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by mrandish 533 days ago
> convince most of their customers it will be safe to attend

Apparently, you've never met my Aunt Sue. She has a graduate degree in innumeracy with a minor in illiteracy and a specialization in worrying about whatever the media tells her to worry about. However, she always votes.

More seriously, it's not cost-effective to "convince most customers it will be safe enough to attend." The game theory around fallacious public perception makes it a losing proposition for a politician or company to ever appear to reduce security requirements because as soon as "rare bad thing happens", they will be blamed - even though their reduction in pointless measures had no bearing on it.

Most independent experts agree that securing cockpit doors in 2002 made subjecting every passenger to the TSA's increased security measures unnecessary and, objectively, a very poor ROI in both cost and disruption. However, the TSA will never, ever go away - even though it could and should. Not only is reducing security politically costly, the TSA is now a multi-billion dollar federal bureaucracy, paying hundreds of vendors with lobbyists and employing tens of thousands of unionized workers spread across the most populous congressional districts. Yes, this is frustrating.

1 comments

They don't need to convince most of the public, just enough so they can fill up their venue. There are some Aunt Sues who are too afraid to go to concerts, but concert venues are still able to fill up when they have a popular act so it stands to reason that they're managing public perception of the risk well enough for their own needs.