> There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security.
> Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location.
Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.
Why should private plane passengers be subject to TSA? TSA (paid for by you and me by the way, not for free) exists to protect the public from harm, on public flights by common carriers. It used to be contracted by airlines themselves. Unless you are the most extreme of pro-seatbelt law people, it would make little sense for TSA to screen anyone on a private plane manifest unless the client asked them to.
No, the TSA exists because 19 people hijacked 4 flights and succeeded in crashing 3 of them into various important buildings in the US on 9/11/2001.
Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.
Lots of things can crash into buildings. Should they all be screened by TSA? Drones and their operators prior to every launch? 30 minute helicopter tours and high-rise HVAC drop offs? Private satellites?
Or is licensing and registration (of pilots and aircraft and manifest and flight plan) enough?
Governments are reactive. So if any of these other things ever successfully destroy a building then you can absolutely count on new rules and laws that, at a minimum, will include screening.
So it’s complete building destruction that is the protective mission here? Not loss of life or general terrorism or something else? I’m glad we are clarifying
I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.
The danger of Steve Jobs hijacking his own private plane was obviously quite high! We can only thank the dutiful TSA officers for their brave service. I’m sure they risked their lives averting this danger. Have they been awarded any medals yet?
I don’t even understand why this is an issue, because TSA screening is funded through user fees. There’s a line item of $5.60 per one-way ticket for exactly this that’s separate from airfare and other fees. (https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/security-fees)
If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?
The question itself feels like it calls for "Schoolhouse Rock" level basics about how the federal government works.
The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.
On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.
Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.
You’re right that that’s the default state. However, Congress could have set things up such that the fees would pass through to TSA’s budget (i.e. earmarked) but chose not to.
Because the fee revenue was created by congress, so the money goes 1/3 to Treasury to help pay national debt (doesn't really make a dent), about $1.6B goes to the government general fund. But FY24 collected $4.5B in fees, but the budget was almost $9.5B.
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 5.60 per person per flight doesn't cover the cost of TSA airport security operations leaving congress responsible for the gap.
If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.
AFAIC there's no good reason for airport security to be a federal jobs program in the first place. The airports and/or their contractors are perfectly capable of operating x-ray machines and metal detectors on their own, and from what I understand are even still permitted to but all choose to let the government do it and pay for it.
What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.
I'm not the first to suggest this, but I think "fly at your own risk" airlines would be popular with some people. Keep the cockpit door reinforced, and maintain a gentleman's agreement among travellers on what to do if a passenger threatens a flight. Airport security is now reduced to 10 seconds.
It seems that SFO's policy of having an intermediate company that buffers salaries is working well because I flew through there to Taipei after this whole situation and there was no wait.
I _just_ went though the line. It wasn't too bad (5-10min, despite having bio ID), but it was by far the worst I've encountered at SFO in the decade I've been flying out of there.
No, it's accurate, because TSA (or at least the feds) ultimately pay for it, but the company has some runway it can spend to keep the employees working on the assumption it'll be paid later, I.E. a buffer.
Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
I have been kind of experimenting with using single archive pages for archive.is /.ph/.today links and then experimenting with either putting these on my github pages (and then archiving) just for more preservation purposes.
Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org
I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now)
I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes.
I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be.
This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up.
(This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)
I know it's bad, but yeah, I just hate waiting, it's stupid. So whenever I can I just go through "first class" security and nothing bad happens, just skipping the queue. Look decent, look busy, keep on walking and bam you're past the security in a minute compared to tens of minutes or hours. And don't ever remove that "short connection" or "priority" tag from your luggage, it indeed goes out first. Airports are so freaking annoying way to commute, take a bus/train/tram/taxi/car to the airport, figure out the maze, wait in queue, get bored after security (because you arrived to early not knowing how much you're going to wait in security), go to a gate, then a different gate, queue again, get inside, and wait again. Why did we do this to ourselves!?
Fascinating. Is there something specific about those temples that draws the crowds, like something akin to a famous cathedral? Must worship take place in a temple? I don't know how the religion works but did get to visit a local temple once with some coworkers and enjoyed the atmosphere.
At least it is a break from the endless stream of anti-LLM posts written by LLM with half the comments being serious replies and the other half fake-politely debating whether it was written by LLM.
Plus there is a bonus start-up opportunity to LLM-code an app that enables travelers to earn money while they wait in line at the airport.
Technology businesses need to fly employees around. Most airline traffic is for business not pleasure. I knew a guy who worked sales at IBM who practically lived at the airport.
I also like articles like this because I learn from the discussions from other commenters.
In the worst case, if I am not interested in the topic, I just move on to one of the other posts. I deliberately skip over the LLM posts, but I don't tell them to stop discussing it just because it isn't of interest to me. I'm not that self centered. There is enough space on the internet for everyone's discussion.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I thought the whole reason they're not funded was that Democrats refused to pass the bill unless it contained ICE reforms? Even if you're sympathetic to those reforms it's a bit disingenuous to characterize it as "Republicans are working hard to abuse people"
And it's important to note that ICE and CBP don't need additional funding. They were overfunded with the last spending bill by about 10x their actual needs.
That's the reason why ICE and CBP agents are still collecting paychecks while the rest of DHS is not.
It's actually a bit silly that Republicans, the party of limited government, have been holding up funding the TSA and FEMA because an agency they already overspent on won't get additional dollars. Not very DOGE.
Why won’t Republicans agree to the reforms? Seems like a pretty reasonable ask from the Democrats to restore law enforcement norms that reflect a civil society.
Doesn't that mean statements like "Republicans are working hard to abuse people" are just a long winded way of saying "grr I hate Republicans"? It doesn't matter who's doing the blocking, because your side is always right and Fighting For The People™, and the other side are just obstructionists blocking reasonable reforms?
>Would you mind answering the question, please, instead of embarking on a side quest?
Funny you're accusing me of derailing the topic when in my initial comment I specifically mentioned I wasn't interested in arguing over the merits of those reforms
>[...] Even if you're sympathetic to those reforms [...]
And for the record, in case you wanted to interpret my refusal of discussing that topic as some sort of sign I'm against them: I'm not. I just believe the topic has been discussed to death and there's no point relitigating it.
So if you want to derail the discussion it's "Don’t enter a ring if you can’t take a punch", but when I do it, it's "... instead of embarking on a side quest"?
its seems far more likely that they are just playing politics as sport. that is they are quite content to cause suffering if they can point the finger at the other team. just like the snap monies in the last shutdown.
You know, prior to this sentence "they" could have referred to either party. After all, the last shutdown was largely because the Democrats were fighting for ACA subsidy extensions, but I guess it's only "playing politics as sport" when you don't agree with the justification?
this is the problem isn't it? this is supposed to be why trump co is running the country. that governance has collapsed and they were supposed to refocus it on things that's mattered. see how that's going.
but yes, I think the result is that we have even less effective governance then we had a year ago. and I find it pretty troubling that the narrative that's being actively reinforced is that we really don't need to bother with the legislative process anymore since they are obviously completely useless
I know, I can't believe they refuse to pass the bill that would fund TSA.
Wait a minute, I'm getting additional information....you're not gonna believe this, but Republicans have been voting for it. I wonder who the holdup is, then....
> In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
Negative. It was passed with unanimous consent, there was only maybe five people there. I think that's a big difference between "passed" which gives the connotation that people actually voted on it, "unanimous consent" of the present.
You make this sound like it was a democrat plot, it was not.
Thune, the republican senate majority leader, was the one that put up the unanimous consent motion.
There were more than just 5 people there. Though it was late at night.
You can't push something through unanimous consent if there's not a quorum. That requires at least 51% of each party to be present.
Now, it's possible they waited until some of the big objectors to the bill fell asleep or left. But, that doesn't really change the fact that Thune pushed this through.
I made no claim as to party, it's just how it was done. If anything it was the Republicans who are the majority. I wanted to clarify that it was by unanimous consent, not a recorded vote.
Fair enough. But I do still have to push back on the notion that it was just 5 people there. If that were the case, you could have expected one of the more lucid members to have done a quorum call.
But what effects does it have on the legislative process? It sounds like at the very least, all the senators vaguely wanted it to be passed, but didn't want to be on the record for voting for it.
You are correct. The Speaker of the House is a toady who is held in line in the house by a small cabal of super MAGA people. Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation. His supine nature is also probably the strategy for the “3rd term” loophole.
>Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation
1. source on the bank account claim?
2. I don't think you need to involve theories that he's being financially blackmailed, when it's pretty clear that Trump has a tight grip over the Republican party, and isn't afraid to attack or back primary challengers for Republicans that he doesn't agree with, eg. Thomas Massie.
The one at CNN is the more interesting one. It says that he has a bank account but isn't required to disclose it "because it isn't an interest bearing account".
And this is why bills sound cover one topic and not a bundle of topics. "I heard it was X who blocked the bill that would actually make gas prices low (which also meant voting was eliminated)"
It’s really just a handful that have long lines part of the day. LAX for example hasn’t has a line at all really. Takes longer for my bag to be secondary checked every time than it does to wait in line.
Essential Air Service travelers aren't seeing any major pain either traveling outbound. Fortunately (though kind of sadly) the TSA folks only work a couple hours a day at the checkpoint for the single flight in and out so most of them are working side jobs anyways as their day job from what I hear. Our checkpoint doesn't even open until ~45 minutes before boarding starts in the middle of the day.
I wonder why Trump just doesn't sell this himself, like golden tickets that you can buy from ICE where they just push back the free-tier line enjoyers to insert the patriotic gold level travelers.
In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.
Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.
From the last few paragraphs:
> There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security.
> Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location.
Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.
The people arriving on private jets have always bypassed these bureaucratic procedures. Brotherhood and equality.
Why should private plane passengers be subject to TSA? TSA (paid for by you and me by the way, not for free) exists to protect the public from harm, on public flights by common carriers. It used to be contracted by airlines themselves. Unless you are the most extreme of pro-seatbelt law people, it would make little sense for TSA to screen anyone on a private plane manifest unless the client asked them to.
No, the TSA exists because 19 people hijacked 4 flights and succeeded in crashing 3 of them into various important buildings in the US on 9/11/2001.
Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.
Were you born after 2001? Did you remember those planes that flew into the buildings?
Private planes can do the same thing.
The TSA was created because a plane crashed into a building. Private planes can crash into buildings. Why should they be exempt from TSA checks?
Lots of things can crash into buildings. Should they all be screened by TSA? Drones and their operators prior to every launch? 30 minute helicopter tours and high-rise HVAC drop offs? Private satellites?
Or is licensing and registration (of pilots and aircraft and manifest and flight plan) enough?
Governments are reactive. So if any of these other things ever successfully destroy a building then you can absolutely count on new rules and laws that, at a minimum, will include screening.
Commercial drones can't bring down buildings. And they're still subject to an awful lot of regulations.
So it’s complete building destruction that is the protective mission here? Not loss of life or general terrorism or something else? I’m glad we are clarifying
I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.
This reminds me of when Steve Job's had his ninja throwing stars confiscated by TSA getting on his private jet.
The danger of Steve Jobs hijacking his own private plane was obviously quite high! We can only thank the dutiful TSA officers for their brave service. I’m sure they risked their lives averting this danger. Have they been awarded any medals yet?
HN can always be counted on to have a good contingent of temporarily embarrassed billionaires ready to stick up for them at the slightest provocation.
You don’t have to be a billionaire to fly out of an FBO and you don’t have to fly out of an FBO to be interested in freedom of movement. No Kings.
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I don’t even understand why this is an issue, because TSA screening is funded through user fees. There’s a line item of $5.60 per one-way ticket for exactly this that’s separate from airfare and other fees. (https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/security-fees)
If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?
The question itself feels like it calls for "Schoolhouse Rock" level basics about how the federal government works.
The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.
On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.
Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.
You’re right that that’s the default state. However, Congress could have set things up such that the fees would pass through to TSA’s budget (i.e. earmarked) but chose not to.
If you scroll down on the page, it'll show that the user fees only offset ~20% of the overall security expenses.
In addition, most fees (including most of the TSA fee) collected by the US Federal government isn't earmarked - it just goes into the general fund.
More breakdown here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/tsa-funding-security-fees-...
Thanks!
The same article you linked has a chart that shows that actual expenses are around 4x the fees that are collected.
Because the fee revenue was created by congress, so the money goes 1/3 to Treasury to help pay national debt (doesn't really make a dent), about $1.6B goes to the government general fund. But FY24 collected $4.5B in fees, but the budget was almost $9.5B.
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 5.60 per person per flight doesn't cover the cost of TSA airport security operations leaving congress responsible for the gap.
If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.
AFAIC there's no good reason for airport security to be a federal jobs program in the first place. The airports and/or their contractors are perfectly capable of operating x-ray machines and metal detectors on their own, and from what I understand are even still permitted to but all choose to let the government do it and pay for it.
What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.
I'm not the first to suggest this, but I think "fly at your own risk" airlines would be popular with some people. Keep the cockpit door reinforced, and maintain a gentleman's agreement among travellers on what to do if a passenger threatens a flight. Airport security is now reduced to 10 seconds.
It seems that SFO's policy of having an intermediate company that buffers salaries is working well because I flew through there to Taipei after this whole situation and there was no wait.
It’s an odd list of airports which contract their own security screeners. I’d bet a lot of places are going to consider joining that program:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/us/airports-without-tsa
I _just_ went though the line. It wasn't too bad (5-10min, despite having bio ID), but it was by far the worst I've encountered at SFO in the decade I've been flying out of there.
yeah SFO seems to be completely uneffected
buffers salaries?
A strange way of saying, not TSA at all, and handled by a private for-profit company instead.
No, it's accurate, because TSA (or at least the feds) ultimately pay for it, but the company has some runway it can spend to keep the employees working on the assumption it'll be paid later, I.E. a buffer.
Only FOUR people actually used these services?
Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
https://archive.ph/cwDaq (No account needed)
I have been kind of experimenting with using single archive pages for archive.is /.ph/.today links and then experimenting with either putting these on my github pages (and then archiving) just for more preservation purposes.
Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org
https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-...
I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now)
I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes.
I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be.
This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up.
(This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)
Doesn't this guy's server just DDoS some dude's blog with your own browser? Didn't click.
Yes, and: If I recall correctly, cloudflare is sinking all the extra traffic for him, so it doesn't actually impact him.
Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact.
(Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)
I know it's bad, but yeah, I just hate waiting, it's stupid. So whenever I can I just go through "first class" security and nothing bad happens, just skipping the queue. Look decent, look busy, keep on walking and bam you're past the security in a minute compared to tens of minutes or hours. And don't ever remove that "short connection" or "priority" tag from your luggage, it indeed goes out first. Airports are so freaking annoying way to commute, take a bus/train/tram/taxi/car to the airport, figure out the maze, wait in queue, get bored after security (because you arrived to early not knowing how much you're going to wait in security), go to a gate, then a different gate, queue again, get inside, and wait again. Why did we do this to ourselves!?
https://wapo.st/4rYan7y
In Indian temples line-sitters are very common. Many queues are 5+ hours long.
Fascinating. Is there something specific about those temples that draws the crowds, like something akin to a famous cathedral? Must worship take place in a temple? I don't know how the religion works but did get to visit a local temple once with some coworkers and enjoyed the atmosphere.
What in the hell does this have to do with technology? Violates HN's post rules.
At least it is a break from the endless stream of anti-LLM posts written by LLM with half the comments being serious replies and the other half fake-politely debating whether it was written by LLM.
Plus there is a bonus start-up opportunity to LLM-code an app that enables travelers to earn money while they wait in line at the airport.
Technology businesses need to fly employees around. Most airline traffic is for business not pleasure. I knew a guy who worked sales at IBM who practically lived at the airport.
I also like articles like this because I learn from the discussions from other commenters.
In the worst case, if I am not interested in the topic, I just move on to one of the other posts. I deliberately skip over the LLM posts, but I don't tell them to stop discussing it just because it isn't of interest to me. I'm not that self centered. There is enough space on the internet for everyone's discussion.
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
.......................
Nowhere does it say it must have to do with technology.
Capitalism works quite well at solving problems.
Efficiency is when you make a problem and then make people pay you to solve it. Or maybe that was some other word, I forget.
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It's almost like the Republicans are working hard to abuse people just enough to keep them in their place, like a abusive spouse.
I thought the whole reason they're not funded was that Democrats refused to pass the bill unless it contained ICE reforms? Even if you're sympathetic to those reforms it's a bit disingenuous to characterize it as "Republicans are working hard to abuse people"
The Senate unanimously passed a DHS (excluding ICE/CBP) funding bill this week, which Mike Johnson blocked in the House. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/senate-agreement-dhs...
And it's important to note that ICE and CBP don't need additional funding. They were overfunded with the last spending bill by about 10x their actual needs.
That's the reason why ICE and CBP agents are still collecting paychecks while the rest of DHS is not.
It's actually a bit silly that Republicans, the party of limited government, have been holding up funding the TSA and FEMA because an agency they already overspent on won't get additional dollars. Not very DOGE.
Why won’t Republicans agree to the reforms? Seems like a pretty reasonable ask from the Democrats to restore law enforcement norms that reflect a civil society.
>Why won’t Republicans agree to the reforms?
Doesn't that mean statements like "Republicans are working hard to abuse people" are just a long winded way of saying "grr I hate Republicans"? It doesn't matter who's doing the blocking, because your side is always right and Fighting For The People™, and the other side are just obstructionists blocking reasonable reforms?
Would you mind answering the question, please, instead of embarking on a side quest?
>Would you mind answering the question, please, instead of embarking on a side quest?
Funny you're accusing me of derailing the topic when in my initial comment I specifically mentioned I wasn't interested in arguing over the merits of those reforms
>[...] Even if you're sympathetic to those reforms [...]
And for the record, in case you wanted to interpret my refusal of discussing that topic as some sort of sign I'm against them: I'm not. I just believe the topic has been discussed to death and there's no point relitigating it.
Then why are you even participating in the discussion? You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Don’t enter a ring if you can’t take a punch.
So if you want to derail the discussion it's "Don’t enter a ring if you can’t take a punch", but when I do it, it's "... instead of embarking on a side quest"?
its seems far more likely that they are just playing politics as sport. that is they are quite content to cause suffering if they can point the finger at the other team. just like the snap monies in the last shutdown.
>just like the snap monies in the last shutdown.
You know, prior to this sentence "they" could have referred to either party. After all, the last shutdown was largely because the Democrats were fighting for ACA subsidy extensions, but I guess it's only "playing politics as sport" when you don't agree with the justification?
this is the problem isn't it? this is supposed to be why trump co is running the country. that governance has collapsed and they were supposed to refocus it on things that's mattered. see how that's going.
but yes, I think the result is that we have even less effective governance then we had a year ago. and I find it pretty troubling that the narrative that's being actively reinforced is that we really don't need to bother with the legislative process anymore since they are obviously completely useless
I know, I can't believe they refuse to pass the bill that would fund TSA.
Wait a minute, I'm getting additional information....you're not gonna believe this, but Republicans have been voting for it. I wonder who the holdup is, then....
Yesterday morning, CNN:
> In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
> Then, they left town.
It's obvious what's happening.
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-fundin...
Not just bipartisan. That bill was unanimously passed in the Senate.
Negative. It was passed with unanimous consent, there was only maybe five people there. I think that's a big difference between "passed" which gives the connotation that people actually voted on it, "unanimous consent" of the present.
It was also at 2 o'clock in the morning
You make this sound like it was a democrat plot, it was not.
Thune, the republican senate majority leader, was the one that put up the unanimous consent motion.
There were more than just 5 people there. Though it was late at night.
You can't push something through unanimous consent if there's not a quorum. That requires at least 51% of each party to be present.
Now, it's possible they waited until some of the big objectors to the bill fell asleep or left. But, that doesn't really change the fact that Thune pushed this through.
I made no claim as to party, it's just how it was done. If anything it was the Republicans who are the majority. I wanted to clarify that it was by unanimous consent, not a recorded vote.
Fair enough. But I do still have to push back on the notion that it was just 5 people there. If that were the case, you could have expected one of the more lucid members to have done a quorum call.
But what effects does it have on the legislative process? It sounds like at the very least, all the senators vaguely wanted it to be passed, but didn't want to be on the record for voting for it.
In the Senate.
You are correct. The Speaker of the House is a toady who is held in line in the house by a small cabal of super MAGA people. Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation. His supine nature is also probably the strategy for the “3rd term” loophole.
>Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation
1. source on the bank account claim?
2. I don't think you need to involve theories that he's being financially blackmailed, when it's pretty clear that Trump has a tight grip over the Republican party, and isn't afraid to attack or back primary challengers for Republicans that he doesn't agree with, eg. Thomas Massie.
This search yields a lot of results. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mike+johnson+bank+accounts
The one at CNN is the more interesting one. It says that he has a bank account but isn't required to disclose it "because it isn't an interest bearing account".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/09/politics/mike-johnson-finance...
And this is why bills sound cover one topic and not a bundle of topics. "I heard it was X who blocked the bill that would actually make gas prices low (which also meant voting was eliminated)"
The party who controls all three branches of federal government?
I keep hearing about these long lines but I literally went to a major airport the other day for a flight and got through security in minutes.
It’s really just a handful that have long lines part of the day. LAX for example hasn’t has a line at all really. Takes longer for my bag to be secondary checked every time than it does to wait in line.
That's why anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much.
They are both anecdotal
I’ve heard this is very airport dependent
Essential Air Service travelers aren't seeing any major pain either traveling outbound. Fortunately (though kind of sadly) the TSA folks only work a couple hours a day at the checkpoint for the single flight in and out so most of them are working side jobs anyways as their day job from what I hear. Our checkpoint doesn't even open until ~45 minutes before boarding starts in the middle of the day.
I wonder why Trump just doesn't sell this himself, like golden tickets that you can buy from ICE where they just push back the free-tier line enjoyers to insert the patriotic gold level travelers.
In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.
Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.
If some of his minions gave him this idea he’d probably do it.
we already have this with TSA Pre
Where does the money go? With ICE implementation they can split the proceeds and the customers can enjoy seeing people pushed around on prem.