And by the time the first "warning" was raised- the girl's camp was under water. The "emergency" wasn't raised until hours later.

And the republican legislature (including the repp for Kerr County) voted down the flood siren warning system. He says now that he "might" have voted differently.

The emergency alerts on the phones do not discriminate. They play that incredibly nasty noise.
And they also play it for amber alerts--- for kids who were kidnapped over 100 miles away -- 24 hours a day.

One you get woken up for a watch or an amber alert at 3am out of a sound sleep, the alerts get turned off.

Is that even with all this solar, wind, etc.... China *still* must build more coal plants even tho we are finding out their population is smaller than we thought.

In time, alternative energy will destroy demand for coal but for now, the projections are still for more coal plant by 2045.

I'm hoping they are wrong and solar/wind comes online faster. It's cheaper than coal but they simply can't produce and build it out fast enough globally.

And because where income is high, cost of living is high, and the marginal cost of children goes from "investment in the future" to "big hole I sink money into".

The sooner the culturally inevitable decline of the US is accepted the better rest-of-world can succeed it. Needing the US for anything is a long hangover from WWII destroying real and potential competition.

The world should be doing its own research to keep the fruits thereof from Wall Street's grubby tentacles. I grew up through the space race but now see no reason the US deserves to hog research it can only use to benefit our owning kleptarchs.

So, I get what you're going for, but I would submit that there were more than a few missing steps here.

While the Nokia 3310 and similar models were the 'first phones' for many people, between about 2003 and 2007 there was a whole lot of 'feature phones', and they all had 'fun' names, like the "LG Chocolate" or the "Samsung Juke". They were frequently defined by a keyboard that allowed for full-blown texting beyond the T9-based input you're describing. Early iterations of smartphones, like Blackberry and many of the HTC phones running Windows Mobile, were also popular among consumers and enthusiasts. Teens frequently exchanged BBM PINs, and IT departments were a fan of BES, arguably the first MDM.

As for Nokia itself, it had a pretty solid following in Europe with its Symbian phones. They weren't as popular in America, but a solid foothold, they had.

What Nokia *really* lacked, however, was an analogue to iTunes. Nokia actually had some pretty good phone management software over the years, but it was tucked away as an afterthought, rather than Nokia treating it as a first-class reason to have a Nokia phone. Without it, moving from a Nokia 3310 to a Motorola Razr was just a matter of moving over contacts, rather than shifting ecosystems. With no ecosystem of their own, Nokia had to complete on features to retain loyalty...and then the whole Steven Elop thing happened, and that was pretty much curtains for Nokia as a consumer-facing brand.

...Because they didn't do a lick of marketing.

I had a Nokia 6.2, 7.1, and 7.2 phone...and they were all fantastic. They included one management app, a few wallpapers, and a few custom ringtones...but after that, they were bone stock Android phones without all the extra gunk that Samsung adds. This is a blessing and a curse; I appreciate that they didn't attempt to reinvent the wheel, but they also had nothing notable to set them apart. The Lumia phones were at least visually unique and had solid cameras for their day, but while I appreciate Nokia showing some restraint with the shovelware, it also meant that they were slightly-cheaper Pixels.

They had a handful of other issues that make me completely unsurprised they didn't make meaningful inroads. First and foremost, they weren't sold through carriers. They were exclusively retail/aftermarket phones. I got mine at Microcenter, but that's because I made it a point to ignore any of the free-upgrade or installment-purchase offers from my carrier. Most people get their phones from the carrier; the absence of that option severely cut down their potential customer base.

AT&T also screwed over the handful of users who had them back in 2022 by mandating VoLTE, which the phones didn't support. In fairness, this also caused issues with a number of slightly-older Samsung flagships as well, but that didn't help, either.

Finally, it was ironic that most people's recollection of Nokia phones were that they were indestructible, the 7.x and 6.x phones I had scratched easily, and had screens that were more delicate than other contemporary phones at the time. To add insult to injury, there were far fewer choices for protective cases - they existed, sure, but they were almost never available retail; Otterbox only had options for a subset of Nokia phones, even for mail order.

So yeah, it's completely unsurprising that a revival of the Nokia brand didn't work out well.

Controls should give tactile feedback because every moment the driver is distracted from the road is a safety risk.

The sole reason for zero-tactile feedback controls is lower manufacturing costs. That's also why automobiles do not use MFDs (Multi-Function Displays) like those on aircraft. Though they divert the eye they permit the user to place a finger over a screen-labeled button then press without looking at that button longer than necessary.

Is that with all this solar, wind, etc.... China *still* must build more coal plants even tho we are finding out their population is smaller than we thought.

In time, it will destroy demand for coal but for now, the projections are still for more coal plant by 2045.

I'm hoping they are wrong and solar/wind comes online faster. It's cheaper than coal but they simply can't produce and build it out fast enough globally.

And it's not just kids (won't someone think of the children)...

In Texas, we can get a half dozen "watch" alerts a day when storm systems are moving through.

That's *POINTLESS*. If your alert system is sending more than one message a day, you probably didn't set it up well.

And worse, the watches usually mean "stay at home, avoid getting caught in deep flood waters" and not "leave your home because floodwaters over your roof will be there in under 90 minutes."

And it's not even just amber alerts. You can get a half dozen "watch" alerts from a fast moving system *per day*.

At that level, "watch" alerts are useless. Especially since in most of texas they mean, "don't leave home or your car may be flooded out" and not "leave home- your home will be flooded out".

And the short staffing of the service in the U.S. due to Ham-handed layoffs this year did not help.

This problem was solved decades ago: private servers.

Anti-cheat mandates for public servers? Makes sense. But the way to allow online multiplayer without invasive anti-cheat is to allow users to host their own game servers, so the anti-cheat is good old fashioned community pressure - when everyone knows everyone and games are password protected, it's trivial for a community to self-police to a level they're comfortable with - including servers that expressly allow for cheats, if desired.

I'd almost go so far to say that in a few years, it'll be the only way to combat cheating - there are already methods of cheating being developed that perform their cheats via screen captures and input emulation, rather than memory sniffing. Once the tech gets a bit better, it'll be basically impossible to detect, because the actual cheating is happening on a completely different computer than the one the anti-cheat software is running on...and even consoles won't be immune.

So...small communities that can expel suspected cheaters is my solution to the cheating problem. It worked then, it'll work now...but it would be one more thing for the game companies to support, AND it would remove their ability to incentivize the X+1 release of the game because they couldn't remove the old servers, AND it would remove a good amount of the draw to the PSN and XBL, so I don't anticipate it happening any time soon...

The 677K scrapped were not nearly enough to affect national used car prices over time because that was a drop in the proverbial bucket among tens of millions of new and used vehicle sales and scrappage. CFC did not target ALL used vehicles but select models.

Meanwhile the US total car fleet shrank by FOUR MILLION in 2009 (reflecting the 2008 recession far more than CFC

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fnews%2F...

Meanwhile the 2009 total scrapped was over FOURTEEN MILLION.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgrist.org%2Farticle%2Fu-s-...

"In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.

Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020.

Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15â"17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people."
---

Being a Boomer I should stereotypically believe unsubstantiated drivel propagated by industry-illiterates but it happens I've been wrenching including scrapping cars and harvesting parts from salvage since the 1970s including the CFC era. Facts are fun. I recommend inquisitive learning instead of AssUming correlation is causation.

I read the rules and checked the numbers because we went to auctions where CFC cars were bought by authorized yards where self and boss went to harvest delicious parts (I got all I could pull free if we had room to load them which was nice) some of which came from vehicles like CFC Jeep SUVs (no loss since their transmissions put many otherwise sound ones into salvage and transmissions to repair those on the road were legal to harvest from CFC vehicles). After skinning them out the mandated hull and engine got scrapped with any unwanted leftovers, but the harvested parts kept many others on the road during that recession era.

The number CFC crushed was not even close to enough to change used car prices and (this may be terribly difficult to understand because OMG math is hard) the impact of the tiny few recycled IN 2009 is not what drove used car prices up from then until 2025. (Vehicle price) inflation did because used car prices lag new car prices while driving them upwards. As new vehicle prices rise so do used, there being no reason to sell things for less than market value.

US auto production in 2009 alone was ~5.71 million units (per DOE). Total sales were around ten million for that recession year.

CFC didn't target anything of great cultural value (and though this may be painful for people who REALLY want a special vehicle but not quite enough to do more than blame circumstance for not un-assing the couch and getting one they were too slack to track down as I do) the few pretty toys were exceptions not rules hence irrelevant.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffred.stlouisfed.org%2Fse... gives an idea of total vehicle sales over time.

Few understand 2009 also saw roughly 14 MILLION vehicles scrapped. People offed unwanted tradeable and untradeable (a few hundred for scrap cars moves a lot of iron) vehicles after the recession. That's where the "used" cars went in volume enough to briefly ripple the market then inflation did the rest until present day (when nearly every CFC vehicle would have been scrapped anyway).

Most vehicles taken to salvage could be repaired (burn jobs and utterly smashed excepted) but not at US labor rates so auction buyers send parts and complete vehicles offshore where people still know how to work on things, notably sheet metal/paint/interiors (sheet metal and interiors are easy swaps from other donors).

Used cars in the US supply export markets too and the auction system is highly efficient at moving cars/trucks/SUV/construction equipment/big rigs/etc from backwaters to seaports. That's far from new either since new vehicles are a luxury purchase.

2009 exports exceeded CFC, but I don't see anyone boohooing about that though UNlike CFC, exports send more valuable vehicles for the most part since the markup for the reseller is far more than some econobox they can get used from the EU then truck instead of ship by maritime car carrier.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usitc.gov%2Fpublicat...

"Used Vehicles Are an Important Component of U.S. Passenger-Vehicle Exports

U.S. exports of used passenger vehicles averaged 762,000 per year from 2009 to 2013, with
many destined for lower-income markets. The large foreign market for these exports appears to
have propped up U.S. passenger vehicle sales and may have lessened the price premium for new
vehicles to U.S. consumers. This suggests that the current level of U.S. new-vehicle purchases
can be at least partly attributed to foreign demand for U.S. used vehicles. Estimated data are
used because precise data on some U.S. exports of used vehicles are not available.1
Used vehicles made up 34 percent of U.S. passenger vehicle exports by volume during 2009â"13
(21 percent by value). Major markets for U.S. used vehicle exports differ from markets for new
vehicle exports, particularly in terms of volume. Used passenger vehicles are often exported to
developing countries because they offer luxury options at lower prices, are not available new in
those countries, or match or exceed the quality of locally available new vehicles.
Estimated U.S. exports of used passenger vehicles rose 26 percent from 2009 to 2013, from
656,000 units to nearly 826,000 (figure 1). At the same time, U.S. exports of new vehicles
doubled to nearly 1.9 million in 2013, causing the share of used vehicles among all U.S. exports
of passenger vehicles to fall from 41 percent in 2009 to 30 percent in 2013. The growing global
economy drove a jump in demand for more expensive new vehicles as well as used vehicles.