Terrorism And Risk Assessment In Comic Form

from the it's-funny-because... dept

Tue, Dec 7th 2010 7:02am — Mike Masnick

Here's a quick one, via Julian Sanchez, who sums the following Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic up perfectly: "A short lesson on terrorism, risk assessment, & the availability heuristic"

There are trade-offs to everything we do, and we're still way too focused on this idea of perfect security, while at the same time ignoring the much higher risks in other areas of our lives. This doesn't mean that you ignore risks such as terrorism, but you don't overreact to them. You look for effective solutions, not theatrical solutions.

Filed Under: risk assessment, statistics, terrorism

13 Comments

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Steve R. (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:11am

Point Defense is a Joke
As you point out, perfect security is unattainable. What is also unattainable goal is our ability to protect our public facilities (point defense). We simply cannot afford enough "guards" to protect every airport, bus station, train station, water treatment facility etc. The effective solution is interception before the act.
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:Lobo Santo (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:20am

Re: Point Defense is a Joke
The only effective solution is responsible citizens.

Preferably armed responsible citizens.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:30am

Easy to say, not easy to do. Look at health care. Want to lower the costs and improve the result? Ban smoking and fat people. Those two things will greatly reduce the cost and improve our health. Think it will happen?
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ECA (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:42am

Re: Re: Point Defense is a Joke
Good point..
To protect and defend this nation, from itself and terrorism..
would require 1/2 the people watching the other half.
Who watches the watchers?

A couple points here.
To much security is NOT security..its a jail.
Its fun being an idiot, once in awhile..Why be scrutinized for it?
WE have been dissuaded, from policing ourselves. FROM assisting those that are There to protect us. Its worse int he cities. It started in the 60's, and all the News about anti war, hippies and so forth..the problem is that the police ARNT HELPING clean this up.

Another thing to point out is Terrorism. HAS any of the things we have heard on the news from other countries HAPPENED in the USA?
Iv discussed with a few others about what it would take to CREATE certain things to happen...and we have seen nothing. You dont need a dirty bomb. You dont need a plane. You DONT need a virus/germ/poison. Just a NICE car bomb and Gas explosion. Give me a truck and some propane.

Protecting INSIDE the USA, is helpful..but MONITORING certain things would be 1/2 easy. The first point is INPUT. those incoming TO the USA.. Hardest part is mexico. LET them in..but SCAN and register them as WELL as get their records. building a WALL, isnt the easy way, and wont work. And Every other nation Also has this problem. How to control WALK-INS..
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ECA (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:45am

Re:
Then,
you pay the BASE wage enough to go to a doctor and FEED themselves.
ALSO, find a way that 90% of the sedentary jobs could be done WALKING.. You stand in a register for 8 hours per day, SEE what happens. Or SIT and work computers..
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interval (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:45am

Re: Re: Re: Point Defense is a Joke
Damn hippies,
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interval (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:46am

Re: Re:
Damn computers.
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PaulT (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 7:56am

Re: Re:
"you pay the BASE wage enough to go to a doctor and FEED themselves."

Do you have a lot of doctors in your country not able to feed themselves? In most other countries, they do quite well...
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Michael Wigle (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 8:08am

Misunderstood
I think you misunderstood the meaning due to poor sentence structure. It looks to me like the commenter meant to say that it is important to ensure the population has a minimum base pay that would permit both enough food to eat and to be able to afford basic health care.

It doesn't look to me like they were implying that doctor's were not getting paid enough.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Dec 2010 @ 8:19am

OMG, we have doctors that are starving in America? Wow, we really need to do something about that, it is just a shame that our society would allow our caregivers to go without food.

Where is Jerry Lewis when you need him?
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Steve R. (profile), 7 Dec 2010 @ 8:57am

Re: Re: Re: Point Defense is a Joke
"To much security is NOT security..its a jail."
In the name of security, we seem to resurrecting McCarthyism. What is also particularity distressing about the massive assault on civil liberties is that many of those in charge of our political system today were the "flower children" of the 1970's. However, you won't be able to lay blame on the flower children for much longer since they are retiring. The "fatal" blow to American democracy will probably come from the Obama generation.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Dec 2010 @ 9:20am

Re:
What about the elderly?
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PaulT (profile), 8 Dec 2010 @ 7:38am

Re: Misunderstood
Ah, yes I did misread that. Apologies.
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