4 ms·

How much time has been wasted of people waiting in line, taking off their shoes, unpacking their laptop to go through security? how much money has been wasted b

How much time has been wasted of people waiting in line, taking off their shoes, unpacking their laptop to go through security? how much money has been wasted by the government on the program? People end up on the no fly list. Kids in wheelchairs and little old ladies get felt up for bombs and are put through a needless trauma. Just, amazing. Purely security theater. TSA: nothing for something

noondip 11y ago
I regard the TSA as basically a public work program for low-skilled employees. They certainly do little to improve security, maybe even worsen it, but hey, at least some tens of thousands of people aren't out of work.
- AngrySkillzz 11y ago
  This is also true of the DoD and intelligence community, except that it's a public works program for high-skilled technologists.
- coldpie 11y ago
  I'd much rather we just paid them to stay at home.
ytdht 11y ago
TSA is job and fear creation at the very least
chatmasta 11y ago
One could argue that the TSA checkpoints benefit overall airport efficiency. Optimizing for flow of millions of people per day, it makes sense to funnel through predetermined pipelines. This way passengers enter the terminal at a constant rate.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  I don't think needing to arrive at least 2 hours before your flight is reflective of an efficient system
- simoncion 11y ago
  That would be a bad argument. Consider two passages. One has a mantrap or airlock style set of doors which only permits two people per minute. The other has a set of turnstiles which -collectively- permit six-hundred people per minute. Through which passage are you going to fit the most people in a sixty-minute period? Consider also that -regardless of how many people you fit through the passage- at the destination of each one of those people is an orderly queue designed to never be overloaded. This means that the only thing lowering throughput at the passage does is lengthens the queue to pass through the passage. If you lengthen that queue, then folks waste more time waiting in that queue; time that could be usefully spent doing anything else.
- chrismcb 11y ago
  What? I'm not even sure what you are trying to say. How does creating a bottleneck that can take an hour or more to go through, efficient? ATL is on of the worlds busiest airports with about 100 million passengers or about 250K a day. Some of the busiests European train stations get twice that. Yet they don't seem to have thus efficiency probably.
  - chatmasta 11y ago
    It provides a predictable rate of flow into the terminal.

noondip 11y ago

I regard the TSA as basically a public work program for low-skilled employees. They certainly do little to improve security, maybe even worsen it, but hey, at least some tens of thousands of people aren't out of work.

AngrySkillzz 11y ago
This is also true of the DoD and intelligence community, except that it's a public works program for high-skilled technologists.
coldpie 11y ago
I'd much rather we just paid them to stay at home.

ytdht 11y ago

TSA is job and fear creation at the very least

chatmasta 11y ago

One could argue that the TSA checkpoints benefit overall airport efficiency. Optimizing for flow of millions of people per day, it makes sense to funnel through predetermined pipelines. This way passengers enter the terminal at a constant rate.

meesterdude 11y ago
I don't think needing to arrive at least 2 hours before your flight is reflective of an efficient system
simoncion 11y ago
That would be a bad argument. Consider two passages. One has a mantrap or airlock style set of doors which only permits two people per minute. The other has a set of turnstiles which -collectively- permit six-hundred people per minute. Through which passage are you going to fit the most people in a sixty-minute period? Consider also that -regardless of how many people you fit through the passage- at the destination of each one of those people is an orderly queue designed to never be overloaded. This means that the only thing lowering throughput at the passage does is lengthens the queue to pass through the passage. If you lengthen that queue, then folks waste more time waiting in that queue; time that could be usefully spent doing anything else.
chrismcb 11y ago
What? I'm not even sure what you are trying to say. How does creating a bottleneck that can take an hour or more to go through, efficient? ATL is on of the worlds busiest airports with about 100 million passengers or about 250K a day. Some of the busiests European train stations get twice that. Yet they don't seem to have thus efficiency probably.
- chatmasta 11y ago
  It provides a predictable rate of flow into the terminal.