The Daily Beast presents a nice guide to airline safety called How Safe Is Your Airline?

“Who among us gets to choose when we’ll die?” [professional-pilot-turned-writer William Langewiesche, one of the most articulate people I know on the subject of flying and air safety] asked. So why be any more afraid of flying than we are of crossing a street? Good point. But with whom you fly matters. The Daily Beast compared the global statistics for the 25 airlines with the best safety records and those with the worst, and the differences are striking. The chances of you being on a flight with at least one fatality are 10 times greater in the loser bucket. And the chance of you yourself dying? Twelve times greater.

The difference within the U.S., which has uniformly far safer standards, is far less.

[…]

Sorting through the data leads to all sorts of interesting factoids: Pilot errors have been getting fewer. The accident rate has been consistently lower than in the 1990s. Flying in a private jet is more than four times more dangerous than flying on a big carrier.

Then there’s location. “Where you are is more important than the model you’re in,” says Dr. Todd Curtis, the author of Understanding Aviation Safety Data and creator of AirSafe.com.

That makes sense. If you are on the ground…definitely safer than in the air. Spoiler alert: AirTran gets the nod for safety record, although it has only existed since 1997.

The SF Examiner reports that a judge drops 3 of 4 charges against accused city hacker

Judge Kevin McCarthy today found insufficient evidence for three of the four counts.

Prosecutor Conrad Del Rosario said he will appeal the ruling and try to have the three counts reinstated.

According to Childs’ attorney Richard Shikman, the three counts for which McCarthy found insufficient evidence relate to accusations he had improperly connected three modems to the network, “essentially an anti-hacking statute,” he said.

A fourth count that was allowed to stand was for Childs’ alleged refusal to hand over the passwords to the system to network administrators.

Insufficient evidence of “computer network tampering” has to be a major setback for the prosecution. Charging each modem as a separate count is also an interesting approach. This reads as though all three are dismissed on the same grounds.

I remember years ago when long-time locals around the Santa Cruz mountains discussed that drug cartels were moving in and setting up huge operations in the parks as the state enforced stronger border controls and reduced spending on park rangers and enforcement.

It made sense. With the cost and risk of importing drugs increased by a closing border the cartels arranged for low-risk domestic operations. Apparently one of the side-effects of this trend has been a rash of forest fires. Law enforcement blames these fires on accidents by those tending the drug farms:

“No pun intended, it’s a growing problem,” U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Russ Arthur said.

Arthur said an unspecified “cooking device” left at an encampment by suspected drug traffickers sparked the blaze on Aug. 8 that has scorched more than 137 square miles of brush and timber and briefly threatened two dozen ranches and homes.

That’s the worst pun on an incident since the a DEA Special Agent said world-champion downhill mountain bike racer Missy Giove had gone “downhill fast” into drug trafficking.

Anyway, it also seems plausible to me that fires are intentional and meant as a cheap way to smoke out defenders or destroy operations. Anti-drug agents? Warring drug cartels? They both have motive that fits. The article says in this case the drug plants didn’t burn and were instead pulled out by hand, so apparently the massive fires somehow avoided the crops.

Arthur said an unspecified “cooking device” left at an encampment by suspected drug traffickers sparked the blaze on Aug. 8 that has scorched more than 137 square miles of brush and timber and briefly threatened two dozen ranches and homes.

About 30,000 marijuana plants and an AK-47 assault rifle were found near the origin of the blaze in a remote canyon in Los Padres National Forest, authorities said at a news conference. Arthur said the plants’ quality is similar to marijuana linked to Mexican drug cartels, though he acknowledged the investigation into the link was ongoing.

Why would that rifle be left behind? The article even mentions that someone returned to the origin spot of the fire several days later. 30K plants is small, in terms of California farms, but not so small that it would avoid a giant fire. Strange story.

In Santa Barbara County alone, sheriff’s investigators have recovered more than 225,000 pot plants in the past five months, Brown said. The plants have an estimated street value of about $675 million.

In the Sierra Nevada, an ongoing search has resulted in dozens of prosecutions and the destruction of more than 400,000 marijuana plants.

$675K divided by 225K is 3, so that gives each plant a street value of just $3. The Sierra Nevada operations have thus destroyed $1.2 million in drug value, but there is no estimate given for the percentage of total operations or impact.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum in California, Oakland has passed a 1.8 percent tax on medical marijuana sales.

“It is important because the city of Oakland is facing a massive deficit like many jurisdictions in California,” said Steve DeAngelo, a leader of one of the city’s cannabis clubs. “And we decided to step up to the plate and make a contribution to the city in a time of need.”

DeAngelo, one of the people who led the effort to get the tax approved, said his business will now have to pay more than $350,000 from the new tax next year.

Would this tax revenue cover the cost of destroying illegal farms? Perhaps even more interesting would be to try and figure out if the rate of forest fires would decrease if parks were policed more carefully for drug farms and farming was regulated instead of banned. It all makes for interesting risk versus rewards calculations.

The money spent closing the border to drug traffic did not reduce the flow of drugs but instead created many more complicated and dangerous headaches for law enforcement. Let this be a reminder that a firewall is only the first step in security controls. There are many more elements of prevention as well as detection that should be in budget.