[AnthonyMouse]

> Can you imagine how reticent people would be about flying if planes start blowing up? Much more economic harm comes from a disruption of air travel than if mass transit stopped in one city.

There are more than four times more riders of the subway in NYC alone than there are plane tickets sold nationwide.

Meanwhile if you're actually worried about deterring people from flying then what does it do to force them to risk missing their flight if they don't waste two hours getting there early, or subject them to warrantless suspicion, scary radiation, uninvited groping, nude body scanners and senseless humiliation?

And all for nothing because it can't be the thing preventing people from blowing up planes when tests consistently show that they're still letting through three quarters of contraband.

[raw_anon_1111]

You realize every single country has similar procedures? The only difference in my experience flying out of LHR (London) this year and flying out of ATL is that you don’t have to remove your shoes and they allow liquids to pass through security after a secondary screening. SJO (Costa Rica) was about the same earlier this year except they also don’t aloud liquids.

You also have to go through screening and metal detectors to get on the train between London and France (the “Chunnel”)

If NY gets disrupted - no one cares outside of New York. Do you remember how people were stuck after 911 or more recently when a bad software update took out airlines nationwide?

There is a reason that the government set up a fund to protect the entire airline industry from collapse from liability after 911.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You realize every single country has similar procedures?

The US has a way of setting bad precedents or pressuring other countries to adopt its inanity, yes. Another reason not to do it here.

> If NY gets disrupted - no one cares outside of New York.

The very large number of people in New York probably care though. Also, why would someone blowing up a train in New York be less scary to people in DC than someone blowing up a plane in New York would be to people in DC?

> Do you remember how people were stuck after 911 or more recently when a bad software update took out airlines nationwide?

Less than a quarter as many people as get stuck when the NYC subways are offline, presumably.

[raw_anon_1111]

If you haven’t noticed, “the people in DC” right now don’t care about the US outside of red states. And the reason a plane is different because people think it could happen to them if they got on a plane. If you don’t live in NYC, it’s easy to avoid the NYC train system. If I want to get from ATL to Seattle - what am I going to do drivers two or three days?

>Less than a quarter as many people as get stuck when the NYC subways are offline, presumably.

There plenty of ways to get from Manhattan to Queens if the train system went down then to get from California to Florida.

Is it really that hard to see the difference between a localized transportation system in NYC and a worldwide network of planes? Especially since airline security doesn’t just affect domestic flights it also affects flights leaving the US.

And you think the US pressured England of all places to have higher security? Did you forget about all the bombing they use to have? Did they also irsssye countries to have higher security security measures for domestic flights and their internal train system?

Or do you think that Israel would have less security if it weren’t for US pressure or Central America?

Why would the US care for instance if there were screenings to get on the baby Sansa propellor plane that flies from San Jose Costa Rica to Manual Antonino?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport

The plane they use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_208_Caravan#Variants

Yes the terminal is a hut and I’ve flown into there before.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If you haven’t noticed, “the people in DC” right now don’t care about the US outside of red states.

I feel like you're failing to see the symmetry at all. We have direct historical evidence on point that they cared about some New York City skyscrapers, and those were definitely Republicans too. Do you really think they wouldn't care about the same thing today regardless of whether it was a plane or a train?

> And the reason a plane is different because people think it could happen to them if they got on a plane.

But if it happens to a train people don't think it could happen to them if they got on a train? Either that's not true or those people would have such a disconnected relationship to logic that there is no use pandering to them anyway because they wouldn't see the connection between your policies and the results.

> There plenty of ways to get from Manhattan to Queens if the train system went down then to get from California to Florida.

Spoken like someone who hasn't seen the days when it goes down. What happens when you take the 4 million people who ride the subway every day and tell them it isn't there? Impassable gridlock.

> Is it really that hard to see the difference between a localized transportation system in NYC and a worldwide network of planes?

All of the transportation systems are interconnected. What does the connectedness change? If something happens on a train in New York, does it materially affect San Francisco but not Honolulu because trains connect New York and California but not Hawaii?

Planes are even less affected by this than other things because you can damage train tracks or road bridges that act as a bottleneck but the only infrastructure air travel requires is airports and planes, and airports are widely distributed and planes are easy to move around.

> Especially since airline security doesn’t just affect domestic flights it also affects flights leaving the US.

Which is another reason it's a farce, because it also affects flights entering the US and then it doesn't matter what the TSA does when you can go through airport security in the country of your choosing with the weakest or most bribe-accepting security that lets you get behind the checkpoint on a plane to the US.

> And you think the US pressured England of all places to have higher security?

Your original claim was that all other countries do this. Before 9/11, they didn't, and now you're having to resort to only the countries with the most stringent checks. Obviously Israel where bombings are practically a daily occurrence would need more than countries where that is much less common, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

> Why would the US care for instance if there were screenings to get on the baby Sansa propellor plane that flies from San Jose Costa Rica to Manual Antonino?

Are you saying that the screenings to get on that plane are the same as the ones imposed by the TSA, or are you now conceding that this is wrong:

> You realize every single country has similar procedures?

[raw_anon_1111]

No I’m saying it’s completely illogical that you believe the US pressured countries to have the same security screenings on domestic flights within the country including to get on a baby twin engine plane for a 30 minute flight from SJO to XQP or that countries like Great Britain or Israel that had a history of bombings wouldn’t have increased security measures.

If you are asking whether it is the same, everywhere. In my recent experience of flying out of international airports…

- LHR - you don’t remove your shoes and they have newer scanners that supposedly detect explosives in liquids.

- SJO - you don’t remove your shoes

- XQP - they don’t have sophisticated scanners. Security uses handheld scanners. But what do you expect when the terminal is literally a hut? (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Qu...)

> But if it happens to a train people don't think it could happen to them if they got on a train?

Well first most people outside of NYC aren’t as heavily dependent on public transportation. They already see it as dangerous and for poor people (yes I think that’s ignorant). In other words people with means already avoid public transportation and they would even be more likely to do so. This is very much a car centric culture

Do you know how many people outside of NYC believe the narrative that the minute you step on a train in NYC that you are going to be shot or raped?

No I don’t believe that. I’ve used NYC mass transit once when I went to the US Open (the reason I mentioned Queens where the Arthur Ashe stadium is).

I lived in Atlanta for 25 years. I took MARTA once to get from the north suburbs of Atlanta to the airport. The rest of the time we would drive or take Uber. I took it again recently to get from the airport to downtown when visiting.

MARTA also has such a reputation for only being for poor people to the point where its derogatorily called Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta (before the pearl clutching starts about me using a racist acronym I’m Black). If people started bombing trains. You would see even less ridership from people who had alternatives.

> All of the transportation systems are interconnected. What does the connectedness change? If something happens on a train in New York, does it materially affect San Francisco

You mean all 5 people who ride trains inter-city across the country?

> Which is another reason it's a farce, because it also affects flights entering the US and then it doesn't matter what the TSA does when you can go through airport security in the country of your choosing with the weakest or most bribe-accepting security that lets you get behind the checkpoint on a plane to the US.

Most bribes are for drugs and other contraband. Have you ever in the past 20 years heard of a case where someone bribed an official to bring a weapon on board a plane that was used to take over or bomb a plane?

But you still haven’t answered the main overriding question - why does every major airport in every country have the same procedures? Is everyone in the world wrong? And if it is because of supposed pressure from the US, why is it true for domestic flights within their own borders and for their train systems (at least my n=1 experience on a train outside of the US)?

[AnthonyMouse]

> No I’m saying it’s completely illogical that you believe the US pressured countries to have the same security screenings on domestic flights within the country including to get on a baby twin engine plane for a 30 minute flight from SJO to XQP or that countries like Great Britain or Israel that had a history of bombings wouldn’t have increased security measures.

Nobody said they successfully pressured everyone about everything. But they do it a some and it doesn't do nothing, unfortunately. There are many countries still now requiring ineffective nonsense they didn't require before 9/11.

> They already see it as dangerous and for poor people

It seems like your argument is that we should needlessly harass middle class airline passengers but not poor people riding mass transit because nobody cares about poor people, but that seems like a bad idea for not just one but both reasons.

> Most bribes are for drugs and other contraband. Have you ever in the past 20 years heard of a case where someone bribed an official to bring a weapon on board a plane that was used to take over or bomb a plane?

Of course not, because the TSA is completely pointless so you don't have to bribe anyone. When someone wants to do that (e.g. shoe bomber) they just go right through without having to pay a bribe, and then they get stopped by passengers or crew.

> why does every major airport in every country have the same procedures?

To begin with, they don't. Moreover, even the original cargo cults were about planes.

> If people started bombing trains. You would see even less ridership from people who had alternatives.

But that was my point. If we cared about any of this and it was actually effective (which it isn't) then it doesn't make sense to do it for planes but not hotels and trains and everything else.

And we can clearly see that not doing it for anything other than planes hasn't resulted in an epidemic of bombings in the US for everything that isn't an aircraft, so why are we still wasting resources and troubling people by doing it for planes?