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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#291

Post by bradly »

raffael_de wrote: post #44
cwmoore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.

care to provide examples?

Jean Baudrillard wrote some really great pieces on what the proliferation of technology with things like the clocks and mirrors did to humans. I highly recommend his book The System of Objects (https://archive.org/details/systemofobjects0000baud/mode/2up).

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#292

Post by [deleted] »

nerdsniper wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

[deleted]

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#293

Post by pm215 »

roryirvine wrote: post #241
GJim wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me It most certainly was NOT OK. By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving). By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed. The net result of thi…

An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that. You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population…

I think it's reasonable to complain that the system doesn't have an "important but not urgent" message category (which might e.g. have the same "window pops up that you have to dismiss" UI but trigger whatever your usual text-message notification sound/vibration is rather than the VERY LOUD siren).

And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when the government uses the "urgent" notification system for something that is not urgent.

It caused me to turn off "severe" alerts (leaving "emergency" enabled).

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#294

Post by Roark66 »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

A somewhat similar situation here in Poland. While the volumes of these messages are much, much lower (the most i ever got was one or two a week. Normally there is maybe one every month or two) they are typically about bad weather.

Something like "stormy weather, be ready for electricity interruption". So of course "Armed drones have been seen in the area, don't touch any suspicious objects on the ground" message arrived I opened it on next day...

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#295

Post by Gareth321 »

Otterly99 wrote: post #283
Gareth321 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good I've always found this sentiment to exist exclusively in privileged and overly educated, left wing, Western circles. It is an extension of the philosophy built around tabula rasa, and posits that individuals are not to blame for their actions, but rather society. When someone harms another, it wasn't because they wanted to harm another, but…

> Back here in the real world, with zero exceptions, we know that power inevitably corrupts even the most chaste and moral of people. Humans are both a product of their environment and possess free will. Both. At the same time Isn't it a bit contradictory? If corruption really is an inevitable consequence of power, then there is not much free will involved. It's easy to think that some people choose to harm other as…

> Isn't it a bit contradictory? If corruption really is an inevitable consequence of power, then there is not much free will involved.

On the contrary. Unlimited power allows one to express their free will to a degree most people could only ever dream of. Given all the power in the world, what do humans do with it? Abuse others.

To extend an olive branch, the determinism debate doesn't have a neat answer. I could make compelling arguments for both sides. However determinism isn't just about social conditioning. It also requires accepting uncomfortable arguments about biology and genetics. If one is not willing to accept that humans are born non-equally capable of cognitive and physical tasks, they have no choice but to accept the premise of free will.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#296

Post by sortoflog »

WalterBright wrote: post #187
rmunn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politic…

> selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.

That’s an ideal free market, but do you know of any large economies that actually meet this criteria? Happy customers are optional when you have regulatory capture.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#298

Post by roryirvine »

pm215 wrote: post #293
roryirvine wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that. You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population…

I think it's reasonable to complain that the system doesn't have an "important but not urgent" message category (which might e.g. have the same "window pops up that you have to dismiss" UI but trigger whatever your usual text-message notification sound/vibration is rather than the VERY LOUD siren). And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when t…

In this case, I think the problem was that it was urgent (multiple fire services were on the verge of being overwhelmed, and that was considered to pose an immediate threat to critical infrastructure) and it was the severity that was arguable.

But, to be honest, it doesn't seem to be too far out of line with the past alerts listed on https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts

(I also only have the extreme alerts enabled - I've been disabling severe ones since the system was introduced. If there's a storm I'm likely to be staying inside anyway!)

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#299

Post by quietbritishjim »

sporkland wrote: post #290
boomlinde wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In college they made us study the case of therac-25 so we understood the dangers of creating too many errors in our software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I didn't think that was about too many alarms going off and so that a real one was being ignored, and re-reading the article doesn't give that impression either. It was more to do with a bug in the user interface (it appeared that you were re-editing a field you'd just filled in but actually weren't) and a memory corruption bug, along with assuming that software always works so doesn't need any additional checks. Are you thinking of another software failure?

(If by "dangers of creating too many errors" you just meant "don't create too many bugs" then that's not really relevant to this conversation, and also totally the wrong lesson to learn from that incident. The lesson is, software will inevitably have bugs, so make sure you have redundant checks to minimise their impact.)

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#300

Post by ryzvonusef »

I'm in Pakistan, and the amount of spam I receive from the govt is absurd... random patriotic slogans ('We will never forget Kashmiri struggle!'), generic welfare messages('Let's work together for a Polio free Pakistan!'), vague warning messages('Don't use antibiotics without doctor's approval!')...it runs the whole gamut.

The latest message I'm being bombarded with it a reminder not to use Whatsapp without a 'valid' sim... like wtf? Is there something should know? Whatsapp is a private org, why is govt asking me about that? But all I get is the random sms bombardment and more questions than answers.

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