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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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

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