If you’re from New Mexico, you should just know better than to travel without your passport.
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The sad thing is that’s actually arguably true.
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The last time I had an unpleasant experience with airport security was in 1997.
Whoa, whoa, slow down maestro! There’s a new Mexico?
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See, that’s so totally obviously BS, because otherwise the other one would be called Old Mexico.
I bet you thought you were pretty clever there. Didn’t expect to run into someone as sharp as me, didja?
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It’s not an either/or scenario. Terrorism IS a threat, and anyone who noticed a little thing called 9/11 should know that. That doesn’t mean that TSA isn’t f’d to the core. They are both true, and this is what especially makes it upsetting, and more than a little frightening.
You have a better chance of drowning in your bathtub than being killed by a terrorist. Terrorism isn’t much of a threat.
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Terrorism is pretty much a non-threat. Check the list of death numbers by cause, and terrorism is somewhere far away in the long tail.
A politician that wastes money on “security” instead of investing to e.g. health care or even just traffic signs causes more damage and is more dangerous than al-Qaida.
Because opportunity cost.
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I’m confused: are police-state measures better or worse when they’re clownish?
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That’s an excellent question, on many levels!
I wish I had a good answer :-/
A: Sedition!
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Law Enfarcement!
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…and more TSA news…
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The problem isn’t “The TSA hires idiots”. The problem is the TSA hires people and treats them like idiots by having them enforce policies that are irrational and inconsistent, and do not contribute to their stated mission. That means that their employees are either going to be too stupid to realize how dumb the rules are, or smart enough to realize that if they want to keep their job they better stop thinking they can use reason between 9 and 5.
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Yeah, but bathtub drownings, even in aggregate, generally don’t take down skyscrapers. And if airliners were being hijacked at the same rates they were in the security-light 1970s, there might be considerably more airline-terrorism deaths.
The Pointless TSA does a[pointless act, that’s worth reporting
Don’t these people have documented procedures to follow? Like list of accepted forms of ID. That sort of thing.
Congress(wo)men are all from the states (the one pseudo-congresswoman from DC can’t vote), and so none of them have DC licenses.
The problem here is that in their training, TSA agents are told they have to accept state licenses, and their training literature says “state,” so if they adhere strictly to the letter of their instructions, they can’t accept DC licenses because DC is not a state. It is not that they think DC isn’t part of the US, it’s that they’re afraid to use any initiative to interpret the rules sanely.
By the way, “civil service empire building” and giving handouts to contractors are inconsistent: contractors are definitively NOT part of the civil service.
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You think someone can pull that stunt again? They’ll get swarmed by the passengers in no time now.
Even without that, a more common cause of a building collapse would still be a bog-standard structural failure, gas explosion, fire, corrosion…
And it would still barely blip on the radar, move a notch on the long tail of statistics and don’t pose any threat to the top ten risks.
I repeat, money spent on counterterrorism is money that could be more productively spent elsewhere.
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Related news: You’re now required to get groped by a stranger, prior to every bath.
For Your SAFETY.
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