181–190 of 409 posts
I actually wonder why this warning can be send in the first place. As this unwanted "test" has shown, people have absolutely no idea what to/where to go in that situation. Instead there was a lot of panic. If there is the possibility that you will send out such a message it would be a good idea to give some advice on what to do.
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There’s not much of a consensus on “cover”, hence people seek insight on the concept from law enforcement officials. Is it cover when you’re inside but 30 floors up in a high rise?
That is actually reasonably well-established - check out this: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268... Not common knowledge, though, in part because nuclear hazards have been painted in an exaggerated light by Hollywood (basically, no point in trying to survive, because everybody is going to die and what's going to be left is a 1,000-year lethal nuclear wasteland), and in part because we stopp…
I've often wondered, what does "protection" mean if the building has collapsed around us, so we're now 20 feet below ground, with a pile of rubble on top, and no way to get out?
I don't think you should direct your ire towards Hollywood, at least not in any significant way. I don't think it was until "The Day After" (1983) that any movie showed anything like a realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war, and even that was deliberately downplayed.
It surely wasn't a Hollywood depiction which caused Dorothy Day and others in 1955 to protest the "Operation Alert" drill, saying:
> We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.
This "The Heritage Foundation" report from 1984 titled "The New Case for Civil Defense" also doesn't mention anything about Hollywood depictions. https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-new-case-civil-d...
Finally, the NWSS book you cited says "American official policy, or at any rate the implementation of that policy, is based on the assumption that civil defense is useless." Again, I don't think that policy was influenced by Hollywood.
(BTW, it's funny that Teller says "With the use of American automobiles an evacuation could be faster and more effective than is possible in Russia." - I guess he never saw a city trying to evacuate from a hurricane. Or the plans to evaluate NYC should there be a major disaster at Indian Point.)
Instead, NWSS and The Heritage Foundation (and an essay I read by Freeman Dyson) all say the US policy of MAD was a much bigger influence.
(I'm not going to get into a discussion of the validity of MAD. I only want to point out that I disagree with the idea that Hollywood depiction had much of a role.)
Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
We really need to step up the sactions against Russia and North Korea, and start to impose tariffs and sactions against China. Otherwise a nuclear strike will likely head to hawaii, silicon valley, new york, or tokyo.
Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.
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A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
BINGO. If someone makes a mistake like this, unless it was deliberate or negligent (e.g. he/she didn't follow established procedures), you don't fire them! You fix the technical or procedural failures that allowed them to make the mistake in the first place. Heck, you should probably THANK them for making the system better by uncovering a bug! When I was still mostly a Noogler, I took a large portion of Google comple…
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Misguided. Circumstances are that he either is or is not qualified for a single point of failure job like that. If not it’s management failure. If the human is “qualified” for a single point of failure responsibility like that, he’s now fired.
I suspect that if your criteria is “you can never make a mistake” that no one is qualified for a single point of failure responsibility.
This isn’t a newbie getting set up on his dev db who was given too much access to production. They’re pointing the finger so that mechanism that facilitates single point of failure should be independently audited
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Misguided. Circumstances are that he either is or is not qualified for a single point of failure job like that. If not it’s management failure. If the human is “qualified” for a single point of failure responsibility like that, he’s now fired.
I suspect that if your criteria is “you can never make a mistake” that no one is qualified for a single point of failure responsibility.
when you're dealing with processes as critical as this one...
there should be no single point of failure.
Even our President has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard for the purposes we're discussing here. And that backup has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard. Etc etc etc.
If I were going to erode public trust in emergency broadcast systems in order to increase the amount of damage I would do by launching an actual missile, this is how I would do it. A series of false alarms. A similar, if obviously much smaller and less disastrous example, happens at my apartment about 4 times a week: the fire alarms for entire floors of my apartment building are easily triggered by people smoking in…
A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center. This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at…
This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their largest, only a small portion of the population would be screwed regardless of what they did. While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
So it took 38 minutes to send out a new message informing this was a false alert. How is that possible if this was simply a human error during a "shift change"? You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?
The long delay is what lightly tickles my suspicion that maybe this wasn't a mistake. It's a little too much of a coincidence that this particular alert happens in Hawaii at a time of escalating tensions with North Korea. I mean it's probably just a simple mistake, but it's also the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to stoke fears about a nuclear strike.
A screw up seems more likely though.
An interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.
Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting…