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The TSA is something that shouldn’t exist in its current form. They very often fail their audit checks and normalize invading your privacy to an extreme degree like body scanners and pat downs. If water bottles are considered potentially explosive then why dump them on a bin next to a line of people where they can go off? This is low grade security theater that inconveniences passengers at best.
The main reason that rule still exists is to sell overpriced water. Otherwise they could just ask you to drink some of it to prove it’s water.
you are allowed to take empty bottles with you, just saying
Some airports have no place to refill and have only hot water in the toilet sinks. It’s inhumane.
Which airport? I have never ever experienced this.
I can’t remember which one it was. Maybe Munich?
Munich has refilling stations after security
I don’t remember, and it was some time ago. Lately some airports have indeed been installing water refilling stations which is great.
Yeah … in their hot water toilet sinks. Gross!
Boise eh?
They treat people like cattle because they are protecting the airplanes and the airline’s liability, not the people onboard or in line to board.
If people think it’s unsafe people won’t pay up to fly.
According to the story I heard as to the origin of the “no liquids over X amount” rule, years ago there was a terrorist that tried to smuggle hydrogen peroxide and acetone - which can be used to rather easily synthesize triacetone triperoxide (TATP, a highly sensitive explosive) - onto a plane in plastic toiletry bottles. They got caught and foiled somehow, and then the TSA started restricting liquids on planes. This was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, if I recall correctly.
And I happen to know, from a reliable source, of someone who accidentally made TATP in a rotary evaporator in an academic lab. So it seems plausible.
Not that the rule is actually effective prevention against similar attacks, nor that the TSA even knows what the reason is behind what they do at this point, haha. I just thought it was an interesting story.
At least they haven’t taken away our shoes. And is there a limit to the number of 3 Oz bottles you can carry?
You can bring as many as you can fit in a single (quart size I believe) ziplock back.
Honey would you grab my water for me please?
The main reason why it exists is to provide jobs. The number of people who work at the TSA at every airport in every state…no representative wants to cut those jobs.
Could we pay them to dig a ditch and fill it back in again? It’d be just as useful.
No, it’d be more useful just on account of the harm they are not doing. I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do instead, hell, do a huge UBI experiment and just let them chill. Might as well.
I fucking hate that this is a thing. “We can’t stop doing this useless and/or detrimental thing, look at all the work it makes for other people to do!!!” Absolutely bonkers that it’s just a standard political argument.
Same thing with medical insurance. It shouldn’t exist but it pays a lot of people’s salaries.
The worst part is if people only worked two or three days a week corporations would still be profitable and everyone would have a job.
i once heared something like this:
“the idea of having more than those who have nothing is the very only reason shareholders can ever imagine someone would work for at all, thus they also falsely believe they would do something good when enforcing this by removing everything from those who already are vulnerable and thus create a living example of how you would end when you don’t help them rob even more.”
what
What’s wild is that if you replaced them with a single payer system or whatever else, you would still have a lot of bureaucratic work that needs to get done by the new system, so most if not all of those jobs would still exist - they would just shift from trying to deny people care to trying to connect people to care.
lol you don’t think a government’s single-payer office is going to be tasked with trying to deny people care?
If so, why not? Why wouldn’t those government people’s orders be “Make sure people don’t use too much medical resources”
Well, if the government is accountable to the people, then pressures from below should shape its policies. But in America as-is I suppose you’re right that there would be no reason to think that that would happen, only a proletarian democracy can truly ensure that a government is responsive to the needs and desires of the people.
It shouldn’t exist? I’d like to see you pay for your medical expenses out of pocket.
P. S. No, I am not American.
I do pay for my medical expenses out of pocket, because I can’t keep insurance long enough to ensure consistent cate.
I’ll give an example. Back in 21 I signed up for medicaid because I was poor enough to qualify. I get an email from my psychiatrist’s office “We can no longer treat you at this office because of your new medicaid status. We are not allowed to treat people on medicaid.” I asked, and they’re not even allowed to treat me if I pay out of pocket.
This is a new medicaid rule. Now if you’re on medicaid you can only see medicaid-approved providers.
So I canceled my medicaid. And I continue to pay out of pocket.
I’ve tried using other government-assisted programs before, with disastrous results. I’ve been kicked off the rolls before, at random, and I’ve had to go through the crash involved in stopping my medication, because while these government programs are helpful, they’re also buggy as fuck and can’t be relied upon.
That’s why you want a national health care program funded by taxes (they call it health insurance, but it’s mandatory and based on income, so it’s a tax, really). Private insurance is still allowed, but everyone gets a baseline.
Sure, this system has got its share of problems, and they’re massive, but if you need care, you generally receive it regardless of your financial situation. Again, bureaucracy happens and there are waiting times etc. etc., but the idea that you may lose everything because you got sick is so alien to me I have no words.
Yeah I guess the kind of Single Payer model I prefer can be conceptualised as “insurance.” But it feels more like health care is taxpayer funded. The similarity to insurance is just details for the detail nerds.
A lot of private insurance in the US amounts to paying a couple hundred monthly to have the insurance and then they deny payment for basically anything and everything. So you pay them to pay out of pocket anyway.
Just got state insurance which covers everything, but very few offices accept it.
So yeah. Insurance in the US is super fucked up and people go without healthcare, even if they have insurance because they simply can’t afford it.
Here in the states when we say “medical insurance shouldn’t exist” what we mean is “the medical insurance industry shouldn’t exist”
Basically the cluster fuck of insurance companies we have now shouldn’t exist, we should just have a single payer type system where medical expenses are paid for through our tax dollars. In its current state it’s a nightmare to deal with.
Agreed. I’d rather they be paid that wage NOT to bother me.
so, we pay more (fastpass or whatever it is) for the privilege. 😅
“The government made 25% of my district unemployed, why didn’t I get reelected?”
Ask it from that side and you have your answer.
I wasn’t asking a question. I understand why politicians do it, I just think it’s a sign of a terrible system.
I agree with you 99%, and I’m only saying this incidentally: I think the world makes a lot more sense when we realize that change as such has real, ethically-valid costs associated with it.
We do want change, but change is a source of stress for a nervous system, so it’s always worth remembering that there’s a certain maximum rate of change we can follow while keeping people sane.
This was a key recognition, for instance, in finally succeeding at fixing various addictions of mine. I just slowed down the rate of the change and stopped trying to change overnight. And I’m not referring to dangerous withdrawal here. I’m talking about managing my own anxiety during the change to trigger snap-back.
I agree TSA’s gotta change, and stop doing their super invasive checks at the airports. But I just wanted to point out at a more global level there should be a little respect for such things as “We can’t just drop this all at once because we’ve been doing it for 25 years”.
We could always use more traffic enforcement. Just switch them all over.
If it’s just for the jobs we can put them to work doing something useful like carrying bags for old people in the airport. Literally anything would be more useful.
I mean if a state removed the TSA and spent the money on something else, surely they could use the money to create as many jobs as they removed but in an actual useful field.
But would the TSA workers vote for them?
Probably not, but the people who just got a job maybe would.
And people watching this exchange from the outside might vote against because they don’t like the idea of “minus a job for Bob, plus a job for Carl” as even-steven.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I wouldn’t vote for a republican who got me a job, and I probably wouldn’t vote for anyone who got rid of my job (unless they were otherwise really great). So at least for me, getting rid of the job means you lose my vote and replacing it doesn’t necessarily gain my vote.
We could pay them to do nothing* that would be just as effective.
*not nothing but do whatever they want
It’s because all the shops inside want you to buy their shit.
I recently realized that I have been boarding planes for years with multiple boxes of razor blades in my carry-on.
…Not a single checkpoint picked them up.
To be fair a explosion in a on the side of a line not gonna kill anyone, now a explosion in the airplane windows, maybe?, i get their argument, not that’s a good argument
The major airports have huge crowds. And we know from unfortunate experience that suitcase bombs can kill hundreds of people.
