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There are plenty of ways to be notified of breaking news if you so choose to use them. Why should an alert about something that happens in any state have to be broadcast to the whole country with no means of disabling it? What could possibly require every person in the US to need to know about some event immediately?
Nukes? There are such a thing as nationwide emergencies.
I can't think of an important message that could go over this channel that would not cause more panic than if it were not sent. Unless it's some good thing, like "we landed on the moon" or "victory in Europe" If it's about a natural disaster or threat that affects the whole country, forget about it...
I cannot think of a single thing. Even "nukes incoming" -- well what precisely should you do in this situation? If it's not actionable, no matter how important, it's not urgent.
I had to switch off the FEMA alerts -- which are a good idea! -- because I was getting spammed by spurious alerts about things hundreds of miles away (I re-enable them when I travel and when I am near my vacation house which is in a fire zone). An earthquake down south or a fire 8 hours' drive north do not require my immediate attention.
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Nukes? There are such a thing as nationwide emergencies.
Honestly how could that be actionable in a short timeframe?
As absolutely mind-boggling as nukes are, I think people today credit them with more destructive force than they really have. For one thing, blast force goes down with the inverse square of of the distance. There's very much a diminishing return to bigger nukes, and the area of total destruction will always be much smaller than the area of sorta-destruction.
So if you have a 15 minute warning, you can get away from windows or perhaps go to a basement or subway, There are plenty of ways to drastically increase your odds of survival if you are in the middle-zone of a nuclear strike.
Any all out nuclear war is going to have a lot of people die. The purpose of national warnings and preparedness is to just make that number be smaller than it otherwise would be.
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> The name just automatically angers a significant portion of the population, no matter who the president happens to be. I think that pretty much speaks to how shamefully bad politics has gotten here in the US. I see a couple of comments that jump to speculate that it could be used as a tool of politics, or that they would rather opt-out of knowing about an imminent threat to themselves and/or their fellow American's…
Here's a good example. This tweet from a respected Dr. is really unfortunate. "But it’s called the Presidential Alert because Trump has a huge ego. And he loves his intruding into our lives without consent." https://twitter.com/eugenegu/status/1047562343503122432 He states it as though it's fact. Now many of his 200,000+ followers also think that, if they didn't already. I might've also believed that if I didn't do t…
Do we consider this fake news?
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The most obvious example is the Hawaii Nuclear Scare that just happened in January [1]. Obviously it was a false alarm but I would like (or should I say dread) to be alerted of a crisis of that magnitude the moment it occurs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...
There are plenty of ways to be notified of breaking news if you so choose to use them. Why should an alert about something that happens in any state have to be broadcast to the whole country with no means of disabling it? What could possibly require every person in the US to need to know about some event immediately?
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Honestly how could that be actionable in a short timeframe?
It's about a 30 minute travel time for land-based ICBMs to reach the US from Russia or China. Let's say 10 minutes to get through the chain of command, and 5 minutes to send out the alert, so you might have a 10-15 minute warning. As absolutely mind-boggling as nukes are, I think people today credit them with more destructive force than they really have. For one thing, blast force goes down with the inverse square of…
The local FEMA alert system is a good idea; the last time I personally found it useful was in 1989 (Loma Prieta earthquake) though I hear it works in more dangerous areas (e.g. tornado alley) and am not surprised by that. However here in the Bay Area its link to phones was ruined by spam (pointless interruptions sent to my phone) so I disabled it. This new system is worse.
(BTW I wouldn't classify the false missile alert in Hawaii "spam". It was simply an error. But here I got messages that should have been on the news).
Regardless of what it's called (let's say, "nationwide alert") is it possible to imagine anything that is 1> immediately actionable and 2> must be known by every person in the country? I cannot think of a single thing. Even "nukes incoming" -- well what precisely should you do in this situation? If it's not actionable, no matter how important, it's not urgent. I had to switch off the FEMA alerts -- which are a good i…
People who live in big cities or live near high value strategic targets wouldn't survive for long anyway. Maybe some of those people wouldn't want to know that they will be dead in 5 minutes or in 5 days. Nevertheless, I expect that many if not most people would still want to know!
There are also literally millions of people in the USA who live in remote areas and who would survive the blast and radiation effects of a nuclear war. Giving those people some warning could make a big difference in their survival rates. Those people probably wouldn't enjoy living in the dystopian post-nuclear landscape, but that's a topic that's been amply covered by Sci-Fi movies.
I had to switch off the FEMA alerts
What is a FEMA alert? Is that something regional or something on Android?
My iPhone running iOS 11.4.1 has two different "GOVERNMENT ALERTS" (found under Notifications). These are AMBER Alerts and Emergency Alerts. I have them both enabled and I don't think I get even one per year.
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It's about a 30 minute travel time for land-based ICBMs to reach the US from Russia or China. Let's say 10 minutes to get through the chain of command, and 5 minutes to send out the alert, so you might have a 10-15 minute warning. As absolutely mind-boggling as nukes are, I think people today credit them with more destructive force than they really have. For one thing, blast force goes down with the inverse square of…
There are 330M people in this country. How many of them have any idea what to do if an ICBM is on the way? I would be shocked if the number exceeded 330K. If anyone thought there were a credible thread of nuclear attack they would be taking steps of which a warning system like this would be a late step, not the first one. The local FEMA alert system is a good idea; the last time I personally found it useful was in 19…