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

shkspr.mobi

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

#241

Post by roryirvine »

GJim wrote: post #205
red_admiral wrote: post #198

The UK system has "severe alerts", which is what the wildfire alert was, and "extreme alerts" which is a higher category. Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me. Both levels can be deactivated on Android (no idea about iOS but I presume it's the same), there's no unblockable presidential alert level.

> 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-level scale.

It makes more sense to use the existing cell broadcast alert infrastructure which has been planned for exactly this type of use case and has been thoroughly tested.

A more reasonable complaint might be that it wasn't geofenced to only the drought-hit areas, but that would only have excluded something like a quarter of the population.

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

#242

Post by sylware »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
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…

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 France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf").

It may be a EU wide tale.

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

#243

Post by OroPla »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
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…

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…

Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.

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

#244

Post by ubertaco »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #228
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 the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fa…

Yeah, if only the government didn't regulate that pesky

checks notes

workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!

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

#245

Post by inigyou »

rayiner wrote: post #117
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

You don't have a society if half the population is fighting with the other half. Pretending that you do is not useful.

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

#246

Post by inigyou »

rayiner wrote: post #123
edot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.

> But who decides which rules are neutral You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.

Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.

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

#247

Post by inigyou »

WalterBright wrote: post #193
vkou wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution? Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?

Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

Are you saying I should have to bid for oxygen rights?

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

#248

Post by inigyou »

salynchnew wrote: post #113
Johnny_Bonk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not onl…

It is kind of funny and sad that in the U.S. we've gone from corporations virtue-signalling to vice signalling in just a few years.

They signal to whoever's in charge of the government. Sone people in charge respond to virtues, others respond to vices.

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

#249

Post by inigyou »

sellmesoap wrote: post #139
9x39 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing something out to look at in the US at least-- Interpersonal trust might be decreasing: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on... But dwarfed by the trust decrease in institutions: https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee... But maybe it's overstated, because trust seems sort of stable according to this group: https://www.edelman.com/trust/25years >We no longer are ca…

Much like people being arrested for online statements in the UK, while violent crime is swept under the rug or otherwise downplayed.

Which statements did people get arrested for?

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

#250

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

kioleanu wrote: post #162
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…

It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones…

I got the bear one while on Transfăgărășan. Which is funny because the bears are totally expected there.
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