Contrast these three situations: 1) you are sitting in a hotel bar in Mongolia and want to use your Visa card to buy a round of drinks for your friends, and; 2) your Mom is at the check-out counter at a Sears store when the clerk asks her if she wants to apply for a Sears credit card and save 10 percent on her order, and 3) a possible terrorist with a dubious travel record and suspected al-Qaeda connections is standing in line at a European airport waiting to board a flight to the U.S. that leaves in an hour. What happens in each of these cases?

In Mongolia the bartender takes your card and authorizes it in seconds across a 12,000-mile round-trip. At the Sears store the transaction is not only authorized in less than a minute, but a new account is created and both your Mom’s identity and her creditworthiness are established and calculated on the spot, along with her discount. Meanwhile the airline, airport, local security, European police, Interpol, Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Customs Service, FBI, CIA, and NSA can’t between them figure out in an hour whether this guy standing in line in Holland should be allowed on the plane or not.

How is it that we can run our credit card operations so well and our national security so poorly?

A bit of an unusual comparison, to be sure. But a fair question nonetheless.

The data supports the notion that younger people are more supportive of gay marriage than older people. I also think it’s interesting that, even in states that we normally consider quite hostile to gay rights (the ones at the bottom of the table), there is still a significant age difference: 18-29 year-olds in Alabama, for example, are more supportive of gay marriage than people 65 and older in Massachusetts. So, while we like to think about states as “liberal” or “conservative,” spreading out the data by age tells a much more complicated story.

Bob Cringely often points out how it generally takes a generation for the widespread adoption (80-85%) of any new technology or technological advances. How many of you had internet access (as opposed to AOL or CompuServe) or even an email account in the early 90s? (I did, but then I’m a “computer guy”… who likes to digress!) How many of you have parents and/or grandparents who still don’t?

Obviously, circumstances are quite a bit different when it comes to social change; for one thing, the time scales can be much, much greater. But, and I’m just spitballing here, I’ll bet that the graph showing support for interracial marriage by age and state would have looked very similar to this some 50-60 years ago.

Encouraging is the fact that only twelve states–sadly, most of them Southern states–show less than majority support for same-sex marriage among 18-29 year olds.

[via Daring Fireball]