5 MPH would experience a velocity change of 2*5*(1-2600/80000) = 9.675 MPH. Your numbers are correct, not mine :)
But my argument remains largely unchanged, just that the problem was overstated.
So it should be that the 2600 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-2600)/7100 = 76MPH collision while the 4500 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-4500)/7100 = 44MPH collision. Sucks for the smaller car, but not necessarily fatal. (Ignoring that whole bumper height thing.)
So here you have many choices. In the system I proposed, you could (a) limit the weight of the Explorer to 4000 lbs, and (b) mandate that the 2600 lbs Focus be designed to handle a collision with a 4000 lbs vehicle at 60 MPH.
You can improve the fuel-efficiency and safety of the vehicles by changing the upper limit or the speed.
Then Joe Sixpack takes his two 400 pound mothers-in-law to the hardware store to buy a dozen 100 pound bags of road salt.
You could limit the gross weight, or you could just accept that most of the time a car carries 1 average adult. Also, I'd be surprised if the weight of passengers are much of an effect in the impulse of the collision. I'd expect much of the violence and sudden change in velocity to be over by the time they connect with a belt or airbag.
Now an event has said: hey queuing up for an hour to get a Rapiscan is an hour YOU COULD DIE!
These passengers were not in a security line. There are plenty of lines to attack at an airport - you are in danger whether you are checking in, getting on the plane, or getting your bags. The security line is only maybe 1/4 of the problem.
I now get to change it to "What if someone in line has a Bword? Can we get this line moving before we all die?! Please?!"
It's still dishonest, and makes you just as bad as dishonest people on the other side. But hey, if "fight fire with fire" is your thing, don't let morality get in the way.
BTW: Am I the only person who noticed those things are called Rapiscans? Do you pronounce it differently maybe?
They could be called "THE BODY VIOLATOR" and it wouldn't change the arguments.
If we are being realistic, there are no other responses that can work.
I'm not as pessimistic as you.
Panicking, shutting down a country's airports, nude scanners and junk pat downs is not an effective response.
Any politician that does not take swift "action" and vow to improve safety is not going to survive. A little revenge won't hurt their prospects, either. In short, you have to accept this response as human nature and work within it, despite it not being the most efficient solution in theory.
People are NOT going to accept zero security at airports because they don't want planes blowing up, no matter how infrequently.
The problem with the data
It's not that I disagree with you - I think there probably was a moderate decrease when the speed limit was raised to what people were driving anyway. I was just pointing out that, even on the highway, what you said is not absolutely certain.
You're missing the point. It isn't that we can't spend money to save lives, it's that we have to make it cost effective.
That is EXACTLY the point I was trying to make. People are able to make a fairly rational cost-benefit analysis when dealing with cars, but not with airplanes and other common terrorist targets. The terrorists know this, and use it when selecting targets. The government knows this, and uses it to select which targets to protect.
but the difference isn't as much as most people make out.
I strongly disagree! An explorer hitting a focus is a disaster. If the focus is built to handle a 60 MPH head-on collision, and it hits an Explorer, it is like having a 4500 / 2600 * 60 = 104 MPH collision. Conversely, the people in the Explorer only felt a 35 MPH collision. In other words, the people in the Focus are dead and the people in the Explorer survive.
There are three rational solutions, and they are not mutually exclusive - design all cars such that they can hit a heavy car at a high speed, bring the speeds down, or bring the weight of the heaviest cars down. All have tradeoffs... imagine the increase in weight of a Ford Focus if it had to handle a 100+ MPH collision! Off-highway speeds would have to come down to about 35 MPH in order for a Focus to handle a head-on collision with an Explorer as-designed. Or you could just try to bring cars down to Taurus levels. That would help a little bit, too. Then you could go 40 instead of 35 without killing the occupants of the Focus.
I think in the end you need to pick a speed, and then have an upper weight limit, and then force the smaller cars to improve safety to handle the upper weight limit. Obviously this would increase costs, average weights, and slow everyone down a bit - in short, it would be unpopular with everyone! :)
So since there are terrorist organizations out there, there definitely are conspiracies. But do you think they spontaneously came into being? Well, maybe some did. But I doubt many. Terrorist camps exist though, right?
There are many, many reasons for terrorist groups to spring into existence. Sometimes it's a genuine grass-roots hatred of some real or perceived injustice. Sometimes you have someone like the CIA or a dumb-but rich Saudi Prince lending a hand. I think it varies.
Well, who funds these camps?
Again, it varies. Sometimes it's a dictator like the good Colonial Quadaffi. Sometimes it's a oil prince with more money than education or sense. Sometimes it's the spy agency of your friendly local democracy.
People being fed propaganda are stupid and rabid... but I doubt the people doing the funding are like that.
A counter-example would be the IRA, who were quite successful fund-raising in the greater Boston area from the ethnic Irish population.
Because someone, somewhere, is thinking strategically. Not the bombers themselves, the people with the coin purses.
That's true, but there are ample examples of money not correlating with brains. Sometimes it works splendidly... if one considers the mujahideen to be terrorists, that would be one example. In any event, most of the time I think terrorists are funded as a long-shot hope from a government or individual who either does not want to or cannot otherwise get their hands dirty. They are tools of a proxy war.
Keep in mind that of the anti-US terrorism, very little "real" damage has been done. It's mostly been about stirring up the hornet's nest and making people scared.
I'd argue that this is due to our large military presence in the Middle East. To use a cliche, we've "taken the fight to them". Scared US citizens aren't the only ones susceptible to human nature... I think that would-be suicide bombers are much more attracted to defending their homeland than in overseas adventure.
So if you want to know who the people behind the terrorists are, you probably have to look at who gains from all the stuff you just described.
The stockholders of Lockheed/Boeing? I dunno - that's a pretty big stretch. It certainly is more complex than other explanations, and I'm a big fan of Occam :)
to end of your second paragraph the second paragraph cannot be a separate commentary, but a continuation of your argument that he was building a straw man.
That was an appeal to an honest debate, which I was attempting to start - not an attempt to put words in his mouth.
Anyway, I've apologized and attempted to clarify... can we move on?
Why would they want to do that? Aren't they really happy with how the security theatre is panning out? If you bomb it directly you risk provoking the adoption of real security, and you also risk people realizing that the security doesn't do anything ("if they can bomb the security lines, obviously it does nothing!") and getting rid of it. Both of those are disasters for the terrorist.
Why, other than operationally, would a terrorist care what we do with security? So long as there is a soft yet horrifying target, they will have plenty to do. If we step up security at airports to a point where they simply can't risk an operation there, well, lets just say there are plenty of soft targets for them to choose from.
Of course, I can answer my own question a bit - terrorists see certain targets as more valuable than others. They (and we) are particularly hung-up on planes. No matter how much security you throw at airports, they keep going after the planes rather than picking low-hanging fruit. So of course, we throw even more resources at the preferred target.
Anyway, I think you are giving "terrorists" far too much credit for strategic thinking...
Timothy McVeigh thought that he could incite a popular revolution, and instead he's best remembered for killing a bunch of preschoolers.
Bin Laden wants us out of the Middle East, yet his actions so far have drawn us further in.
Ramzi Yousef wants - at the very least - a Palestinian state and uses terrorism to further that cause, which has not exactly panned out.
My point is that they aren't, as a class, the best strategic thinkers. In fact, they usually hurt their cause - so much so that it fuels conspiracy theories. George Bush would never have had the political capital to invade two Middle Eastern countries without the 9/11 attacks. Chechnya is more locked down and less independent than ever, and Russia is now largely an autocracy. And this North Caucasus stuff has some Russians so whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy that ordinary Muslims are just attacked for daring to exist.
In fact, it makes things more dangerous
That may be true on highways where it seemed to improve things by a few percent, but in London the traffic fatalities were reduced by over 40% when they reduced the speed limit to 20 MPH.
Even on highways, your thesis is debatable.
Now you've got a revenue problem.
Indeed - just as people are comfortable going fast at the expense of lives, they are comfortable making money at the expense of lives.
if they would just make "trucks" (SUVs) meet the same safety standards as passenger vehicles.
We just have to get them off the road - they are far too heavy. Actually, anyone with any sense of self-preservation drives a heavier car with a good safety rating. Most people illogically choose fuel economy, style, or some other metric rather than safety. But basic physics is not in your corner with a light car. In an ideal situation (from a purely safety standpoint), all cars would weight about the same. Of course, this makes no sense in practical terms, as the needs of cars are too varied.
If terrorist can hold a nation hostage and cause them to fear everything then they do win. If you man-up and just get on with your lives showing little change then it devalues their attack which is a good thing.
I don't think Russian's increasing willingness to empower the central government for reasons of security is a good example here.
The only way to defeat the terrorists is to refuse to be terrorized.
???
"Terrorists" aren't an entity to be defeated - terrorism is a tactic. And yes, if you ignore human nature and tell everyone just to not be scared, that would destroy the effectiveness of the tactic.
But, c'mon, be realistic... that ain't going to happen. Instead, people will look to leaders who promise - realistic or not - to keep them safe. It also won't hurt if the leader also appeals to human nature in the form of revenge. That people in Russia are somewhat used to terrorism does not change the fact that they have empowered some pretty scary men to do whatever the hell they want in order to keep Russians safe.
I'd argue that preventing (or at least reducing the severity of) the attacks is the only *realistic* way to keep the knee-jerking to a minimum. And by "severity", I mean the propaganda value. An airplane (and by extension an airport) is a big propaganda target. I can already see the central government getting stronger in Russia. :)
Perspective, people....
It's easy to say, but much harder to do. Human instincts can be quite powerful things - I could not, for instance, step out on the glass at the CN Tower without getting down on the floor and slowly scooting over, despite my logical engineer brain KNOWING it was perfectly safe.
You have to account for human nature when proposing policy, and the simple fact is that our brains are not very optimized for normal city life. We can handle hundreds of thousands of deaths every year from automobile accidents, but a few planes getting hijacked will bring everything to a standstill.
You can fight that, if you wish. But IMHO it is better to understand it and try to take action while taking this into account. You'll get labeled a kook if you suggest we lower our speed limits for safety reasons, despite it saving thousands of lives.
Security Theater introduces additional delays.
Sure, compared to ZERO security. It would work like Amtrak. Are you advocating zero security? Otherwise, there will still be a line.
If a huge inconvienence/injustice only buys you a tiny bit of saftey, then it isn't a cost worth paying.
I'd agree with that statement, though I'd add the propaganda value of downing an airplane to your equation.
You are making a straw man argument, yourself.
No, I was making an accusation. If I wasn't explicit enough, I apologize. To be more clear, I was accusing him of trying to undermine the argument for gate screening by asserting that a more vulnerable target is created in the process of screening.
While true that a line (and thus an additional target) is created, there are already at least three other places with very large and dense lines. The first is the most obvious - when 100+ people are crowded in a jetway. The second is check-in, which is so large and snaking at times that it can overflow the lobby of the airport. The third is baggage claim.
All of those can rival any security line that I've seen, depending of course on the day and time.
The second paragraph of my post is what you call a "straw man", and I can't imagine how you get there. Surely I can continue the discussion by adding my own on-topic commentary? I thought I addressed his two-sentence post adequately in my first paragraph.
in the security theater line
This is a straw man. There will be lines at the airport, with or without "security theater". They can just as easily blow you up in a crowded jetway.
No one is selling the airport gate screening as a way to make the airport safer - they are selling as a way to make the plane (and potential targets on the ground) safer. We can argue whether or not this is effective, but there's no reason to set up a bogus argument.
Here we'd have closed the airport for days to make it look like we were doing something.
Don't you think that has just a little to do with them being "used" to terrorism? The British didn't stop everything when the IRA was blowing stuff up, either.
I don't think I'm on board that our skin needs to be as thick as the Russians. It is admirable that they can move past such an event, but it's actually quite sad as well.
Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.
Oh yeah, well, call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity... ON THE MOON!
Americans don't drive 400 miles regularly.
That's true, but how many live somewhere with access to an outlet? I was 35 before I owned my house, and prior to that it was street parking at an apartment complex. I'm lucky enough now to have not only a driveway, but an actual garage... but right up the street the properties are too small and everyone has to park at the curb.
So I don't see the need for just one solution. Maybe in a few years I will buy one of these new electric cars. But for apartment dwellers or long-range drivers, if someone can close the carbon cycle (and the buying from people who want to kill us cycle) with some synthetic gasoline... why the hell not? Whatever works for each individual - the whole gasoline infrastructure is there, so it seems like low-hanging fruit to me.