If it were just the pornoscanners that made flying so awful, thatād be fine. But the TSA has so many ways of being dicks to us, thatās just icing on the cake.
Also, if you take into account the extra helping of greenhouse gasses that planes add compared to other modes, you could argue the TSA is doing our grandkids a favor.
Just in case you needed something else to worry about. And youāre welcome.
We should also require health insurance to cover plane tickets.
If it saves just one life, isnāt it worth it?
Depends on lifeās value, which can easily be quanted by the experts readily available to testify in this case. Factor in your past & projected monetary contributions to the common weal, adjust for circumstance of birth and certain bankable Wild Talents, and oneās Lifeās Value ā¢ may be fairly & accurately calculated for the purposes of this endeavour. Quality of Life is a separate issue, best left to our highly trained PhiloSophist branch. Also, if One Dollar/One Vote applies to the U.S. electoral system, future SCOTUS decisions could cement the dollar value of human and other lives as legal precedent. Cheers, all!
I would note that the elevated cancer risk 1) was in TSA officers who suffered occupational exposure and 2) was from the x-ray back-scatter machines that were removed from service in 2013. The concerns raised by the article donāt apply to members of the general public flying today.
Theyād be welcome to ogle my flabby bod all they want if they could just get it done in a timely manner. Last flight we spent nearly 1.25 hrs getting through security and nearly missed the flight though weād gotten to the airport with what we thought was plenty of time to check a bag and get to the plane.
Newark Liberty? Just a hunch.
When you submit to the body scanners because you donāt want to be a hassle and demand a pat-down, or because you donāt want to wait a little bit longer for a screener to become available, youāre as much a part of the problem as the TSA itself.
Resist.
Hardly.
Fun spongeā¦
Nope, though thatās my home port. It was San Juan PR. The plane crew commiserated that it was awful there. Ridiculously, though we live 15 min from EWR, we flew out of JFK because the fares were SO much cheaper! United has a near monopoly at Newark now.
Why? some of us really donāt give a shit about āporno scannersā. I canāt imagine all the women traveling in yoga wear do either, theyāve got nothing to hide!
Yup. And yet itās as if they do nothing to improve that airportās TSA shit show. Itās as if they have no idea people were going anywhere that day.
Add up all the hours people spend in security at airports. How many lifetimes is that - more than the number of lives saved, I bet.
Seeing as the official number of lives saved is [weāre not disclosing], the sensible thing to assume is zero and that Itās complete waste.
Thatās my personal, and horrendous bugbear that made me detest the entire system. The maths are easy, and shocking.
For any given airport, stats can be estimated or foundā¦
LAX for example: LAX Official Site | Welcome to Los Angeles International Airport apparently admitted 37,000,000 departing passengers last year. These must have all gone through the scanners.
We should also add airport and airline staff, which may be an additional 5%, but whatever.
The TSA is (at this instant) listing wait times at half the posts of up to 30 minutes.
https://apps.tsa.dhs.gov/mytsa/
It also lists some as āno waitā.
Splitting the difference at 15 minutes seems reasonable, and also matches with my experience as a good estimate.
So immediately we can see that:
37,000,000 people
- .25 hours in line
/ 24 hours_in_the_day
/ 365 days in the year
/ 78 years live expectancy (US)
= 13 lifetimes, 13 people are killed by waiting in queues in JUST LAX per year
I donāt even want to count the number of airports, or add the lives of the employees on the other side of the desk ā¦ etc etc.
Is my math wrong?
Itās not a point against the lawsuit that evidence supporting their claims doesnāt exist - the point is that this, and many other things, should have been studied before the scanners went into place. Of course there will be little evidence for or against, when the studies havenāt been conducted.
Instead, itās eight years after they started deploying AIT that they even released a final regulation authorizing them to do so, and they still havenāt done basic goddamn research.
Not that I trust them to report results honestly, even if they do the research. They claim that AIT doesnāt slow down lines at all, because passenger throughput is constrained by x-ray scanning of baggage. I donāt believe that, and even if it were true, that means you could speed things up by having multiple x-ray scanners per passenger screening lane, and AIT prevents that. They also claim that on average opting out will add 150 seconds on average to a passengerās screening time. If youāve opted out more than a couple of times, you know thatās laughable.
Does the fact that security has become a pain in the ass in the last 15 years make people dislike air travel more? Of course. If people dislike one mode of travel, are they more likely to choose a different mode of travel? Of course. Does people choosing car travel over air travel cost lives? Of course.
There can be no doubt that this effect (increased deaths from AIT) exists, the only question is the magnitude, and how that compares to the supposed benefits. Thatās why you do the research. And yeah, itās very difficult to distinguish the effects of AIT from the effects of other passenger-hostile measures like removing shoes or banning liquids. Thatās why you do the research. And maybe thereās a balancing effect where some people whoād avoid flying because of terrorism fears are now reassured and will now fly instead of drive. Does it balance or outweigh the increased deaths from people who avoid flying because of increased security measures? Possibly. Thatās why you do the research.
Really, not only should all this research be done - done before they illegally deployed AIT everywhere - but it should be done by an agency thatās independent from the TSA. TSA has demonstrated over and over that they canāt be trusted.
But this is all dreaming. Nothing will happen.
Oh, and if you havenāt seen it, hereās the final rule from the TSA authorizing the use of AIT. Effective May 2, 2016. Passenger Screening Using Advanced Imaging Technology
They address the āmore people will dieā issue, briefly, in section DD (other costs). They blow it off, of course.
Flying is a lot more fuel efficient than the average US car. As I recall a modern jet does nearly 200 passenger miles per gallon. To achieve that with an average 27mpg US car you would need to be carrying 7 or 8 people.
