In other news today...
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@groo said in In other news today...:
I would be scared if I had to travel to the US for any reason
Imagine ordinary airplane security, but implemented by a bunch of untrained gibbons with total job security and no inclination to behave efficiently.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@groo said in In other news today...:
I would be scared if I had to travel to the US for any reason
Imagine ordinary airplane security, but implemented by a bunch of untrained gibbons with total job security and no inclination to behave efficiently or professionally.
FTFY
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@Fox: I never expect a gibbon to behave professionally, whether trained or otherwise.
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@dkf My admittedly unfounded impression is that the TSA gets the same sorts of personnel that most security firms do: college students, semi-senile retirees, writers and musicians who need a day job, small-time drug dealers and other petty crooks who need a legit job to keep the IRS from noticing them, creepy pervs who get off on making people do what they say, and wannabe cops who couldn't pass the psych exam.
I worked as a rent-a-cop longer than I care to remember, and trust me, the combination of boredom, irritation, disrespect (aimed at the guards, I mean, though guards tend to return the favor), and paranoia takes a toll on your psyche, even if you aren't a power-hungry nutjob to begin with.
The only real differences I see are that there's slightly more of a chance that a real threat could actually show up some day (like maybe 0.5% chance instead of 0.01%), and you wouldn't get as many times where no one was around so you could read or take a nap.
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@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
The only real differences I see are that there's slightly more of a chance that a real threat could actually show up some day (like maybe 0.5% chance instead of 0.01%), and you wouldn't get as many times where no one was around so you could read or take a nap.
I'm still puzzled why they decided to make the TSA the employer of all those grunts instead of having the airport (etc.) being the employer (or contracting it out) and with the TSA doing occasional checks to see if the regulations are being enforced. There's a real case to be made for the USA going virtually unerringly for the worst option when anything to do with government is involved, even by comparison with that commie haven of Western Europe.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
The only real differences I see are that there's slightly more of a chance that a real threat could actually show up some day (like maybe 0.5% chance instead of 0.01%), and you wouldn't get as many times where no one was around so you could read or take a nap.
I'm still puzzled why they decided to make the TSA the employer of all those grunts instead of having the airport (etc.) being the employer (or contracting it out) and with the TSA doing occasional checks to see if the regulations are being enforced. There's a real case to be made for the USA going virtually unerringly for the worst option when anything to do with government is involved, even by comparison with that commie haven of Western Europe.
What you have to understand is that security (and to a large extend law enforcement) is a shell game by its very nature. They aren't there to prevent attacks, because the only way to do that would be to forbid air travel and shoot down anything that does get into the sky (and even that probably wouldn't work). The guards are there for due diligence, not to actually accomplish anything.
And trust me, the guards themselves are well aware of it; at the sites I worked (which were all no-carry, but I understand that armed sites weren't very different), we were told outright by some of the more honest chiefs that the main thing we were guarding was the owners' insurance rates. The TSA is there to make it look like something is being done, but they aren't actually doing anything, they can't do anything, and they know it.
A lot of why so many of them act like dicks sometimes is simply out of frustration from being in an impossible job. Sound familiar?
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@accalia said in In other news today...:
or, a decent kershaw would get them in too if they need access.
Sorry... (not really)
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@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
creepy pervs who get off on making people do what they say
There are apparently a significant number of TSA agents who are in it because they get off on searching people or rooting through their bags.
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@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
and you wouldn't get as many times where no one was around so you could read or take a nap
Naaahhhh, still plenty of those.
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When Larry was first packaged for shipping last week, FedEx refused to take him.....
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@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
the same sorts of personnel that most security firms do: college students, semi-senile retirees, writers and musicians who need a day job, small-time drug dealers and other petty crooks who need a legit job to keep the IRS from noticing them, creepy pervs who get off on making people do what they say, and wannabe cops who couldn't pass the psych exam.
Proper cops also do it occasionally as a side job or between jobs.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
I'm still puzzled why they decided to make the TSA the employer of all those grunts instead of having the airport (etc.) being the employer (or contracting it out) and with the TSA doing occasional checks to see if the regulations are being enforced.
That's the way it used to be before 9/11, but then 9/11 happened. The private guards let the 9/11 terrorists on the planes, so we had to make sure that could never happen again. Since the private guards weren't adequate, we had to have the government make the airports more secure by doing it themselves (and promptly hired many of the same people who weren't adequate when they worked for the private companies).
We have to do something; this is something; yada, yada.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
That's the way it used to be before 9/11, but then 9/11 happened.
Well, I remember what airport security in the US was like before then, and “total joke” is perhaps about as polite as I can get. So far as I could tell, there was no attempt to assess whether the private security people were doing their jobs at all. I suppose you could argue that there was a common minimum standard; “none” is a minimum of sorts. ;) Now you've wandered off in the direction of useless (and expensive, and inefficient) governmental fascism.
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@Fox said in In other news today...:
@ScholRLEA said in In other news today...:
creepy pervs who get off on making people do what they say
There are apparently a significant number of TSA agents who are in it because they get off on searching people or rooting through their bags.
Color me shocked.
Seriously, I saw plenty of them just in corpse-rat security, when you didn't even have a gun and the only authority you had was that you could politely ask someone to show them their ID badge and if you were lucky, maybe they would if they weren't one of the upper execs, and maybe you wouldn't get fired if you asked one of the upper execs to show you their badges because you were supposed to know them on sight even if they just flew in from East Mofn and had never been to this site before.
If even that tiny amount of power can go to people's heads, and attract the kind of people even my father would have said were a kinda creepy on the covert non-con Dom/Sub shit, then yeah, no surprises there.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
There's a real case to be made for the USA going virtually unerringly for the worst option when anything to do with government is involved, even by comparison with that commie haven of Western Europe.
And then you guys wonder why we resist letting the USG take over health care.
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In other news today: Most 13 year old girls don't fit in the toddler seat on a shopping cart. link.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
13 year old
@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
toddler seat
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
link.
Uh huh...
Whelp, I guess I'm out.
So many barriers to entry...
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@Tsaukpaetra The ponies on your screenshots will never cease to amuse me, I think. That one on the top looks so done with these full-screen popup windows.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
link.
Uh huh...
Whelp, I guess I'm out.
So many barriers to entry...
And they're a bugger to link to here cause of the underscores in the URLs. And that video wasn't even theirs it was apparently on dumpert.nl originally but they didn't link source and I can't find the video on there. Linking to source is hard, apparently.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
There's a real case to be made for the USA going virtually unerringly for the worst option when anything to do with government is involved, even by comparison with that commie haven of Western Europe.
And then you guys wonder why we resist letting the USG take over health care.
And then we laugh at you when you go bankrupt because of a broken toe.
(Alternate: we laugh at you when you don't go to the doctor for a broken toe because it's too expensive, and instead hobble for the rest of your life-- slowly degrading your ability to walk, and thus function at your job-- and since you're in a "right to work" state, your employers terminates you because you aren't serving The Overlords to the best of your ability-- so you lose your income, car, home and liveleyhood anyways-- until eventually that broken toe doesn't set right, pierces the skin, and you get Gangrene and die)
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@Lorne-Kates said in In other news today...:
And then we laugh at you when you go bankrupt because of a broken toe.
Are you another humorless German, then?
@Lorne-Kates said in In other news today...:
Alternate: we laugh at you when you don't go to the doctor for a broken toe because it's too expensive, and instead hobble for the rest of your life-- slowly degrading your ability to walk, and thus function at your job-- and since you're in a "right to work" state, your employers terminates you because you aren't serving The Overlords to the best of your ability-- so you lose your income, car, home and liveleyhood anyways-- until eventually that broken toe doesn't set right, pierces the skin, and you get Gangrene and die
I suspect you're just upset because we won't let you live where it's warm.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Are you another humorless German, then?
no, he's just a psychopath. But a psychopath who won't go bankrupt from medical bills, so there's that
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
And then you guys wonder why we resist letting the USG take over health care.
It's the eternal optimism of the retarded. "Surely this time we'll get it right".
There is no New Soviet Man. If your plan revolves around having "the right people this time" it will fail.
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@FrostCat I'm much happier letting people have wrong ideas about "medical bankruptcies" in the US than join them in ruining our healthcare system.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Whelp, I guess I'm out.
Chrome? Ctrl-Alt-N, paste new link, hit green button. Fuck you, newspaper, your cookie is ephemeral.
Of course, all you'll get is a page in Dutch, so if you can't read the "please don't starve us, adblocker user" page, you won't be able to read the article, either.
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@Lorne-Kates said in In other news today...:
nd then we laugh at you when you go bankrupt because of a broken toe.
And we respond by laughing at you when you come here for an MRI. Or point out--again--the time my wife went to see a doctor about stomach pains, and the doc said "sounds like you need your gall bladder out. Can you come back tomorrow?" And in spite of the word "need" it wasn't emergency surgery.
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@Lorne-Kates said in In other news today...:
you don't go to the doctor for a broken toe because it's too expensive
EMTALA laughs at you, too.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
I'm much happier letting people have wrong ideas about "medical bankruptcies" in the US than join them in ruining our healthcare system.
Everyone who thinks the US needs to have single-payer should have to move to a country that already does, and use the system the way regular people do, not connected ones. I.e., "macular degeneration? Fuck you, we'll give you the treatment after you go blind in one eye." Also, Liverpool Pathway.
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@FrostCat It's not worth it. Better to live in Mississippi.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
It's not worth it.
sending a few wannabe commies to Europe is likely to be far cheaper than fucking around with 1/6 of the economy AGAIN.
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@FrostCat Well, yeah. I meant the whole thing.
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@boomzilla Time for the parking brake next time, I guess.
About 20 years ago my wife stopped off to pick me up from work and came inside the building to wait for me. While she was waiting, she told me another woman came in ranting about the car parked with the dog inside, and did anyone know whose it was, because she was thinking about smashing the window and rescuing the poor thing.
That's when my wife piped up and said "that's my dog, and the car's running, and he's got AC that's probably cooler than what's here in the office."
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
How did the dog shift gears?
From the article:
the Mercury apparently had a column-mounted gear-changer, meaning one of the dogs likely hit it out of "park" and into "drive"
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@TimeBandit Why am I not surprised that this person drove a Mercury.
Although I guess a Buick would have been an even better fit...
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@blakeyrat Because Mercury and Buick are mainly for old people ?
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@blakeyrat said in In other news today...:
@TimeBandit Why am I not surprised that this person drove a Mercury.
Although I guess a Buick would have been an even better fit...
Crazy 'bout a Mecury,
goin' crazy 'bout a Mercury!
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury and cruise itup and down the roadinto the side of a store!
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@TimeBandit They're for this particular demographic of middle-aged woman, usually overweight, who keep tiny dogs.
Next time you see either brand take a look at who's behind the wheel. Is it a man? Hardly ever. Is it a woman under about 40 years old? Never. Do they have an annoying yippy dog? Usually.
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@FrostCat said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Whelp, I guess I'm out.
Chrome? Ctrl-Alt-N, paste new link, hit green button. Fuck you, newspaper, your cookie is ephemeral.
Of course, all you'll get is a page in Dutch, so if you can't read the "please don't starve us, adblocker user" page, you won't be able to read the article, either.
Yeah, ads are blocked at the DNS level, and I currently don't have access enough to temporarily switch to a non-adblocked DNS server just to view something I can't read anyways. J
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
switch to a non-adblocked DNS server
[Insert "Why would you do that?" meme here.]
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
where it's warm.
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@bb36e Holy shit it's even freezing in the middle of summer!
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@bb36e Come on, he lives in USA, be polite at least (it's the Canadian way).
That's 80.6 Fahrenheit, feels like 89.6.
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@boomzilla Celsius!
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@boomzilla There's even a ring of snow around the sun.