Tired of Safety? Republicans push for abolishment of TSA

[Carolyn225]

IMO, you're overthinking in an effort to justify government involvement where it just isn't necessary. Privately run airport security worked as well as TSA, if not better. Government involvement often creates unnecessary red tape and expense.

Unfortunately, the overreaction to 9/11 created any number of unnecessary, intrusive and expensive government departments.

EDIT: "It is true that airport security was provided by private firms. That might have been your main point."

Yes and I'm fine going back to that.

Oh gosh, I remember being at Dulles prior to 9/11 and TSA; the private security personnel was beyond inattentive so no thank you!

 

[StrangePackage]

Oh gosh, I remember being at Dulles prior to 9/11 and TSA; the private security personnel was beyond inattentive so no thank you!

I flew to Texas the summer before 9/11 carrying a Spyderco Endura Mk 2. The security guard complimented me on my choice of knife.

Kinda crazy to think about in retrospect.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

I don't think this is true. You need to cite some authoritative source for these numbers.

Link

"Air marshals don’t protect every flight. In the U.S., less than 5% of flights have an air marshal on board. The Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) can’t cover all 44,000 daily commercial flights across the country. The New York Times also gave an estimate, that only 6% of domestic flights have an air marshal onboard. High-risk flights, especially international routes to and from countries deemed risky, have a higher chance of air marshal presence."

The same article I quoted also says "To give an idea of the numbers, every flight has on average one to two Air Marshals domestically although they aren't on every flight. There's an average of four Air Marshals on every international flight. They focus more on US carriers but not exclusively." You quoted this word for word this without attribution and failed to provide context, which was simply that air marshals never work alone. When air marshals are on flights (maybe 5% of all flights) they work in pairs, or pairs of pairs on international flights.

So did you purposely misrepresent this or did you just Google, find an out of context passage, then plagiarize it and attempt to pass off as fact?

You are absolutely right.

I think I just saw the google blurb and didn't look at the whole article.

 

[BlooVooDoo]

I flew to Texas the summer before 9/11 carrying a Spyderco Endura Mk 2. The security guard complimented me on my choice of knife.

Kinda crazy to think about in retrospect.

Plain, serrated or combo edge?

 

[StrangePackage]

Plain, serrated or combo edge?

Combo edge. Pretty knife but wouldn't hold an edge for anything.

 

[Calheel]

Im honestly trying to think of one thing in my 47 years on the planet which has been privatized and gotten better, cheaper, and/or more efficient.

Does anyone have examples?

The US has not really done much privatization -- at least compared to the rest of the world (in part because a lot of those businesses were never nationalized in the first place in the US). I guess one example is Sallie Mae, and I don't have any knowledge as to whether Sallie Mae got better once it stopped being a GSE and became a private corporation.

There has been a lot more privatization effort in Europe, particularly with the national airlines. Here is a Cato Institute article on the pros and cons (and of course, because it is Cato, you can guess that it favors it for certain industries): https://www.cato.org/policy-analysi...vatization-reform-lessons-abroad#introduction

 

[BlooVooDoo]

Combo edge. Pretty knife but wouldn't hold an edge for anything.

I have an endura 4 combo edge but the steel is VG-10 which is a bit better for edge retention than AUS-6 or G-2 ( I can’t remember which steel the mk2 used. Anyway, I really like the combo edge in a blade of that length.

 

[StrangePackage]

I have an endura 4 combo edge but the steel is VG-10 which is a bit better for edge retention than AUS-6 or G-2 ( I can’t remember which steel the mk2 used. Anyway, I really like the combo edge in a blade of that length.

Aus-6. I swear I spent more time sharpening that knife than any other I have owned.

 

[superrific]

The US has not really done much privatization -- at least compared to the rest of the world (in part because a lot of those businesses were never nationalized in the first place in the US). I guess one example is Sallie Mae, and I don't have any knowledge as to whether Sallie Mae got better once it stopped being a GSE and became a private corporation.

There has been a lot more privatization effort in Europe, particularly with the national airlines. Here is a Cato Institute article on the pros and cons (and of course, because it is Cato, you can guess that it favors it for certain industries): https://www.cato.org/policy-analysi...vatization-reform-lessons-abroad#introduction

That's an interesting analysis of Air Traffic Control -- citing Canada (hee hee) as the model for air traffic privatization. I'm not sure it really qualifies. It's a monopoly owned by a non-profit, with airlines and workers represented on the board. That sure seems like a public entity functionally, if not by law.

The article also conflates two forms of privatization, and two different rationales.

1. Get Congress out of the business of micromanaging railroads and airlines, because Congress uses those things as pork. I think this point is true and should be low-hanging fruit. Amtrak, for instance, is profitable on the Acela line. In my considerable but dated experience, the Acela line is a great service. But the rest of the Amtrak system is a disaster because it makes no sense. Who the fuck rides a train from LA to New Orleans? I once looked at the time required to get to Salt Lake City from Chicago by Amtrak. It was like 55 hours or something ridiculous (changing trains is required, as is going around mountains).

Now, if we could establish an independent agency to manage Amtrak . . . oh never mind.

2. Government is inefficient and the private sector is better. This is sometimes true. But as I mentioned elsewhere, there are some businesses where efficiency is less important than reliability. Red tape is usually a derisive term, and sometimes red tape is just a disaster on every metric -- but usually, I think, red tape increases costs and improves reliability of performance. Maybe you don't think that is a good tradeoff, but it should be within democratic control. If the service is privatized, we're subject to the private sector bean counters. What would stop a private ATC system from doing a ValuJet? From deciding that a 99.9% non-crash rate is good enough given the savings inherent in going to an all-AI system.

I think a great example of this is submarines. Well, submarines as presented in movies -- I don't know if they are real life, but what we see on the screen makes sense. In Hunt For Red October, the captain and political officer of the sub were both required to open the safe containing the orders. Inefficient? Yes. Wise? From the Soviets' perspective, yes. It discourages defection -- requiring the defector to commit murder to succeed. Or the repetition of orders. It took me a while to understand why, on submarines (and space ships like the Enterprise), the captain gives an order to a subordinate, who then turns to give the order to someone else. Why not just have the captain give the order directly? Because, I think, it reduces the possibility of error. Again, Hunt For Red October: if the captain gives an order to turn directly into a torpedo instead of away, it's probably a big mistake. The junior officer is in a position to ask, "is that what you really mean?" in a way that the guy turning the steering wheel isn't.

[I have no idea whether this is real life, but I think you can see the safety benefits play out in the constructed scenes -- which are plausible and probably grounded in something.