If you have the job that forces you to feel up the crotches of children in order to encourage their parents to send them through a machine that takes naked pictures of them without probable cause of having committed any crime, then I suggest you quit that job.

Are plenty of hardworking people going to have their feelings and self esteem hurt by this process? Good. Systemetized violations of our most private areas should cause all sorts of pain.

I might feel differently if these were sworn law enforcement officers we're talking about, for a number of reasons. I'm generally very respectful of law enforcement. Fortunately (or not), I'm not forced to confront that conundrum, since these aren't police officers, but low-skilled "security" contractors whose sole purpose is to harass citizens in order to create the illusion of control.

By the way, in the history of all-time worst rationalizations for behavior, do we even need to talk about "that person has a job and they are doing it as they are instructed to do"?

The pat-down is better than the machine. If my privacy is going to be invaded, I want to look the person doing it in the eyes. If I'm going to be embarassed, I want the agent embarassed too. The pat-downs are inconvenient. Systematized invasions of our most private things should be inconvenient. TSA agents are going to face a torrent of complaints alleging abuse, molestation, &c. Good. The whole program is abusive.

What scares me is the faceless machine nobody cares about silently collecting naked pictures of every citizen, managed by people nobody will ever see who can never be held accountable for anything. You can't simply flip a switch and capture high fidelity copies of a pat-down search. You can with the machines.

Incidentally: contrary to popular opinion, security agents, law enforcement, border control, &c all very much do care when complaints are filed on them. Their M.O. is that nobody takes the time to file those complaints. They're counting on people not bothering with the pat-down because the machine seems more convenient, and they're counting on not dealing with a flood of complaints. I plan on filing a complaint at the first hint of an off-color comment about what they're doing. "Better get new gloves, Fred!" --- "I'd like your name and your supervisor's name, now."

I don't know what the answer is for all drugs, but Marijuana should obviously be legal, so that's a good place to start. If we wait for the perfect answer to all questions, we'll never fix anything.

It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of creating the right incentives.

In the 1940’s, the paleontologist von Koenigswald was searching for early human remains on Java and decided to enlist the help of the locals in his search by offering them “ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with.” Unfortunately for von Koenigswald (and for his findings), he discovered too late that the locals “had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.”

From http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/when-youre-...

(The story is from the book A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is one of the best books I've ever read. The amazing thing about the book is that it is in fact a short history of nearly everything.)

Combine the difficulty of getting incentives right with the inherent problems of Government and a dangerous mix results. For example, every time a subsidy is created, a special-interest group sprouts up dedicated to preserving the subsidy in perpetuity, long after it has outlived its utility.

We certainly don't care, as long as you make things people want.

Stemming the flow of money to brutal drug lords is reason #1 to rethink the current drug policies. Glad to see that point spelled out so clearly. What's going on in Mexico is truly heartbreaking.

Marijuana is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but what about legalizing harder drugs like cocaine?

EDIT: Removed the question because I saw another HN'er posted it. Then added it back when Paul responded so it'd make sense in context.