Boeing used to have a surplus store in the Seattle area and that’s where I got my first multimonitor setup - they had these huge old CRTs that were like 18-21" which at the time was insane - partially because they weighed like 50 lbs each.
I very nearly bought a server rack there once which would have been an extremely poor idea.
I’m in Austin all the time for work but never knew about this place. It’s on my must-visit lists now.
So much of this is just pure security theater. Last Thanksgiving flying into NOLA my girlfriend took a few glass jars of her favorite tuna on the flight (maybe 5-6). No problem. Coming back there was one left and TSA in NOLA was adamant that she could not take it on the plane because it was “liquid”. This is a 6.7oz jar of tuna with minimal olive oil (pic below). I told them it came on the flight out (they told me I was lying), and I asked if they thought tuna was a liquid, or if they would confiscate a tin can of tuna. They really had zero rationale for their decision, other than some weird power trip.
Yea, I forgot I had my Leatherman in my backpack one time, but thankfully I was there early enough I was able to check my other bag. My wife had given it to me for my birthday, no way was I going to lose that to the TSA…
I have had things magically disappear from my secured/locked checked bags. My boss too. Jewelry, Gerber and Swiss Army multitools, etc.
My boss had her late mother’s earrings very carefully and surgically extracted out of her locked, checked bag on a well-known airline that I will not name here. Her bag looked completely untampered with, and she only found out when she got home to unpack.
Here is what probably happened:
Really pisses me off. But this hard lesson, learned years ago, has prevented me from taking anything that I really want to keep, on a flight.
It’s one of the many reasons I prefer driving if I am not in a hurry to travel, even if it’s a thousand miles of road.
Indeed, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that “random” is anything but.
Attractive women in their mid-teens to mid-twenties seem to get disproportionately groped by male TSOs. And Muslim or Jewish presenting men almost always get “randomly” selected.
That’s not even counting the blatantly political stuff, like how the late Senator Ted Kennedy got on the no fly list for being a prominent Democrat who rubbed the DHS the wrong way.