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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

The TSA is a massive welfare jobs program for under/non-educated people, they employ approx. 60k people. The security theatre is just the guise they gave it for the welfare to be accepted by the public.

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Great! Let's give those people free jobs doing something useful, instead.

Think how nice it would be having them all work on trail maintenance in our national parks. Our parks are a national treasure, yet apart from the majors (Yosemite, Yellowstone, etc) most have approximately zero budget for trail maintenance. In the Wallowa-Whitman, for example, last year they had approximately two people covering that entire area. There are so many other places we could deploy federal workers into jobs programs apart from the defense industry and this security theater.

That would indeed be nice, but unfortunately a significant portion of the country would be diametrically opposed to it.

But that's actual work. If people wanted to do actual work, there are plenty of manual labor jobs unfilled right now. You'd have to walk and dig and use tools and maybe sweat, none of which the TSA guys have to do.

I'd like to see the TSA go as much as the next, but they have some job positions I'd call real work. Throwing 80 pound bags on and off conveyor belts, looking forward to ski season when the ski bags hit, opening up suitcases full of things I don't want to see, touch or smell. They have their share of jobs sitting around or standing around looking important, but behind the scenes there is some "real" work going on. Too bad it doesn't accomplish much.

The problem is that the locations of the vast majority of TSA employees (major airports -- near to major cities) are not particularly near the major national parks in need of that kind of work. There was an article on here recently about how many people don't want to move from the rural hinterlands to the major urban centers (raises hand), so I assume that that feeling goes in the other direction as well...

How about instead of performing security theatre, they perform actual theatre? They could do it in the airport lounges to entertain waiting passengers. They'd still get props, and they'd still get to dress up, they'd love it!

Law enforcement is the only acceptable form of government welfare, according to one powerful camp.

Imagine how much better off we would be as a society if we paid them the same salaries to pick up trash and clean up our parks and public spaces. But that doesn't jive with our national ethos - authoritarianism.

Then we should take their full body scanners and give them spoons.

But the scanners make it like like they are doing something useful. A large team of people with wooden sticks can dig the foundation for a major build - but since all those people know about modern excavators they will all feel unproductive despite getting the job done. The same size team 4000 years ago would not know of a better way, and so they would be happy to be helping making this large building.

So why not take all those people operating a security theater, and employ them to actually do the work that the agency claims to do?

That's what I thought marketing jobs were for.

But I guess there are people who cannot even do those jobs. Even McDonalds has standards.

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