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A comment on Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep fliers safe.

Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by ck2 on Sunday March 10, 2013 @12:48PM (#5352507)
Think of the TSA as kinder, gentler war profiteering vs the contractors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Think of how much money they've completely sucked from the economy that can never be returned.

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by pavel_lishin on Sunday March 10, 2013 @01:37PM (#5352674)
But look on the bright side - they're providing jobs to the otherwise-virtually-unemployable, if the competence and dedication to work I've seen is indicative of the TSA workforce as a whole.
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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by miles on Sunday March 10, 2013 @03:18PM (#5353067)
It's important to remember, it's easy to create jobs. Let's dig an enormous trench from Omaha, Nebraska to the Duluth, Minnesota using spoons. It'll take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people; many of them will be women. So we'll have this gender equality that we're worried...

When we start worrying about these kinds of things, the creation of jobs per se, we give - we have costs that are often hidden and hard to notice. When you talk about digging a trench with spoons, it's obvious. As we talk about these other things, buying American, doing things in expensive ways - we're going to impoverish ourselves, not make ourselves better off.

Econ professor Dr. Russell Roberts on NPR: http://m.npr.org/story/99015346

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by corysama on Sunday March 10, 2013 @01:59PM (#5352755)
Hooray for a trillion dollars spent getting thousands of people to do busywork 8 hours a day for years and years. :/
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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by javert on Sunday March 10, 2013 @04:58PM (#5353436)
Rewarding poverty just results in the breeding of even more poor people.

Government "creation" of jobs is not economically sustainable.

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by Evbn on Sunday March 10, 2013 @10:49PM (#5354622)
Higher quality of life is inversely correlated with family size. Bored people breed. And then use violence to survive.

Wtf is "rewarding poverty" anyway?

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by javert on Monday March 11, 2013 @01:19AM (#5355039)
It was a response to the comment that I was responding to.

Giving out make-work jobs that don't produce anything is rewarding poverty.

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by mpyne on Sunday March 10, 2013 @06:03PM (#5353686)
> Think of how much money they've completely sucked from the economy that can never be returned.

Strictly speaking it's all gone back into the economy anyways, though perhaps to other uses of capital than you might have wanted.

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by protomyth on Sunday March 10, 2013 @03:33PM (#5353134)
Sadly, the contractors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would probably be cheaper and more effective.
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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by Samuel_Michon on Sunday March 10, 2013 @04:44PM (#5353379)
How do you figure? Blackwater employees earn up to $1,000 a day [1], whereas the screeners at TSA get $25,000 to $45,000 a year [2].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/weekinreview/23burns.html?...

[2] http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/11/29/fox-panelists-ou...

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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by mpyne on Sunday March 10, 2013 @05:57PM (#5353662)
It's a good indicator of how reviled TSA is though: Blackwater has changed their name how many times due to how reviled they are, and yet people still compare them favorably to the TSA!
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Re:Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep flie... by protomyth on Sunday March 10, 2013 @08:33PM (#5354257)
Not as many needed and that is their in combat zone rate.
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