As others have noted, rain coats for weather, and bikes trigger inductive loops all the time (with some notable, broken, exceptions). It does help to know how the loops works, and it helps to have a bike with conductive (aluminum) rims. And for ice, studded tires.
Cargo, it depends on the bike. Mine is rated to carry 200lbs (in addition to me) and has done so. I've hauled 100lbs up hills. It's easy to find pictures of boring 3-speed city bikes in other countries hauling a second person on the rear rack (and those other countries have the safety stats to prove that it's not a dangerous thing to do).
Bikes are good for getting through traffic jams (even cargo bikes, like mine), and they're much easier to park than cars. My wife and I once had a "race" to an office in Cambridge (car, bike) and the bicycle (me) won, mostly because she first got stuck in a traffic jam, and then had to go find parking, and then had to walk to the office from parking. Shopping at the local mall, I always find parking, and if things are so busy that all the carts are in use, I can easily spot a spare cart out in the parking lot and drag it in while riding the bike.
As far as controlled access highways, do not confuse may not with can not. It's against the law, but a bicycle is perfectly well capable of traveling on that surface or the shoulder. Note that we're pretty lax about enforcing/observing many traffic laws, so this is not even really the law, it is more a matter of policy. If I thought that no-bikes-on-freeways would be enforced as well as no-speeding-on-freeways, I'd use the shoulder without a second thought.
I rather doubt that the economic models are that strong, and you have certainly not supported your claim. They're not based on physics, we don't have thousands of years of quite good economic data (tree rings, ice cores) or hundreds of thousands of years of not-too-bad data (sediment cores). They did not predict this slump that we're in now, and alleged economists are arguing (from the so-called "fresh" and "salt" water sides) whether the prescription to revive the economy is more government borrowing and spending (for those countries that control their currencies, i.e., not the southern EU) or more austerity. Lots of people predicted that Obama's stimulus package would spark hyperinflation, which has thus far failed to materialize -- were they using economic models? If the economic models are so good, why is there so much disagreement over the right action to take to get people back to work?
Business in the US has a long history of crying "wolf", and the groups that oppose action to reduce GHG emissions also opposed (for example) Clinton's tax increases, claiming that they would be very bad for the economy (quotes here: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2010/08/10/173450/1993-quotes/ ). They were quite wrong in their prediction; why should I pay any attention to what they say now? Or were they making shit up then, but now, now, they are using reliable economic models?
It's not just "human greed". If you want to keep bees someplace that it gets good-N-cold, feeding them can help them get through the winter. I had bees, a new batch. I took NO honey the first year. We had a nasty winter (not this one just past, but the previous year). Bees did not survive, partly because I did not feed them. Another way to feed them (not sure how much HFCS is in this, but I will check) that a beekeeper friend recommended was to get bulk fondant icing, smear it on wax paper, and just stick that in the top (?) of the hive.
When I was a kid, we kept bees in Florida. That was pretty much dead easy, compared to beekeeping in the Northeast.
I didn't see polite, or a rebuttal, as noted in the other reply (which is evidence that I listened none-the-less). The "science" behind "cutting CO2 emissions will sacrifice-the-economy/destroy-wealth/increase-poverty" is not very strong. We've got far more data and better tested models (and better-predicting models) for the climate than we do for the economy. (This is partly because the economy is not just complex and chaotic, but filled with actors attempting to game the economy for an advantage as soon as they can figure out how it currently works. We can also work with thousands of years of preserved climate indicators, that we lack for economics.)
In addition to being impolite, you are also unable to construct anything like a plausible justification that curtailing GHG emissions will do serious harm ("sacrifice", "at the cost of prosperity") to the economy. You start with an implausible hyperbolic analogy ("death ray", "Great Britain"). That's not proof. Next, you play innumerate hopscotch from "telling people what to do", to "interfere with the economy", to "destroy wealth", to "drives people into poverty". At every step, you fail to provide numbers, and fail to consider "compared to what", and whether there are any relevant examples that would support your argument. Lots of things "destroy wealth" -- to judge from recent unemployment reports, good weather creates wealth (employment), and bad weather destroys it. Underregulation of banks and mortgage lending appears to eventually destroy wealth, too, and it blew a bigger hole in our economy than anything else I can point to.
For an end-to-end test of your "theory", we might consider nations that are roughly as wealthy as ours, that have more regulations, and look at their poverty rates. If the poverty rate in Scandinavia or other Northern European countries (famous for regulations) is not higher than ours, then your argument falls to pieces. Let me check... (CIA world factbook, wikipedia, both caution that definition of poverty varies by country) -- it doesn't appear that they have a higher poverty rate. Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, all lower. Germany, 15.5% versus our 15% (but they're still digesting East Germany, aren't they?) Finland and Sweden have about the same unemployment rate as we do, Norway's is much lower, so it doesn't look like regulation is hurting them there. So I think there is no evidence for your claim; within limits, "telling people what to do" is not a poverty-creator. Note that you're also mischaracterizing the favored "solutions" for global warming, which are generally market-based (cap-and-trade and/or carbon tax), both because market-based solutions will tend to be more efficient (the market makes it so) and because that explicitly avoids "telling people what to do" -- if you want to burn carbon, and you can afford it, that can be your choice.
So it looks to me like you are making stuff up from libertarian religion, and that, only after constructing a strawman to attempt (AND FAIL) to knock down (that should be really embarrassing to you). Everything you say is accepted as gospel by libertarians, even if there is no particular data to support it (or even if there is data to contradict it, as there is in this case). Climate change poses a problem for libertarians, because if it is caused by humans, and if it is costly, then the only solution is government interference with the economy.
You live in Minnesota, what more do you want? I live near Boston, high enough that Greenland could melt and I'd still be dry and connected to the mainland. We've got ample water supplies, too (MWRA, Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs).
Don't be an asshole about it, but you don't need to be quiet, either. You can be that weird guy who recycles, or that weird guy who rides a bicycle everywhere, or that weird mostly vegetarian guy. If you really want to mess with their minds, don't be consistent. Eat meat sometimes; drive a car sometimes, etc.
I'm the weird guy who rides a bicycle many places (though not everywhere). Mind you, when I hear someone complaining about the parking and traffic in Cambridge, or about the cost of gasoline, or about how out of shape they are, I *don't* usually say, "well, you could ride a bike", because that would be annoying. Mind, if I were really feeling like a jerk, I'd say things like "does it bother you, spending all that money on gasoline so you can get fat sitting in your car in a traffic jam?" That's not how you win hearts and minds.
This stuff is not, not, not new. The basic mechanism is well known, it's the details that are still somewhat up for grabs. If you read the paper, and read other papers, even recent ones, you'll see that it is pretty thorough and covers many issues that so-called skeptics propose as "but did you consider...?". Yes, they did consider them, 30 years ago.
The first paper that got my attention was published in some form in the late 1980s; it pointed out that the annual maximum on the Keeling curve (look it up) was coming earlier -- basically, that it was getting warm enough to start photosynthesis earlier than it had been. The Keeling data collection is designed in a way that makes it immune to most of the problems that would make you wonder about measurement quality.
You are leaping to the conclusion that anyone in the stop-climate-change mainstream (as opposed to the fringe) desires or intends to trash the economy. That's really rude, since it assumes either horrible motives or absurd stupidity on the part of people proposing these things.
One of the reasons for a proposal like carbon tax or carbon cap-and-trade is that those address exactly the problem (GHG emissions) without pre-supposing a solution. It's up to the market to allocate resources in the best way to avoid those carbon-associated costs.
Second, people have studied what it would take. Our big-ticket GHG items are (personal) transportation, the mammal-meat production stream (everything from fertilizer to grow corn, to burping cattle, to manure "lagoon" emissions), and electricity generation. It does not destroy the economy to eat less meat (the money we save, we spend on something else). It does not destroy the economy to drive smaller cars, carpool, ride bicycles, and/or telecommute and use mass transit. Electricity generation is the hardest problem, principally because non-FF sources will require larger distribution networks, storage, and some amount of "smart loads", and none of that is in place right now (you could cut your beef consumption in half tomorrow, and if people were motivated, they could start carpooling in short order). On the demand side we can do everything from painting roofs white, to better insulating refrigerators, to sealing air leaks in our houses. These things do not destroy the economy.
I don't see that coal scores particularly well on this metric. Coal ash contains trace levels of radioactivity, and summing that over the total volume of coal ash results in a lot of radioactivity released into the environment (more of it scrubbed now, than in the past). Coal-mining tears up plenty of land. Nukes might have trashed more, but I'd want to see a little accounting done before just accepting that nukes are worse.
Oil has its own problems; years of burning leaded gasoline contaminated many many acres of soil adjacent to high-traffic roads. We didn't abandon those areas, we just kept on living there and got ever-so-slightly lead-poisoned.
It may be that "probability theory" tends to lead to assumptions that traditionally make the math more tractable -- independent events, not linked events, and assumptions about probability distributions (e.g., normal distributions). Those assumptions might not hold.
There was an article some years back in SIAM Review proposing that traditional structural analysis too often made the assumption of linearity -- literally, that you CAN push a rope. Suspension cables do not obey Hookes' law in compression, concrete does not in tension, and ships heaving all the way out of the water experience forces that are not linear with displacement. Modeling non-linear systems used to be impractical, so people would just assume linearity to make the math tractable.
Suppose the reactor area is flooded, such that the plug is underwater (hence actively cooled by boiling water) but all other cooling systems are off-line. Reactor still safe? I think that violates one of the assumptions of the design, which is that the plug is only cooled if the cooling systems are (generally) working.
But in fact, it was not replaced, despite the obvious age of the reactors. An unimplemented policy is a failed policy.
We might also argue that we learn from our mistakes (in the same way that (quoting a friend) "each quirk in the electrical code corresponds to some deaths from an accident"), but when you're working with nuclear reactors education is expensive.
But -- you also have to consider that a small percentage of the population is just cranks, always and/or randomly predicting disaster, and given enough cranks, you'll find who got really lucky in his predictions. Does that make him an expert, or just a lucky crank?
Or you will find people who predict "disaster", without properly predicting the nature of the disaster. Me, for example -- when Bush was re-elected, it was my opinion that the economy was likely to go kerflooie -- but what I expected was a surge in inflation (because of trade and federal deficits, and an obvious aim to continue with tax cuts without a corresponding spending cut), not a housing-bubble-popping collapse. I knew that housing prices had zoomed up, but having lived in Silicon Valley through that irrational late-80s-early-90s bubble that didn't really pop (if it had, we'd have bought there), I discounted my thinking that prices were insanely high. Whoops.
One problem is that we seem to have people have attained permanent "expert" status. Results from Europe over the last few years strongly suggest that "austerity" does not revive economies, yet many "experts" persist in recommending it. Other "experts" predicted that Obama's stimulus spending would lead to runaway inflation, yet that has hardly been the case. So why are the mis-predictors still respected and quoted?
"Thousands" is no longer likely at all. The cockpit door is reinforced, and the passengers, if they get wind of what you are up to, will no longer cooperate. Worst case now is blowing up an airplane. Bad, but not thousands.
Mod parent up please. And add to that, cockpit doors are now reinforced.
Also had a brief demonstration this weekend of what a pilot can do to incapacitate passengers. We had a go-around at our landing, first time I've ever done one. Pilots were not trying hard to be annoying or unpleasant, but the down-down-down then up-up-up made my tummy not very happy. A few more of those, I'd have probably been sick, and I'm sure I was not the only one. Imagine if the pilots were trying -- "fasten your seatbelts, or else".
But you'd be perfectly okay with a somewhat-crumpled bag from some random airport shop, right? Or a "pillow"? What do you think could be concealed inside a hardback "book"?
This bullshit fear-of-the-weird caused us to check a bag this weekend, rather than put it in the carry-on, because we knew it would be considered "unusual" and we might lose it in security (a conch shell, and 4 quarts of frozen calamondin slurry -- says my teenage son "it's not liquid, so what's their problem?").
I got on a plane once with about 9 inches of railroad rail in my carry-on.
If you need to improvise a weapon, use a towel to make a rat-tail, and finish it (with as gradual a taper as possible) with a length of dental floss. Crack the whip, dental floss goes reliably supersonic, cuts lots of stuff. I cut half-way through a sunday paper with one of those, easier than with a packing knife. Aim for the head; even if you miss, they'll be deaf.
As I said to someone else, back when the Lite-Brite Mooninites panicked the Boston Police, the first rule of making a bomb, is to not make it look like a bomb. That's why IEDs get buried, stuffed into dead dogs, what have you. Around here, if you wanted to hide a bomb in plain sight, you'd stick it in a crumpled Dunkin Donuts bag.
Reducing other taxes, preferably mostly on the poor, because gas taxes are regressive and we'd like to stay not just overall revenue-neutral, but per-class revenue neutral.
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As others have noted, rain coats for weather, and bikes trigger inductive loops all the time (with some notable, broken, exceptions). It does help to know how the loops works, and it helps to have a bike with conductive (aluminum) rims. And for ice, studded tires.
Cargo, it depends on the bike. Mine is rated to carry 200lbs (in addition to me) and has done so. I've hauled 100lbs up hills. It's easy to find pictures of boring 3-speed city bikes in other countries hauling a second person on the rear rack (and those other countries have the safety stats to prove that it's not a dangerous thing to do).
Bikes are good for getting through traffic jams (even cargo bikes, like mine), and they're much easier to park than cars. My wife and I once had a "race" to an office in Cambridge (car, bike) and the bicycle (me) won, mostly because she first got stuck in a traffic jam, and then had to go find parking, and then had to walk to the office from parking. Shopping at the local mall, I always find parking, and if things are so busy that all the carts are in use, I can easily spot a spare cart out in the parking lot and drag it in while riding the bike.
As far as controlled access highways, do not confuse may not with can not. It's against the law, but a bicycle is perfectly well capable of traveling on that surface or the shoulder. Note that we're pretty lax about enforcing/observing many traffic laws, so this is not even really the law, it is more a matter of policy. If I thought that no-bikes-on-freeways would be enforced as well as no-speeding-on-freeways, I'd use the shoulder without a second thought.
I rather doubt that the economic models are that strong, and you have certainly not supported your claim. They're not based on physics, we don't have thousands of years of quite good economic data (tree rings, ice cores) or hundreds of thousands of years of not-too-bad data (sediment cores). They did not predict this slump that we're in now, and alleged economists are arguing (from the so-called "fresh" and "salt" water sides) whether the prescription to revive the economy is more government borrowing and spending (for those countries that control their currencies, i.e., not the southern EU) or more austerity. Lots of people predicted that Obama's stimulus package would spark hyperinflation, which has thus far failed to materialize -- were they using economic models? If the economic models are so good, why is there so much disagreement over the right action to take to get people back to work?
Business in the US has a long history of crying "wolf", and the groups that oppose action to reduce GHG emissions also opposed (for example) Clinton's tax increases, claiming that they would be very bad for the economy (quotes here: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2010/08/10/173450/1993-quotes/ ). They were quite wrong in their prediction; why should I pay any attention to what they say now? Or were they making shit up then, but now, now, they are using reliable economic models?
It's not just "human greed". If you want to keep bees someplace that it gets good-N-cold, feeding them can help them get through the winter. I had bees, a new batch. I took NO honey the first year. We had a nasty winter (not this one just past, but the previous year). Bees did not survive, partly because I did not feed them. Another way to feed them (not sure how much HFCS is in this, but I will check) that a beekeeper friend recommended was to get bulk fondant icing, smear it on wax paper, and just stick that in the top (?) of the hive.
When I was a kid, we kept bees in Florida. That was pretty much dead easy, compared to beekeeping in the Northeast.
I didn't see polite, or a rebuttal, as noted in the other reply (which is evidence that I listened none-the-less). The "science" behind "cutting CO2 emissions will sacrifice-the-economy/destroy-wealth/increase-poverty" is not very strong. We've got far more data and better tested models (and better-predicting models) for the climate than we do for the economy. (This is partly because the economy is not just complex and chaotic, but filled with actors attempting to game the economy for an advantage as soon as they can figure out how it currently works. We can also work with thousands of years of preserved climate indicators, that we lack for economics.)
In addition to being impolite, you are also unable to construct anything like a plausible justification that curtailing GHG emissions will do serious harm ("sacrifice", "at the cost of prosperity") to the economy. You start with an implausible hyperbolic analogy ("death ray", "Great Britain"). That's not proof. Next, you play innumerate hopscotch from "telling people what to do", to "interfere with the economy", to "destroy wealth", to "drives people into poverty". At every step, you fail to provide numbers, and fail to consider "compared to what", and whether there are any relevant examples that would support your argument. Lots of things "destroy wealth" -- to judge from recent unemployment reports, good weather creates wealth (employment), and bad weather destroys it. Underregulation of banks and mortgage lending appears to eventually destroy wealth, too, and it blew a bigger hole in our economy than anything else I can point to.
For an end-to-end test of your "theory", we might consider nations that are roughly as wealthy as ours, that have more regulations, and look at their poverty rates. If the poverty rate in Scandinavia or other Northern European countries (famous for regulations) is not higher than ours, then your argument falls to pieces. Let me check... (CIA world factbook, wikipedia, both caution that definition of poverty varies by country) -- it doesn't appear that they have a higher poverty rate. Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, all lower. Germany, 15.5% versus our 15% (but they're still digesting East Germany, aren't they?) Finland and Sweden have about the same unemployment rate as we do, Norway's is much lower, so it doesn't look like regulation is hurting them there. So I think there is no evidence for your claim; within limits, "telling people what to do" is not a poverty-creator. Note that you're also mischaracterizing the favored "solutions" for global warming, which are generally market-based (cap-and-trade and/or carbon tax), both because market-based solutions will tend to be more efficient (the market makes it so) and because that explicitly avoids "telling people what to do" -- if you want to burn carbon, and you can afford it, that can be your choice.
So it looks to me like you are making stuff up from libertarian religion, and that, only after constructing a strawman to attempt (AND FAIL) to knock down (that should be really embarrassing to you). Everything you say is accepted as gospel by libertarians, even if there is no particular data to support it (or even if there is data to contradict it, as there is in this case). Climate change poses a problem for libertarians, because if it is caused by humans, and if it is costly, then the only solution is government interference with the economy.
Ah, "absurd stupidity". I guess that's polite, if you're a fucking idiot.
You live in Minnesota, what more do you want?
I live near Boston, high enough that Greenland could melt and I'd still be dry and connected to the mainland.
We've got ample water supplies, too (MWRA, Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs).
Don't be an asshole about it, but you don't need to be quiet, either. You can be that weird guy who recycles, or that weird guy who rides a bicycle everywhere, or that weird mostly vegetarian guy. If you really want to mess with their minds, don't be consistent. Eat meat sometimes; drive a car sometimes, etc.
I'm the weird guy who rides a bicycle many places (though not everywhere). Mind you, when I hear someone complaining about the parking and traffic in Cambridge, or about the cost of gasoline, or about how out of shape they are, I *don't* usually say, "well, you could ride a bike", because that would be annoying. Mind, if I were really feeling like a jerk, I'd say things like "does it bother you, spending all that money on gasoline so you can get fat sitting in your car in a traffic jam?" That's not how you win hearts and minds.
There was a paper in the 90s. The 1890s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#First_calculations_of_human-induced_climate_change.2C_late_1800s .
This stuff is not, not, not new. The basic mechanism is well known, it's the details that are still somewhat up for grabs. If you read the paper, and read other papers, even recent ones, you'll see that it is pretty thorough and covers many issues that so-called skeptics propose as "but did you consider...?". Yes, they did consider them, 30 years ago.
The first paper that got my attention was published in some form in the late 1980s; it pointed out that the annual maximum on the Keeling curve (look it up) was coming earlier -- basically, that it was getting warm enough to start photosynthesis earlier than it had been. The Keeling data collection is designed in a way that makes it immune to most of the problems that would make you wonder about measurement quality.
That's not enough math knowledge, so no. Lacking other information, you're probably too stupid. (You asked.)
Nope, sorry, you are misinformed and full of shit.
You are leaping to the conclusion that anyone in the stop-climate-change mainstream (as opposed to the fringe) desires or intends to trash the economy. That's really rude, since it assumes either horrible motives or absurd stupidity on the part of people proposing these things.
One of the reasons for a proposal like carbon tax or carbon cap-and-trade is that those address exactly the problem (GHG emissions) without pre-supposing a solution. It's up to the market to allocate resources in the best way to avoid those carbon-associated costs.
Second, people have studied what it would take. Our big-ticket GHG items are (personal) transportation, the mammal-meat production stream (everything from fertilizer to grow corn, to burping cattle, to manure "lagoon" emissions), and electricity generation. It does not destroy the economy to eat less meat (the money we save, we spend on something else). It does not destroy the economy to drive smaller cars, carpool, ride bicycles, and/or telecommute and use mass transit. Electricity generation is the hardest problem, principally because non-FF sources will require larger distribution networks, storage, and some amount of "smart loads", and none of that is in place right now (you could cut your beef consumption in half tomorrow, and if people were motivated, they could start carpooling in short order). On the demand side we can do everything from painting roofs white, to better insulating refrigerators, to sealing air leaks in our houses. These things do not destroy the economy.
I don't see that coal scores particularly well on this metric. Coal ash contains trace levels of radioactivity, and summing that over the total volume of coal ash results in a lot of radioactivity released into the environment (more of it scrubbed now, than in the past). Coal-mining tears up plenty of land. Nukes might have trashed more, but I'd want to see a little accounting done before just accepting that nukes are worse.
Oil has its own problems; years of burning leaded gasoline contaminated many many acres of soil adjacent to high-traffic roads. We didn't abandon those areas, we just kept on living there and got ever-so-slightly lead-poisoned.
It may be that "probability theory" tends to lead to assumptions that traditionally make the math more tractable -- independent events, not linked events, and assumptions about probability distributions (e.g., normal distributions). Those assumptions might not hold.
There was an article some years back in SIAM Review proposing that traditional structural analysis too often made the assumption of linearity -- literally, that you CAN push a rope. Suspension cables do not obey Hookes' law in compression, concrete does not in tension, and ships heaving all the way out of the water experience forces that are not linear with displacement. Modeling non-linear systems used to be impractical, so people would just assume linearity to make the math tractable.
Suppose the reactor area is flooded, such that the plug is underwater (hence actively cooled by boiling water) but all other cooling systems are off-line. Reactor still safe? I think that violates one of the assumptions of the design, which is that the plug is only cooled if the cooling systems are (generally) working.
But in fact, it was not replaced, despite the obvious age of the reactors. An unimplemented policy is a failed policy.
We might also argue that we learn from our mistakes (in the same way that (quoting a friend) "each quirk in the electrical code corresponds to some deaths from an accident"), but when you're working with nuclear reactors education is expensive.
But -- you also have to consider that a small percentage of the population is just cranks, always and/or randomly predicting disaster, and given enough cranks, you'll find who got really lucky in his predictions. Does that make him an expert, or just a lucky crank?
Or you will find people who predict "disaster", without properly predicting the nature of the disaster. Me, for example -- when Bush was re-elected, it was my opinion that the economy was likely to go kerflooie -- but what I expected was a surge in inflation (because of trade and federal deficits, and an obvious aim to continue with tax cuts without a corresponding spending cut), not a housing-bubble-popping collapse. I knew that housing prices had zoomed up, but having lived in Silicon Valley through that irrational late-80s-early-90s bubble that didn't really pop (if it had, we'd have bought there), I discounted my thinking that prices were insanely high. Whoops.
One problem is that we seem to have people have attained permanent "expert" status. Results from Europe over the last few years strongly suggest that "austerity" does not revive economies, yet many "experts" persist in recommending it. Other "experts" predicted that Obama's stimulus spending would lead to runaway inflation, yet that has hardly been the case. So why are the mis-predictors still respected and quoted?
Nah, you're getting "poor impulse control"
"Thousands" is no longer likely at all. The cockpit door is reinforced, and the passengers, if they get wind of what you are up to, will no longer cooperate. Worst case now is blowing up an airplane. Bad, but not thousands.
Just put a little sign on the backpack that says "this is not a bomb", that way you'll know it's okay. Problem solved!
Mod parent up please. And add to that, cockpit doors are now reinforced.
Also had a brief demonstration this weekend of what a pilot can do to incapacitate passengers. We had a go-around at our landing, first time I've ever done one. Pilots were not trying hard to be annoying or unpleasant, but the down-down-down then up-up-up made my tummy not very happy. A few more of those, I'd have probably been sick, and I'm sure I was not the only one. Imagine if the pilots were trying -- "fasten your seatbelts, or else".
But you'd be perfectly okay with a somewhat-crumpled bag from some random airport shop, right? Or a "pillow"? What do you think could be concealed inside a hardback "book"?
This bullshit fear-of-the-weird caused us to check a bag this weekend, rather than put it in the carry-on, because we knew it would be considered "unusual" and we might lose it in security (a conch shell, and 4 quarts of frozen calamondin slurry -- says my teenage son "it's not liquid, so what's their problem?").
I got on a plane once with about 9 inches of railroad rail in my carry-on.
If you need to improvise a weapon, use a towel to make a rat-tail, and finish it (with as gradual a taper as possible) with a length of dental floss. Crack the whip, dental floss goes reliably supersonic, cuts lots of stuff. I cut half-way through a sunday paper with one of those, easier than with a packing knife. Aim for the head; even if you miss, they'll be deaf.
As I said to someone else, back when the Lite-Brite Mooninites panicked the Boston Police, the first rule of making a bomb, is to not make it look like a bomb. That's why IEDs get buried, stuffed into dead dogs, what have you. Around here, if you wanted to hide a bomb in plain sight, you'd stick it in a crumpled Dunkin Donuts bag.
Reducing other taxes, preferably mostly on the poor, because gas taxes are regressive and we'd like to stay not just overall revenue-neutral, but per-class revenue neutral.