When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers • Hacker News Board

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#101

Post by honkhonkpants » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

bluejekyll wrote: post #92

mysterypie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction You sound very sure of yourself, but telephony is pretty damn complex and there are lots of strange things that happen in telephone call routing. Maybe if that guy has a cell number from another city or a foreign country, or with a certain carrier that doesn't comply with all the requirements of E911, or there are obscure…

In San Francisco, if you dial 911 on a cell phone you get the CHP, not San Francisco police. Adds delay to the help getting there. There is real number you can dial instead, which I've stored in my phone and allows me to dial the SF 911 center directly. Luckily I haven't needed it for more than a brush fire. This might be true in other states as well.

In SF when you dial 911 it is a good solid five minutes before anyone picks up because there is first the TTY modem handshake and then a recorded message in English, Spanish, more than one kind of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and on and on.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#102

Post by bsg75 » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:08 PM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #49

URSpider94 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than enough blame to go around. Part of the issue is that private firms come in and pitch an option to cities and towns by which they can get out of their budget scrape by privatizing schools/fire/jails/traffic enforcement in return for granting a monopoly to a company and allowing them to charge new fees. This looks like an attractive option, rather than raising taxes, but I can't think of a time when I…

A lot of privatised systems work very well. Denmark has an almost entirely privatised emergency system; one company alone runs 65% of their fire brigades and 85% of their ambulance services, and it seems to work great. Frankly, this story seems to be "terribly run towns that mismanaged their way almost into bankruptcy and can no longer afford to provide critical services are also terrible at negotiating other contrac…

Does that government still regulate the systems, ensuring proper service as a priority over profit, or do they simply forgo responsibility as often appears to be the case in the US examples?

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#103

Post by winstonewert » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:12 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #100

winstonewert wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. Both are actually, in some sense, the same thing. Both are costs which you will pay instead of your insurance company. Because they don't pay those costs, their assesments of the costs of a fire will be off. Thus they will let some houses burn which optimally, would not burn. However, my underlying point was really that it does make rational sense to allow some houses to burn. We could put a fireman on e…

Firemen get trucks with sirens and lights. There is no need to locate one on every street. Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?

> Firemen get trucks with sirens and lights. There is no need to locate one on every street.

But we'd still save more lives, houses, and heirlooms if we did put one on every street. Every additional kilometer between my house and the fire station increases the level of risk for my house. My point is: it's not binary: you have fire protection or you don't. You have varying degrees of fire protection quality with varying degrees of cost and you have pick the one you want.

> Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?

No, I certainly hold to the subjective theory of value which rejects the idea that there is an objective fair total ordering of value.

By rational, I mean its a decision that makes sense given your subjective valuation. You aren't going to reduce the risk as much as possible because that would be far too expensive. You are going to choose a level of risk that in your estimation trades off expensive and risk in an acceptable manner. That's subjective, and will vary from person to person, but no matter what your decision is, you will end up having some risk that you could have gotten rid of it, if you were willing to pay for it.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#104

Post by hangsi » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

dexterdog wrote: post #33

andrepd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very simplistic way to do things. If there were no private firefighters then it wouldn't take long for there to be enough public pressure for a firefighting force to be financed by the state. Because these predatory companies are already in place, the government won't bother and will just shrug. So the alternative to private firefighters isn't no firefighters.

But does the public version cost less than the private one. I would be shocked if it did.

Cost? Probably very similar. However, should the private fire service be around when your house is on fire, you are in no position to refuse whatever price they ask for (and they will happily pocket the difference).

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#105

Post by hangsi » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

freditup wrote: post #11

weisser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts) Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...

Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US. I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.

I think it has less to do with superiority than many people believe. Consider the gist of this idea I made up now:

If a person is considering ideas (especially political ideas) then they might view those ideas as being held by a person like themself. Some ideas are very easy to picture being held by a very similar person (e.g. spicy food), but the more complex the idea (e.g. Trexit) the more difficult it becomes to conceive of the mindset that the similar person would need to have in order to have reached the differing conclusion.

The key here is that it's not really about a differing mindset, so much as different circumstances that construct the differing mindset. This, I assert, is very difficult to account for completely without simply accepting all views at face value as both perfectly valid and a complete mystery, unknowable outside each person's mind.

As such, it is inconceivable to the person who thinks they understand both the issues at hand and the mind of the relevant populace to reach a conclusion that contradicts the logical consequences of the (broken) assumptions, and thus the conclusion is that the one who holds such opinions is an illogical dunce, and unacceptable in this rational age. In actuality the assumptions are broken in a subtle way such that it is easy to miss the leap made to broad-brush painting.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#106

Post by grecy » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #16

In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not a…

I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes

In what other countries did you try?

I called 911 in Canada many times as a ski patroller, and EMS were always on the way in less than 1 minute.

In Australia, when my Grandfather had a heart attack and teenage me had to call the equivalent (000), the ambulance was there extremely quickly (coming from a town about 12km away).

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#107

Post by grecy » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #71

jzwinck wrote: post #16

In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not a…

This doesn't sound right. I don't know as much about other cities but if you call 911 in Manhattan you're going to be connected to a call center at Metrotech in Brooklyn, a few blocks from where I am typing this, where a real live human who is almost certainly from NYC and lives here will answer your call, determine the precinct and sector and get the job to dispatch. If someone is asking clarifying details it's like…

> The 911 system in NYC is sophisticated, was revamped by the Bloomberg administration heavily in the wake of September 11th, and is very much part of the civil service here. Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction and makes me doubt the rest of your stories as a result.

I worked at a telco for 4 years, one of our "responsibilities" was to supply the government daily with "the 911 dump" which is a mapping of all phone numbers to physical addresses for reverse lookup.

From experience, I can tell you it would often go many weeks of script failures with nobody noticing, and in any given dumps there were hundreds of addresses that were wrong and incoherent. Telco is a numbers game. When you're dealing with millions of entries, a couple of percent are always garbage.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#108

Post by CPLX » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 4:54 PM UTC

decktech wrote: post #85

CPLX wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't sound right. I don't know as much about other cities but if you call 911 in Manhattan you're going to be connected to a call center at Metrotech in Brooklyn, a few blocks from where I am typing this, where a real live human who is almost certainly from NYC and lives here will answer your call, determine the precinct and sector and get the job to dispatch. If someone is asking clarifying details it's like…

Not incorrect, although the revamped system has become pretty infamous for going down, leading lines to ring busy and overworked dispatchers to revert to pen and paper. The outages have been responsible for several deaths. http://lubbockonline.com/stories/020299/LA0689.shtml#.V2_jIp...

The article you're linking to has a dateline of 1999.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#109

Post by mtanski » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #71

jzwinck wrote: post #16

In the US a lot of us grew up with the idea that when something really bad was happening you would dial 911 and people would appear very soon to help you. I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today. I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not a…

This doesn't sound right. I don't know as much about other cities but if you call 911 in Manhattan you're going to be connected to a call center at Metrotech in Brooklyn, a few blocks from where I am typing this, where a real live human who is almost certainly from NYC and lives here will answer your call, determine the precinct and sector and get the job to dispatch. If someone is asking clarifying details it's like…

When there was a fire in the coop building I was living in Brooklyn the first fire truck was there in minutes of the 911 call and a whole group of them was in under 10.

Re: When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers

#110

Post by hackuser » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #67

hackuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You created a fictional scenario and fictional people taking fictional actions, and then object to it all. I'm not sure that represents (other than a frustrated narrator). I don't have the expertise or time to evaluate ambulance services, or water or police or road safety or much else; I have my own job to do. I don't want direct democracy, which is effectively what the comment describes (voting via checkbook). I lik…

What makes you think elected representatives have more expertise and time to evaluate ambulatory for every municipality in the country? In reality they don't. They rely on (unelected, rarely held accountable) bureaucrats and lobbyists to make those decisions. As to fiction... the town is a real town. The programs are fictional. But there are actual examples of where the 'experts' are completely absent or otherwise le…

> What makes you think elected representatives have more expertise and time to evaluate ambulatory for every municipality in the country?

They are experienced, full-time professionals in running government. I'm an experienced, full-time professional in IT; I know far less than they do about governing. Like any executive, they don't need expertise in every field under their purview - that would be impossible. But they know what goes into the executive-level decision; they have experts to advise them; they have aides, time, and other resources (e.g., funded studies) to study the question; and they are experts in and practitioners of the highest-order issue of every question, the politics.

Not all of them are good at their jobs - which is no different than people in private companies (and in IT). That's the inescapable nature of humanity and human institutions, including voters and also the consumers you have so much faith in, until our AI overlords take over.