2) Many government agencies exist to do things that may not affect you personally. NASA does not do anything you'll be affected by - neither does law enforcement. Or border security. You probably wouldn't notice if your local fire department vanished for a few weeks. Until, of course, your house is on fire.

3) Those things that affect society as a whole (like... EPA inspections) take a long time to affect society but have huge costs down the road if not done (good luck cleaning up water sources, or dealing with your cancer caused by your poisoned soil).

4) Airports are starting to be affected first because these are among the lowest paying federal positions, so those employees are going to have to find other work the fastest.

You will feel this shutdown. You haven't yet because macroeconomics and bureaucracy happen on scales longer than a month.

You'll feel it in the missing percentage gains this year for your investment portfolio (or its complete annihilation if the contraction turns into a depression).

You'll feel it later this year when you try to sort some federal paperwork and it takes them 3 weeks longer than normal because everyone at the department is a brand new employee, or they never managed to recover headcount because nobody wants to work for the Fed anymore.

You'll feel it when you head to Joshua Tree and it's missing a couple more trees than it should be, and they haven't yet managed to scrub off all the spraypaint.

Give it time. You'll feel the pain.

I doubt any of us trust companies to do the right thing most of the time, but I think we all agree some regulations are dumb, and a loss for everyone except the people whose jobs depend on them.

For clarity, I have no idea if the tank inspection is a dumb regulation. And I realize without the regulations, they'd probably be dumping the oil behind the shop somewhere which we obviously don't want.

Same for the TSA. If the TSA disappeared overnight, we’d just get on airplanes and fly to our destinations like we did before they came around. We have long lines not because there are fewer agents, but because the law says an agent must process you and there are few agents.

Unless you'd like to see what Flint Michigan but Worse might look like on a more national scale.

Obviously, regulations can cause problems or have significant issues, so we should continually modify them as necessary, to the best of our ability. This includes removing them if they aren't beneficial, or creating new ones.

Same with TSA. While they aren't perfect, we don't have bimonthly hijackings like we did 40-50 years ago.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/atlanta-tsa-offic...

[1] - https://www.wired.com/2013/06/love-and-terror-in-the-golden-...

And very few after that (two in the 1980s, with a couple attempts in the 1989s and 1990s) because of the first round of airport security rules adopted immediately in the wake of those and the tightening permanently applied during the 1990 Gulf Crisis.

> The TSA doesn't deserve all the credit there as other post-9/11 security changes were implemented at the same time, but you can't just hand wave away their role in that unprecedented streak of safety.

It's not significantly different that the period before 9/11, so it's not clear they the TSA and other post-9/11 actions deserve any credit, and calling it an unprecedented streak of safety is hyperbolic.

>It's not significantly different that the period before 9/11, so it's not clear they the TSA and other post-9/11 actions deserve any credit, and calling it an unprecedented streak of safety is hyperbolic.

First off, you can't just pretend like 9/11 doesn't count in pre-TSA security stats. Four planes were hijacked within an hour of each other on 9/11 and zero have been hijacked in the last 17+ years? Those rates seem significantly different to me. Also can you find any stretch of US history in which commercial airliners have flown close to as many miles as they have over the last 17+ years in which there wasn't a hijacking? Unprecedented seems like a perfectly fine word to describe that streak.

Prior to 9/11, there were 14 years with no US hijackings (failed attempts are a different story) and 27 with no deaths on a commercial aircraft due to a hijacking. 17 years with neither hijackings nor hijacking related deaths is not a clear improvement that calls for credit anywhere. Since the 1980s, hijacking events have been so rare that it would take many decades under a give policy regime before and after a policy change before you couls have even remote statistical confidence that my quiet period

Really, since at least the 1980s, hijacking is so rare that it would take an extraordinarily long time to have even remote confidence that there was an increase in safety, much less of assigning a specific cause to it.

And, on assigning cause, if there was a reduction in hijackings post-9/11, well, there's a pretty good reason to think that al-Qaeda and the passengers of Flight 93 jointly might be responsible without any government policy as an intermediate cause.

Hijacking became something passengers would no longer be likely to accept as a “cooperate and noone gets hurt” event, which rendered it pointless as almost anyone has ever used it (even as al-Qaeda used it on 9/11, which while it doesn't factually fit that model clearly required for effect that people believed that it did.)

I have an anti-tiger rock to sell you.

This may be something like the idea that life still goes on while you have 10% kidney function and for a certain amount of time after liver failure. Even when a system hasn't outright collapsed yet, that doesn't mean it isn't compromised or even approaching failure.

The grandparent comment describes a situation for handling waste, waste that has serious impacts on the health of the environment. That's what you reduce to "paper and ink," so I'll assume you're part of the crowd that generally trivializes environmental concerns.... as if they've forgotten this is where they live and the food chain is how they eat. And then one day we wake up and it's perfectly normal to have a conversation about limiting our consumption of tuna and other fish because of mercury levels they contain as a consequence of uncontained industrial activity. Because we forgot that we're part of a system. Not surprising to see people do... but it is a little surprising to see it pop up on HN.

Speaking of the food chain, here's some fun food for thought:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/lifestyle/food-and-cook...

Planning on flying anywhere?

https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-01-04-air-traffic-contro...

How sure are you that these jobs don't need to exist? These are just two examples. How sure are you that you really have any idea what the government does?

Are you the kind of person who just deletes large swathes of code from a system because they're ugly, because they don't fit your aesthetics, because you're not sure what they do and you'd rather just re-write than find out?

I think that the original commenter is trying to say is that it's possible that their jobs won't be done if their shop has to close. They're already being impacted: their work time is being wasted. That makes the business less profitable and eventually this could affect everyone that works there.

Some of the jobs that "need to exist" are not people who work for the government.

Government waste is frustrating as hell to me as a taxpayer. I believe, however, in spending money to protect our quality of life in the long term.

For instance:

If the EPA and all environmental legislation ceased to exist tomorrow, you wouldn’t be able to tell in a month, or even a year.

You would notice if in ten years’ time your kid got lead poisoning from swimming in the local river.