And yet we’ve survived as a nation for all this time without such a mandate, no other country seems to o have one that I can find, and there doesn’t seem to be any epidemic of people dying who would be alive today if only their car had an AM radio in it.
Why, in Europe they’re phasing out AM altogether! The horror!
In 2015, Radio Info reported that AM stations were shutting down en masse from France to the Netherlands and Russia. The band has largely been superseded by the DAB format. According to recent figures released by WorldDAB, 95% of new cars sold in key European markets were equipped with DAB+ receivers as standard in 2021.
Again, temper tantrum. If we can survive without something, we shouldn’t have it. This is nonsensical rhetoric from someone ranting and foaming at the mouth because they got caught being wrong.
You’ve been wrong a whole hell of a lot in this thread, and not just on this issue. You should quit while behind.
Being wrong about… what? I haven’t seen any compelling argument that mandating AM radios in cars is going to accomplish anything but prop up ad revenues for talk radio, and you lot have proposed nothing but outlandish scenarios where the only way a person could know their lives are in immediate danger is if they’re in their car already listening to AM radio.
But, no, you are clearly far more learned about this than actual emergency management professionals, and incapable of admitting that maybe you might be mistaken, and maybe AM radios are useful and important for this purpose.
As has already been explained to you, it helps ensure that more people have access to an AM radio if and when they need it. Not everyone is going to have your foresight to go buy a standalone radio.
Or be willing to break the fucking law by operating it while driving.
Fiddling around with a device while driving is illegal in the state that Smapti and I live in. A radio built into a car is part of the car, and not illegal, but if you mess around with a cell phone or a coffee maker or a radio you have sitting on your passenger seat or whatever, you could get ticketed for that. (Potentially; the law as written excludes “radios” in general, but if a cop sees you distracted by screwing around with something I wouldn’t want to bet on that being okay.)
We also don’t need mandate seatbelts because people can acquire third party restraint systems and install it themselves, and the country survived for decades before seatbelts were required anyway.
It occurs to one that if one were driving down the road and the entire FM/satellite band suddenly went dark and one’s phone lost all service, one might, I dunno, pull over instead of continuing to roll along as if nothing had happened.
A healthy debate can be had over whether or not legislation mandating radios in vehicles is useful. However…
Objectively speaking, AM radios are not in any way obsolete. That’s absurd and ignorant.
It’s also not stupid to put forth that legislation, even if you disagree with it. There is legitimate merit to it. Certainly not the “man sticks head into alligator’s mouth on a bet” kind of stupidity this thread was created for.
I’m afraid I didn’t do a good job of explaining my POV. Sorry to mislead you. You and I are actually in agreement here.
IMO …
The Feds should be busy now designing a replacement for AM EAS. And should be intending to mandate it for installation in receivers everywhere once it’s ready. Even / Especially in mobile phones. And they should be mandating that AM radios continue to be installed in every car until they finish rolling out the new system(s) whatever they may be.
But just doing the last of those three tasks while ignoring the other two is half-assed. And simply kicks the can down the road. That was my intended point. Sorry.
Now during the current criminal regime, I think can-kicking is probably better for the future than any action this moronic evil clownshow might decide to take. But in more normal times …
Further on my comments from the first part of my quoted post to the effect that AM isn’t as effective as it once was because it’s not actively used … much. …
A public notification system is only as good as the public is aware of it. The graying audience on the SDMB all knows what AM radio is / was. IMO it would be interesting / scary to take a survey of 30yos and ask them if they are aware that AM radio exists and that there’s a national emergency broadcast system that uses it which they should tune into in the event of a disaster. I suspect we’d get a lot of puzzled looks and “I’d need to ask Google about that”. And 30yos aren’t children. A sizeable fraction of 30yos have children, been working a decade or more, are married, etc.
A good point made upthread by several folks is that the deep value of emergency notification systems is not the urgent “news” aspect of it. “A tornado hit downtown 2 minutes ago” is not actionable by most people. If you’re downtown you already know. if you’re not downtown, you don’t (immediately) care. At least not at the safety of your life level of care.
The deep value comes in for a long-lasting situation, say Katrina or Maria or the widepsread cellular outage or a widespread power blackout. People need to be kept informed of the scope of the situation, be given simple actionable instructions everyone can use and do, e.g. where to obtain potable water or useable shelter. And last of all, people need to know that help is on the way, that somebody somewhere is working hard to manage the response to this situation. Lest they turn even harder towards rumor mongering, looting, etc., in the name of providing for their family.
Yes, I got that, sorry, it was I who was unclear: your policy recommendation is sound, and those (unnamed) complainers who are demanding the removal of the AM-in-new-cars requirement before a superior replacement system is ready for rollout are the ones who are trying to have it both ways. (As in, “well modern technology is just so much better that we can easily do without this old dinosaur!”, while ignoring the fact that the dinosaur is still making real-life disasters significantly safer for millions of people by continuing to cover the gaps in the current applications of newer technology.)
Judge Judy has always reminded me of my mother. She’s an incredibly mean person, jumps to conclusions and appears entirely irrational.
Also I presume she’s talking about Republican radicals who are destroying norms and reshaping our country into a barely recognizable husk of its original self.
Your “but we don’t need it because we should just expect individuals to do something else instead!” claims are irresponsibly and ignorantly disregarding the realities of robust multi-layered emergency communication systems. And your “but it’s a sinister conspiracy to promote right-wing talk radio!” claims are tinfoil-hat bullshittery.
I can see that this is destined to be one of those @Smapti-Head-Up-Ass issues where you are just obviously, flatly wrong about a particular situation but simply love your half-assed “contrarian” position too much to ever quit making the same stupid flawed arguments in defense of it. I agree that it’s more than time for the thread to return to discussing some of the other stupid MFers in the news, and I apologize to other posters for having spent so much thread-time beating our collective head against this brick wall.
That said, I feel like mandating an AM radio is like mandating the inclusion of a buggy-whip holder. If this was truly about public safety, wouldn’t it be much more intelligent to mandate the inclusion of an AM receiver on a cell phone? I’d be willing to bet more people have cell phones than cars, and I expect that disparity to increase as time goes by.
Radio receivers were common in cell phones when people used wired headphones with them. But they need an antenna, and without the headphone wires to use as an antenna, the cellphone doesn’t work well as a radio.
And what fraction of Americans uses the radio in their car, and how old are they? I like to listen to the radio (FM) when i drive, but Android Auto doesn’t play well with the radio, it assumes you get your entertainment from your phone. I was griping to friends about that, and the uniform response was, "you listen to the radio in your car? Have you considered using the station’s streaming app instead? "
I’m sure most old people listen to the radio in their car, at least sometimes. But younger people? And AM? How many Americans would even think to tune into their car radio in AM if there was an emergency? I’m guessing that number is small. Especially among Americans under 60.
I thought the law was bizarre, but assumed it was either protectionism (make it harder to import cars) or just a function of the average age of congressmen being dead.
It’s an issue, to be sure, but one that can be addressed – and in an actual emergency, the emergency alert (which, yes, does also come through your cell phone) can be used to provide instruction to tune to a particular AM frequency for more information.
I don’t have a problem listening to the car radio while Android Auto is engaged. As long as you don’t have any … musical aps running when you plug in, it leaves the car radio running. The only time Android Auto overrides my radio is when I have a streaming ap open at the time. It has them waiting to be used (when not open), but doesn’t automatically run.
And would younger people even know how to access a radio on a car? Or to tune it to a particular station? Those functions are harder than they used to be. It took me a while to program a few favorite stations on my new car.
I’m not saying that broadcasting emergency info on AM radio is completely useless. It’s probably helpful for organizations, like police departments. Heck, i have a friend who is part of a ham radio emergency network in SF, that is called up when the data lines are cut. When 911 is down, they are up. But if we are depending on the general public to get emergency info over an AM radio in a car, i think we’re in trouble.
