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What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

newyorker.com

111–120 of 381 posts

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#111
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you but filling the bathtub is my instinctual reaction to anything that goes wrong. Job going badly? Fill the bathtub. Medical emergency? Fill the bathtub. Lost my house key? FILL THE BATHTUB.

Ah. I actually thought filling the bathtub was a measure to mitigate the effects of the heat wave and maybe the radiation as well.

I think it's so if you survive, you have clean drinking water for when the infrastructure has failed and you're waiting for rescue.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#112
post #97
post #35

Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i

Is your peeve that you believe there exists some unwritten requirement that all place names must use identical spellings without consideration of the language they are written in? If so, I don't think this is reasonable. Words are allowed to change when they are taken from one language to another. It's spelled (and pronounced) Hawai'i when written in Hawaiian. But when writing in English, as the article is, it's typi…

English may have no patience for diacritical marks (lack of them on keyboards doesn't help), but they're still a good idea when using words from other languages with pronunciations an English speaker wouldn't know intuitively.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#113
post #32
post #17

I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war. First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail. Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher. Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers. The people in this article se…

I don't think it's as bad as you think. Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256 . If shit hits the fan and you end up surviving, your help in the aftermath can be crucial.

What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#114
post #42

If someone did launch a missile, and it were destroyed with a secret weapons system, this is precisely the timeline (alert, not a drill - passage of 30+ mins to write a cover story about shift change, “oh sorry false alarm”) and news articles I would expect to see. The only thing we know is that we won’t ever receive the truth. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if the story were “US anti-missile defense dest…

You'd have corroborating evidence from multiple other countries that are also looking for missile launches.

Though, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for an enemy to take credit for it in an attempt to further destabilize our relationship with our government.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#115
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thoughts. Errors happen, Developers are lazy and interfaces suck. However this is definitly not a excuse, multiple things have to be completely wrong that it even could get this far.

I've built a lot of alerts. The "This is not a drill" text should not have even been entered until the system was fully tested and operational.

[deleted]

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#116
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also in Japan, and I have a pretty serious go-bag for this kind of thing. It's because of political tensions for me; we're in spitting distance of North Korea.

Fascinating. I live in Seoul, and we really just don't care.

I'm not sure NK would nuke Seoul anyway - it's too close. A massive artillery barrage or more conventional missiles (or chemical weapons?) seems more likely.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#117
post #25

A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.

Let's be honest - most people don't want to hear that the people living in drone target areas of Pakistan, Yemen, etc feel this way, else we'd be seeing many more stories about the psychological trauma faced by these folks.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#118
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt the same way, but its not because I distrusted the government. The situation didn't feel like one wherein nuclear missiles would start being fired (or any missiles of any kind). There's got to be some sort of build up before a conflict before it can't catch people in shock (hence the rational of actual surprise-attacks). If tomorrow you read that Canada had invaded New York City, would you believe it instantly…

Personally i dont think a attack to the U.S. would be to much of a surprise. But true there is currently no direct tension in that direction. Also as someone else said, Hawaii really is a unlikely target. I get it now i guess.

Irony that Hawaii was actually the first target in ww2

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#119
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's as bad as you think. Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256 . If shit hits the fan and you end up surviving, your help in the aftermath can be crucial.

What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?

Those skills which led you to master programming will enable you solve countless problems the apocalypse will bring.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#120

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, es…

I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.) Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.

I remember an occasion when I lived with a partner - the fire alarm had gone off and I immediately got out of bed and started putting my pants and shoes on. She asked why, I said "so we can go outside. What are you doing? Let's go."

She said she didn't understand the point - if it was a REAL fire, wouldn't they just come get us or tell us?

I don't know how prominent this thought process is, or why so many people don't take things like fire alarms seriously. Selection bias, perhaps you're right. Every fire alarm most people has ever heard was a drill.

This has happened twice at work now, even my manager was teasing me for telling people they should leave. Eventually I left on my own.

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