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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

By that logic, TSA actually makes people less safe by causing people to take long dangerous road trips over safe flights.

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Yes, the TSA's policies cause somewhere on the order of 100 extra road deaths each year.

If you have a source for that number, I'd love to spread it around.

Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security. http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf (page 27)

And another 1,200 more deaths than expected in the three months following 9/11: http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml

Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...

Yes, and I've also seen 150 road deaths on one http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/constitution/... and 190.7 deaths via all TSA causes in another that even includes methodoloty http://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2010/11/24/do-the-tsa-new... The bias of those sources might skew their results, but I really doubt the number is less than 50, hence my use of "on the order of".

That's exactly right.

You've managed to stumble across Hacker News meme #17.

Until a problem is fixed, it is acceptable to communicate with solutions. (And if a problem remains unfixed after suitable solutions are offered, it is further acceptable to complain about it.)

I think my comment was misinterpreted by some. I don't disagree with his statement or with him saying it on Hacker News. I find it interesting that memes appear everywhere, even on sites that think they are "above them." Another example of a Hacker News meme is the phrase "Cargo Cult X." I've noticed others, but I can't recall them right now.

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