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The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

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Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#111

Post by jlewallen »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90
CheckHook wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant. Most airlines provide the same digital boarding passes, I often travel with my pass added to Apple Wallet. > If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as "fly at your own risk" "no lifeguard on duty", aka no TSA b.s., I'd happily take the "at your own risk" option rather than the TSA controlled situation we're…

Directed by whom? There is no conceivable threat that would make a pilot agree to fly their plane into a building, and reinforced cockpit doors make it implausible to enter the cockpit without damaging the airplane past the point of flying - and passengers wouldn't stand for it anyway. It's a crap comparison, anyway - the TSA is better at finding toys than they are at finding bombs and weapons. Dogs and x-ray detecto…

> and passengers wouldn't stand for it anyway.

This. We live in a different world now. I find it very difficult to imagine a plane full of people not standing up together to take down a threat.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#112

Post by hammock »

rhino369 wrote: post #75
two2two wrote: post #29

TSA is the number one reason why I don't fly and drive instead. From my POV most of the world's industries have progressed positively, but not air travel. I took a train a couple of years ago and it was a beautiful example of old merging with new. Walking through an antique of a train station, iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant. At that point I realized that air travel is by f…

We have "at your own risk" airtravel in the form of private and chartered flights. There aren't enough people ready and willing to take that risk to make it a competitive business model for airlines. They are a business that only works at massive scale due to extreme competition on price.

It's regulations in large part that draw the line between chartered flights and heavily regulated common carrier flights preventing better air travel from growing.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#113

Post by sageikosa »

suprgeek wrote: post #83

The article completely misses the point of the TSA. It is not meant to actually make air travel safer. It is there for exactly two reasons: 1) Provide our dear politicians the satisfaction that they "Did something" - Security theater is very useful during election times (Tough on Crime et al) 2)Provide a convenient excuse to expand the govt. ability to dictate yet another aspect of people's normal lives. The govt. no…

You are missing the important point of having a new large government workforce to be administered, unionized and funded for decades to come.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#114

Post by jMyles »

pc86 wrote: post #60
ssmoot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife drove up to a private jet this morning. Got on. Took off. No TSA. Holding the "pleebs" to a higher standard than the rich is unconscionable IMO.

1. GA is not limited to the rich. Once you're at about the median US income (or 1/3 of what an SV developer makes, give or take), it is within reach. Slightly more than that and it's starts approaching "affordable," especially as a hobby and not a means of transportation. 2. Money buys you things. By definition people with more money will not be burdened by the same things as those with less.

> Money buys you things. By definition people with more money will not be burdened by the same things as those with less.

The commons are a superset of things provisioned by government, and we expect that the commons will be relatively unburdened and available equally to rich and poor.

Being unburdened by hunger and stress about paying rent is one thing; being unburdened by preferential treatment by the state is another.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#115

Post by xenihn »

acconrad wrote: post #61
mdorazio wrote: post #21

In my opinion, the TSA is basically a very expensive jobs program rather than an actual security organization. This is a big part of why it's going to be hard to get rid of now. According to Wikipedia, the TSA employs over 55,000 people, many of whom would probably have difficulty getting a similar level job if we reverted to a more sane security screening program. Anything that kills thousands of government jobs is…

So is HN turning into a copy/paste of Reddit comment threads now? https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4jr1td/the_tsa_...

Are they wrong though?

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#116

Post by rhino369 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #105
mikeash wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the premise that 9/11 ended the hijacking threat. It ended the threat with basic security in place , because 40 unarmed passengers versus four hijackers armed with box cutters means the hijackers lose. Let the hijackers bring semiautomatic guns and that equation changes radically.

I disagree; the equation only changes somewhat. Passengers under a hijacking still don't expect to survive by cooperating, so the cost of cooperation is still effectively infinite high. Guns still run out of bullets, and are somewhat difficult to wield in a close-quarters situation - it's not a magic first-person shooter. The cost becomes higher than fighting someone with a box cutter, but still lower than evaporatin…

I think you could hijack a plane if you just demand the pilot takes you somewhere rather than trying to get cockpit access. Making a move for the cockpit will cause everyone to rush you. But if you just take prisoners and demand that the pilot flies to Venezuela, I'm fairly sure it would work.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#117

Post by mikeash »

ssmoot wrote: post #103
mikeash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private jets are typically much smaller and have a correspondingly lower potential for mayhem. Yes, there's overlap, there are small airliners and some big private jets, but overall the risk is different, so there's no reason to expect the security measures to be the same.

The Falcon 2000 she flew on this morning is about 1/3 the weight and fuel load of the SWA 737 she might have otherwise. I'm not sure what's unreasonable about the comparison. If the TSA were actually necessary, it would seem like a huge gap in security to allow just anyone with the cash to charter a few private jets around the country.

And that 737 is in turn about 1/3rd the weight and fuel load of the 767s that crashed into the World Trade Center. That's about a factor of 10 difference in kinetic and chemical energy from that Falcon 2000. If 9/11 had been carried out with Falcon 2000s we'd be talking about good the repairs look and how you can barely tell where the holes were on the WTC towers.

I'm not calling the comparison unreasonable, I'm simply saying that the two are not the same, so it's perfectly reasonable for the security to be different too.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#118

Post by sageikosa »

jonnathanson wrote: post #89

The article is exactly right about what needs to be done, and who needs to do it: the airports themselves. No chance any elected official is going to scale back the TSA's screening creep at this point. The political risks of looking "soft on terrorism" are just too high. Imagine being a politician responsible for a TSA rollback, and then, by dumb luck, a terrorist attack succeeds a short while later. There may be zer…

Good things can't happen without government sanction, and bad things can only happen when there is not enough government oversight (or through nefarious conspiracies). This is the narrative structure we call news today.

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#119

Post by jsymolon »

tptacek wrote: post #69
pc86 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. GA is not limited to the rich. Once you're at about the median US income (or 1/3 of what an SV developer makes, give or take), it is within reach. Slightly more than that and it's starts approaching "affordable," especially as a hobby and not a means of transportation. 2. Money buys you things. By definition people with more money will not be burdened by the same things as those with less.

Private jet travel is probably _not_ within reach for the average SV developer.

On a whim, I checked what the rate is to hire a private jet. Can't really do a prop as it'll take too long to get anywhere.

Rate for a Gulfstream jet was about $2500 per hour.

So, "for the rich".

Re: The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them

#120

Post by rhino369 »

lisper wrote: post #58
rhino369 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to see how they got the 95% failure rate. If the TSA was sneaking in actual bombs that could bring down airplanes, that is a horrific. But if they were testing someone bringing in a nail clipper with a 1 inch blade tucked into it, a plastic gun, a disassembled "bomb" with no explosive residue, etc, then it's not that bad. The fact that there have been attempts to blow up airplanes, and they all invo…

> If you could just walk onto a plane with a gun, people would do it again. No, they wouldn't. In the 70's the unwritten rule was: you hijack the plane, land it, make your demands, get your TV time, and then you surrender (or get away) but no one gets hurt. It is only because of that unwritten rule that you could get away with it because everyone assumed that the best route to survival was to cooperate with the hijac…

There have been a couple hijackings in recent years. I think trying to get cockpit access is probably impossible, but you could still take hostages and demand the pilots fly somewhere.

>Any terrorist who wanted to make the headlines would set off a bomb in the TSA line at O'Hare. It would be trivial.

Trivial, but less carnage than a full plane going down. Airplane bombings multiple the deaths by 10X.

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