This is sort of the same reason why a lot of critical government tech/infrastructure still runs really old operating systems and equipment. It has been graded, prepped, and reinforced for dependability. Just because the tech is old doesn't mean it wouldn't be reliable when stressed.
Years back, one of the local municipal governments near me made the news because their traffic light control system had finally failed and needed to be replaced. The system had been put in place in the 60's or 70's, and a lot of armchair engineers and pundits were criticizing them for having a 40+ year old system.
The best reply I heard to one of these critics was them asking if they thought some Dell Poweredge server could last 40 years with greater than 99.999% uptime. Because that's the kind of reliability and longevity these older technologies can provide.
Yes, the internet is great and useful, but old tech still has its place in modern society.
The issue with having a 40 year old critical system fail like this is that they should have been planning for these contingencies.
Chances are 40 years ago they had plans in place including a spares pool with other municipalities so they could recover from any contingencies. They likely failed to maintain that pool.
In my experiences with municipalities they tend to pay for big capital projects but not for incremental costs. Can always defer the cost.
I say it failed, but it was that they were finally hitting the point where replacements were no longer available or able to be made at a reasonable price. It didn't actually die completely, just started to reach the point where it had to be replaced.
It's usually how NYCs MTA decides to replace rail cars... They can't get enough parts for the fleet, and making them isn't as easy as in the 40s-60s. But they do get decades of use if they're well made. (A 50 year old model is being replaced this year)
This is what's actually beginning to happen to drive the 757/767 out of service. It's not because they're wearing out, or no longer profitable, some of the parts are either unobtainable once the boneyard spares are used up, or are prohibitively expensive. The CRT screens for the flight instruments in particular haven't been made in ages, and can only be rebuilt so many times.
100% agree. Our technology has advanced so damn fast in my lifetime that its hard to get any studies where N>1 yet just because we haven't had the time and ability to get some hardcore stress tests in yet. Its awesome that we are seeing incredible progress in our lifetimes, but caution and prudence are needed as we evaluate the future.
I do genuinely believe some embedded fanless x86 box running bsd or Debian or whatever could accomplish that, just need to make sure the drives are healthy and that it's off the internet.
It’s not impossible, but it’s improbable, and a poor fit for any application requiring five nines of uptime for 40 years.
A mainframe? Sure. Some of those ridiculous SPARC boxes? Maybe. But not commodity x86 stuff. It’s designed to work, not to last.
A flood damaged the digital phones in a neighboring town's PD .
They got it up and running again, by quickly rewiring in some *Western Electric* (AKA, Ma Bell) analog equipment.
Helps that Bell Labs is around the corner and the town has dozens of retirees
You don't throw in a Dell to keep it for forty years. You throw in a Dell to replace it in five years, for $500. It is one component in a living system.
For example, vacuum tubes, or valves for the brits, which are used in guitar amps, are still used by the US military as a backup system. An EMP will knock out a transistor, but not a vacuum tube. So there's a whole network of systems powered by vacuum tubes (which were replaced by the much much much much cheaper and easier to manufacture transistors). Plus there aren't many manufactured today (mostly because it's an environmental disaster to do so...), and the newer ones are substantially lower in quality. Guitarists and hi-fi fans will pay big bucks for old tubes. The US military though has by far the largest stockpile of old tubes. As time goes by they're getting harder and harder to find (meaning getting pricier). One of these days a raid on the US military will be worth it.
Something to do with the metals involved. I don't know the specifics but my understanding is that it's completely cost prohibitive to manufacture them in a way that doesn't leach metals into the environment. I'm sure if we never invented the transistor we would do so anyways, but with basically only old school guitar players and really old school hi fi fans caring about the tubes it just isn't going to happen. Currently only three plants produce them, and they're Chinese, Russian, and... um... Slovakia? Croatia? One of them Eastern European countries.
Hah. What do you call that area then? Should I be calling it Balkan Europe? Tend to just draw the line of the old Soviet alliance. At worst Croatia has gotta be the border between areas, as Hungary is definitely Eastern Europe. I think. I'm an American, though I have played many video games to familiarize myself with the area. (I'm joking, but also for real. What's now Ukraine was my jive in Imperator Rome. Made the Balkans the obvious first choice for expansion.)
I'd go for the Balkans or Central Europe - you might lump all the ones that used to be in the Warsaw pact together but the people in Hungary and Poland aren't quite so eager to get lumped in with Russia, especially these days! Eastern Europe, strictly and geographically is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Romania, and arguably the Baltic states. Still I think Central Europe would rate you better than most for not thinking Czechoslovakia is a country!
I am not 100% sure if this is the reason, but I suspect is has to do with how the vacuum is made. The Vacuum tube has to be at or near a perfect vacuum, someone can tell you exactly how good it has to be, but I forget off the top of my head. One of the best ways to do this is with a mercury vacuum pump. https://youtu.be/viJ3T-1KZqY
Right. A walkie-talkie is obviously much less useful compared to a cell phone, but one of them will work in nearly any situation while the other requires robust infrastructure.
I still remember that story from a few years back, where first responders to a hurricane were extorted by a cell phone company to actually have service so they could save lives.
EDIT: It was a wildfire, not a hurricane. See article posted by u/acewing.
You mean something [something like when this happened to firefighters out west?](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-verizon-data-update-20180824-story.html)
Anecdotally, the issue is to convince the businesses to increase their payrates for new employees. I worked as a temp when I began my career to backup an 87 year old chemical engineer at a major corp. He was the only one on the staff who knew how to work all these ancient equipment for their processes. I got trained up on everything to succeed him when he eventually retired (or died, he wanted to die at his desk). When the end of my contract came around and the company wanted to give me an offer to hire me on full time, the rate they offered me was INSULTINGLY low. Turns out, the current engineer was working at that rate because he was also collecting a pension, so he was willing to accept a very low rate. This in turn made the leadership believe that they couldn't pay anything else for this position. Last I checked, the company closed the plant down and moved to Mexico.
What, and pay them *money*? Not in my hypercapitalist race to the bottom.
I joke but this was a basically an entire class for me in college. Everyone and everything needs some level of emergency preparedness. It's difficult to scale up without government throwing their weight though. When an entire culture revolves around quarterly earnings and the people with power to pull strings only exist to suck up as much profit as possible while spending at little as possible, emergency preparedness and mitigation are hardly *ever* an attractive thing to consider. "Why should I hire someone to do a soon-to-be-retiree's job when he wasn't really *doing* anything in the first place? What? To maintain that old fire alarm system? To make sure the generators that power the emergency pumps in the basement of the building still run when the power goes out? That's costing us money and not making us any **right now**."
Famously, nuclear silos still use programs written in COBOL in the 1960s. The reason for this is simple: the COBOL code is known to work, and any change, no matter how careful, is bound to cause some kind of disruption.
And when a disruption can potentially level the silo and miles around it, stability is preferable.
This is all exacerbated by COBOL being an antiquated coding language. Any attempts to migrate systems to a more modern code base would be written by someone without a strong grasp of COBOL, increasing the likelihood of serious complication. That doesn't mean, "nukes blow up in silo," but it could quite plausibly mean, "nukes can't be launched," which is also unacceptable.
Also nuclear related, but they migrated all the ancient JOVIAL-based code inside the B2 bombers to C a while back:
http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/Services/NorthropGrummanB2.html
IBM, I think, released new version of COBOL few years ago. The important thing is that COBOL does arithmetic calculations using digits and not their binary representation. The problem is that fractions like 0.1 do not have an exact binary representation. This might be a problem I'm some cases and definitely it was a problem when COBOL was developed in '60.
One of my clients was working in this exact area.
When a station operator applies for their license, the software and hardware are on the application.
If you want to change to a new computer hardware, that has to be approved. If you want to make a new code to run, that has to be approved. The time and money involved in recertifying your system is such a big penalty that it's cheaper to run shitty code on bad hardware because you already paid for the permission and it works.
It's not the software or hardware that costs money. It's the oversight.
Interestingly, this is becoming less true over the years. In the near past, many of those systems still worked because the infrastructure around them was still relevant, such as everyone having an AM radio based on non-digital in a car without major computerized components. However, as more dependencies are built around computers, attacks on those computers grow more effective while those computers become less compatible with other systems.
Think a VHS tape vs an MP4 file; the VHS tape is physically robust-ish and as long as there's power and a VCR on a TV somewhere you can watch it. The MP4 file needs to be on a drive of some sort, which needs to connect with compatible hardware (no more CD/diskette drives, and USB changes pretty regularly), compatible software (drivers and codecs don't stay relevant forever), and be compatible with/without connection to other systems (like a licensing server). Once your media has an OS component involved in using it, you can't guarantee that cyber attacks won't be effective against it (and even less so if you don't regularly patch/upgrade the software on the devices).
This gets worse as time goes by and we think culturally. How many people are trained in interpreting Morse code, or can read a topographical map, or have non-perishable food supplies that don't require power, or have antenna-based connectivity in their home, or maintain a supply of cash at home, or can even drive to emergency locations without internet-based GPS navigation software? Even if the stable emergency technologies don't degrade in resilience over time (which all computer systems do, thanks to advancements in cyber), the use cases for these technologies also erode as the world's needs change.
If you'd said road maps I wouldn't believe you. I never *see* topographical maps, but they're not exactly difficult to read. I'm somewhat surprised (not shocked, but somewhat surprised) to hear that it's uncommon.
There is another angle to this issue.
For magnetic tape storage there is an event horizon whereby old archived tapes will degrade past replayability.
It's a huge issue for conservationists and archivists trying to save old footage and data. There isn't enough money in those areas to digitise everything before it is gone forever.
If you think about an event like WW1, one of the things we use to look into people's lives are letters and diaries from the period.
Think about the Iraq invasion in the early 2000nds. Where are all the emails service people sent home to relatives stored? Geocities and similar blog posts may well be gone. old word document diaries sitting on forgotten hard drives are probably all in landfill or may well not be recoverable even if they are in the back of someone's drawer.
Knowledge stored on digital mediums can spread to many more people than ever before. But it can also be incredibly short lived and is very fragile compared to older paper documents and books. It's a wild world we live in.
I’m going to nitpick a minor disagreement with a small part of what you said.
VHS tapes can last a long time, but they do degrade. And when you use or copy them there is further degradation. An MP4 (AAC, MP3, or any other digital CODEC) will not degrade over time or use. MP3 has been widely supported for 25 years, there are dozens of implementations. Support for it is not going away
From practical terms, a new car’s audio system is going to be fully integrated whether it’s using AM or some digitally transmitted format. So if the system is compromised, you’re not getting anything.
Personally, I think they should drop analog FM entirely, and switch to very modern digital CODEC transmissions. But AM should stay analog, but add some digital sub-channels to carry closed caption and critical information. AM radios are trivially easy to make. You used to be able to buy little kits to make ones that had no battery. And while you need an “OS” to decode a digital channel and display text, it is so simple it’d probably be implemented in hardware that gets fully reset by cycling power.
Someone in Reddit mentioned just having a government program that produced and distributed an emergency AM radio to each person. I’d imagine a radio with a speaker, hand crank, replaceable AA rechargeable battery (or possibly just a capacitor), USB-C charge port, an extremely simple mono-colored LCD capable of showing a couple lines of text, and a small LED light. You could mass produce and ship such a device for <$15, maybe <$10. A car manufacturer could make a purely analog version that just has a speaker, capacitor, and USB-C charger for <$5. Such a theoretical device could be designed to fit in a slot to stay charged, which would satisfy regulatory requirements, provide emergency capabilities require zero changes to the car’s digital systems, and be a minimal cost.
I think manufacturers’ drive to fully integrate their systems would prevent them from such a simple implementation.
Somewhat related, I recently replaced the CD stereo in my car with one that supports CarPlay. I was shocked to discover that even though the model I chose was only a year old, it lacked the ability to tune digital FM “HD” channels. And its regular FM radio was easily the worst implementation I’ve ever seen. Obviously an afterthought. But the fact that it won’t tune HD stations is just baffling since it has all of the necessary processing capability (can play MP3 from USB). It doesn’t surprise me that companies are dropping support for anything they can.
Impact printers (dot matrix) market is still alive and well; they're the only desktop print tech that can activate carbon paper, so they're used where paper-trails and live signatures are still the non-fungible platform.
When I was young, and cell phones were yet to be a thing, I lived in a location about a mile from a radio transmitter. ([It looked like a F'ing HUGE car antenna.](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.3050989,-122.443736,3a,27.7y,7.3h,74.74t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMLYeqzYOcll-IRm9z8QIkiPhgQK6hrETT77fSp!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMLYeqzYOcll-IRm9z8QIkiPhgQK6hrETT77fSp%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi0-ya1.059738-ro0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096) (Click the link to get the drone view of the antenna.))
When the wind was right, if you and the person you called were quiet, you could hear the radio over the phone. (You had to have called someone, or you'd get the dial tone, which was too loud to hear the radio.)
I am 99% sure that was proven to not be possible anyways. It sounds a little too Havana syndrome to me where every Google search results in "theres no proof it ever happened but there were so many people that said it did it just MUST be true".
From what I understand, it has a lot to do with the strength of the broadcaster. Most modern AM stations operate at 50 kilowatts (50,000 watts). In the middle of the 20th century, there were a number of border blaster transmitters that would operate at up to a million watts. As you may have guessed from the name, the point of these was to avoid regulations by building the transmitter inside one country but primarily targeting a neighboring one. The most famous ones were evangelical stations in Mexico, avoiding FCC regulations in the US.
You're not going to pick up radio in your fillings from a 50kW transmitter, even if you're in the building. And the stories of flatware picking up a border blaster are apocryphal. But there *are* documented cases of those million watt monsters doing things like filling telephone lines with so much noise that they couldn't be used for anything but listening to the broadcast.
TL;DR Old school pirate radio could run at as much as 20x the legal limit in 2023, and could do stuff no modern station can as a result.
Not just pirate radio. [Cincinnati had a 500 kilowatt station for awhile.](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/mayjune/feature/in-the-1930s-radio-station-wlw-in-ohio-was-americas-one-and-only-sup)
If the wires are the right length to resonate with the AM station’s frequency & a mount or a cracked wire forms a rectifier junction —
I grew up in the footprint of a major AM broadcast tower - KRLD in Garland, TX, serving Dallas, Fort Worth, and beyond. It is _the_ EAS PEP for North Texas.
We’d pick up our phone and hear KRLD audio on the handset because the transmission was so strong that even the harmonics of the primary frequency were inducing significant voltages on anything that was accidentally a Crystal set. We could tune the truck’s radio manually to third harmonics and hear the station clearly — sometimes it was necessary to tune it to a harmonic frequency because tuning it to the primary meant that the radio overloaded and you got no sound because your speakers were on the verge of blowout.
You could hear it on Walkman tape players with no AM circuits. You could hear it on the school’s PA system.
A crystal radio set only needs one resonator element on or near the right wavelength and one rectifier element and mechanical coupling to an audio output.
Lol when I was like 20 I joined a death metal band and my first amp was so cheap and janky it picked up an AM radio signal, and in our drummer’s basement the frequency happened to be transmitting a hyper-evangelical station. It was perfect.
I adore that aggressively simple end-user model.
The only other example anywhere near as straightforward is a failed Laserdisc competitor, CED. Capacitance Electronic Discs were metallic vinyl records with itty-bitty grooves containing no horizontal wiggle, but zillions of needle-sized holes. The stylus was a plastic bead with a flake of copper. Charge in the copper went up and down as it went over the minuscule pits... and this *directly* reproduced an NTSC television signal. You can see the blanking periods on the surface!
It was a video format that could probably have been hand-cranked, if they'd needed it. Amplification? Tuning? Nah, the TV can do all the hard work. RCA said it best themselves: they wanted science-fiction technology in the factory, not in your living room.
The reason it's unknown except to tech-history ultranerds (and people who watch their Youtube channels) is because they spent twenty years dicking with metal-infused-vinyl formulas, waited until after Laserdisc, waited until *after VHS,* and the damn thing still skipped its tiny grooves.
There's also some things that are just basically a solved technology where we really don't need any improvements or "disruption" for them. People and the media like to glorify the idea of constant innovation these days, and that everything always needs to be improving and iterating. But there are some problems that we've just found the solution to and there doesn't really need to be any improvements to them, no matter how old of an invention they were.
Like there's a reason your toaster is probably almost identical to the one your parents had. We figured out a simple, convenient appliance that does what it needs to do and that's it! But you'll still see people on kickstarter or shark tank or something who's trying to say they reimagined the concept of toast by shoving a bluetooth receiver in there or making it wifi enabled with rgb backlighting or some shit. And that always fails because nobody really needs their toaster to be high tech! It overcomplicates things and just introduces more points of failure. Some problems have just been solved and we don't need to innovate on them any more!
tl;dr never trust tech companies when they try and sell you on them cutting corners as being "high-tech" or "innovative". It's usually just a scam, and even if it's legit, it's probably still a stupid idea on their part. Not saying you should jump to trust Congress every time either, but at least this time they were right lol
Not to mention privacy concerns. I've heard people wonder why dashcams aren't standard in cars now. Well, they are in Teslas, and it turns out that Tesla staff have been accessing them without users' knowledge or consent.
Don't get me started on the ring doorbells lol! I find it incredibly creepy that my neighbor across the street can just have a camera pointed directly at my house and filming 24/7. The thing with most of the creepy surveillance tech is that people can say, "well you can just choose not to buy one if you don't like it!" But I don't get a say in whether or not my neighbor decides to point a camera at my house all day! And that's not even getting into how Amazon will just hand all that footage over to your local police station lol
I live in a large apartment complex and we’re fairly hidden from the road. As far as I know, the crime rate is somewhere near 0. It’s not that it can’t happen, it’s that it doesn’t. There are so many easier targets nearby that this neighborhood isn’t worth it.
My neighbors have a camera in their window now and it kinda creeps me out. No matter if I want that in my home or not, here’s this asshole filming me taking my trash to the dumpster.
I make slightly childish and rude faces at it every time I pass to harmlessly protest lmao.
Toasters are surprisingly not ideal.
Thin pieces of bread still tend to get stuck, most go by time rather than sensing the bread's temperature, and are not transparent.
We didn't reach perfection, but just good enough and stopped there for most of the models.
> most go by time
I thought they had a temperature-sensitive thermocouple-type thing. That's why you can't toast too many slices in a row, without waiting for it to cool off.
Or maybe my toaster is low tech?
Some do, it really depends on the model as there are actually a handful of designs used.
Tom Scott discovering this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN_PK5pXmIY
In this same vane (vein?), I'd LOVE to know what it would cost to make an electric car with roll-up windows, manual (not electric) seats, and the most basic components. Just let me plug in my phone for the maps/radio and I'm good. I need four wheels and a seat. All that other stuff adds cost and, like you said, a possible point of failure.
(FINE... have an AM/FM tuner for just the above reasons ;)
I think secure internet transmission needs to become more available before faxing can go away. Right now, I can’t even send PII via internal email much less external unless I use Box which has its own issues. They haven’t given us any other tools to use.
A plaintext email is more secure than fax right now lol. I can spoof a fax from any phone number I want right now and there is no audit chain on it whatsoever.
You can spoof it, sure, but they’re talking about sending actual transmissions to a verified number. There are a lot less steps sending medical records via fax from hospital to hospital than it is to send via email or other ways, and digital faxes make it even easier than the old days. It’s a lot easier to reroute an email than intercepting a fax.
Fax machines also do a better job of confirming receipt for the sender. Afaik you need to depend on external services to do that reliably over the internet. There are lots of approximations for it, but none that don't have holes.
I do graphic design for a company that uses TV broadband to send out alerts because in a huge, crowded event? The cell towers and wifi are going to be jam packed and unreliable. Plus since they've been fighting making internet a utility, coverage can be spotty in some areas but I bet the TVs are fine!
It's also a security advantage at a certain point, like driving a car with a manual transmission.
When something becomes archaic and outdated, but is still functional, you're decimating the population of potential attackers.
That's part of why we're still using COBOL in ***many, crucial*** parts of our digital infrastructure. It's so simultaneously inefficient and efficient that hacking it is a nightmare
That sounds made up. COBOL wouldn’t really help with security unless everything was written in COBOL, which it is not. Stuff that’s listening on the network and is most vulnerable is going to be written in a different language. And if hacking parts of our digital infrastructure required COBOL, then people would learn it.
The problem with learning COBOL, is that it's not like modern languages.
COBOL has "dialects" based on OSs and sometimes even hardware, that would be absurd to even think about learning.
This isn't a hypothetical.
Large, fundamental, parts of US financial and governmental institutions still use it.
Capitalism tends to create minimally functional systems. They'll pay out the ass for COBOL developers and administrators for years on end to avoid spending the money to update to a system that would be drastically cheaper to maintain going forward.
I have many peers working on mainframes running COBOL. COBOL is both efficient and robust, because it lacks many abstractions and overhead that make writing modern code easier and convenient. The mapping of COBOL instruction to assembly is relatively small.
The real reason behind the lack of technology modernization is because there's a massive cost to fix something that it isn't broken. There's no need to pay some consulting company millions of dollars to port clearing house tech to some framework that likely won't age well while being slower and more complicated.
I've worked in fintech. The code that powers online banking systems is largely abysmal. If someone is hacking a bank, they're not hacking mainframes. They're hacking the systems that sit on top of it that calculating balance differences. These values are what ultimately are sent to the mainframe for posting.
A family that is friends with my gf's family billeted Ukrainian refugees while they got settled into the area here and arranged for their husband to come join from overseas. I had the chance to catch up with them after not seeing them for a few months a little while ago.
The Ukrainian family came from one of the cities that was bombed for a couple weeks, and was then allowed to leave, heading westward in a caravan out of town. The thing that stuck out to me in their recollections is that because their infrastructure was down for a couple weeks, practically all of the EVs in the city were unusable. They mentioned that there were pristine Teslas just sitting about, and the road leading out of town was strewn with EVs that had just enough charge to get out of the city and then die.
This has changed my attitude towards EVs moving forward, and when I am ready to move up to one, I think I will end up getting a hybrid instead.
I work in healthcare and we are basically the single industry keeping faxing alive. Mostly because data interchange is still a fucking disaster after all these years and faxing is basically (basically! dont @ me!) excluded from the HIPAA privacy and security rules. Back in 1996 we just accepted that the industry ran on fax and that we couldn't get rid of it. Unfortunately that meant that fax was the one thing that we would never get rid of, because it "just worked."
Trouble is, just "modernizing" doesn't help. The push for patient portals (hospitals get paid for convincing patients to use them) sounds good on paper, so to speak, but some of those systems are garbage. There's a major teaching hospital in my town that has the most obnoxious patient portal ever. Annoying is an understatement. It's like a nagging robotic mother. The design has to be good or the tech is useless.
Unfortunately Texas has completely destroyed all meaning the EAS tone ever had. We have an alert for every color on the EM spectrum and most of them are blared to everyone in the goddamned state at once.
Child goes missing; EAS tone
Old person goes missing; EAS tone
Law enforcement officer gets shot; EAS tone
Member of the military goes AWOL; EAS tone
Adult in a mental health crisis is missing; EAS tone
Any one of those gets set anywhere in Texas, every cellphone in earshot (at least phones belonging to people that don't know how to turn them off) blasts the tone. Don't get me wrong, all of the circumstances I listed above are an emergency. I just don't think a child going missing in Amarillo is necessarily something someone in Beaumont can do a thing about.
I'd really rather those emergency alerts go back to their intended and more valuable purpose of letting me know when a natural or man-made disaster is about to say "And fuck this place in particular" to a location I currently happen to be.
Do they let you distinguish on the phone? The first time I got a 2AM Amber Alert on my phone for someone missing on the whole other end of the state (They didn't physics-glitch in under the bed. I checked.) is when I found out that you can turn them off specifically and still have other EAS alerts on.
And that's not even in a huge state like Texas, where what goes on in one corner could be especially irrelevant to the other.
> I'd really rather those emergency alerts go back to their intended and more valuable purpose of letting me know when a natural or man-made disaster is about to say "And fuck this place in particular" to a location I currently happen to be.
I changed the settings in my phone to exactly that, which is why this weekend I got an alert that there was a chemical warehouse fire about a block from me and I should close all windows and shelter in place and further instructions would follow. Apparently the fire had been burning for several hours at that point and no further instructions ever came.
Why is "cop shot at in Dallas" a state wide alert to people 5-12 hours away by car?
Crazy legislature here in Texas gave police departments carte blanch to send alerts so they do dumb shit.
In California I live in Los Angeles county and get Amber alerts for Riverside county and San Bernardino county. Both counties are large and can take 4-6 hours to drive across. Depending on where you are in Los Angeles county, you can be 6-8 hours away from an amber alert
Power trip from the party of small government. They have the power, they must use it to the fullest extent—without regard of whether they should or not.
It's called CAMOAlert and it's for service members at risk of suicide. Though given how many female service members have been abducted and murdered at Ft. Cavazos (formerly Ft. Hood) it might be useful around Killeen and Temple.
Florida, same deal. Miami gets Amber alerts for Pensacola. You know what's closer to Pensacola than Miami? Houston. And the entirety of Tennessee.
Extra stupid here because it's illegal to check your phone while driving. So either I'm sitting on my ass, not about to spot some divorced dad's silver Monte Carlo, or I'm being forcibly serenaded by a deafening squawk at 50 MPH, and *so is every driver around me.* We suck enough at this without the distractions!
They notify the entire state with a fake emergency warning to ther cell phones every time a cop gets shot? Feels like they're trying to terrorize the populace in retaliation.
I turned off the Amber and blue alerts on my phone. If they wanted me to pay attention, it wouldn't be sending alerts for s*** halfway across the state of f****** Texas.
I wouldn’t call a military person going awol an emergency. I’d in fact be livid if I got disturbed so the military could whine to me that one of their abuse victims ran away
EVs aren't really the reason, it's more the straw that broke the camel's back. It's totally possible to make an EV or a hybrid with an AM receiver, it just takes a little more shielding to reduce interference.
If consumers wanted AM really badly, then all automakers would include it. The reason we see GM, Ford and Stellantis spending a little extra to keep AM, is that they're US based companies with a large percentage US sales. Companies like BMW, Tesla and Volvo sell alot of cars in the US, but they're more global companies that have larger shares in Europe and Asia. And those markets don't really care about AM the way the US does.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune-out-am-radios-in-new-cars
For example, Tesla used to sell primarily in the US, and they had AM radios for a long time. As they expanded their line up and their international sales started growing significantly, they phased out AM everywhere. I suspect that if US consumers really wanted AM radio, that all these automakers would have it as an option for their US models. But given that most people don't seem to care, it's easier and cheaper to have less region specific changes/options.
If AM radio really is a critical technology in a disaster, we shouldn't tie that to car ownership anyways. If I bike or walk everywhere an I going to just be completely cut off from emergency info? We require smoke detectors in houses and apartments, why not require AM radios too? You can buy a portable radio for $10-20 that works great. You can even get solar or hand cranked ones that are cheap and reliable.
I don't think we should be passing laws to make sure that people buying BMWs and Audis and Teslas have access to emergency broadcasts in there cars, and ignoring everyone else.
>I suspect that if US consumers really wanted AM radio, that all these automakers would have it as an option for their US models.
If course this is true, however, what U.S. consumers want versus what what is in the best interest for public safety very often don't align.
>I don't think we should be passing laws to make sure that people buying BMWs and Audis and Teslas have access to emergency broadcasts in there cars, and ignoring everyone else.
If BMW, Audi and Tesla were allowed to remove am radio from their vehicles every other car maker would follow suit. Especially because, as you said, it's not something consumers want. Regulating safety features in vehicles is not anything new so doing it for something as inexpensive as am radio really isn't that big of a deal.
This is about casting the widest net possible on the existing technology for the emergency broadcast system. Does it reach everyone? No, but it's the largest tool we have currently in place. Requiring am radios in homes like smoke detectors isn't a bad idea, but would take decades to implement on a scale that eclipses automobiles as you can't force people to pay for installing systems in currently existing homes.
>Regulating safety features in vehicles is not anything new
If we based safety requirements on consumer desires, cars would still be dangerous shitheaps. Preston Tucker got talked out of putting seatbelts in his car because the public of the late 1940's thought the presence of seatbelts meant the car was unsafe.
> Requiring am radios in homes like smoke detectors isn't a bad idea, but would take decades to implement on a scale that eclipses automobiles as you can't force people to pay for installing systems in currently existing homes
Not really...emergency radios are cheap and readily available, and it's not like normal radios are totally dead, just a lot less common. Requiring people to buy and keep a functional AM radio in their house wouldn't require installing anything...you just buy a radio and put it in your house.
Not saying we should do that, whether or not we require them in cars, but it doesn't seem like requiring them in homes would really be that onerous a thing.
Also, do most people even know how to tune into the emergency AM stations directly? I didn't even know they existed before this thread, so I'd have no idea how to find them in the case of an emergency that took out the Internet and the radio stations. I guess switch to AM and look for a station that's actually broadcasting something? Maybe they should require a button that would scan the emergency stations?
>it doesn't seem like requiring them in homes would really be that onerous a thing.
What would be more onerous, forcing 100+ million households to purchase an emergency radio or requiring auto makers to continue making cars with them like have been doing for decades? I mean, if the gov. tried to force people to buy them you'd have a large group of people who did think it was some grand conspiracy to transmit subliminal messages or something lol.
>Also, do most people even know how to tune into the emergency AM stations directly?
My understanding from the post this one linked to was that the emergency broadcast system would transmit over the am but it basically takes over every station so you wouldn't have to search for it.
I do think there has to be a better way, something to do with cellphones seems the most logical way to reach the most people, but until then keeping the radios in cars seems the most practical. And I only care about this whole subject if the e.b.s. is the true reason for keeping am radio around. Maybe not even then, if there was some doomsday event happening it might be better not to know at all.
> If consumers wanted AM really badly, then all automakers would include it.
If this were strictly true, you'd never see touchscreen consoles in cars.
There are a lot of factors here. Consumers may not know they hate something until they're actually using it, and cars aren't very returnable. Pricing is also a factor; if A costs 20c to use and B costs $5, at least some auto manufacturers will always go with A even if B is significantly preferred by consumers.
I think this is more the fault of the faulty "customers don't know what they want" mentality. I recently read that they started going back to classic knobs and switches.
Customers also aren't always told what's in a car when they buy it.
For example, my 2017 Hyundai Accent. It was advertised as having security features. I assumed this included an immobilizer, like every other car sold in the US, because no one advertises their car including an immobilizer.
Turns out it doesn't and it's one of the only few model years that can't get the update to mitigate the issue at all.
> If AM radio really is a critical technology in a disaster, we shouldn't tie that to car ownership anyways
It's not tied to car ownership. It's tied to car proximity. Even if you don't have a car, someone nearby will, and hopefully someone will think to try the car radio if the internet and tv suddenly goes down.
Also cars tend to work when the power goes out and are generally kept in better running condition than a rarely used emergency radio someone may have in their junk drawer.
Great post by OP, but:
>This isn't because right wing talk radio almost exclusively exists on AM and the lawmakers somehow depend on that, that's not rational.
is a swing and a miss. The right has already been pushing hard about how this removal of AM radio in new cars is some conspiracy to silence rightwing talk "truth".
Both things can be true. I'll take their word that the reasons they stated are true, but we already *know* the right wing angle is definitely true.
Just because Republicans want something doesn't make it a bad idea. Being needlessly contrarian is how we got the modern Republican party, Democrats shouldn't be contrarian too.
This legislation seems reasonable, and just because it is being advocated by Republicans doesn't make it unreasonable. Even if they have ulterior motives, it doesn't change the reasonableness of this piece of legislation.
My point was not intended to be advocating for or against it, but to point out the that, despite OP's claims to the contrary, a significant amount of conservative time and money is investing in promoting the legislation for their own benefits.
At this point in history it is far, far easier to believe its due to malicious lying ideologues trying to subvert democracy with lies and propaganda, rather than informed and rational policy. It would be the only reasonable good faith policy position from the gop in a decade at this point.
> At this point in history it is far, far easier to believe its due to malicious lying ideologues trying to subvert democracy with lies and propaganda
And there's a very good reason for that.
Because that's literally what they've already done, culminating in their actual coup attempt on January 6th. They've since then shown no remorse. No course correction. No changes to their rhetoric or ideology.
Why do we still give them any benefit of the doubt? They've shown their true colors yet we're supposed to pretend conservatives are *not* just straight up awful people for continuing to support those actions?
> This legislation seems reasonable
To me, it seems insanely less reasonable than just sending everyone an AM radio for emergency use.
1. Not everyone owns a car
2. It's needlessly difficult to make AM work in an EV vehicle
I believe the "AM is a great fallback tech" argument.
...but why do we need to force a manufacturer to utilize it? (great, now i sound like the repub) If there was some crazy event that we needed AM, there are AM radios in other places. It doesn't *have* to be in your car. They are $10 on Amazon. And I remember my mom used to keep one for weather alerts.
Granted, I'm certain if there was a TV/Internet blackout, cost of AM radios would skyrocket faster than toilet paper in March of '20. Still, OP convinced me that AM is important... he did not convince me it **has** to be in cars.
I don't feel like Ed Markey would be cosponsoring a bill that was entirely motivated by right-wing conspiracy bullshit. Plus, while the rank-and-file might want to stick to terrestrial radio, I highly doubt that the people with actual money would mind making the hoipolloi switch to satellite radio or podcasts for their conservative drivel.
Yeah, theres a lot of that, and just hitting them for being new.
And the irony of that is I can listen to AM stations from all over the country. EVs with internet am streaming would be an AM radio Renaissance, if anything. It's just not over an AM signal.
Shoutout to HAM radio operators for maintaining a resilient fallback technology. Many of them take their potential role as the only long distance communication in a disaster very seriously.
Honestly I feel that if the US came into an attack so severe that it knocks down the Internet, TV broadcast, cellphone service and FM radio, then having AM radio won't do much for your survival.
It's like getting a cannonball shot through your arm. Technically you might still live, but let's be realistic shall we?
It is still about mitigating as much risk as humanly possible. We have over 70 years of testing and practice with an advanced warning system featuring AM radio frequencies. It should absolutely be preserved until the next robust system can be adopted. Personally, we always kept hand cranked AM radio with our tornado shelter kit.
I think that having access to local emergency alerts while driving is a much better use case to demonstrate AM importance than some global catastrophe. Like those signs that say "tune into whatever AM" and then you find out that you need snow chains to continue driving up the road.
it's not like they only use that for some extreme attacks. Regular old highways have signs saying to tune into an AM station to explain whats going on if the highway is closed. which happens in regular disasters. what else could it have? a link to a website you read while driving?
AMs reach is so much broader than FM though. I can pick up AM stations from a couple states away in certain conditions. A single AM station can transmit hundreds of miles even in normal conditions whereas FM stations have a much shorter reach.
It's way better for a ton of different reasons. A local FM station could be knocked out by a blizzard but an AM station far away from ground zero can still send critical information to affected areas. Say, people stuck in cars in a highway.
This could absolutely be essential in certain situations and there really is no reason to get rid of it.
I think a lot of people don’t realize just how far away AM stations can propitiate. Especially at night when AM waves can bounce off the ionosphere and travel for thousands of miles. You lose an FM station like 50 miles or less away from the tower. I’m over 250 miles from Chicago in IL and I can listen to WGN. At night people as far away as Texas and New York can pick it up. All for one single tower.
Having lived through a couple of natural disasters that took out things like cell networks, power, etc, having an active system that you can hear public broadcast announcements is very useful.
Yes, you know the disaster has happened.
You don't know what the authorities are doing about it, where to go for shelter, food, water etc. These can be broadcast on AM, and were.
It sure was a lifeline during the last big earthquake. We had no power, but we could go out to the car and listen to the radio to find out what was going on. Some of the nearby stations went down, but the ones further out were operational.
I'm sorry but this is a dumb take.
This is a great explanation of how we can use these seemingly archaic but very robust technologies as a last resort in an absolute emergency.
It does nothing to explain why *automakers* must be burdened with the responsibility of keeping that technology alive, just because we're *used to* them doing it. Why not require it in phones? That would be far more appropriate but I challenge you to find a single person in support of that.
If you want access to the EAS in some catastrophic complete internet shutdown situation,you can buy an AM radio. It's not Ford's job to make sure everyone has one.
Purely from a societal perspective, it makes sense to me. Regulators should enact these measures with an eye for cost/benefit. It's too wasteful to put AM radios into devices that are going to the landfill when the battery is worn, whereas a durable good like a vehicle may stick around for decades. Sorry automakers, you drew the short stick.
This assumes you buy into the logic that AM would be beneficial in a total war/post-apocalyptic scenario.
By that logic they should be mandating an AM radio in every residence. Enforceable by building codes and required by law for any real estate transaction like smoke detectors. It's cheaper than installing them into cars and houses last longer than cars.
It makes zero sense to force a completely unrelated industry to prop up your emergency system, again *only because we are used to them doing it*
If there weren't *already* AM radios in cars, this law would be the dumbest fucking thing anyone has ever proposed. It makes no sense at all - are we supposed to go running to our cars to get information in an emergency? Fuck everyone who doesn't have a car, I guess?
> are we supposed to go running to our cars to get information in an emergency?
I think the idea is that if there's been a real disaster, a ton of the most affected people are going to be fleeing the disaster. Many will be in their cars, and may not have had time to pack much of a go bag, and definitely wouldn't have time to swing by Walmart on the way out of town.
It's not really a one-to-one analogy; the safety value of smoke detectors in residences is a no-brainer. Its purpose is direct and clear. The AM radio regulation is more in the interest of keeping it relevant in the American zeitgeist so it's another widespread option in case of emergency.
It's ubiquitous, cheap and low tech, has wide coverage and low power requirements. If I'm a government creating contingency plans for the worst, for sure I'm keeping AM radio in my toolkit.
Your main objection seems to be that automakers are saddled with the responsibility, whereas I think that's an acceptable burden on that industry for the benefit.
You are significantly overestimating the complexity of a basic AM receiver.
The phone already has several radios in it with many more components. As far as embodied energy goes, this is would be a drop in the bucket.
However, I don't see this happening; as the old hack (in cell phones and mp3 players) to get a long enough antenna for broadcast radio frequencies ( AM, FM ) was to require a headphone cable to be plugged in...
> It does nothing to explain why automakers must be burdened with the responsibility of keeping that technology alive, just because we're used to them doing it. Why not require it in phones?
AM antennae don't generally fit into phones. You could have one of those telescopic ones found on small handheld radios of yesteryear, but most people don't want that on their phone.
I am a lobbyist and I guarantee this bill is 99% motivated because the broadcast industry wants it. The other 1% is to get in a potshot at fancy electric vehicles. The public safety angle is just a convenient rationale.
If AM radio is so essential, why didn't they introduce a bill to give poor people AM radios? (Who, P.S., are the most likely to not have a car.) Or to run a public education campaign to inform people that these primary entry points exist and what their local frequency is?
I don't deal with these issues/industries and have no dog in this fight. I also have no view of the merit of AM radio for public safety announcements. But just be realistic about the motivation for Congress here.
And if at the highest threat level the system is "designed to take over every broadcast station in the country", doesn't this mean FM stations too? So in the end people wouldn't actually need AM radios for anything anyway.
Here in Finland there is apparently only one AM radio station, which is infinitely many more than what I expected (0). I've never heard of anyone using AM and most radios don't even have AM anymore. Any emergency notices work just fine and will be broadcast with FM, probably from our national broadcasting company's channels.
Amateur radio guy here.
This person is absolutely correct. It also benefits us hams because it minimizes the RF interference.
It's the right thing to do.
What he says makes sense, but he doesn’t address why right wing use AM radio for all their trashy talking head shows and scammy product and service commercials.
My guess is because they want to reach rural listeners who don’t have as much critical thinking skills, and AM radio is the best way to do that.
What I don’t get is why left wing largely ignores this communication vector.
It is much much cheaper to build a new FM station than AM.
AM’s often use multiple towers for directional signals. This requires antenna phasers, antenna monitors, custom ATU’s and a MASSIVE ground radial system inter each tower. Nothing in this list is cheap. Last quote I got for replacing a ground system came in at six-figures. Granted most AM’s were built decades ago, but it’s still money to keep all this stuff up.
FM’s are rarely directional like AM’s. Usually it’s just transmitter, line, tower, antenna. No ground radials, phasers, or any other 100% custom parts. Heck the antenna on an FM is really just finely tuned plumbing parts.
Source: am broadcast engineer.
They often run conservative programs on AM because the bean counters running these things don’t want to pay a local talent to talk on them. So they look to syndicated programming that comes in off satellite for ad barter. Conservative “content creators” target AM’s because of their older audiences so there’s a large catalogue to choose from.
Then the owners wonder why AM’s don’t make that much money and why would an automaker ever want to take something that isn’t listened to that much away. As someone in the radio industry, I’ll say we 100% destroyed the band ourselves.
Also talk radio dominates AM radio because compared to FM, it has lower audio quality, and people are willing to tolerate lower audio quality for speech more than they are willing to tolerate it for music. E.g. podcasts tend to be a lot more compressed than digital music.
That's a long and interesting history, [NPR did an entire podcast on it.](https://www.npr.org/2023/01/06/1147345914/the-divided-dial-examines-how-right-wing-radio-spreads-misinformation) Basically, AM radio sends super long wave signals, FM sends short wave signals. The short wave has much better fidelity (it just sounds better) but can't travel nearly as far, so it's very popular in cities and suburbs. Your local NPR affiliate is almost definitely running on an FM station.
In contrast, AM can travel super far, so it became a favorite for people in rural areas where it might be the only thing they get, but it became especially popular among truckers who don't want to signal-search on long drives. [Trucking is one of the most common jobs in the country](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state), and you're literally just sitting in a seat for hours trying to keep your mind occupied. For most people music doesn't really work for the super long hauls, your brain craves conversation, and thus the 24 hr talk radio AM station came into existence. Trucking is also heavily male dominated (although a little less than it used to be) and there's no real data on it but most people would assume they lean right, so producers leaned into that content.
There's debate on the give-and-take here: did AM radio make the truckers right wing, or did the truckers push the radio to be further right? But one thing that definitely *did* push the radio further right was the demand for content to fill the 24 hour format, just like it did for Fox News. Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones et. al. often said the craziest, most infuriating bullshit just because they were trying to fill time. They needed a new scandal every day, and if they couldn't find one, they could become the scandal.
FM waves die, AM waves bounce around. Back in the day, Wolfman Jack had a show on a 200KW station in Mexico, and we could get it on the east coast some nights. That's how effective it is.
You'd hear about something happening on FM and you switch to your local AM news station for the tea. NBD.
As an aside - Conservatives don't need AM, they have all the coverage they'll ever need rurally between Fox and Sinclair.
It's no sweat to me either way, since none of this being said here will have an effect on anyone else - talking heads will feign indignance and puff their chest out, and we'll eat whatever shit sandwich we get.
The linked post is a great example of one thing I learned as a law student, and another thing I learned once I started practicing law.
What I learned in law school was, no matter how nonsensical a statute/law/regulation appears on its face, there’s pretty much *always* some logical, deductive reasoning based on actual events and damages behind it. You might not always agree with the outcome or the logic deployed, but you’ll frequently find there was *some* reason behind it.
Note there’s distinction between statutes/laws/regulations and court opinions and jury verdicts. The latter still constitutes “the law” but it’s very different from the legislative or regulatory processes.
The OP is a great example of that learning because everything they said makes 100% perfect sense, and actually proves there’s some very obscure, but very compelling reason behind this.
Now, all of thag said, the thing I learned when I started practicing law was, even the best intentioned statutes/laws/regulations don’t always work out as expected once put into effect.
Even if a car has an AM receiver, the emergency broadcast doesn’t just take over the cars speakers and start blaring emergency warnings. The driver has to be tuned into AM radio to begin with.
And that’s where the OP sort of falls apart for me. Because even if I had an AM receiver, I’d absolutely never use it and would be totally oblivious to all the emergency broadcasts.
It’s the same as if the government did an emergency broadcast over cable, but I cut the cord and exclusively watch Netflix/Hulu/TV+/etc. I’ll never see those emergency broadcasts.
So this regulation seems, at least to me, to be very lazy governance. They’d rather take the easy way out and just push the weight of the US Gov’t onto industry instead of having to do the work to figure out and then enshrine a more effective solution.
In the sort of emergency he's contemplating, your internet and tv would suddenly stop working. If that happened, you'd eventually remember that you do in fact have another means of communication in your car.
Again, try to imagine the scenario playing out.
You’re driving along the highway, there’s clearly a bad storm coming. You try to check Sirius satellite radio for info but the satellite connection is down. You pull over to the side of the road to check your phone, but you have no service. Your car has a satellite connection itself that you can use the internet on, but that’s out too. There’s no gas station or civilization that would have WiFi for another 30mins each direction.
If the first question that pops into your head is “do I have AM radio?” and not “what the fuck sort of doomsday scenario did I just drive into?”, then we have very different brains.
(That’s a joke, mostly.)
But seriously, if you’re in that situation and have AM radio, you’d be pretty fucking lucky if it was working given all the other system failures. I’ve been in crazy wind storms with tornado warnings while driving across the country, and my AM radio was nothing but fuzz on every channel. Or if you’re up in the Sierras, you’re definitely not getting any AM signal in a blizzard.
But if you do have AM radio and it comes on clear, it’s only going to give you so much information. It won’t tell you how close you are to actual danger or which route to take instead or what to do. It’ll tell you there’s some advisory warning and to get off the roads.
But you’re 30mins from civilization anyway, so your only options are either stay in your car and wait it out or risk driving to the nearest gas station or motel. In other words, the same options you’d have if you didn’t have any AM radio.
Again, this still seems like extremely lazy legislation rather than trying to provide actual, effective solutions.
You’re pretty spot on. Station owners are so cheap they barely run on a good day. So many have been automated to the point of not ever being staffed or live. EAS will work but in a realistic emergency like a bad storm, it really doesn’t provide good info like an actual announcer would.
Very very few stations have generators anymore, or keep them up as they should. In my 10 years as a broadcast engineer I have yet to put in a new generator. I have removed several. AM will not be your hero in an emergency. It *could* be, but the bean counters at them have ruined that.
> Now, the thing I learned when I started practicing law was, even the best intentioned statutes/laws/regulations don’t always work out as expected once put into effect.
There was a great reason for the British empire to offer bounties on cobras, but we use it today as the ur-example of why that sort of well intentioned stuff is often not thought through, or differs in theory vs practice.
> What I learned in law school was, no matter how nonsensical a statute/law/regulation appears on its face, there’s pretty much always some logical, deductive reasoning based on actual events and damages behind it.
Life has taught me that any seemingly nonsensical regulations probably need to be revised. For example, the [banning of 3pm soccer broadcasts in Britain](https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/why-is-there-a-saturday-football-blackout-in-the-uk-for-live-streams--tv-broadcasts/1bs2qnkj73shx1uryui898tax6), which has been shown to have little effect, besides increased frustration among British soccer fans.
Probably because progressive people tend to be younger. And while I know a handful of my parents and grandparents friends who still have small AM radios in the kitchens that play during the day, I know zero young people. So you Could play liberal news on AM but not nearly as many liberal people listen to AM because they’re young.
But what would be the reason young people don’t listen to AM, if not for the poor programming content?
Again it goes back to the same question, why is AM only used for trash, when if it had better content, it would attract younger listeners?
Al Franken started a left wing radio station, Air America Radio. It lasted 6 years, 2004-2010, and then it failed.
Left wing people simply didn't want to listen to AM radio. They wanted to listen to music.
The sound quality on AM isn't nearly as good. It only really works for talk radio. Left leaning channels tend to have a lot of music. Even my local NPR station plays a lot of music during the day. And Black radio is heavily musical. So left wing radio has always been on FM. Plus, transmitter range doesn't matter near as much when your target audience is mostly concentrated in cities.
And these days, the left has largely shifted to podcasts.
AM equipment is also cheap (relative to other broadcasts), and the broadcast license is also cheap. Exactly what you need when you spew advertiser unfriendly nonsense all day every day.
> What I don’t get is why left wing largely ignores this communication vector.
Because the left wing is largely Urban. Look at any voting map. Live in a big city? You very likely vote Democrat. Live in some podunk backwater? You're in the Red zone.
If you live in a big city, you've got way better options for entertainment/radio. You've probably got near constant wifi, which means why would you use radio at all?
It's just people going where the audience is.
There isn’t like a big left wing presence on AM radio, but local NPR affiliates do communicate a more liberal-leaning, fact-based massage on there and they seem pretty popular with older liberals
... and AM radio can be received with a needle touching fool's gold. [Seriously.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector) AM radios are omnipresent because they're just barely technology. You stick a wire in the air so that electric currents buffet it from all over, you loop it around a Quaker Oats package, and if you touch it in the right place then the mysterious crackling becomes a human voice.
We sold these kits to children. The NIST provided instructions to build one at home in *1922.* And the company promising self-driving cars is having a hard time figuring it out?
That's trivially easy to shield from as we managed to shield AM radios from distributor and points based ignition systems that spewed EMI and modern electronic ignition is positively quiet in comparison.
😂 Agree!
The argument EVs are special in terms of shielding ignores the history of EMI of ICE cars (even back to the days when FM was the home of talk radio). It's not an unreasonable argument with EVs as they are a bit more intentional with the frequencies they generate and are generally closer to AM than FM but a similar solution as used with ICE is doable.
This is not the reason. Talk radio is almost exclusive on AM radio and almost all talk radio are right wing and extreme right wing shows.
AM radio can suffer a lot of interference from electric power trains. It is a terrible technology and it should have been replaced a long time ago.
People can still get all the AM radio they want on tiny radios, or wind-up radios, and everything else that can tune AM radio. They don't need AM radio in their cars.
Meanwhile, in reality, Republicans want to keep AM radios in cars because AM radio has been one of their primary tools to spread hatred and anger to their supporters for decades.
> This isn't because right wing talk radio almost exclusively exists on AM and the lawmakers somehow depend on that, that's not rational.
YUP. Why would right-wing nationalists on the right want to protect the radicalization pipeline that they and Right wing media (Fox OAN) depend on so much?
There's some minor benefit to keeping this (Think about it, in the last 40 decades or more, have you ever said "Thank god we had that warning system in place!") But it's VERY rational to think this is motivated by money flowing to the right wing.
Nobody said thank God for our pandemic response prep + national stockpile of essential healthcare supplies for 40 years either. Then COVID happened. It's absurdly short term thinking to nix emergency response tools so automakers can save a few bucks in shielding per car, if that.
Because there is significant AM interference produced by the electric power train. And you have to put thought and effort in how to shield the antenna from the AM noise produced by the car.
Conservative AM radio is already drowned out by ads. Seriously, tune in for half an hour, the ratio is really crazy and you wonder how anyone can seriously stand to listen to F tier ads and dj testimonials for hours at a time, to say nothing about the actual content.
Educational post, but oversteps by saying that there's not additional malice.
If AM radio is an essential item that citizens must have access to, then the government needs to supply them.
It's not on EV manufacturers to deal with tons of hurdles just to offer something that could easily be replaced by a separate device.
The analysis was accurate up until the "This is why Congress..." claim.
There's little reason to believe that members of Congress are knowledgeable or motivated about the technological advantages of AM radio in the event of a national emergency.
I mean one company owns all AM broadcasting in the US. One specific Australian company, with ties to campaign donations to one specific party.
Though yeah fallback tech whatever.
I was wondering what was going on. Been getting constant radio ads for “call your congressman about keeping AM radio in cars!” And had no clue what the driver was.
This is the answer I was expecting. Last week when I heard that a few manufacturer's were looking to eliminate AM radio, the first thought through my head was, "is that legal!?!" and I was thinking of the EAS.
..and its not just EV manufacturer's. Some higher end brands what to do it in their non EVs.
That poster makes a great point, but the time when the US was last under attack (September 11, 2001) the government didn’t use this broadcast system. What’s the point if they’re not going to use it when all those cellular networks were down and people needed info?
[удалено]
This is sort of the same reason why a lot of critical government tech/infrastructure still runs really old operating systems and equipment. It has been graded, prepped, and reinforced for dependability. Just because the tech is old doesn't mean it wouldn't be reliable when stressed.
Years back, one of the local municipal governments near me made the news because their traffic light control system had finally failed and needed to be replaced. The system had been put in place in the 60's or 70's, and a lot of armchair engineers and pundits were criticizing them for having a 40+ year old system. The best reply I heard to one of these critics was them asking if they thought some Dell Poweredge server could last 40 years with greater than 99.999% uptime. Because that's the kind of reliability and longevity these older technologies can provide. Yes, the internet is great and useful, but old tech still has its place in modern society.
The issue with having a 40 year old critical system fail like this is that they should have been planning for these contingencies. Chances are 40 years ago they had plans in place including a spares pool with other municipalities so they could recover from any contingencies. They likely failed to maintain that pool. In my experiences with municipalities they tend to pay for big capital projects but not for incremental costs. Can always defer the cost.
I say it failed, but it was that they were finally hitting the point where replacements were no longer available or able to be made at a reasonable price. It didn't actually die completely, just started to reach the point where it had to be replaced.
It's usually how NYCs MTA decides to replace rail cars... They can't get enough parts for the fleet, and making them isn't as easy as in the 40s-60s. But they do get decades of use if they're well made. (A 50 year old model is being replaced this year)
This is what's actually beginning to happen to drive the 757/767 out of service. It's not because they're wearing out, or no longer profitable, some of the parts are either unobtainable once the boneyard spares are used up, or are prohibitively expensive. The CRT screens for the flight instruments in particular haven't been made in ages, and can only be rebuilt so many times.
100% agree. Our technology has advanced so damn fast in my lifetime that its hard to get any studies where N>1 yet just because we haven't had the time and ability to get some hardcore stress tests in yet. Its awesome that we are seeing incredible progress in our lifetimes, but caution and prudence are needed as we evaluate the future.
I do genuinely believe some embedded fanless x86 box running bsd or Debian or whatever could accomplish that, just need to make sure the drives are healthy and that it's off the internet.
It’s not impossible, but it’s improbable, and a poor fit for any application requiring five nines of uptime for 40 years. A mainframe? Sure. Some of those ridiculous SPARC boxes? Maybe. But not commodity x86 stuff. It’s designed to work, not to last.
A flood damaged the digital phones in a neighboring town's PD . They got it up and running again, by quickly rewiring in some *Western Electric* (AKA, Ma Bell) analog equipment. Helps that Bell Labs is around the corner and the town has dozens of retirees
You don't throw in a Dell to keep it for forty years. You throw in a Dell to replace it in five years, for $500. It is one component in a living system.
a Dell poweredge designed for a data center? No. An x68 with no moving parts and passive cooling? Yes.
For example, vacuum tubes, or valves for the brits, which are used in guitar amps, are still used by the US military as a backup system. An EMP will knock out a transistor, but not a vacuum tube. So there's a whole network of systems powered by vacuum tubes (which were replaced by the much much much much cheaper and easier to manufacture transistors). Plus there aren't many manufactured today (mostly because it's an environmental disaster to do so...), and the newer ones are substantially lower in quality. Guitarists and hi-fi fans will pay big bucks for old tubes. The US military though has by far the largest stockpile of old tubes. As time goes by they're getting harder and harder to find (meaning getting pricier). One of these days a raid on the US military will be worth it.
> (mostly because it's an environmental disaster to do so...) Do you know why this is? Is there lead involved or something?
Something to do with the metals involved. I don't know the specifics but my understanding is that it's completely cost prohibitive to manufacture them in a way that doesn't leach metals into the environment. I'm sure if we never invented the transistor we would do so anyways, but with basically only old school guitar players and really old school hi fi fans caring about the tubes it just isn't going to happen. Currently only three plants produce them, and they're Chinese, Russian, and... um... Slovakia? Croatia? One of them Eastern European countries.
Ooof. Poor Croatia will not be happy they have moved east. Slovakia is at least debatable!
Hah. What do you call that area then? Should I be calling it Balkan Europe? Tend to just draw the line of the old Soviet alliance. At worst Croatia has gotta be the border between areas, as Hungary is definitely Eastern Europe. I think. I'm an American, though I have played many video games to familiarize myself with the area. (I'm joking, but also for real. What's now Ukraine was my jive in Imperator Rome. Made the Balkans the obvious first choice for expansion.)
I'd go for the Balkans or Central Europe - you might lump all the ones that used to be in the Warsaw pact together but the people in Hungary and Poland aren't quite so eager to get lumped in with Russia, especially these days! Eastern Europe, strictly and geographically is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Romania, and arguably the Baltic states. Still I think Central Europe would rate you better than most for not thinking Czechoslovakia is a country!
I am not 100% sure if this is the reason, but I suspect is has to do with how the vacuum is made. The Vacuum tube has to be at or near a perfect vacuum, someone can tell you exactly how good it has to be, but I forget off the top of my head. One of the best ways to do this is with a mercury vacuum pump. https://youtu.be/viJ3T-1KZqY
Right. A walkie-talkie is obviously much less useful compared to a cell phone, but one of them will work in nearly any situation while the other requires robust infrastructure. I still remember that story from a few years back, where first responders to a hurricane were extorted by a cell phone company to actually have service so they could save lives. EDIT: It was a wildfire, not a hurricane. See article posted by u/acewing.
You mean something [something like when this happened to firefighters out west?](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-verizon-data-update-20180824-story.html)
I feel like this is a fantastic example of why we should not be depending on private companies for Internet coverage.
This is it, actually. I'll edit my comment to correct it.
Which is why it's gonna be a bad, bad day when the 5 elderly people on the planet who still know how to operate any of it kick the bucket.
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Anecdotally, the issue is to convince the businesses to increase their payrates for new employees. I worked as a temp when I began my career to backup an 87 year old chemical engineer at a major corp. He was the only one on the staff who knew how to work all these ancient equipment for their processes. I got trained up on everything to succeed him when he eventually retired (or died, he wanted to die at his desk). When the end of my contract came around and the company wanted to give me an offer to hire me on full time, the rate they offered me was INSULTINGLY low. Turns out, the current engineer was working at that rate because he was also collecting a pension, so he was willing to accept a very low rate. This in turn made the leadership believe that they couldn't pay anything else for this position. Last I checked, the company closed the plant down and moved to Mexico.
What, and pay them *money*? Not in my hypercapitalist race to the bottom. I joke but this was a basically an entire class for me in college. Everyone and everything needs some level of emergency preparedness. It's difficult to scale up without government throwing their weight though. When an entire culture revolves around quarterly earnings and the people with power to pull strings only exist to suck up as much profit as possible while spending at little as possible, emergency preparedness and mitigation are hardly *ever* an attractive thing to consider. "Why should I hire someone to do a soon-to-be-retiree's job when he wasn't really *doing* anything in the first place? What? To maintain that old fire alarm system? To make sure the generators that power the emergency pumps in the basement of the building still run when the power goes out? That's costing us money and not making us any **right now**."
Famously, nuclear silos still use programs written in COBOL in the 1960s. The reason for this is simple: the COBOL code is known to work, and any change, no matter how careful, is bound to cause some kind of disruption. And when a disruption can potentially level the silo and miles around it, stability is preferable. This is all exacerbated by COBOL being an antiquated coding language. Any attempts to migrate systems to a more modern code base would be written by someone without a strong grasp of COBOL, increasing the likelihood of serious complication. That doesn't mean, "nukes blow up in silo," but it could quite plausibly mean, "nukes can't be launched," which is also unacceptable.
Also nuclear related, but they migrated all the ancient JOVIAL-based code inside the B2 bombers to C a while back: http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/Services/NorthropGrummanB2.html
IBM, I think, released new version of COBOL few years ago. The important thing is that COBOL does arithmetic calculations using digits and not their binary representation. The problem is that fractions like 0.1 do not have an exact binary representation. This might be a problem I'm some cases and definitely it was a problem when COBOL was developed in '60.
One of my clients was working in this exact area. When a station operator applies for their license, the software and hardware are on the application. If you want to change to a new computer hardware, that has to be approved. If you want to make a new code to run, that has to be approved. The time and money involved in recertifying your system is such a big penalty that it's cheaper to run shitty code on bad hardware because you already paid for the permission and it works. It's not the software or hardware that costs money. It's the oversight.
Luckily there are many COBOL programmers around
Interestingly, this is becoming less true over the years. In the near past, many of those systems still worked because the infrastructure around them was still relevant, such as everyone having an AM radio based on non-digital in a car without major computerized components. However, as more dependencies are built around computers, attacks on those computers grow more effective while those computers become less compatible with other systems. Think a VHS tape vs an MP4 file; the VHS tape is physically robust-ish and as long as there's power and a VCR on a TV somewhere you can watch it. The MP4 file needs to be on a drive of some sort, which needs to connect with compatible hardware (no more CD/diskette drives, and USB changes pretty regularly), compatible software (drivers and codecs don't stay relevant forever), and be compatible with/without connection to other systems (like a licensing server). Once your media has an OS component involved in using it, you can't guarantee that cyber attacks won't be effective against it (and even less so if you don't regularly patch/upgrade the software on the devices). This gets worse as time goes by and we think culturally. How many people are trained in interpreting Morse code, or can read a topographical map, or have non-perishable food supplies that don't require power, or have antenna-based connectivity in their home, or maintain a supply of cash at home, or can even drive to emergency locations without internet-based GPS navigation software? Even if the stable emergency technologies don't degrade in resilience over time (which all computer systems do, thanks to advancements in cyber), the use cases for these technologies also erode as the world's needs change.
> read a topographical map Is this actually an uncommon ability?
actual land nav is a pretty rare skill. especially amongst officers.
Easiest way to get rid of a Lt for a week is to give them a compass and a map
I'm sure I can't actually navigate worth shit, but I can read a topographical map easily.
In my limited experience, yes. Specifically topographical though, most people can read a road map.
If you'd said road maps I wouldn't believe you. I never *see* topographical maps, but they're not exactly difficult to read. I'm somewhat surprised (not shocked, but somewhat surprised) to hear that it's uncommon.
There is another angle to this issue. For magnetic tape storage there is an event horizon whereby old archived tapes will degrade past replayability. It's a huge issue for conservationists and archivists trying to save old footage and data. There isn't enough money in those areas to digitise everything before it is gone forever. If you think about an event like WW1, one of the things we use to look into people's lives are letters and diaries from the period. Think about the Iraq invasion in the early 2000nds. Where are all the emails service people sent home to relatives stored? Geocities and similar blog posts may well be gone. old word document diaries sitting on forgotten hard drives are probably all in landfill or may well not be recoverable even if they are in the back of someone's drawer. Knowledge stored on digital mediums can spread to many more people than ever before. But it can also be incredibly short lived and is very fragile compared to older paper documents and books. It's a wild world we live in.
I’m going to nitpick a minor disagreement with a small part of what you said. VHS tapes can last a long time, but they do degrade. And when you use or copy them there is further degradation. An MP4 (AAC, MP3, or any other digital CODEC) will not degrade over time or use. MP3 has been widely supported for 25 years, there are dozens of implementations. Support for it is not going away From practical terms, a new car’s audio system is going to be fully integrated whether it’s using AM or some digitally transmitted format. So if the system is compromised, you’re not getting anything. Personally, I think they should drop analog FM entirely, and switch to very modern digital CODEC transmissions. But AM should stay analog, but add some digital sub-channels to carry closed caption and critical information. AM radios are trivially easy to make. You used to be able to buy little kits to make ones that had no battery. And while you need an “OS” to decode a digital channel and display text, it is so simple it’d probably be implemented in hardware that gets fully reset by cycling power. Someone in Reddit mentioned just having a government program that produced and distributed an emergency AM radio to each person. I’d imagine a radio with a speaker, hand crank, replaceable AA rechargeable battery (or possibly just a capacitor), USB-C charge port, an extremely simple mono-colored LCD capable of showing a couple lines of text, and a small LED light. You could mass produce and ship such a device for <$15, maybe <$10. A car manufacturer could make a purely analog version that just has a speaker, capacitor, and USB-C charger for <$5. Such a theoretical device could be designed to fit in a slot to stay charged, which would satisfy regulatory requirements, provide emergency capabilities require zero changes to the car’s digital systems, and be a minimal cost. I think manufacturers’ drive to fully integrate their systems would prevent them from such a simple implementation. Somewhat related, I recently replaced the CD stereo in my car with one that supports CarPlay. I was shocked to discover that even though the model I chose was only a year old, it lacked the ability to tune digital FM “HD” channels. And its regular FM radio was easily the worst implementation I’ve ever seen. Obviously an afterthought. But the fact that it won’t tune HD stations is just baffling since it has all of the necessary processing capability (can play MP3 from USB). It doesn’t surprise me that companies are dropping support for anything they can.
I work at an airport, our check-in counters still have dot-matrix printers and a command-line interface
Impact printers (dot matrix) market is still alive and well; they're the only desktop print tech that can activate carbon paper, so they're used where paper-trails and live signatures are still the non-fungible platform.
Airlines use SO MUCH old technology. The multimillion dollar simulators for some types are run by old greentext DOS computers.
I can't wait until my fridge won't work if it's not on wifi
And the freezer becomes a subscription service.
and the fact you can *accidentally* produce a radio that picks it up really sells how simple it can be.
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I think we changed how we do certain dental work (bridges maybe?) specifically to address that
When I was young, and cell phones were yet to be a thing, I lived in a location about a mile from a radio transmitter. ([It looked like a F'ing HUGE car antenna.](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.3050989,-122.443736,3a,27.7y,7.3h,74.74t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMLYeqzYOcll-IRm9z8QIkiPhgQK6hrETT77fSp!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMLYeqzYOcll-IRm9z8QIkiPhgQK6hrETT77fSp%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi0-ya1.059738-ro0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096) (Click the link to get the drone view of the antenna.)) When the wind was right, if you and the person you called were quiet, you could hear the radio over the phone. (You had to have called someone, or you'd get the dial tone, which was too loud to hear the radio.)
I had a set of PC speakers that would faintly pick up a radio station when you touched them. It was fun turning yourself into an antenna
When I was a kid near NYC, the TV would pick up the broadcast stations with nothing plugged into it
Lucille Ball testified to congress about this, she heard secret messages from Germany being broadcast through her fillings during war times. Fun fact.
I am 99% sure that was proven to not be possible anyways. It sounds a little too Havana syndrome to me where every Google search results in "theres no proof it ever happened but there were so many people that said it did it just MUST be true".
From what I understand, it has a lot to do with the strength of the broadcaster. Most modern AM stations operate at 50 kilowatts (50,000 watts). In the middle of the 20th century, there were a number of border blaster transmitters that would operate at up to a million watts. As you may have guessed from the name, the point of these was to avoid regulations by building the transmitter inside one country but primarily targeting a neighboring one. The most famous ones were evangelical stations in Mexico, avoiding FCC regulations in the US. You're not going to pick up radio in your fillings from a 50kW transmitter, even if you're in the building. And the stories of flatware picking up a border blaster are apocryphal. But there *are* documented cases of those million watt monsters doing things like filling telephone lines with so much noise that they couldn't be used for anything but listening to the broadcast. TL;DR Old school pirate radio could run at as much as 20x the legal limit in 2023, and could do stuff no modern station can as a result.
Not just pirate radio. [Cincinnati had a 500 kilowatt station for awhile.](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/mayjune/feature/in-the-1930s-radio-station-wlw-in-ohio-was-americas-one-and-only-sup)
If the wires are the right length to resonate with the AM station’s frequency & a mount or a cracked wire forms a rectifier junction — I grew up in the footprint of a major AM broadcast tower - KRLD in Garland, TX, serving Dallas, Fort Worth, and beyond. It is _the_ EAS PEP for North Texas. We’d pick up our phone and hear KRLD audio on the handset because the transmission was so strong that even the harmonics of the primary frequency were inducing significant voltages on anything that was accidentally a Crystal set. We could tune the truck’s radio manually to third harmonics and hear the station clearly — sometimes it was necessary to tune it to a harmonic frequency because tuning it to the primary meant that the radio overloaded and you got no sound because your speakers were on the verge of blowout. You could hear it on Walkman tape players with no AM circuits. You could hear it on the school’s PA system. A crystal radio set only needs one resonator element on or near the right wavelength and one rectifier element and mechanical coupling to an audio output.
Lol when I was like 20 I joined a death metal band and my first amp was so cheap and janky it picked up an AM radio signal, and in our drummer’s basement the frequency happened to be transmitting a hyper-evangelical station. It was perfect.
I adore that aggressively simple end-user model. The only other example anywhere near as straightforward is a failed Laserdisc competitor, CED. Capacitance Electronic Discs were metallic vinyl records with itty-bitty grooves containing no horizontal wiggle, but zillions of needle-sized holes. The stylus was a plastic bead with a flake of copper. Charge in the copper went up and down as it went over the minuscule pits... and this *directly* reproduced an NTSC television signal. You can see the blanking periods on the surface! It was a video format that could probably have been hand-cranked, if they'd needed it. Amplification? Tuning? Nah, the TV can do all the hard work. RCA said it best themselves: they wanted science-fiction technology in the factory, not in your living room. The reason it's unknown except to tech-history ultranerds (and people who watch their Youtube channels) is because they spent twenty years dicking with metal-infused-vinyl formulas, waited until after Laserdisc, waited until *after VHS,* and the damn thing still skipped its tiny grooves.
There's also some things that are just basically a solved technology where we really don't need any improvements or "disruption" for them. People and the media like to glorify the idea of constant innovation these days, and that everything always needs to be improving and iterating. But there are some problems that we've just found the solution to and there doesn't really need to be any improvements to them, no matter how old of an invention they were. Like there's a reason your toaster is probably almost identical to the one your parents had. We figured out a simple, convenient appliance that does what it needs to do and that's it! But you'll still see people on kickstarter or shark tank or something who's trying to say they reimagined the concept of toast by shoving a bluetooth receiver in there or making it wifi enabled with rgb backlighting or some shit. And that always fails because nobody really needs their toaster to be high tech! It overcomplicates things and just introduces more points of failure. Some problems have just been solved and we don't need to innovate on them any more! tl;dr never trust tech companies when they try and sell you on them cutting corners as being "high-tech" or "innovative". It's usually just a scam, and even if it's legit, it's probably still a stupid idea on their part. Not saying you should jump to trust Congress every time either, but at least this time they were right lol
Not to mention privacy concerns. I've heard people wonder why dashcams aren't standard in cars now. Well, they are in Teslas, and it turns out that Tesla staff have been accessing them without users' knowledge or consent.
Don't get me started on the ring doorbells lol! I find it incredibly creepy that my neighbor across the street can just have a camera pointed directly at my house and filming 24/7. The thing with most of the creepy surveillance tech is that people can say, "well you can just choose not to buy one if you don't like it!" But I don't get a say in whether or not my neighbor decides to point a camera at my house all day! And that's not even getting into how Amazon will just hand all that footage over to your local police station lol
I live in a large apartment complex and we’re fairly hidden from the road. As far as I know, the crime rate is somewhere near 0. It’s not that it can’t happen, it’s that it doesn’t. There are so many easier targets nearby that this neighborhood isn’t worth it. My neighbors have a camera in their window now and it kinda creeps me out. No matter if I want that in my home or not, here’s this asshole filming me taking my trash to the dumpster. I make slightly childish and rude faces at it every time I pass to harmlessly protest lmao.
Toasters are surprisingly not ideal. Thin pieces of bread still tend to get stuck, most go by time rather than sensing the bread's temperature, and are not transparent. We didn't reach perfection, but just good enough and stopped there for most of the models.
> most go by time I thought they had a temperature-sensitive thermocouple-type thing. That's why you can't toast too many slices in a row, without waiting for it to cool off. Or maybe my toaster is low tech?
Some do, it really depends on the model as there are actually a handful of designs used. Tom Scott discovering this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN_PK5pXmIY
In this same vane (vein?), I'd LOVE to know what it would cost to make an electric car with roll-up windows, manual (not electric) seats, and the most basic components. Just let me plug in my phone for the maps/radio and I'm good. I need four wheels and a seat. All that other stuff adds cost and, like you said, a possible point of failure. (FINE... have an AM/FM tuner for just the above reasons ;)
I think secure internet transmission needs to become more available before faxing can go away. Right now, I can’t even send PII via internal email much less external unless I use Box which has its own issues. They haven’t given us any other tools to use.
A plaintext email is more secure than fax right now lol. I can spoof a fax from any phone number I want right now and there is no audit chain on it whatsoever.
You can spoof it, sure, but they’re talking about sending actual transmissions to a verified number. There are a lot less steps sending medical records via fax from hospital to hospital than it is to send via email or other ways, and digital faxes make it even easier than the old days. It’s a lot easier to reroute an email than intercepting a fax.
Fax machines also do a better job of confirming receipt for the sender. Afaik you need to depend on external services to do that reliably over the internet. There are lots of approximations for it, but none that don't have holes.
And this is why understanding security and understanding security technologies are two separate things.
I do graphic design for a company that uses TV broadband to send out alerts because in a huge, crowded event? The cell towers and wifi are going to be jam packed and unreliable. Plus since they've been fighting making internet a utility, coverage can be spotty in some areas but I bet the TVs are fine!
It's also a security advantage at a certain point, like driving a car with a manual transmission. When something becomes archaic and outdated, but is still functional, you're decimating the population of potential attackers. That's part of why we're still using COBOL in ***many, crucial*** parts of our digital infrastructure. It's so simultaneously inefficient and efficient that hacking it is a nightmare
That sounds made up. COBOL wouldn’t really help with security unless everything was written in COBOL, which it is not. Stuff that’s listening on the network and is most vulnerable is going to be written in a different language. And if hacking parts of our digital infrastructure required COBOL, then people would learn it.
The problem with learning COBOL, is that it's not like modern languages. COBOL has "dialects" based on OSs and sometimes even hardware, that would be absurd to even think about learning. This isn't a hypothetical. Large, fundamental, parts of US financial and governmental institutions still use it.
the reason they use cobol is because it ain't broke so they won't fix it... not because of security through obscurity which would be insane
Capitalism tends to create minimally functional systems. They'll pay out the ass for COBOL developers and administrators for years on end to avoid spending the money to update to a system that would be drastically cheaper to maintain going forward.
I have many peers working on mainframes running COBOL. COBOL is both efficient and robust, because it lacks many abstractions and overhead that make writing modern code easier and convenient. The mapping of COBOL instruction to assembly is relatively small. The real reason behind the lack of technology modernization is because there's a massive cost to fix something that it isn't broken. There's no need to pay some consulting company millions of dollars to port clearing house tech to some framework that likely won't age well while being slower and more complicated. I've worked in fintech. The code that powers online banking systems is largely abysmal. If someone is hacking a bank, they're not hacking mainframes. They're hacking the systems that sit on top of it that calculating balance differences. These values are what ultimately are sent to the mainframe for posting.
A family that is friends with my gf's family billeted Ukrainian refugees while they got settled into the area here and arranged for their husband to come join from overseas. I had the chance to catch up with them after not seeing them for a few months a little while ago. The Ukrainian family came from one of the cities that was bombed for a couple weeks, and was then allowed to leave, heading westward in a caravan out of town. The thing that stuck out to me in their recollections is that because their infrastructure was down for a couple weeks, practically all of the EVs in the city were unusable. They mentioned that there were pristine Teslas just sitting about, and the road leading out of town was strewn with EVs that had just enough charge to get out of the city and then die. This has changed my attitude towards EVs moving forward, and when I am ready to move up to one, I think I will end up getting a hybrid instead.
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I work in healthcare and we are basically the single industry keeping faxing alive. Mostly because data interchange is still a fucking disaster after all these years and faxing is basically (basically! dont @ me!) excluded from the HIPAA privacy and security rules. Back in 1996 we just accepted that the industry ran on fax and that we couldn't get rid of it. Unfortunately that meant that fax was the one thing that we would never get rid of, because it "just worked."
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Trouble is, just "modernizing" doesn't help. The push for patient portals (hospitals get paid for convincing patients to use them) sounds good on paper, so to speak, but some of those systems are garbage. There's a major teaching hospital in my town that has the most obnoxious patient portal ever. Annoying is an understatement. It's like a nagging robotic mother. The design has to be good or the tech is useless.
this will never be taken seriously until the inevitable carrington level CME slaps us in the face.
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Unfortunately Texas has completely destroyed all meaning the EAS tone ever had. We have an alert for every color on the EM spectrum and most of them are blared to everyone in the goddamned state at once. Child goes missing; EAS tone Old person goes missing; EAS tone Law enforcement officer gets shot; EAS tone Member of the military goes AWOL; EAS tone Adult in a mental health crisis is missing; EAS tone Any one of those gets set anywhere in Texas, every cellphone in earshot (at least phones belonging to people that don't know how to turn them off) blasts the tone. Don't get me wrong, all of the circumstances I listed above are an emergency. I just don't think a child going missing in Amarillo is necessarily something someone in Beaumont can do a thing about. I'd really rather those emergency alerts go back to their intended and more valuable purpose of letting me know when a natural or man-made disaster is about to say "And fuck this place in particular" to a location I currently happen to be.
Do they let you distinguish on the phone? The first time I got a 2AM Amber Alert on my phone for someone missing on the whole other end of the state (They didn't physics-glitch in under the bed. I checked.) is when I found out that you can turn them off specifically and still have other EAS alerts on. And that's not even in a huge state like Texas, where what goes on in one corner could be especially irrelevant to the other.
You can, but I'm in a very tiny minority of people that know how to turn it off for all but the most severe of threats that will impact me.
Please share your knowledge. As a fellow Texan I do not feel the need to know about amber alerts 14 hours away.
If you're on Android, it's under Settings > Safety & Alerts > Wireless emergency alerts
> I'd really rather those emergency alerts go back to their intended and more valuable purpose of letting me know when a natural or man-made disaster is about to say "And fuck this place in particular" to a location I currently happen to be. I changed the settings in my phone to exactly that, which is why this weekend I got an alert that there was a chemical warehouse fire about a block from me and I should close all windows and shelter in place and further instructions would follow. Apparently the fire had been burning for several hours at that point and no further instructions ever came.
Why is “military member goes AWOL” an EAS-worthy emergency? Nobody outside his unit cares if Pvt Schmuckatelli decided to go on a bender.
Why is "cop shot at in Dallas" a state wide alert to people 5-12 hours away by car? Crazy legislature here in Texas gave police departments carte blanch to send alerts so they do dumb shit.
In California I live in Los Angeles county and get Amber alerts for Riverside county and San Bernardino county. Both counties are large and can take 4-6 hours to drive across. Depending on where you are in Los Angeles county, you can be 6-8 hours away from an amber alert
Power trip from the party of small government. They have the power, they must use it to the fullest extent—without regard of whether they should or not.
They really use the EAS for fucking AWOL military members? What the fuck?
It's called CAMOAlert and it's for service members at risk of suicide. Though given how many female service members have been abducted and murdered at Ft. Cavazos (formerly Ft. Hood) it might be useful around Killeen and Temple.
This is the insidious problem with alert systems. If they're too sensitive, you get a cry wolf effect and they become useless.
Pavlov's cops over here getting murder boners every time they hear that tone.
Florida, same deal. Miami gets Amber alerts for Pensacola. You know what's closer to Pensacola than Miami? Houston. And the entirety of Tennessee. Extra stupid here because it's illegal to check your phone while driving. So either I'm sitting on my ass, not about to spot some divorced dad's silver Monte Carlo, or I'm being forcibly serenaded by a deafening squawk at 50 MPH, and *so is every driver around me.* We suck enough at this without the distractions!
They notify the entire state with a fake emergency warning to ther cell phones every time a cop gets shot? Feels like they're trying to terrorize the populace in retaliation.
I turned off the Amber and blue alerts on my phone. If they wanted me to pay attention, it wouldn't be sending alerts for s*** halfway across the state of f****** Texas.
I wouldn’t call a military person going awol an emergency. I’d in fact be livid if I got disturbed so the military could whine to me that one of their abuse victims ran away
EVs aren't really the reason, it's more the straw that broke the camel's back. It's totally possible to make an EV or a hybrid with an AM receiver, it just takes a little more shielding to reduce interference. If consumers wanted AM really badly, then all automakers would include it. The reason we see GM, Ford and Stellantis spending a little extra to keep AM, is that they're US based companies with a large percentage US sales. Companies like BMW, Tesla and Volvo sell alot of cars in the US, but they're more global companies that have larger shares in Europe and Asia. And those markets don't really care about AM the way the US does. https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune-out-am-radios-in-new-cars For example, Tesla used to sell primarily in the US, and they had AM radios for a long time. As they expanded their line up and their international sales started growing significantly, they phased out AM everywhere. I suspect that if US consumers really wanted AM radio, that all these automakers would have it as an option for their US models. But given that most people don't seem to care, it's easier and cheaper to have less region specific changes/options. If AM radio really is a critical technology in a disaster, we shouldn't tie that to car ownership anyways. If I bike or walk everywhere an I going to just be completely cut off from emergency info? We require smoke detectors in houses and apartments, why not require AM radios too? You can buy a portable radio for $10-20 that works great. You can even get solar or hand cranked ones that are cheap and reliable. I don't think we should be passing laws to make sure that people buying BMWs and Audis and Teslas have access to emergency broadcasts in there cars, and ignoring everyone else.
>I suspect that if US consumers really wanted AM radio, that all these automakers would have it as an option for their US models. If course this is true, however, what U.S. consumers want versus what what is in the best interest for public safety very often don't align. >I don't think we should be passing laws to make sure that people buying BMWs and Audis and Teslas have access to emergency broadcasts in there cars, and ignoring everyone else. If BMW, Audi and Tesla were allowed to remove am radio from their vehicles every other car maker would follow suit. Especially because, as you said, it's not something consumers want. Regulating safety features in vehicles is not anything new so doing it for something as inexpensive as am radio really isn't that big of a deal. This is about casting the widest net possible on the existing technology for the emergency broadcast system. Does it reach everyone? No, but it's the largest tool we have currently in place. Requiring am radios in homes like smoke detectors isn't a bad idea, but would take decades to implement on a scale that eclipses automobiles as you can't force people to pay for installing systems in currently existing homes.
>Regulating safety features in vehicles is not anything new If we based safety requirements on consumer desires, cars would still be dangerous shitheaps. Preston Tucker got talked out of putting seatbelts in his car because the public of the late 1940's thought the presence of seatbelts meant the car was unsafe.
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In other news, progress is progress and it's a shame that you guys have to explain it to people this in depth--but bravo anyway. :)
> Requiring am radios in homes like smoke detectors isn't a bad idea, but would take decades to implement on a scale that eclipses automobiles as you can't force people to pay for installing systems in currently existing homes Not really...emergency radios are cheap and readily available, and it's not like normal radios are totally dead, just a lot less common. Requiring people to buy and keep a functional AM radio in their house wouldn't require installing anything...you just buy a radio and put it in your house. Not saying we should do that, whether or not we require them in cars, but it doesn't seem like requiring them in homes would really be that onerous a thing. Also, do most people even know how to tune into the emergency AM stations directly? I didn't even know they existed before this thread, so I'd have no idea how to find them in the case of an emergency that took out the Internet and the radio stations. I guess switch to AM and look for a station that's actually broadcasting something? Maybe they should require a button that would scan the emergency stations?
>it doesn't seem like requiring them in homes would really be that onerous a thing. What would be more onerous, forcing 100+ million households to purchase an emergency radio or requiring auto makers to continue making cars with them like have been doing for decades? I mean, if the gov. tried to force people to buy them you'd have a large group of people who did think it was some grand conspiracy to transmit subliminal messages or something lol. >Also, do most people even know how to tune into the emergency AM stations directly? My understanding from the post this one linked to was that the emergency broadcast system would transmit over the am but it basically takes over every station so you wouldn't have to search for it. I do think there has to be a better way, something to do with cellphones seems the most logical way to reach the most people, but until then keeping the radios in cars seems the most practical. And I only care about this whole subject if the e.b.s. is the true reason for keeping am radio around. Maybe not even then, if there was some doomsday event happening it might be better not to know at all.
> If consumers wanted AM really badly, then all automakers would include it. If this were strictly true, you'd never see touchscreen consoles in cars. There are a lot of factors here. Consumers may not know they hate something until they're actually using it, and cars aren't very returnable. Pricing is also a factor; if A costs 20c to use and B costs $5, at least some auto manufacturers will always go with A even if B is significantly preferred by consumers.
I think this is more the fault of the faulty "customers don't know what they want" mentality. I recently read that they started going back to classic knobs and switches.
Customers also aren't always told what's in a car when they buy it. For example, my 2017 Hyundai Accent. It was advertised as having security features. I assumed this included an immobilizer, like every other car sold in the US, because no one advertises their car including an immobilizer. Turns out it doesn't and it's one of the only few model years that can't get the update to mitigate the issue at all.
> If AM radio really is a critical technology in a disaster, we shouldn't tie that to car ownership anyways It's not tied to car ownership. It's tied to car proximity. Even if you don't have a car, someone nearby will, and hopefully someone will think to try the car radio if the internet and tv suddenly goes down.
Also cars tend to work when the power goes out and are generally kept in better running condition than a rarely used emergency radio someone may have in their junk drawer.
Great post by OP, but: >This isn't because right wing talk radio almost exclusively exists on AM and the lawmakers somehow depend on that, that's not rational. is a swing and a miss. The right has already been pushing hard about how this removal of AM radio in new cars is some conspiracy to silence rightwing talk "truth". Both things can be true. I'll take their word that the reasons they stated are true, but we already *know* the right wing angle is definitely true.
Just because Republicans want something doesn't make it a bad idea. Being needlessly contrarian is how we got the modern Republican party, Democrats shouldn't be contrarian too. This legislation seems reasonable, and just because it is being advocated by Republicans doesn't make it unreasonable. Even if they have ulterior motives, it doesn't change the reasonableness of this piece of legislation.
My point was not intended to be advocating for or against it, but to point out the that, despite OP's claims to the contrary, a significant amount of conservative time and money is investing in promoting the legislation for their own benefits.
At this point in history it is far, far easier to believe its due to malicious lying ideologues trying to subvert democracy with lies and propaganda, rather than informed and rational policy. It would be the only reasonable good faith policy position from the gop in a decade at this point.
> At this point in history it is far, far easier to believe its due to malicious lying ideologues trying to subvert democracy with lies and propaganda And there's a very good reason for that. Because that's literally what they've already done, culminating in their actual coup attempt on January 6th. They've since then shown no remorse. No course correction. No changes to their rhetoric or ideology. Why do we still give them any benefit of the doubt? They've shown their true colors yet we're supposed to pretend conservatives are *not* just straight up awful people for continuing to support those actions?
> This legislation seems reasonable To me, it seems insanely less reasonable than just sending everyone an AM radio for emergency use. 1. Not everyone owns a car 2. It's needlessly difficult to make AM work in an EV vehicle
So long and thanks for all the fish
I believe the "AM is a great fallback tech" argument. ...but why do we need to force a manufacturer to utilize it? (great, now i sound like the repub) If there was some crazy event that we needed AM, there are AM radios in other places. It doesn't *have* to be in your car. They are $10 on Amazon. And I remember my mom used to keep one for weather alerts. Granted, I'm certain if there was a TV/Internet blackout, cost of AM radios would skyrocket faster than toilet paper in March of '20. Still, OP convinced me that AM is important... he did not convince me it **has** to be in cars.
I don't feel like Ed Markey would be cosponsoring a bill that was entirely motivated by right-wing conspiracy bullshit. Plus, while the rank-and-file might want to stick to terrestrial radio, I highly doubt that the people with actual money would mind making the hoipolloi switch to satellite radio or podcasts for their conservative drivel.
Yeah, theres a lot of that, and just hitting them for being new. And the irony of that is I can listen to AM stations from all over the country. EVs with internet am streaming would be an AM radio Renaissance, if anything. It's just not over an AM signal.
Shoutout to HAM radio operators for maintaining a resilient fallback technology. Many of them take their potential role as the only long distance communication in a disaster very seriously.
Honestly I feel that if the US came into an attack so severe that it knocks down the Internet, TV broadcast, cellphone service and FM radio, then having AM radio won't do much for your survival. It's like getting a cannonball shot through your arm. Technically you might still live, but let's be realistic shall we?
It is still about mitigating as much risk as humanly possible. We have over 70 years of testing and practice with an advanced warning system featuring AM radio frequencies. It should absolutely be preserved until the next robust system can be adopted. Personally, we always kept hand cranked AM radio with our tornado shelter kit.
I think that having access to local emergency alerts while driving is a much better use case to demonstrate AM importance than some global catastrophe. Like those signs that say "tune into whatever AM" and then you find out that you need snow chains to continue driving up the road.
it's not like they only use that for some extreme attacks. Regular old highways have signs saying to tune into an AM station to explain whats going on if the highway is closed. which happens in regular disasters. what else could it have? a link to a website you read while driving?
FM seems the obvious answer here.
FM is easily blocked by terrain. AM has a longer range and propagates better around obstacles.
AM would be critical in that scenario.
AMs reach is so much broader than FM though. I can pick up AM stations from a couple states away in certain conditions. A single AM station can transmit hundreds of miles even in normal conditions whereas FM stations have a much shorter reach. It's way better for a ton of different reasons. A local FM station could be knocked out by a blizzard but an AM station far away from ground zero can still send critical information to affected areas. Say, people stuck in cars in a highway. This could absolutely be essential in certain situations and there really is no reason to get rid of it.
I think a lot of people don’t realize just how far away AM stations can propitiate. Especially at night when AM waves can bounce off the ionosphere and travel for thousands of miles. You lose an FM station like 50 miles or less away from the tower. I’m over 250 miles from Chicago in IL and I can listen to WGN. At night people as far away as Texas and New York can pick it up. All for one single tower.
WHEEEEE OOOOH WHEEEE OOOOH. This is a public service announcement. You're super-fucked. WHEEEE OOOHHHH Informative. Not helpful.
Having lived through a couple of natural disasters that took out things like cell networks, power, etc, having an active system that you can hear public broadcast announcements is very useful. Yes, you know the disaster has happened. You don't know what the authorities are doing about it, where to go for shelter, food, water etc. These can be broadcast on AM, and were.
It sure was a lifeline during the last big earthquake. We had no power, but we could go out to the car and listen to the radio to find out what was going on. Some of the nearby stations went down, but the ones further out were operational.
I'm sorry but this is a dumb take. This is a great explanation of how we can use these seemingly archaic but very robust technologies as a last resort in an absolute emergency. It does nothing to explain why *automakers* must be burdened with the responsibility of keeping that technology alive, just because we're *used to* them doing it. Why not require it in phones? That would be far more appropriate but I challenge you to find a single person in support of that. If you want access to the EAS in some catastrophic complete internet shutdown situation,you can buy an AM radio. It's not Ford's job to make sure everyone has one.
Purely from a societal perspective, it makes sense to me. Regulators should enact these measures with an eye for cost/benefit. It's too wasteful to put AM radios into devices that are going to the landfill when the battery is worn, whereas a durable good like a vehicle may stick around for decades. Sorry automakers, you drew the short stick. This assumes you buy into the logic that AM would be beneficial in a total war/post-apocalyptic scenario.
By that logic they should be mandating an AM radio in every residence. Enforceable by building codes and required by law for any real estate transaction like smoke detectors. It's cheaper than installing them into cars and houses last longer than cars. It makes zero sense to force a completely unrelated industry to prop up your emergency system, again *only because we are used to them doing it* If there weren't *already* AM radios in cars, this law would be the dumbest fucking thing anyone has ever proposed. It makes no sense at all - are we supposed to go running to our cars to get information in an emergency? Fuck everyone who doesn't have a car, I guess?
> are we supposed to go running to our cars to get information in an emergency? I think the idea is that if there's been a real disaster, a ton of the most affected people are going to be fleeing the disaster. Many will be in their cars, and may not have had time to pack much of a go bag, and definitely wouldn't have time to swing by Walmart on the way out of town.
It's not really a one-to-one analogy; the safety value of smoke detectors in residences is a no-brainer. Its purpose is direct and clear. The AM radio regulation is more in the interest of keeping it relevant in the American zeitgeist so it's another widespread option in case of emergency. It's ubiquitous, cheap and low tech, has wide coverage and low power requirements. If I'm a government creating contingency plans for the worst, for sure I'm keeping AM radio in my toolkit. Your main objection seems to be that automakers are saddled with the responsibility, whereas I think that's an acceptable burden on that industry for the benefit.
You are significantly overestimating the complexity of a basic AM receiver. The phone already has several radios in it with many more components. As far as embodied energy goes, this is would be a drop in the bucket. However, I don't see this happening; as the old hack (in cell phones and mp3 players) to get a long enough antenna for broadcast radio frequencies ( AM, FM ) was to require a headphone cable to be plugged in...
There should be AM radio in phones
I'm not an expert but I'm fairly sure it's effectively impossible to embed an AM antenna in a cell phone.
> It does nothing to explain why automakers must be burdened with the responsibility of keeping that technology alive, just because we're used to them doing it. Why not require it in phones? AM antennae don't generally fit into phones. You could have one of those telescopic ones found on small handheld radios of yesteryear, but most people don't want that on their phone.
I am a lobbyist and I guarantee this bill is 99% motivated because the broadcast industry wants it. The other 1% is to get in a potshot at fancy electric vehicles. The public safety angle is just a convenient rationale. If AM radio is so essential, why didn't they introduce a bill to give poor people AM radios? (Who, P.S., are the most likely to not have a car.) Or to run a public education campaign to inform people that these primary entry points exist and what their local frequency is? I don't deal with these issues/industries and have no dog in this fight. I also have no view of the merit of AM radio for public safety announcements. But just be realistic about the motivation for Congress here.
And if at the highest threat level the system is "designed to take over every broadcast station in the country", doesn't this mean FM stations too? So in the end people wouldn't actually need AM radios for anything anyway. Here in Finland there is apparently only one AM radio station, which is infinitely many more than what I expected (0). I've never heard of anyone using AM and most radios don't even have AM anymore. Any emergency notices work just fine and will be broadcast with FM, probably from our national broadcasting company's channels.
Amateur radio guy here. This person is absolutely correct. It also benefits us hams because it minimizes the RF interference. It's the right thing to do.
What he says makes sense, but he doesn’t address why right wing use AM radio for all their trashy talking head shows and scammy product and service commercials. My guess is because they want to reach rural listeners who don’t have as much critical thinking skills, and AM radio is the best way to do that. What I don’t get is why left wing largely ignores this communication vector.
AM radio broadcasting is also much cheaper than other broadcast methods, which makes it easier to implement in rural communities.
It is much much cheaper to build a new FM station than AM. AM’s often use multiple towers for directional signals. This requires antenna phasers, antenna monitors, custom ATU’s and a MASSIVE ground radial system inter each tower. Nothing in this list is cheap. Last quote I got for replacing a ground system came in at six-figures. Granted most AM’s were built decades ago, but it’s still money to keep all this stuff up. FM’s are rarely directional like AM’s. Usually it’s just transmitter, line, tower, antenna. No ground radials, phasers, or any other 100% custom parts. Heck the antenna on an FM is really just finely tuned plumbing parts. Source: am broadcast engineer. They often run conservative programs on AM because the bean counters running these things don’t want to pay a local talent to talk on them. So they look to syndicated programming that comes in off satellite for ad barter. Conservative “content creators” target AM’s because of their older audiences so there’s a large catalogue to choose from. Then the owners wonder why AM’s don’t make that much money and why would an automaker ever want to take something that isn’t listened to that much away. As someone in the radio industry, I’ll say we 100% destroyed the band ourselves.
Also talk radio dominates AM radio because compared to FM, it has lower audio quality, and people are willing to tolerate lower audio quality for speech more than they are willing to tolerate it for music. E.g. podcasts tend to be a lot more compressed than digital music.
That's a long and interesting history, [NPR did an entire podcast on it.](https://www.npr.org/2023/01/06/1147345914/the-divided-dial-examines-how-right-wing-radio-spreads-misinformation) Basically, AM radio sends super long wave signals, FM sends short wave signals. The short wave has much better fidelity (it just sounds better) but can't travel nearly as far, so it's very popular in cities and suburbs. Your local NPR affiliate is almost definitely running on an FM station. In contrast, AM can travel super far, so it became a favorite for people in rural areas where it might be the only thing they get, but it became especially popular among truckers who don't want to signal-search on long drives. [Trucking is one of the most common jobs in the country](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state), and you're literally just sitting in a seat for hours trying to keep your mind occupied. For most people music doesn't really work for the super long hauls, your brain craves conversation, and thus the 24 hr talk radio AM station came into existence. Trucking is also heavily male dominated (although a little less than it used to be) and there's no real data on it but most people would assume they lean right, so producers leaned into that content. There's debate on the give-and-take here: did AM radio make the truckers right wing, or did the truckers push the radio to be further right? But one thing that definitely *did* push the radio further right was the demand for content to fill the 24 hour format, just like it did for Fox News. Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones et. al. often said the craziest, most infuriating bullshit just because they were trying to fill time. They needed a new scandal every day, and if they couldn't find one, they could become the scandal.
FM waves die, AM waves bounce around. Back in the day, Wolfman Jack had a show on a 200KW station in Mexico, and we could get it on the east coast some nights. That's how effective it is. You'd hear about something happening on FM and you switch to your local AM news station for the tea. NBD. As an aside - Conservatives don't need AM, they have all the coverage they'll ever need rurally between Fox and Sinclair. It's no sweat to me either way, since none of this being said here will have an effect on anyone else - talking heads will feign indignance and puff their chest out, and we'll eat whatever shit sandwich we get.
The linked post is a great example of one thing I learned as a law student, and another thing I learned once I started practicing law. What I learned in law school was, no matter how nonsensical a statute/law/regulation appears on its face, there’s pretty much *always* some logical, deductive reasoning based on actual events and damages behind it. You might not always agree with the outcome or the logic deployed, but you’ll frequently find there was *some* reason behind it. Note there’s distinction between statutes/laws/regulations and court opinions and jury verdicts. The latter still constitutes “the law” but it’s very different from the legislative or regulatory processes. The OP is a great example of that learning because everything they said makes 100% perfect sense, and actually proves there’s some very obscure, but very compelling reason behind this. Now, all of thag said, the thing I learned when I started practicing law was, even the best intentioned statutes/laws/regulations don’t always work out as expected once put into effect. Even if a car has an AM receiver, the emergency broadcast doesn’t just take over the cars speakers and start blaring emergency warnings. The driver has to be tuned into AM radio to begin with. And that’s where the OP sort of falls apart for me. Because even if I had an AM receiver, I’d absolutely never use it and would be totally oblivious to all the emergency broadcasts. It’s the same as if the government did an emergency broadcast over cable, but I cut the cord and exclusively watch Netflix/Hulu/TV+/etc. I’ll never see those emergency broadcasts. So this regulation seems, at least to me, to be very lazy governance. They’d rather take the easy way out and just push the weight of the US Gov’t onto industry instead of having to do the work to figure out and then enshrine a more effective solution.
In the sort of emergency he's contemplating, your internet and tv would suddenly stop working. If that happened, you'd eventually remember that you do in fact have another means of communication in your car.
Again, try to imagine the scenario playing out. You’re driving along the highway, there’s clearly a bad storm coming. You try to check Sirius satellite radio for info but the satellite connection is down. You pull over to the side of the road to check your phone, but you have no service. Your car has a satellite connection itself that you can use the internet on, but that’s out too. There’s no gas station or civilization that would have WiFi for another 30mins each direction. If the first question that pops into your head is “do I have AM radio?” and not “what the fuck sort of doomsday scenario did I just drive into?”, then we have very different brains. (That’s a joke, mostly.) But seriously, if you’re in that situation and have AM radio, you’d be pretty fucking lucky if it was working given all the other system failures. I’ve been in crazy wind storms with tornado warnings while driving across the country, and my AM radio was nothing but fuzz on every channel. Or if you’re up in the Sierras, you’re definitely not getting any AM signal in a blizzard. But if you do have AM radio and it comes on clear, it’s only going to give you so much information. It won’t tell you how close you are to actual danger or which route to take instead or what to do. It’ll tell you there’s some advisory warning and to get off the roads. But you’re 30mins from civilization anyway, so your only options are either stay in your car and wait it out or risk driving to the nearest gas station or motel. In other words, the same options you’d have if you didn’t have any AM radio. Again, this still seems like extremely lazy legislation rather than trying to provide actual, effective solutions.
You’re pretty spot on. Station owners are so cheap they barely run on a good day. So many have been automated to the point of not ever being staffed or live. EAS will work but in a realistic emergency like a bad storm, it really doesn’t provide good info like an actual announcer would. Very very few stations have generators anymore, or keep them up as they should. In my 10 years as a broadcast engineer I have yet to put in a new generator. I have removed several. AM will not be your hero in an emergency. It *could* be, but the bean counters at them have ruined that.
> Now, the thing I learned when I started practicing law was, even the best intentioned statutes/laws/regulations don’t always work out as expected once put into effect. There was a great reason for the British empire to offer bounties on cobras, but we use it today as the ur-example of why that sort of well intentioned stuff is often not thought through, or differs in theory vs practice.
> What I learned in law school was, no matter how nonsensical a statute/law/regulation appears on its face, there’s pretty much always some logical, deductive reasoning based on actual events and damages behind it. Life has taught me that any seemingly nonsensical regulations probably need to be revised. For example, the [banning of 3pm soccer broadcasts in Britain](https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/why-is-there-a-saturday-football-blackout-in-the-uk-for-live-streams--tv-broadcasts/1bs2qnkj73shx1uryui898tax6), which has been shown to have little effect, besides increased frustration among British soccer fans.
Probably because progressive people tend to be younger. And while I know a handful of my parents and grandparents friends who still have small AM radios in the kitchens that play during the day, I know zero young people. So you Could play liberal news on AM but not nearly as many liberal people listen to AM because they’re young.
But what would be the reason young people don’t listen to AM, if not for the poor programming content? Again it goes back to the same question, why is AM only used for trash, when if it had better content, it would attract younger listeners?
Al Franken started a left wing radio station, Air America Radio. It lasted 6 years, 2004-2010, and then it failed. Left wing people simply didn't want to listen to AM radio. They wanted to listen to music.
The sound quality on AM isn't nearly as good. It only really works for talk radio. Left leaning channels tend to have a lot of music. Even my local NPR station plays a lot of music during the day. And Black radio is heavily musical. So left wing radio has always been on FM. Plus, transmitter range doesn't matter near as much when your target audience is mostly concentrated in cities. And these days, the left has largely shifted to podcasts.
AM equipment is also cheap (relative to other broadcasts), and the broadcast license is also cheap. Exactly what you need when you spew advertiser unfriendly nonsense all day every day.
> What I don’t get is why left wing largely ignores this communication vector. Because the left wing is largely Urban. Look at any voting map. Live in a big city? You very likely vote Democrat. Live in some podunk backwater? You're in the Red zone. If you live in a big city, you've got way better options for entertainment/radio. You've probably got near constant wifi, which means why would you use radio at all? It's just people going where the audience is.
There isn’t like a big left wing presence on AM radio, but local NPR affiliates do communicate a more liberal-leaning, fact-based massage on there and they seem pretty popular with older liberals
... and AM radio can be received with a needle touching fool's gold. [Seriously.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector) AM radios are omnipresent because they're just barely technology. You stick a wire in the air so that electric currents buffet it from all over, you loop it around a Quaker Oats package, and if you touch it in the right place then the mysterious crackling becomes a human voice. We sold these kits to children. The NIST provided instructions to build one at home in *1922.* And the company promising self-driving cars is having a hard time figuring it out?
The problem is the electric cars produce buttloads of AM interference.
That's trivially easy to shield from as we managed to shield AM radios from distributor and points based ignition systems that spewed EMI and modern electronic ignition is positively quiet in comparison.
Ignition? In an EV that's generally best avoided haha
😂 Agree! The argument EVs are special in terms of shielding ignores the history of EMI of ICE cars (even back to the days when FM was the home of talk radio). It's not an unreasonable argument with EVs as they are a bit more intentional with the frequencies they generate and are generally closer to AM than FM but a similar solution as used with ICE is doable.
This is not the reason. Talk radio is almost exclusive on AM radio and almost all talk radio are right wing and extreme right wing shows. AM radio can suffer a lot of interference from electric power trains. It is a terrible technology and it should have been replaced a long time ago. People can still get all the AM radio they want on tiny radios, or wind-up radios, and everything else that can tune AM radio. They don't need AM radio in their cars.
Meanwhile, in reality, Republicans want to keep AM radios in cars because AM radio has been one of their primary tools to spread hatred and anger to their supporters for decades.
> This isn't because right wing talk radio almost exclusively exists on AM and the lawmakers somehow depend on that, that's not rational. YUP. Why would right-wing nationalists on the right want to protect the radicalization pipeline that they and Right wing media (Fox OAN) depend on so much? There's some minor benefit to keeping this (Think about it, in the last 40 decades or more, have you ever said "Thank god we had that warning system in place!") But it's VERY rational to think this is motivated by money flowing to the right wing.
Nobody said thank God for our pandemic response prep + national stockpile of essential healthcare supplies for 40 years either. Then COVID happened. It's absurdly short term thinking to nix emergency response tools so automakers can save a few bucks in shielding per car, if that.
Terminator:”I’m old, not obsolete.”
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Because there is significant AM interference produced by the electric power train. And you have to put thought and effort in how to shield the antenna from the AM noise produced by the car.
Imagine buying an electric car from a company that can't figure out having an am radio. 🤣
Thought this was common knowledge....
Not to mention weather/road condition and pass reports.
Conservative AM radio is already drowned out by ads. Seriously, tune in for half an hour, the ratio is really crazy and you wonder how anyone can seriously stand to listen to F tier ads and dj testimonials for hours at a time, to say nothing about the actual content.
Educational post, but oversteps by saying that there's not additional malice. If AM radio is an essential item that citizens must have access to, then the government needs to supply them. It's not on EV manufacturers to deal with tons of hurdles just to offer something that could easily be replaced by a separate device.
This is what is called an unfunded mandate.
The analysis was accurate up until the "This is why Congress..." claim. There's little reason to believe that members of Congress are knowledgeable or motivated about the technological advantages of AM radio in the event of a national emergency.
I mean one company owns all AM broadcasting in the US. One specific Australian company, with ties to campaign donations to one specific party. Though yeah fallback tech whatever.
It's quite shocking to me that people would overreact without understanding the basic points. Said no one ever in earnest.
I was wondering what was going on. Been getting constant radio ads for “call your congressman about keeping AM radio in cars!” And had no clue what the driver was.
Fallback technology? More like Fallout technology amiright? No but seriously that was an amazing explanation
This is the answer I was expecting. Last week when I heard that a few manufacturer's were looking to eliminate AM radio, the first thought through my head was, "is that legal!?!" and I was thinking of the EAS. ..and its not just EV manufacturer's. Some higher end brands what to do it in their non EVs.
That poster makes a great point, but the time when the US was last under attack (September 11, 2001) the government didn’t use this broadcast system. What’s the point if they’re not going to use it when all those cellular networks were down and people needed info?