This is a pretty silly conspiracy. Do you think the manufacturers of those products have some sort of lobbying arm to convince politicians to make draconian TSA regulations?

The much more likely scenario is that the politcians, who sometimes have ownership interest in the companies that get government contracts, want to be able to sell new equipment. This is also supported by the constant equipment updates we see at TSA lines.

They could have just banned liquids all together, but they picked some magic 15 mL limit (or whatever it is) that no existing containers at the time fit under.

> The much more likely scenario is...

Why do you phrase this as an either or situation? "My conspiracy is more likely than your conspiracy" as if there can't be more than one conspiracy.

And some airports require that your liquids fit in a 1L bag. Which they’ll gladly sell to you.

At least every airport I've been to (Europe, Dubai and India) have provided the 1L baggies for free. I usually get 4-5 uses out of them before they start tearing.

'baggies' is an interesting development in the English language, a colloquialism that is longer than its base word.

It's just a diminutive form of "bag", ie. "small bags"?

Just like you have for instance "telefonino" as the diminutive of "telefono" in Italian, literally "small telephone". And in German you add -chen or -lein to words to create the diminutive, so "Hund" becomes "Hündchen" (adding an umlaut as well, if applicable).

Generally I think it's very common for a lot of languages to add a cutesy suffix to the base word, in order to create the diminutive.