• spare_muppets
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    772 years ago

    It doesn’t matter what color your skin is, what your name is, or what your religion is. Air Canada will still treat you like shit.

    • Echo Dot
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      112 years ago

      Until last year I’d never even heard of Air Canada, and now every time anybody mentions them all I hear is how terrible they are.

        • Echo Dot
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          22 years ago

          I remember when British Airways used to actually be posh. If you were flying with BA you’d made it.

          • @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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            12 years ago

            Well despite how far it’s fallen, it’s still up on Air Canada. Their business model is running flights as a cover for taking as much government funding as they can get.

            When I was still living in Canada and my now wife was here in the UK, we discovered that booking with Air Canada was $100-$300 cheaper in the UK than in Canada.

  • @Squeak@lemmy.world
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    452 years ago

    The title is a bit clickbaity. He wasn’t stopped from boarding, he had to go through additional security checks. He claims he was told he had to go through the checks because his name was Mohammad… although that’s just him saying that.

    I live in UK and I’d say around 50% of the flights I’ve taken to/from US I’ve been pulled aside for extra checks. Many times both on the way out and way back for a 100% check rate on that single trip.

    If they did actually say it was due to his name being Mohammad then yeah that’s really bad, but this sounds like they’re making something of nothing. And at no point was he stopped from boarding.

  • @Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    292 years ago

    It was completely unacceptable for a member of this house human being to be treated in this way.

    In absolutely no context does the name your parents gave you correlate to whether or not you’re a terrorist.

    • @blindsight@beehaw.org
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      22 years ago

      I think the problem is terrorist watch lists based only on first/last name combos. If you have a common name, particularly a male Middle Eastern name, then your name is likely shared by someone on a terrorism watch list.

      The problem is that means these people are harassed every time they try to travel. We need at least one other piece of identifying information, not just first/last, so it’s quick to exclude all the false positives.

              • kayjay
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                92 years ago

                Sources say it’s of Hindi origin, but when I actually checked the statistics, it says there’s only 130 people in India with the name, while there’s ~56 million in China. So it seems to be mostly a Chinese name. Although further googling seems to indicate that’s the Chinese name for “Mrs.”… so it might be that these sources are reading the title field as the first name, lol.

        • Echo Dot
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          72 years ago

          And Smith is the most common last name. So statistically speaking most people are called Maria Smith

          • @blindsight@beehaw.org
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            2 years ago

            Only in the US. Internationally, the most common last name is Wang:

            Wang is a patronymic (ancestral) name that means “king” in Mandarin, and it’s shared by more than 92 million people in China, making it the most popular last name in the world. The reason it’s so populous today may have a lot to do with the fact that many royal families changed their name to Wang when their kingdoms fell under the first Qin dynasty emperor. This was both to preserve their status and protect themselves from assassination.
            Source

            So Mohammed Wang is the most common name in the world.