“How Do TSA Employees Feel About Working For a Despised Agency?”

Re:“How Do TSA Employees Feel About Working For a Despised A... by jlgreco on Friday December 21, 2012 @05:19PM (#4954820)

> I suspect that the economic cost of an successful terrorist attack on a U.S. aircraft would cost the U.S. economy more than one part in fifteen thousand.

Now include the probability of such an event actually taking place, and the probability that the TSA could prevent it...

A comet strike would cause many trillions of dollars worth of damages. How much money are we spending right now on a pea-shooter based comet defense system?

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Re:“How Do TSA Employees Feel About Working For a Despised A... by mctx on Friday December 21, 2012 @10:59PM (#4955720)

> pea-shooter based comet defense system?

I'm pretty sure the state of art of this field is deep core drilling (as of 1998, anyway)

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Re:“How Do TSA Employees Feel About Working For a Despised A... by dredmorbius on Monday December 24, 2012 @03:56AM (#4962315)

The point isn't "pea shooter" as a description of state of the art, but of its effectiveness. There's nothing we have available to us in technology that would be able to divert a mass-extinction class meteor (or even just a really-bad-day meteor) on short notice. Given a decade or more we might be able to launch a mission to moderately divert an orbit, but at very high expense.

It's the cost-to-effectiveness ratio I believe TSA is being compared.

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