Hacker News Reader

Comment by changoplatanero | Hacker News Reader

I tried to estimate how many deaths TSA is responsible for from traffic fatalities from their employees commuting to work, thinking that maybe more people died this way than lives were saved from prevented terror attacks. Turns out driving is really safe and not many fatalities are due to TSA employees commutes.

View on HN

The amount of time they've wasted (billions of hours) is on the order of one 9/11 of lifespans. Is that a valid analogy?

The article shows the number of people who died due to driving because driving increased when airline travel decreased due to the TSA.

But how many people were saved from cancer deaths, because they weren’t exposed to more radiation in the upper atmosphere? Is that offset by breathing more ozone and PM2.5 on the roadway?

No. That's the same amount of radiation as eating an average banana gives you.

I've never understood the banana reference. Are they saying that there's so little radiation from a high altitude flight that it's the equivalent to a banana, or that a banana is an unusually high source of radiation?

Bananas are rich in potassium which can be radioactive. On average, bananas emit roughly similar amounts of radiation as high altitude flight. The intent is to demonstrate the silliness of the argument that flying poses some kind of radiation risk that elevates mortality - would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality?

People hear radiation and lose rationality because of the fear mongering in the 50s and beyond.

> would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality

Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've seen or done. So you really shouldn't listen to me.

The only time I've really seen this info about bananas being bad is typically in Taboola sponsored ads that I'll never click on and only see when I'm using some device that's not mine not using blockers.

Just because of where the article is listed, I've always just assumed it to be crackpottery.

>> rich in potassium which can be radioactive.

All potassium is always radioactive. Unless your have a gas centrifuge facility next to your greenhouse, all your bananas are always radioactive.

>All potassium is always radioactive

While practically true, this is sufficiently imprecise to bother the more pedantic variety of nerd; for accuracy I therefore quote the relevant section of Wikipedia (a resource we should give daily thanks for):

"Naturally occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which potassium-40 is radioactive. Traces of potassium-40 are found in all potassium, and it is the most common radioisotope in the human body."

Bananas have a lot of potassium which is naturally radioactive

But also those people would still exist and have other jobs to commute to instead.

But we could give everyone 55000 full-time equivalents of leisure time back in saved resource spending/wastage.

It’s a drip for everyone but there are many more drips available where that came from.

And with a bit of luck, those other jobs would contribute to society in other ways. The question the parent was trying to answer was whether having those people drive to their TSA jobs was a net good, measured in terms of "lives saved" which is the TSA's own metric of success - in other words, does it "pull its own weight", given the sunk cost of the commute?

Not many is still not none, which is the order of magnitide for lives saved by the TSA.

While driving is safe, it's also a lot more dangerous than flying. So pushing people towards driving miles instead of flying iles also should have been a source of mortality in your analysis-- too bad that one is harder to assess. Since for many trips driving is often not a reasonable alternative there probably wouldn't be that many-- but again, it wouldn't take much to overcome any arguable benefit of the TSA.

And, of course, the enormous resources that go into the TSA could be instead funneled into actual lifesaving activities.

Driving is more or less safe depending on the conditions - if the TSA was requiring workers to drive in on a Friday or Saturday in icy conditions where they otherwise would not that'd be way more dangerous than a 9am commute. Still relatively safe (although I really don't like the characterisation of driving as actually safe - people usually only look at the fatalities and ignore the injury rate which is dramatically higher).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com