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Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

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Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please don't irritate the TSA agents. If they don't get you for it, they will take it out on everyone behind you. We really shouldn't tolerate people like that though, should we? If you don't respect TSA agents, it's your duty to remind them of that. Our ability to change the TSA through the democratic process has been on the wane for years now, but we can still force change by making it hard for the TSA to hire. If…

This is a really shitty attitude to have towards your fellow human beings. Do you also shame people working at McDonalds for enabling their rich corporate overlords? Do you hate gas station attendants for contributing to global warming? If you really want to make a statement, stop flying and stop paying money into the TSA.

Neither of those two parties is doing anything wrong; you just invented fanciful abstract offenses to be argumentative. TSA agents are doing something concretely wrong every time they grope my genitals, even if it is sanctioned by the state.

It's certainly unoptimal that we'd ever have to be rude to people to change things for the better, but we don't actually live in a wholly civil society, evidenced by the fact that my genitals get groped every time I book a flight.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#242
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By multiple orders of magnitude proabably. I'm going to go ahead and call 5000 people who have been killed by aviation terrorism events. Assuming they all live to 90 years old, that's 450,000 man years tragically lost. The FAA website stats that 630,000,000 people fly per year. If each of them takes 10 minutes to cross the line, that's 105,000,000 man-years lost per year...

You’re mixing man years and man hours. But it’s still over 11,000 man years spent in lines at the airport.

Wow, you're absolutely right. Screwed the math hard there. 10 minutes was a very low estimate though, especially in bigger airports like Seattle, SF, NYC.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#243
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I’m more nervous in security than I am on the actual plane.

Don’t be nervous. TSA misses the vast majority of weapons during screening in repeated tests, so it is evident that basically no one wants to commit mass violence on/with planes.

That ... didn’t help.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#244
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm, that's interesting. I went through Schipol a few days ago and don't recall having to go through a metal detector. Nude body scanner yes, metal detector no. Maybe I just wasn't looking?

The scanner replaced the metal detector. Some places have both.

To my knowledge, those "nude body" scanners (millimeter-wave or X-ray backscatter) can detect suspicious irregularities underneath clothing, but they do not specifically detect metals, and cannot search body cavities.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've literally brought a pickaxe by accident. But one time I was trying to bring a fish, and had a next to impossible time trying to get them to agree that water was a "life sustaining liquid" as defined by their exemptions on the 3oz rule wrt to fish.

That reminds me of the time, sometime before the statute of limitations expired, I was coming back to the US from Montreal with a bunch of illegal raw milk cheese in my carry-on. No problem.

Are personal amounts of raw-milk cheese restricted or prohibited from entry into the US? This CBP page says nothing about raw cheese or pasteurization. It clearly states that hard and semi-soft cheeses are fine to bring in passenger baggage, as long as they don't contain meat.

Just because the FDA requires raw-milk cheeses to have aged for at least 60 days in order to be sold in the USA, that doesn't mean you can't bring some in with you and consume it.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#246
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Probably the most important thing it does is to keep the world from descending into a flaming fireball of constant wars between countries" How many millions were killed by government in the 20th century? WW1, WWII, concentration camps, gulags, Mao's great leap forward, Vietnam, and the list goes on. War has been a constant for most of the 21st century. There is a strong argument that much of the above would not have…

> There is a strong argument that much of the above would not have been feasible without large centralized states. Precluding that was small states engaged in constant warfare. Note that I'm not saying that centralized states are necessarily the solution, but that the US Federal Government has been successful in its objective of preventing further World Wars and that itself is a huge achievement.

Naturally I disagree. The US has been waging a never ending global war on "terror" since 2001. I'll also cite Hans Herman Hoppe's lecture refuting Steven Pinker. Apologies in advance for his thorough technique.

"Pinker devotes some 10 pages (pp. 228-238) to this case, and the central information is condensed in a single graph (p. 230) depicting the “rate of death in conflicts in greater Europe, 1400-2000.” If anything, however, this graph demonstrates the opposite of Pinker’s progress thesis. What it shows is that the longest period of (relative) peacefulness and low levels of violence were the almost 200 years from 1400 until the very end of the 16th century. Yet this period falls precisely within the longer period of the European Middle Ages (and marks its end), and the Middle Ages, as I have argued before, are a prime example of a State-less social order. (Interestingly, Pinker concurs with this assessment of medieval Europe as State-less, but he then fails to see that this assessment implies, according to his own data, an empirical refutation of his thesis.)

And it gets worse for Pinker’s case. According to the same graph, the following historical period, from the late 16th century on to the present, is characterized by three huge spikes in the level of violence. The first spike, from the late 16th century until the Westphalian Peace in 1648, is largely associated with the 30-Years-War; the second, from the late 18th century until 1815 and somewhat less steep than the first, is associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; and the third and greatest spike, from 1914-1945, is associated with the 20th century’s two World Wars. As well, for all intermediate periods, the level of violence remained well above that of medieval times and this level was only reached again, three centuries later, during the period from 1815-1914, and again during the post-WW II era. All in all, then, the record for post-medieval Europe in terms of violence appears rather depressive. And yet, the entire period, from the late 16th century until today, is the era of States, which Pinker considers the driving forces of a “civilizing process.” "

https://mises.org/wire/libertarian-quest-grand-historical-na... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTWrFTFxGbk

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#247

It's fascinating how the security theatre has gotten so big that now it basically just rolls forward under its own momentum. It's been around long enough that people accept it as normal, it serves no other purpose than to employ the unemployable and fill contractors' coffers, and it seems that no entity is able to stop or dismantle it.

Maybe increasing friction in air travel is a morally good environmental service, a lesser of two evils.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really shitty attitude to have towards your fellow human beings. Do you also shame people working at McDonalds for enabling their rich corporate overlords? Do you hate gas station attendants for contributing to global warming? If you really want to make a statement, stop flying and stop paying money into the TSA.

Neither of those two parties is doing anything wrong; you just invented fanciful abstract offenses to be argumentative. TSA agents are doing something concretely wrong every time they grope my genitals, even if it is sanctioned by the state. It's certainly unoptimal that we'd ever have to be rude to people to change things for the better, but we don't actually live in a wholly civil society, evidenced by the fact tha…

I've had my genitalia groped exactly zero times by the TSA. I'm guessing that you probably got put on some TSA shitlist, probably from behavior like the above, or you're an ordinary person of color, not sure which.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those two parties is doing anything wrong; you just invented fanciful abstract offenses to be argumentative. TSA agents are doing something concretely wrong every time they grope my genitals, even if it is sanctioned by the state. It's certainly unoptimal that we'd ever have to be rude to people to change things for the better, but we don't actually live in a wholly civil society, evidenced by the fact tha…

I've had my genitalia groped exactly zero times by the TSA. I'm guessing that you probably got put on some TSA shitlist, probably from behavior like the above, or you're an ordinary person of color, not sure which.

The preferred nomenclature is "Mediterranean", thank you.

Re: Laptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please don't irritate the TSA agents. If they don't get you for it, they will take it out on everyone behind you. We really shouldn't tolerate people like that though, should we? If you don't respect TSA agents, it's your duty to remind them of that. Our ability to change the TSA through the democratic process has been on the wane for years now, but we can still force change by making it hard for the TSA to hire. If…

This is a really shitty attitude to have towards your fellow human beings. Do you also shame people working at McDonalds for enabling their rich corporate overlords? Do you hate gas station attendants for contributing to global warming? If you really want to make a statement, stop flying and stop paying money into the TSA.

>If you really want to make a statement, stop flying and stop paying money into the TSA.

This is a non-argument. Flying is a part of modern life. For a large percentage of the population, refusing to fly would lose them their job, as would refusing to use a mobile phone or insisting on being paid with cash.

It is self evident to any rational person that it is acceptable to attempt to change a system rather than opting out of it if one sees a problem with that system.

>This is a really shitty attitude to have towards your fellow human beings. Do you also shame people working at McDonalds for enabling their rich corporate overlords? Do you hate gas station attendants for contributing to global warming?

I don't see the connection to McDonalds employees. Please explain how McDonalds employees are like TSA workers.

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