If TSA insists I discard my unopened bottle of water then they should have a supply of OK ones at the finish line. It’s not the cost, it’s the hassle, unless you’re at the airport, and then it’s the cost, too.
They’ll spend untold amounts of money on equipment and hassling people but make ZERO effort to anything even remotely accommodating.
*shivers*
That’s why “terrorism” is such a destructive concept. If one party does it, you get totalitarianism. If it is democratized, you get anomie. It ends up being a cheap rhetorical gambit of being able to label anyone you are afraid of (or want others to be afraid of) as The Enemy.
People need to be responsible for their own actions, as well as their own feelings about others. And when circumstances are bad and blame gets flung around, the latter seems to be especially difficult.
Cause the TSA sucks.
Trying to show they are worth something.
Need plenty of that.
Considering it’s been going on for 16 years now, many more.
I would say something about Jared from Subway, but honestly…
They don’t care about accommodating anyone. They only care about showing how “tough” they are.
I know! I know! The bobby pin was between his fingers!
I was fortunate to take a course with the late, great Seymour Melman decades ago, where he very vividly demonstrated how the underlying goals and assumptions of (in that case) highly complex procurement programs interacted and could easily be manipulated to create non-linear outcomes. But the activity leaves clues. His big example was the fact that the percentage of the decisionmaking criteria allocated to cost for many military systems and programs was so low, it effectively assured the highest cost proposal would be accepted. His theory was this was done at the end of the cold war not so much to make the “best” weapons as to make the most expensive ones and bankrupt the USSR. Worked great.
I’m no expert on TSA, and I haven’t looked for critical analyses of its history and “success”. But I would bet the underlying goals it appears to have, states it has, and actually really has are not identical, making it a triviality to justify any priorities it wants. It’s hard to imagine who would challenge that in a systematic way right now.
I have accidentally, truly accidentally flown with prohibited items. And a full body cavity search would have only been a waste of time.
I’d be much happier with simple metal detectors and plain clothed Marshalls on the flight. If batteries are the issue, supply battery boxes. Liquids? If sealed why is this even an issue?
Oh wait, I know exactly why.
I am still exceedingly polite at airports.
Goes in the category of NOT such a wonderful thing, don’t ya say?
That chip on your shoulder’s going to drag you down.
Under different circumstances the groping of that boy would be labeled as sexual assault. No doubt the boy will have some issues to sort out after having been publicly played with for the edification of a TSA Perv.
Hopefully that’ll be going away soon, with the new water bottle scanners. They’re starting to roll those out — you can put your water bottle through it & once it’s cleared, take your water through security (hallelujah!)
Made me look! Found this.
http://mashable.com/2014/11/03/airport-liquid-scanning/#UrHdD8Ug7uq3
The trouble is they will continue to have failures, and they will continue to tighten pat-down screening. And this goes for all policing, not just the TSA. The end result is a security nightmare reminiscent of East Germany.
I can’t seem to find the video. What’s being described doesn’t sound unusual, so I must be missing something by not watching it happen. Anyone have a link? (Fusion didn’t have it, unless I have to allow Facebook scripts to show it.)
What’s an alternative? Is there one proposed?
Options seem to be:
Some preferred combination of those we can all agree on? Something I’ve left out? Prognosis?
I’d say no to 1 and 2, yes to 3, and definitely yes to 4.
But what we will get is 1 and 2, but no 3. In fact, if/when we have future acts of violence, I think risk acceptance will decrease further, with more calls for 1 and 2 (at least by politicians). Number 4 is out because of past behavior on the part of the West, IMO; especially the US in the Middle East. Future actions may ameliorate some of it, but the likelihood of such attempts is low, I think.
Number 5 would be genetic engineering to rid people of tribalism and increase survival of species and rest of the planet over survival of self. Ha.
Outlook for Wednesday and rest of the week: glum.
I recently flew to and from Tulsa for work pretty recently. On my way back home i forgot to remove my laptop from my bag, even though i had JUST asked if i needed to do so (brainfart). I was expecting TSA to give me a hard time especially with me being a brown man, but honestly they just did the explosive swab test on the laptop and then i was on my way.
Granted it may come down to particular circumstances. Maybe the patdown of the kid was wholly unavoidable, which is then why the mom made sure police officers were present and she ended up filming. I don’t know the circumstances so i can’t fault her for doing so, though had it been me i wouldnt have made much of a deal over it but if i had a kid that was gunna get manhandled i may have spoken up and made a fuss.
I have to use a prescription drug that comes as a liquid in little plastic bottles. Air makes it go bad, so it’s sealed in an aluminum envelope. The prescription is right there on the outer box. Usually I just yell out “Medical liquids coming through!” and have no problem. But once they wanted to swab one of the bottles. They insisted on opening the aluminum package, even though I told them it would make it go bad faster. It probably would have lasted the trip, but it was the principle of the thing. Who are they to make medical decisions like that?
I’ve used the one in the Columbus OH airport, seemed to do its job. I’m pretty sure I saw them at MCO last year as well.
One time the poor guy in front of me was trying to carry on a styrofoam cooler filled with ice cream packed in dry ice. TSA guys x-rayed it but were super weirded out by it and said they’d have to open it up; the guy’s alarmed protests just made them more eager to get that thing open. Dry ice fog started pouring out of it and they flipped out; the poor traveler was just like “aw man, my ice cream.”
