Creating Social Engagement

As the number of mass shootings continues to climb I, like everyone else, will put in my two cents about causes and possible solutions.

I do not believe the problem in the US is one of guns. It is a problem of culture and will not end until the culture changes. Luckily, culture is the sum of what each of us thinks, does, and says. That means we can change it by changing ourselves. This personally daunting task becomes easier as we see our friends and neighbors modeling the behavior. Each of us contains a multitude of selves and we just need to let the best of ourselves come out, repress the worst in ourselves, and reward the better actions of others.

In this post I won't be posting much in the way of references, but I believe that my argument is well supported by the evidence. I am looking at trends, not universals.

First, some words on "safe" and "comfortable". It is ingrained that these words belong together. In a recent survey on traffic in my city people were asked to prioritize the importance of a number of items. One of them was "Streets should be safe and comfortable". In fact, safety and comfort do not go together. If people feel too comfortable driving, they increase their speed which, off the highway, makes the street less safe. In the same way, we often feel most comfortable when we do not engage strangers, but we are social creatures and expanding our social circles makes us better people.

Violence against strangers tends to be perpetrated by people who are socially isolated. Social isolation is defined as a lack of contact with other people and it is deadly in a social animal like humans. The opposite of social isolation is social engagement. Increased social engagement makes us more capable in dealing with people in a variety of situations. It gives us greater control of our environment and makes us more aware of what is going on around us.

Here are some ways we can improve our culture and ourselves. Some are simpler than others. All require some effort, at least at the beginning.

You know that weird person you have noticed? The one that makes you a little uncomfortable? Next time you pass him/her, say hello. You need not converse, just acknowledge their existence as a fellow human being and move along. After a while you might make some small talk or even have a real discussion, but that is not a requirement. It is not likely, but eventually that person could turn into your best friend.

Join or start a group. Almost two hundred years ago Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." Prove him right. Join a book club, a bowling league, a soccer team, a bicycle club ... It doesn't have to require much time. Book clubs generally meet about once a month and you don't even have to read every book.

When you converse, listen to the other person. In general, allow them to have the last word. Listening does not signify assent. When it comes right down to it, you probably disagree with everyone around you on one topic or another. That doesn't mean you have to shun them. However... if someone's views are truly vile, feel free to call them on it. Tell the racist "I'm sorry, I could not disagree more. I think your beliefs are without support and if you act on them I will work against you." Again, this is hard, but with practice you will get better at it. If someone seems like they might be dangerous, report them.

If someone asks you for help, provide it. There are, of course, requests and circumstances that make this unwise or infeasible, but make "yes" your default answer. You can take this a step further. If someone looks like they need help, offer it. A little harder is a change of attitude. Be more concerned that everyone who needs help gets it and less concerned that someone who is "undeserving" may be abusing the system.

Our built environment is often badly constructed for social interaction. Do not support this. In choosing a home we often look at the inside amenities. This is important, but don't forget the outside. Is there somewhere outside, facing the street, where you and a couple friends can sit down and watch the world go by. If not, is there a way to easily construct a sitting spot? If a home fails this simple test, don't buy or rent it. Inside, is there a room where you are likely to spend time that has windows on the street? If not, you will have no opportunity to get to know the daily life of your street. It is harder to integrate into a neighborhood if you never see your neighbors. On a nice evening, think about walking around the block. As you go around, say hello to folks. Ask them about their day. If you cannot do this comfortably or if no one is ever around to say hello, you have a bad neighborhood. Try to fix it or move.

Vote to make your community better even if it means increased taxes. If there is a ballot measure to build/improve schools, support it. More parks and improved public spaces, support it. Support it especially if it goes to other folks who have less than you. Send your support to the lowest income schools and neighborhoods. Make sure poor kids have good parks and athletic fields. Even better, make sure your community works to integrate people of all incomes and backgrounds into the same neighborhoods. If, as is common, your school board sets the boundaries of schools to keep rich and poor separate, confront the candidates and ask them to change. A unit of neighborhoods is the boundary for the local elementary school. If a school does not have a mix of incomes, bus the rich kids in. Better is to build more lower income housing throughout the town. This seems scary, but all the evidence shows it makes everyone better and safer.

Underlying all of this is an acknowledgement that we are all people. We differ in backgrounds and in how we think society should work. Communication and engagement teaches us about each other, how to get along, and how much we are alike. We exist in a biological ecosystem, but also in a social ecosystem. Make your ecosystems stronger by encouraging diversity and strong connections.

If We Aren't Careful, We May End Up Where We Are Heading.

It is easy to predict man made catastrophes. Sometimes they even happen. Here are some intractable problems/trends that are likely to make the next hundred years "difficult". If we do not find some way, pretty quickly (fifty to one hundred years), to change course I think we could be fairly described as a failed species. That is, things will look much more like "Blade Runner" or "The Mote in God's Eye" than "Ecotopia".
This post assumes an unstated desired future. If your view of a desirable world differs significantly from mine, you may not find any problems here.
The good news is that we can relatively easily make things much much better. The bad news is that, as a species, we seem incapable of making good long term choices. If change occurs it will likely occur on the back of poverty, war, famine, and plague. If change does not occur, we are condemning our descendants to an impoverished, less habitable planet.

Social Trends - Concentration of Wealth

It has always been true in settled societies that wealth is concentrated. As productivity increases in industrialized societies, it takes less and less labor to make the same amount of goods. Either we constantly increase the amount of goods we desire and require (endless growth) or more and more people become "redundant" as they say in England. That is, there is no need for their labor.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a serious countervailing social movement to redistribute wealth to make societies more equitable. Tides seemed to have turned and, particularly in the United States, the scales have tilted toward unfettered wealth and, along with it, increasing manipulation of both media and elections to serve the plutocracy.
I am not suggesting a trilateral commission type conspiracy. Instead, individuals and groups with plenty of money are doing their best to publicize their point of view and make it the basis of discourse. There has been about a century of systematic work to improve marketing. In the political arena the admonition that government should be more like business has been taken to heart in the propaganda department. Political messages use the tools of marketing (focus groups, test markets ...) to find the most immediately effective messages.
There have been some genuine innovations in the exercise of power though. For example, it is no longer necessary to buy politicians. It is much easier to find someone who already holds your point of view and work for their election. An extreme example is Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co..
Sometimes there are social policies that reinforce the concentration of wealth as an unintended consequence. For example, higher education is increasing in cost and is commonly funded with loans. Forbes reports that two thirds of all students graduating from four year colleges and universities carry loans with an average debt of $23,000. This is a doubling from 1996. Instead of leaving the University with knowledge and a clean slate to start new enterprises, this generation is pretty much forced by debt to become simple employees of existing operations.
We know the end of this story. In the U.S. there is relentless propaganda campaign that insists that we have a pure meritocracy and the wealthy are the ones who feed us all. As the gap between haves and have nots continues to widen and the number of have nots increases, eventually they will simply rebel. If that happens, expect decades of chaos and class warfare with guns.

Social Trends - Fewer, Larger Entities

As technology improves it becomes possible to create larger and larger organizations. Advances in information processing have accelerated this capability.
The current tendency is writ large in the video distribution industry. When VHS tapes became the technology winner, the low entry costs for starting a video store allowed thousands or even tens of thousands of independently owned video stores to blossom. Almost as quickly there was a wave of consolidation as smaller operations were either bought or driven out of business by a regional video chains. These, in turn, were consolidated into a few national chains (Blockbuster, Showtime) which dominated the market. There are still mom and pop video stores, but after the first boom they never had appreciable impact on the market as a whole.
In many industries there are very few real players. This includes media companies where nine companies control virtually all television and Clear Channel controls 1200 radio stations. Four cell phone providers own the lion's share of the mobile phone market (280 million subscribers). There are five major oil companies. Oil companies are among the largest companies that have ever existed. Over half of all farm seed is produced by fewer than ten companies.
As a side effect, increasing institution size also works to further concentrate wealth.
We know from network theory and from study of biological systems that diverse systems which have large numbers of highly interconnected parts are more resilient and less prone to catastrophic failure than systems with fewer nodes and interconnections. When diverse systems of many nodes have some of them fail, the remainder of the system tends to work around the problem. When their are fewer, strongly connected nodes, they tend to drag each other down in the face of disaster. Note how this sounds just like the start of the 2008 financial crisis and the current Greek debt crisis.
In agriculture, the number of farms has decreased, the acreage of each farm has increased, and the vast majority of farms are a monoculture. We have centralized meat and food processing. While the system may be immediately efficient, it is also incredibly fragile and shortsighted. We impoverish the ecosystem, including the soil ecosystem. We also make our food supply dependent on a smaller variety of foods where a single virulent disease can spell disaster. Centralized processing means that millions of people can be infected or poisoned from a single point.
Despite their inherent fragility when faced with the unexpected, in the normal course of events, centralization tends to win. The only way to redress the problems is by creating an environment that rewards smallness or penalizes bigness.

Social Trends - Race to the Bottom

Globalization has allowed the entire world to become a source of labor and products. One side of this is that wealth has flowed to some desperately poor places. The other side is that it has depressed pay in many developed countries and made jobs much less secure. While money does flow toward poor areas of the world, the net effect is to lower labor costs in general. It is interesting to note that globalization involves capital and goods, not people. A factory worker in Sheboygan is competing with workers in Bangalore, but it is unlikely the factory worker can emigrate to Bangalore and take advantage of its lower cost of living.
Globalization allows producers to reduce costs. Labor is part of this, but not the whole picture. It is also possible to reduce costs by operating in locales that allow costs to be ignored or externalized. For example, it will be cheaper to produce in a country that allows wholesale pollution or deforestation because you don't have to install that expensive emission control equipment or worry about forty years down the road when the trees are all gone.
Because every locality wants the jobs, the tendency is to offer the most attractive deal possible to producers who promise jobs. Producers use this to pit localities against each other. Internationally, this rewards countries with the worst labor practices and the most lax regulations. Within the U.S., communities generally bid by offering tax breaks. The hope is that the increased wage base will make up for the breaks, but often the end result is simply to starve local government.
When the cost of production goes down, a number of things can happen. The cost of goods to the end consumer can go down. High tech items show this most clearly but it also shows up in the price of clothes at Old Navy. Second, profits for producers can increase. This has happened as well. In the current "recession" profits for U.S. manufacturers have completely recovered. Finally wages for workers can increase. In the past few decades this has not happened. Wages in the U.S. have been stagnant for almost two generations. When producers (owners) increase profits but workers do not share in the wealth, this increases the concentration of wealth.
Remarkably, public discourse on workers benefits has joined this race to the bottom. Look at the discussion over public pensions. There is a problem with pension funding. Governments have sometimes promised more than was prudent (as did GM and other major corporations). The discussion never seems to be "how can we get private retirement better", it is always "public employees are getting benefits that private employees do not, let's reduce them".

Social Trends - Rise of the Ideologues

Never underestimate the power of a simple idea or worldview even if it is completely wrong or destructive.
People will take a few general principles and assume everything can be explained by them without much regard to complicating factors. If the ideas lead to bad results, it is a failure of application, not the principle.
Among the current Ideologies that are threatening social destruction I would include (non-exhaustive list): radical violent Islam, any religion based on literal inerrancy of the bible, libertarianism, and all forms of racism.

Social Trends - Algorithms and Hubris

There is a notion in computer science called the singularity. This is the creation of smarter than human intelligence. A basic question is, will we notice it?
We already have specialized machines that perform much better than humans. Computers have bested humans in games like chess. Robots create and assemble parts much faster and more accurately than humans. In the computer gaming world, our "enemies" are dumbed down to correspond to our terribly slow human reaction time and limited ability to handle large numbers of inputs. Our planes and cars are already run by computers. Humans enter basic parameters for flight, but the plane itself makes virtually all decisions.
To increase efficiency we constantly streamline and automate business processes. The end result is an expansion in the power of algorithmic systems. In a modern corporation there are fewer and fewer levers pulled by fewer and fewer people. Take shipping as an example. A company like Fed-Ex has completely automated the routing of packages. Once your package information is entered into the system, humans do nothing but follow a machine generated instruction to pick up a box in one place and drop it at another. Airline reservations are another example. Humans do not play any role in the process. The price is determined by complex algorithms that are probably beyond the understanding of any single person. Planes are automatically booked and overbooked. Even upgrades and seat re-assignments are pretty much controlled by the algorithm. The person at the gate has almost no choices and no authority.
The system we have to create these systems is not reassuring. When a business decides to automate a process, a team of people, often outside specialists, is assembled to analyze the problem and implement a solution. When successful, the results are put into production and handed off to a separate team that is in charge of operating, maintaining, and improving the system. In theory this is a repeatable process with each group playing its specialized role. The players usually do not understand each other's roles very well. At the business level, the indicators are productivity (how many flights are booked in how much time and at how much cost) and overall profit and loss. The systems are designed to report some set of indicators so this can be tracked. The people who look at the indicators do not usually understand the underlying algorithms. The people who design and implement the system are specialists in new product creation and generally leave the scene after the process is in place. The people who maintain and improve the system generally have documentation, but they may not be aware of why particular design choices were made and the trade-offs involved.
Another way to state this is that every day we create large algorithmic systems that no single person, or even group of people, understands. As long as he systems work reasonably well or can be discarded, there is no real problem. When the systems fail or are critical but so complex they cannot be discarded, we run into trouble.
On Wall Street, most trading does not involve humans. In 2009 almost three quarters of all stock trades were automated trades based on computer algorithms. Since then this number has almost certainly increased. When you listen to commentators discuss the stock market and why it moves one way or another, it is complete nonsense. It sounds good and it always supports the commentator's overall view of the world, but it is not based in any kind of fact. On May 6, 2010 the stock market briefly crashed. It took five months to issue a report that could attempt to explain what actually happened. The basic answer is that the machines did it.
The hubris part of this trend is that there are people who think we can model and control complex systems. As an example, one of the great failures of modern economics has been the attempt to quantify risk. Do a google search for "quantification of risk economics". You will get pages of google results that are complete nonsense written by people who actually believe they are close to the holy grail of putting a number on risk. Often they create models that work well in certain circumstances - but their predictions ALWAYS fail catastrophically in the long term.
What happens when you put a couple of people with Nobel Prizes in Economics in a room with the Vice Chairman and Head of Bond Trading at Solomon Brothers. You get a well funded scheme to make money based on the finest and most capable economic models of the day. You get "Long Term Capital Management" a firm which made profits until it completely failed in 2000. The failure of a single firm, even a big one, is not particularly important. Unfortunately the firm was so highly leveraged (highly leveraged means "playing with huge sums of other peoples money") it threatened to bring down large portions of the financial system. Fixing the problem required a massive bailout supervised by the Federal Reserve. It failed because of events that they simply could not predict. That is the point. There are always events that we simply cannot predict. We do pretty well with "normal distributions", hence the reliable existence of life insurance. Unfortunately, most real world economics are not "normal".
The run-up to the 2008 collapse was a tribute to the power of simple greed, but all good cons need a convincing story. In this case, investors were reassured that the risk involved in collections of mortgages was known and quantified, and besides, we can hedge (insure) to limit losses. There was outright lying at every level of the financial transactions, but a systemic problem was that the intertwined system intended to reduce risk by spreading it, simply increased risk for everyone. Of course there were some folks who knew about the lying and worked the system to their own advantage (notably, Goldman Sachs).

Social Trends - Missing the Big Picture

Evidence based action is important to understand what works and what doesn't. When we have the evidence it seems silly to ignore it. But, it is also silly to read more into our simple experiments than is actually there.
Experimentation is difficult and expensive. This is especially true with trying to understand humans. Too often we end up understanding and exploiting a tendency. The results may be immediately satisfying but ultimately destructive.
There are many situations where short term investigation gives us a "local optimum" where people are more satisfied at this instant, but the end result is ultimately destructive to our health and well being.
The prime example of this is industrial food production. To build a more popular food product you have to understand what people want so they will buy your product. An industry with a new product must be able to produce it consistently and on a large scale. If you create a focus group or simply ask people on the street to tell you which of several food products they prefer, the winner is likely to be the the cheapest product with the highest sugar/fat/salt. As organisms that evolved in circumstances of want, we crave these things. To produce the product consistently and in large quantities you have to industrialize the production of the raw ingredients. In the case of food this is living organisms. For crops, we standardize the breeds, the methods of production, and we process the results in chemical plants to homogenize, filter, and extract. For animals, we reduce them to eating machines on a cheap controlled diet and we engineer their genetics to change what was an animal into a muscle production machine.
We get consistent products that we biologically crave, we also get obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and an odd form of malnutrition. Don't worry about the malnutrition though, because we have processed supplements to fix that.
Since the introduction of the automobile we have done exactly the same sort of short term fixes. When faced with traffic problems, typically traffic congestion, the answer is always the same. Congestion will be alleviated if we add more lanes and reduce the number of entrances into the main streets (no houses on arterials). It also helps if people stay away from the congested areas. The end result is our typical suburban city form. That is, a built environment that is reasonable if you are a car, but not very suitable for supportive human culture.
On a business level the question is usually "How can we improve our profits this quarter or this year?" It is almost never "How can we stay in this business in a sustainable way?" or "How can we make the world a better place in ten or a hundred years?" If your time horizon for profit is one or even five years and an opportunity arises to make a profit based on destruction that will not become apparent for ten or twenty years, most businesses will take the profit and screw the future, which leads to the next section.

Environmental Trends - Destruction of the Natural World

It is clear that as a species we are quite willing to destroy everything around us for short term survival or short term gain. We are willing to completely destroy the natural environment. Take as examples mountaintop removal for coal, deforestation and overfishing.
On top of this, there are unintended results of our actions. The prime example is global warming. General habitat destruction as we exploit more and more of the world is a severe problem.

Environmental Trends - Unsustainable Human Population

We have already passed a tipping point in human population. We have more people than the planet can sustainably support. Like a profligate child with a large inheritance, we can live for some time by depleting our inheritance, but in the end we will be broke. In this case of humanity, our inheritance is the natural world and all its riches which we are rapidly despoiling.
It is not clear what the carrying capacity of our planet is, particularly since this is partially related to the technology at hand. It is clear that we have exceeded the current capacity. As the human population continues to increase we will see even more rapid environmental degradation as well as more frequent human disasters (crop collapse, famine, social unrest, war for resources...).
In industrial countries population has stabilized or even decreased. This gives some hope that we can control our own numbers. For the world as a whole I think it is likely that we will simply exhaust natural resources. This will cause a very painful decline in human population based on misery.
As a contrast, think what the world would be like with our current technology if we had a third of our current population. We could live in a world of human plenty with a massively improved environment. We have passed the point in human society where increasing human labor is the best way to improve the human condition.

Let's Have Less Security at Airports

After the recent, foiled attempt to bring down an airliner let me, once again, ask for fewer security measures at airports. This seems counter-intuitive, but the current measures are almost completely ineffective and new measures will simply increase the cost without making us safer. Here is how I think terrorists can define success. Spend a couple of thousand dollars to get a guy to burn himself on a plane and the US responds by spending billions of dollars on useless security measures and, as a bonus, slows commerce and communication. The real wounds of terrorism are self inflicted. Every time we clamp down on civil liberties or spend lavishly on additional defense, the terrorists have won.

The recent terrorist failure to bring down an airliner has, predictably, been hailed as a failure of airport security. On the TV, round after round of security experts have been crying for more money and technology to be deployed at airports to protect us. Secondary screenings have been instituted at many places and travel experts are urging travelers to arrive at the airport even earlier and to anticipate even longer delays. In international travel to the US you will be confined to your seat, with no permitted distractions and no ability to go to the bathroom for the last hour of the flight.

If you want to make a bundle over the next few years, invest in the companies that make corporate jets. As travel becomes more costly in terms of time (money) business travel will decrease overall, but more companies will simply buy/lease their own planes to bypass the increasing hassle of commercial flight.

As far as I know, there has never been a hijacking attempt that was thwarted by airport security. None, zero, zip, nada, zilch. There have been thousands of box cutters and pocket knives seized. I am probably pretty typical of the passenger who has a "dangerous weapon" confiscated. I always carry a pocket knife (swiss army tinker). Sometimes I forget to leave it behind and find it in my pocket while waiting in the security line. I have had to throw away at least three pocket knives (and smuggled them through security a half dozen times). Occasionally even a gun is found in a passenger's carry on. This is hardly surprising considering that Florida alone has over half a million concealed carry licenses in force. Let me repeat, security screening has proven to be ineffective. I have not been able to find a single case of hijackers being stopped by airport security. The security could deter terrorists, and it may be best to keep guns off planes, but I doubt the current screening system could pass any kind of cost/benefit analysis.

There are three things that actually increase security on airplanes.

The primary effective security measure is the tracking of extremist individuals and groups long before a member approaches an airport. The failure of tracking is what lead to the latest (pathetic) terrorist attempt.

The second effective air security measure is locks on the cockpit door combined with the assurance that pilots will never allow anyone on board to direct the flight. This means that planes cannot be used as guided missiles. The most a terrorist can dream of is a plane that goes down in an urban area causing a maximum of perhaps five or six hundred dead. Locking the cabin doors was one of the few proper reactions to the September Eleventh bombings.

Given that the worst immediate consequence of an airline hijacking is several hundred dead people, terrorists have better targets elsewhere. In terms of maximum terror, public places are easier and more attractive. The Madrid bombings killed 19 and wounded 1800. The Mumbai attacks killed 173 and wounded abut 300 others. Baghdad bombings in October killed 132 and wounded more than 500. The Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people and injured about 700.

The final security system is the passengers and crew. Starting with September eleventh itself, passengers came to realize that the best way to survive a terrorist attack is to eliminate any threat that appears. Because of this, it is basically impossible to hijack a plane with a knife or even a gun. Both of the terrorist hijackings since 2001 (Richard Reid and Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab) were thwarted when passengers took action


The only reason for a terrorist group to attack an airline is to trigger a disproportionate defense response. This is exactly what the current attack is likely to do. The terrorists have won.

A brief history of hijackings since 9/11 shows the current sources of hijacking threats to US citizens - largely drunk or crazy folks. Don't expect that threat to decrease as airline travel becomes even more unpleasant.

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This list comes from internet sources including Wikipedia (proves its worth again) plus worldwide news media.


December 2001 - Richard Reid attempts to ignite explosives in his shoe. Passengers prevent this. (terrorist/passengers)

August 2002 - Swedish man (originally Tunisian) arrested for trying to take a gun on board a plane going from Stockholm to London. Caught by racial profiling and security screening. Most of the early reporting turned out to be incorrect. All charges were dropped. Apparently he had simply forgotten to take his gun out of his possessions before heading to the airport. (police mistake)

March 2003 - Turkish Airlines aircraft Ergene on the way from Ankara to Istanbul was hijacked and forced to land in Athens, Greece. The Turkish citizen hijacker surrendered, appears to be mentally unstable. (crazy/surrender)

April 2003 - Cuban passenger plane hijacked. Landed back in Cuba, some passengers released in exchange for food and fuel. Plane flew and landed in Key West. "Second time in two weeks a plane has been hijacked to the US." The man apparently had his wife and child on the plane. (asylum/surrender)

Oct 2006 - A man hijacked a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 with 107 passengers and six crew on board. He was captured. Hijacker was seeking asylum in Italy, but was returned to Turkey. (asylum/surrender)

December 2006 - Russian plane hijacked. Russian wanted the plane diverted to Cairo. Emergency landing in Prague. Man arrested, no one hurt. Terrorism not a motive. Hijacker claimed to have a bomb. Apparently he was drunk, involved in a fight, then demanded that the plane be diverted. The man was traveling with eight family members, three of them children. (drunk/surrender)

January 2007 - Internal Sudanese flight hijacked. Flight landed in Chad where the hijacker surrendered. Hijacker entered the cockpit with a gun. Passengers were unaware that the plane had been hijacked. Motive was political, to call attention to the conflict in Darfur. (statement/surrender)

February 2007 - Flight from Mauritania to the Canary Islands hijacked by a gun wielding hijacker who wanted political asylum in France. The pilot took the plane to its planned destination and speaking in French (the hijacker did not speak french) warned the passengers and flight crew that he would brake hard on landing. This threw the hijacker off balance and he was subdued and beaten by passengers and crew. (asylum/passengers)

April 2007 - Turkish flight forced to land in Ankara. Security forces overwhelmed the hijacker. Unemployed man tried to approach the cockpit and said he "had something in his belt" and wanted to go to Iran. (??/police)

August 2007 - A Turkish passenger plane heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus was hijacked and forced to land in southern Turkey, where the 136 passengers escaped or were set free and the hijackers surrendered to authorities. (??/surrender)

August 2008 - Sudanese flight from Darfur - apparently successful attempt to divert the plane. The hijackers wanted to go to Egypt, but ended up in Libya. No injuries. (??/surrender)

April 2009 - Flight from Jamaica to Hallifax hijacked by a gunman. He asked to be taken to Cuba. He allowed passengers to buy their way off the plane. The "mentally challenged" hijacker was captured by a security officer who entered through the cockpit window and pretended to be the copilot. (crazy/police)

September 9, 2009 - Flight out of Cancun Mexico. A crazy guy says he has a bomb and tries to hijack a plane. His demand is to speak to the Mexican president. The plane continued to its destination and landed five minutes early. (crazy/police)

October 2009 - Man attempts to hijack a plane from Istanbul to Cairo using a plastic knife from the meal (US airlines have phased out food and utensils). Marshals overpowered the man and the flight continued. Man may have been drunk and claimed that he wanted to "liberate Jerusalem". (drunk/air marshall)

December 2009 - Northwest Airlines Flight 253 Amsterdam to NY Man on plane to the US attempts to combine materials (hidden in his underwear) for an explosive device. Passengers and flight crew intervene. There is a fire, the terrorist is badly burned and a couple of passengers injured. (terrorist/passengers)

Rules Schmules

There is a joke among business consultants that when you go into an organization, figure out if they are a top down organization where decisions flow from above, or a bottoms up organization where individual units have a great deal of autonomy. If a business is top down you recommend it become more bottoms up so that individual units can understand and respond to the marketplace more quickly. If it is bottoms up you recommend that it become more top down to avoid chaotic redundancy and lack of focus.

There is a lot of truth in this. There is no ideal organization. Every organizational structure has problems. Over time, organizations tend to oscillate between structures based on the current set of problems. The same is true in other aspects of life. Should dictionaries be descriptive or prescriptive? How much freedom should parents allow their children?

This note is about the balance between individual freedom and enforced order. Based on what I see in the United States, I think the pendulum has swung too far toward order and it is time to move toward more freedom of action. I think the current situation is largely based on unreasonable fears combined with a desire to make the world safer for ourselves and our children. The end result is not a safer society, but a society with less freedom and more rigidity of thought.

I think the current situation is based on widespread misunderstanding of humans and their capabilities. As a species we are remarkable in our ability to exist in social groups and to flexibly react to each other and the environment. Despite the fact that we are capable of unspeakable cruelty, on the whole we are extremely kind and cooperative with each other. We are also protective, particularly of the most vulnerable among us. I do not deny the atrocities and cruelty, the scams, the sociopathic behavior of both individuals and groups. I merely say that these are anomalies. Bad behavior makes the news and becomes a focus of our thoughts precisely because it is uncommon in a stable society like the US.

As individuals we also misunderstand risk and emotionally overreact to perceived danger. Lately Hans Monderman has been in the news. For example, Wired Magazine. Monderman was a Dutch traffic engineer who died in January 2008. Monderman improved safety by removing traffic controls. That's right, he removed speed limit and other traffic signs and signals to make the roads safer. At a busy intersection there is nothing to segregate pedestrian, bicycle, auto and truck traffic. He has a stunt to prove his point to reporters. I have seen several separate reports on this, but from the wired article:

We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

From the International Tribune.

"Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."

When asked, people who use these uncontrolled intersections say they are not safe, despite the statistics to the contrary. The fact that people do not feel as safe, as controlled, leads them to be more careful. Take off the explicit controls and people use their own judgment to behave in ways that increase safety rather than the perception of safety.

We have allowed our fears to distort our behavior and our society in ways that I find unacceptable. One example of this is the way we treat our children. As a seven or eight year old child I had large amounts of time that were unsupervised. My mother had a bell to call us in for dinner. As long as I was within earshot of the bell at that time, I could do what I wanted. When I got my first bicycle at about the age of seven, my world expanded and I was allowed to roam at will as long as I was home at designated times. Because our family was a large tribe I had more freedom than most, but I was not alone. At Halloween groups of children, without parental accompaniment, roamed miles from their homes to scour the best neighborhoods for candy. Neighborhood children organized their own games without supervision.

The United States has changed, but it has not become less safe. I do not believe that the rate of child kidnapping or abuse by strangers has increased. There is more traffic, but I do not believe that our neighborhoods present more dangers. What has changed is the level of fear. We have institutionalized the belief that the world is unsafe and children cannot be trusted to operate without constant supervision. As a result, elementary school children are not allowed to walk a quarter mile to school by themselves. Because parents believe that children can never be left alone, activities outside of school are supervised and, as a result, expensive. The constant supervision also diminishes the development of conflict resolution skills. I am not saying that adults should not look out for children. To the contrary, each of us has a responsibility to keep everyone around us safe, especially the young and defenseless. The world is unsafe. Children do not understand much of what is going on around them. But it is safe enough and we are here to help them.

The same attitudes and fears have helped turn children into incipient economic units. The current school debates focus on more time in school and more controlled school environments. This regimentation devalues the children and, in the long run, will hurt us economically. The genius of the American economy is our flexibility and inventiveness. As we become more regimented, as children's education become more standardized, I believe we lose that flexibility and inventiveness.

I recognize that I am neither typical nor a role model. In a sense that is my point. Few of us are typical. Only a few people think I am stupid or incompetent. I do well in a field that requires both constant education and inventiveness. I consider myself to be reasonably well educated. I also didn't do homework until I entered the university. Homework was assigned, I just never did it. My grades through high school were spotty, but performance on tests seemed to overrule the bad homework grades. As far as I know, no one ever considered holding me back. Based on college entrance tests, I was admitted to the university after my junior year in high school.

In junior high school instead doing my homework, I was reading a book a day. I read all the science fiction, "boy in the country", and biographies in the school library. In high school I was reading the daily newspaper, two to three weekly news magazines, and several monthly magazines including Scientific American and the Atlantic Monthly (it used to be a monthly). I also studied mathematics on my own. Had I spent more supervised time in school or had more structured after school activities, I would not have had time to get my real education. Looking back, I think I could have benefited from better schools. By better schools I mean those populated by more educated, and flexible teachers. I do not believe I would have benefited by more structure or more hours in school.

As a society we seem to have grown more and more rule bound. By rule bound I mean respecting and enforcing rules without looking at the sense of the situation. I have always followed Bob Dylan's dictum "To live outside the law you must be honest". A simple example from my masters swim group. We rent lanes at one of the pools in town. In addition to the pool life guards, we provide our own coach on the deck. The lifeguards and pool administration have recently gotten upset because some of our swimmers did not enter the pool feet first as the rules require. This is an experienced group of swimmers, many of them competitive. In my several years of swimming with the group, I have not seen a dangerous entry into the pool. The lifeguards either have no idea what is dangerous, have no idea why the rule exists, or are simply complaining about infractions for the sake of the rule itself.

As Monderman's practical experiments with traffic show us, posting and enforcing rules does not always make us safer. We are at our best when we take the time and effort to understand and respond to the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Rules are a means to an end, not the end itself. The valid reasons behind the rules should be obeyed and enforced. If a rule is about safety and you are in a position to enforce, enforce safety not the rule. This is not a slide down a slippery slope toward anarchy. It is a slide down the slope toward respect and humanity. As with all things, you must do this intelligently and with awareness of your own limitations. Don't let your like or dislike of a person cause you to abuse your power and selectively enforce the rules.

If you are in a position to make rules, make sure that you are addressing a real problem, not the perception of a problem. Do not make rules in the mistaken belief that you can enforce conflict out of existence (the homeowners association fallacy). In work environments, try not to rigidly enforce standard practice at the expense of better solutions.

In our day to day lives each of us should remember the old saying, "People who like sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made". Rigid order is both impossible and overrated. Do the right thing. Help and protect those around you. This has nothing to do with rules, it has to do with humanity.

Running the dog

In looking through old writing, I ran across this letter I wrote to the city after receiving the second in a series of tickets. The topic of the letter is of less than earth shaking importance, but there are serious issues on the function of government and freedom versus order.

After writing the letter I did some research. I discovered that the level of injury and death caused by dogs is almost exactly the same as that resulting from baseball, and the most common victim in both cases is children. It also turns out that dogs are most likely to cause trouble in or near their homes and least likely to cause trouble in public places. In addition to normal animal control my city (through its Natural Resources department) spends on the order of a quarter million dollars a year enforcing leash laws. The leash law applies to all animals including cats, but there is a specific exemption for birds under voice control.

In the end, the city had its way. The fines double on every ticket and I could no longer shoulder the burden. I made some attempts to change the law, but could find no leverage point. I no longer spend much time at the park. Other dog owners have also been driven away. When I do go by the park the dogs are gone, and so are many of the people. I was genuinely surprised at how important the simple pleasure of running the dog at "my" park was to me, and how betrayed I felt at having local government stop me. When my dog running disappeared, so did my pride and sense of responsibility toward the city.

The Letter

This note is about a bad law that has been badly applied. On September 29, 2004 I received a ticket for having my dog off leash in Spring Creek Park (animal at large). This is my second ticket. Each ticket was issued by park rangers I had never seen before and have not seen since. Each of them said they had no discretion in issuing the ticket. The second ticket was issued in what looked like a concerted effort by the city to crack down on unleashed dogs in the park. There were at least two rangers, one of them driving a pickup truck through the park to make sure lawbreakers did not escape.

Over the past nine and a half years I have come to Spring Creek Park at least twice a day virtually every day: rain, snow or shine. I spend between ten minutes and half an hour at each visit. That makes about 7000 visits to the park or about 1400 hours. I think it is accurate to say that over the past ten years I have spent more time in Spring Creek Park than anyone else. Until receiving this latest ticket, it was my intention to create and publish a photo essay book showing daily views of the park over an entire year.

The purpose of those 7000 visits to the park has been to run my dog. She is an impeccably trained border collie. If you have ever been around a border collie, you know that they are active dogs that need to run. I have trained Josie to run laps around the ball fields. She is getting old now and has slowed down. In her prime she would routinely run 20 or so laps around the ball-field as a warm up. After the laps she generally has the energy to do other training exercises. Her record is 50 laps, or about eight miles, at a full run. I have taken her to the dog parks, but there is nothing there that can provide the flat out running that she both enjoys and needs. She is completely disinterested in other dogs and humans.

I stopped bringing a leash to the park years ago. I can honestly say that, in all our visits, not once has my dog been a danger to any person in the park. By training and temperament, Josie rarely acknowledges that there are people in the park. As a border collie, she is all business and her business is running in the patterns that I tell her to.

Josie is a fixture at the park. She is known by the workers and the neighbors. She is admired for her ability and her training. I have received countless compliments on this dog. The number of complaints can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On the rare occasion someone looks nervous or says something, I take Josie out of the park. Periodically, either in Spring Creek Park or in other parks, an animal control person will stop by and tell me about the law. Without exception, those folks have complimented me on Josie's obedience and asked me to take her out of the park. To make life easier for all of us, on those occasions I leave the area. One animal control person said they were responding to complaints about dogs in that particular park. He suggested other places where he would not be patrolling that day.

The animal control workers and the visitors to the park have understood something the city ordinance and the park rangers do not. My dog running in the park is an innocuous and safe activity that improves my life, the dog's life, and is largely a joy to other park visitors.

While I am at the park, I pick up more dog waste than Josie leaves. I collect and throw litter away. Every couple of years I find a stray that has wandered away from home. I track down the owners and return the dog. One time I found and returned a wallet that had been stolen from a truck in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t even know it was missing. When teens rolled one of the trash barrels out onto the frozen lake, strewing garbage along the way, I recruited a couple of fire-fighters from the next door station. We retrieved the trash barrel and picked up the garbage.

Of course, the fact that my dog is well behaved does not make the law bad nor does it excuse me as a lawbreaker. What makes the law bad is that it worsens rather than betters the community. I have spent a lot of time researching human behavior, particularly in cities. We know a lot about what makes good, vibrant communities. One of the most important factors is that neighbors know each other, are aware of their surroundings, and take responsibility for the community. Parks can be marvelous places, but many towns have the problem that their parks are dangerous, particularly in off-hours. One of the major differences between a safe park and a dangerous one is community use. Crime and trouble avoid public view. When good people are near and watching, trouble moves away.

Over the years it has been interesting to see how people use the park. Almost no one simply walks through the park enjoying it. People come because they have a reason. They do what they planned to do, then they leave. Parents who bring their kids to the park stay very close to the playground. The more adventurous will walk over to the ball field to play for a couple of minutes. Ball players stay on or next to the playing field. Walkers and runners tend to either walk in a straight line through the park or they travel the perimeter. Sunbathers invariably pick a spot away from these main uses. Except for dog runners, most of the park is simply unused other than as an attractive backdrop to the other activities. People with dogs off lead almost always stay away from other park users and run their dogs in the open, unused spaces.

I seem to be pretty typical of the people who take their dogs to Spring Creek Park. These are neighborhood people who care about the neighborhood and take care of the park. I know this because I see them every day. I see them talk with each other and pick up after themselves and others. Some of the dogs are on leash, most of them are not. The difference seems to be in the temperament of the owner and the dog. If someone has a dog that will not obey or is flighty, they will only take the dog off lead once or twice. The adventure of screaming at your dog while chasing it through the public park or nearby neighborhood is a powerful deterrent to letting untrained animals off lead. People with leashed dogs behave more like walkers. They move through the park rather than spend time in it.

I am sure the Parks Department receives complaints about dogs running wild through the park. Many people feel threatened by dogs on the loose and many people simply do not like the idea that others violate the law. If the city banned blue flowers, I am sure it would receive many calls about the law violators with blue flowers in their yards.

In terms of actual danger or harm, I cannot speak with authority because I do not have the figures. I can speak from my experience and observations. Fossil Creek Park just opened. It is a beautiful park and heartening in terms of its design. For some time parks have been dumbed down to make sure that no visitor can be injured. Fossil Creek Park seems to have very thoughtfully constructed play areas, but ones where the users must take responsibility for their actions. The skate park at Fossil Creek is marvelous and seems to be heavily used. Even without seeing the figures, I can guarantee that there are more injuries in that skate park in a single week than dogs have caused in Spring Creek Park in the past ten years. Of course there is a difference between me falling off my own skateboard and being accosted by a strange dog. One I control, the other I do not. Whenever a skateboarder lets his board fly and it hits someone else or a dog owner has a dog that is out of control, they should be held accountable. But control is the problem, not the activity.

The Parks Department is in an awkward position. There is a law on the books. Until the law is changed, they must either ticket the offenders or turn a blind eye. I would prefer that the law is changed, but this is an area where emotion runs high. Not many politicians will stick a neck out for a fight that will gain them nothing but animosity, regardless of the facts. We, unfortunately, live in a time where many areas of civil behavior have been written into law. Most of them are well intended, but many of them are violated routinely. If a policeman decided to ticket every lawbreaker he saw, he could never get to a violent crime scene. He would spend all his time ticketing speeders, jaywalkers, and litterers along the way. When laws are numerous they are, and always will be, selectively enforced. I suggest that the Park Rangers would be better employed by spending more time getting to know the neighbors who do the real policing in the parks and less time driving them away by ticketing them for harmless activities.

Flying Has Gotten Really Bad

US air travel says a lot about people and organizations, some of it not so nice.

The conditions on most airlines approach that a cattle car filled with refugees fleeing for their lives. While on the plane we are expected to stay almost completely motionless and quiet for the duration of the flight. Our bodies are built for motion. Even while sleeping, people constantly change position. On an airplane this is impossible. The conditions are so unnatural that people actually die from the experience due to deep vein thrombosis. The airline rules enforce this motionlessness with ruthless efficiency. The aisles are narrow, the galley off limits, and a cart is pushed back and forth to both block and clear the aisles. The seat positions limit human interaction. In the unlikely event that you converse with another passenger you are likely to end up with a neck ache from the strain of trying to actually see them. Conversation is unlikely partly because the chance of two strangers having both the same need for interaction and the same interests is small. Contact is made even less likely by the stress induced by the experience. I say this as someone who likes the high vantage point that air travel provides.

There are periodic instances of people snapping on planes. Sometimes they get drunk and assault another passenger, sometimes they just become delusional in one way or another. It is true that people fall apart in lots of ways and in lots of places, but I believe that being crammed on a contemporary airline approaches the limits of human endurance.

Of course each airline differs somewhat. Southwest has a single class of seats and somewhat more reliable pricing. United is perhaps the worst of the worst. Most airlines seem to be rushing toward the United end of the continuum so that end is discussed here.

The time on the plane is only one part of the dehumanizing experience. The whole system is inhuman. I mean literally inhuman. That is, there is very little true human contact involved. The basic corporate motivation is money and the current competitive environment largely removes all other motivations from both selling and buying decisions. Passengers are higher paying, but more inconvenient, cargo.

Buying the Ticket

It is a general truism that interaction with paid employees decreases over time. The cost efficiencies of automated systems move us in this direction. I find that a well designed automated system is more effective and more pleasant than trying to explain my intentions to a stranger I will never see again. However, the automated systems lead us to evaluate on a small number of criteria and these criteria generally reflect airline corporate needs. Most airline systems tell you about flight times, duration, stops, and (immediate) price. Consumers tend to fly on the cheapest flight. The flight is something to endure and surely the big contract or time with Grandma is worth a few hours of pain. Might as well save the money to use on something more worthwhile. Given these conditions, the airlines have competed almost exclusively on price. Occasionally one will try larger seats or better food, but those efforts do not seem to pay off enough to be sustained. The reservation systems turn these into intangibles that do not enter the flyer's decision making process.

I heard a prediction that in the future all prices will be instantaneous. The vending machine that gives you a soda for a quarter in the dead of winter will charge a buck fifty on a hot summer day. Airlines have been the vanguard of this for many years. They have been willing to invest in a wide variety of profit maximizing devices. I do not want to paint the airline companies as uncaring blood sucking vampires seeking the last drop of blood from their unfortunate victims. Wait, I do want to paint them that way. However, as with any good vampire story, you have to have some sympathy for vampire who may not have wanted to become what he did. Many airline companies have lost unimaginably vast sums of money for year after year. A few dollars more per customer may mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy (which they regularly enter). Ok, enough sympathy, let's look at what they have done to us.

If you can manage it, it is an interesting experience to compare fares with the people around you. Because of the ways fares are managed and the multiple outlets for selling, everyone pays a different amount. The person sitting in the seat next to you, even if it is a middle seat, may have paid close to ten times more than you did (or vice versa). The same thing holds for all airline transactions. I was on a business trip with two colleagues when our plans changed and we had to rebook flights. The three of us had the class of tickets on the same planes. We sat across a table from each other and each called to make changes. I fared the worst (charged two hundred dollars), one person did not have to pay at all and the third, for unknown reasons, was given a credit of forty dollars.

Getting That Last Penny

The techniques to make sure the planes are more or less full, but that you pay more than you would like are interesting. Here is my naive and uniformed guess at some of the techniques. My information comes from lightly tracking the topic in my general reading and my direct observations.

The airlines would love to sell all their seats at the highest price, but a full seat (some money) is always better than an empty one. This is particularly true because many of the costs (fuel, labor for pilots/attendants...) are fixed. The best flight for the airline is a completely full flight. This is easiest to accomplish if you can sell more tickets than there are seats. A certain percentage of people will miss their flight. Those customers will likely lose the cost of the fare. If you have someone at the gate ready to sit down in the seat of a passenger who missed the flight, two people have paid for one seat. What could be better for the airline. If the airline overbooks too much, it risks losing the little goodwill that is left with the traveling public. Too little overbooking and there could be empty seats.

To get the most money from each person, the first goal of the airline is to split the herd. There are at least four types of passengers I have identified from the fare structure: fare indifferent passengers, forced passengers, flexible passengers, whim passengers.

The first class of passengers are the first class passengers. These are people less constrained by money. They are willing to pay high prices for the added comfort of first class. First class passengers pay dearly for their comfort. Of course, the worse the conditions behind the flimsy first class curtain, the better the first class seats look. Sometimes there are not enough people willing to pay the high fare. If the rest of the plane is full, a desperate passenger may be forced to pay a higher fare "economy sitting in first class". This is usually less than full first class, but much more than any other seat on the plane. If no one can be forced into a higher fare, the first class seat can be bought by frequent flyer miles. This is a zero cost way for airlines to reduce their frequent flyer miles debt load.

Forced passengers are those whose travel plans are completely determined by outside forces. Those who must travel on a fixed schedule (generally business travelers) are forced to pay more. Common tricks to identify these travelers include: unwillingness to stay over a weekend, short notice for travel, a desire to keep an option open for last minute changes, and a desire for short travel times. Once identified, the airlines charge these passengers a higher rate.

Because the people who can be forced to pay more are identified by certain characteristics, the people who get lower prices are those that don't share those traits. These are the flexible passengers. Because of the way forced passengers are identified, flexible travelers flights will generally be longer and less direct. They will be staying over a weekend and, with some notable exceptions. Their fares are also non-refundable with a charge for changes (even to a "cheaper" flight). Earlier booking is a double edged sword for the airlines. On one hand, they are assured a fare. On the other hand, that fare is less than they might get if they waited for a more desperate person. Some of this can be handled by overbooking, but not enough. So, the airlines play intricate games with the prices that take into account the history of the flight and the actual booking numbers every point in time.

If a plane is truly under-booked, the airline may sell seats through discount sites on the internet, but that is a last resort. To discourage use of these services, they must be somewhat unreliable. That is, you cannot be sure whether you will be able to make it to Mabel's wedding on Sunday. These tickets are sold to whim passengers. A typical whim passenger is someone who has a lover in another city and would like, if it is cheap and easy, to take a last minute flight for the weekend.

Getting to the Plane

Everyone who travels frequently has stories about how late they were and still got the plane. Many of us have missed a flight or two. I have known people who left a rental car illegally parked in the departure zone. I have left a car with the keys under the mat in close parking and called the rental company to pick it up. For business travelers someone else is usually picking up the tab, so we are a little more cavalier than personal travelers. My ideal for the airport is to walk up to the gate exactly when my row is being called for boarding.

Reliable time planning is impossible because of several choke points in the process. The lack of reliability is why you are asked to be at the airport a couple of hours before boarding. That extra time for uncertainty reduces the number of trips for which it is worthwhile to travel by air. For me, the crossover is about 450 miles. For any trip less than 450 miles, it is just as fast and usually cheaper to rent a car and drive. Driving has other drawbacks (I hate to drive, more susceptible to weather problems...) so sometimes I fly anyway, but that crossover point is a longer trip than you might guess. The crossover point is different for everyone, mine is increased by the fact that I have an hour drive to the airport.

The main choke point in the process are checking bags and security. At any given airport you may know the average wait, but the times are extremely variable and you may be caught in a long line on any given trip.

Security

Let's also get this out of the way at the beginning. Airport security is a huge joke. Unfortunately, the traveling public is the butt of the joke. Airport security costs vast amounts of money and disrupts the travel of every single passenger to protect against attacks that are both unlikely and stupid.

Here is an uncomfortable fact. Planes crash. Not very many of them and not very often, but they crash. In this inherently risky business of flying, your biggest worry is not terrorists. Less than 10% of all air fatalities have resulted from sabotage (http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_crash).

Governments conceal many of their security operations so we will never hear about them. On the other hand "Terrorist Caught with Bomb at Airport" makes an irresistible headline. What better way to build support for the current airport security efforts. I have been unable to find a single instance where airport security has detected and stopped a terrorist attack from occurring. I have found numerous cases where governments have stopped attacks in the planning stages, but none where airport security has done so.

Here is a simple example of misplaced security. I always carry a pocket knife (swiss army tinker). I use it every day. Every few months I either have to mail it back to myself from the airport (if I have time) or throw it away (if I do not have time). No airliner can be hijacked with a box cutter, or a knife, or any other sharp object.. It has not been possible to hijack a plane this way for years. There are two reasons for this. Before the September 11th attacks, the best way for a passenger to survive a hijacking was to cooperate with the hijackers. After September 11th, the best way for a passenger to survive was to actively eliminate the threat. We have seen this numerous times in the past few years. When a passenger on a flight is perceived as a threat, the other passengers attack him and eliminate the threat. You and your fellow passengers are the first line of defense. In the unlikely event that someone with a knife starts killing passengers, the plane will not go down. The doors to the cockpit are reinforced and no matter what happens in the passenger cabin, the pilots will not open the door.

Reinforcing cockpit doors and educating pilots never to open them are probably the most effective defenses against a September 11 style attack. If hijackers cannot get control of the plane, they cannot use it as a missile. If planes cannot be used as missiles, their value as a terrorist target is greatly reduced. The most someone bent on destruction can hope for is a crashed plane with a few hundred dead. There are other, more attractive targets.

We are mostly kept safe by the fact that there is a vanishingly small number of people who wish to crash a plane and governments are trying to find monitor those people. Of course the best way for governments to monitor these folks is for ordinary citizens to be aware of their neighbors and be willing to report people who seem to be threatening. This requires the trust and goodwill of the people toward their government. Goodwill is hard to feel at the end of airport screening.

Security at airports will never be relaxed no matter how useless and illogical it is. No one wants to be blamed for something going wrong. Governments also have a vested interest in fostering a certain amount of fear. Fear of outsiders unites us behind the government and makes us willing to follow instructions, even when they go against our self interest.

Checking In and Luggage

Checking in used to serve the function of telling the airline that you were at the airport and ready to catch the plane. Now that you can do it online, check in serves to get you through airport security. A primary goal of airline management is to reduce labor costs. The ideal for management is for no human interaction with airline personnel at all. For passengers without luggage, they have almost accomplished this. You buy your ticket from an online system. Check in is either on line or, if you don't have baggage, an electronic kiosk. To board the plane, you hand your boarding pass to the only human you will interact with before boarding the plane.

Luggage is inconvenient for airlines in a couple of ways. First, human labor is needed to get it on to and off of the correct plane. Second, it takes up room in what could be a cargo hold. A natural discouragement is knowing that airlines are neither careful nor reliable with luggage. Airlines have recently found some excellent (from their point of view) workarounds to the luggage problem. This first is to charge for checked bags. This makes your luggage ordinary paid cargo. It also increases the ticket price in a way that does not show up when you make your reservation. Businesses love the hidden fee. It allows them to compete on the basis of a deceptively low price. See http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/how-red-tape-be.html. The danger for the airlines is that people will try to carry on even more than they already do. For this, security takes the hit. At the same time the airlines announced luggage charges, the security folks said they had to limit the amount any single person can take through the line.

On the Plane

Most people on a plane are not in First Class. The airlines mantra is "pack em in". There was a time when you could put down your tray table, open a laptop and do some work. Those days are long past. The seats are so close that if the person in front of you reclines, you must have your laptop half closed. I have spent time typing reports without viewing the screen, my hands inside the half closed clamshell of the computer. There are a few seats with, very slightly, more legroom. The airlines are mandated to put these in so that you can reach the emergency exit in case of a crash. Many airlines charge more for these seats. They do not, however, charge less for the seats in front of the exits that cannot recline.

The closeness of the seats is one of the reasons movement is so difficult in planes. If someone by the window wants to get up, the passengers between him and the aisle must exit the cramped space to let him by. The aisle is just wide enough for a food cart. "Watch your elbows" is probably the flight attendants most common phrase. Once the passengers between the window seat and the aisle are up, they must march single file up the aisle so the window sitter can escape. There is not enough room for people to pass each other in the aisle so if the people in the aisle and center seats head the wrong way, it is a chinese puzzle to get everyone in place.

Inter-city busses have the reputation of being uncomfortable and dirty. Inhabited only be the undesirables who cannot afford another means of travel. I would say that airlines have become the inter-city busses of the sky, but I have never been in a bus that is as uncomfortable as a "modern" airline. Just as with busses, you can expect nothing from the company but a seat. For a long trip on either, everyone knows they must bring their own food and drink. The vestige of past food and drink service, the cart going up and down the aisle, serves almost no function but to keep the attendants busy with a moving battering ram to keep people out of the aisles.

I joke that if a completely safe anesthetic is created, the airlines will dose all the passengers and stack us like cord wood.

On the Other Side

I have no real complaints about traveling once I am out of the airport. Often when I get off the plane, there is no real public transportation. Car rental companies use new cars which are, on the whole, quite reliable. All the car rental companies I use have worked pretty hard to make the experience easy even as they have reduced the amount of human interaction needed. Sure, they try to gouge with insurance, gas, and upgrade charges. If you rent a few times, you get used to the three or four "no"s it takes to avoid these standard traps. In the cities where there is public transportation, it is usually pretty good. I expect some inconvenience when traveling to a city that is not my own. Pretty universally, people are helpful, and transportation systems work well.