Safety Check for Brussels
facebook.com
facebook.com
After all, you've got a perfect list of those who already responded.
Can anyone tell me what this is about?
Also, I received a push notification on my Android that "Friend was marked as safe" from someone I know who lives there.
Brussels Explosions
FACEBOOK SAFETY CHECK
Quickly find and connect with friends in the area. Mark them safe if you know that they're OK.
Are you in the affected area?
Yes, let my friends know.
----
Basically if you are in Brussels you let Facebook know you are ok. And if you have friends who knows you're in Brussels, they can check if you are ok. Rather then the poor Brussels person getting lots of messages from people asking if he is ok, they can check once.
It is basically just a fancy way for people to update their status following news of a disaster.
All businesses should have one, and they are useful for many reasons. Test it annually or more, depending on business. And have results posted back - who responds, who doesn't.
This was Reddit's advice three days ago: http://i.imgur.com/M9umIy2g.png
If you were actually more likely to die in a terrorist attack than being shot by a toddler in the USA, it probably wouldn't be a terrorist attack, it'd be something more like... an actual war.
Statistics didn't help them any less than it helps the people accidentally killed by firearms in the US. Those people are dead too. And there are more of them. And it's just as senseless. Honestly wtf.
I will take accidental gun deaths in the US over terrorism any day. I invite anyone on HN to go stand in northern iraq and I will stand at a shooting range all day.
Take any other statistic for accidental or otherwise entirely preventable deaths. People get into a fucking panic and gloss over all kinds of much more important problems because TERRORISM. This is the whole point of terrorism! To cause FEAR and PANIC in order to force us to take some political action. I'm more worried about whether I'll make it home without getting killed on the highway!
Howabout airline crashes? 34 people were bombed in Brussels? Guess what, 136 people died in airline crashes last year, and ~650 the year before! Are we going into a fucking panic about that?
Of course the people who just got bombed will disagree... but they will have an entirely biased opinion that has absolutely no relevance to the overall reality. Why the heck do people keep repeating this line? Go ask somebody who was hit by lightning if we should be worried about getting hit by lightning! It's irrelevant!
Victims find no solace knowing they've suffered a highly improbably tragedy.
9 people are killed in America every day related to distracted driving. In four days distracted and texting Americans kill more people than terrorists did in Belgium. Let's have an uproar about that.
Statistically, it's still highly improbable. Of course, Belgium and other NATO related countries in Europe currently face a stronger possibility of crimes of this kind but actually suffering from one is unlikely.
Is this selective outrage really suits a rational platform like HackerNews?
Hypocrisy? Yes.
Surprising? Not really.
These Brussels attacks have wall-to-wall coverage on all news stations, including local ones, unlike the Turkish blasts which were covered much less and only by the major outlets.
It goes without saying. My statement was meant to be general.
Belgium wages war against ISIS as a part of NATO, and ISIS includes some Belgian citizens, so they wage war against them. It's just they are further away than Kurds. But as we can see, explosion-wise, this makes small difference.
I also think that there is not just empathy at play, but fear. Because the closer an event is to us or the people we know/relate to, the more we realise it could also happen to us.
You may ignore it since you don't know anyone there, but people from there would appreciate knowing their friends and relatives are safe.
Still, like it was already told, FB did activate the feature also in the Ankara bombings and other occasions for Turkey, there is nothing racist here going on.
But for me that lives in EU, a bomb in EU feels much closer than a bomb in Turkey. It is not strange at all?
What point are you making here? If they were covered a lot, why no safety check?
https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/ankaraturkey-explosion-...
I don't have a Facebook account, so I can't verify, but at least on that landing page, they're not serving up advertisements.
Nothing about any of this is very rational, but there's something in our collective nature that draws more attention to a single incident involving X casualties than X/Y unrelated incidents each involving Y casualties.
Actually terror attacks that harm more than 10 or 100 people, as opposed to less than 10, are a small minority. [0]
Firstly, these are mostly teenagers in caves with yesterdays cell phones. They simply don't have the resources or the numbers to kill millions, or even tens of thousands. I don't think you understand that your argument is a purely emotional one[1]. It appears to be rather simple to sneak a firearm on a plane[2], and yet there has not been any repeat attacks like 9/11. Firearms are illegal in Paris and they have large divisions of domestic and foreign spies, that failed to prevent anything[3]. Now lawmakers around the globe want to outlaw prime numbers (encryption) yet terrorists don't seem to even bother using it[4]. Emotion aside, dollar for dollar, fighting malaria is more effective in preventing the loss of human life than fighting terrorism by many orders of magnitude.
[1]"If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout to him to steer clear. And if the shout is not heard he will shout Again, and yet again, and begin cursing - And all because there is somebody in that boat. Yet if the boat were empty, He would not be shouting, and he would not be angry." - Chuang Tzu
[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percen... [3]http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/18/europe/paris-terror-attacks-in... [4]https://bgr.com/2016/03/22/paris-attacks-iphone-encryption/
Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of the NPR bit about "The Cost of Free"[1]. People's expectations rapidly change once you offer some of them something. While the main lesson in that story is about charging after offering something for free for many years, there's the second lesson: the reason it was made free was that the Brits were upset that the Americans got free doughnuts.
Afterwards, no one got free doughnuts. It's funny. Something that seems clearly like a Pareto improvement ends up not being one because of people's opinions of perceived privilege.
0: https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156585333855177
1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-c...
If you pick say $50 each, the other person tends to always accept. If you give him more, he'll accept too. But what if you give yourself $75, and the other $25?
If he rejects it, you both get nothing. Turns out, at certain levels (cant remember where), people tend to reject.
Which is interesting, because every non-0 figure is a benefit to you. If you get $5 and the other $95, why reject it? You'd get nothing. It's a one-time experiment, you're basically rejecting free money.
It turns out that the other guy getting $95 and 'screwing you', is so bad, that you'd rather reject free money than for him to get more than he 'deserves'.
Now if this was your enemy, or say someone close to you, sure. But this experiment holds with complete strangers you don't see and will never meet. The notion that someone gets more than you, when normal moral notions suppose you deserve an equal amount, incites people to be vengeful even at the cost of free money.
We have not evolved in an environment where you interact with "complete strangers you don't see and will never meet". So, you can't allow others take the upper hand on you too much. That is even more true if third parties are observing the interaction.
You can see the same, for instance, in how pub fights start for the most stupid reasons. Even if is a big city and they will never meet again, they can't just leave it alone because when our brain was programmed it was not going to be only an interaction. And if your friends, or god forbid, attractive women are present, then the contenders are trapped in the situation.
Glenn Greenwald (The guy who broke the Snowden story) sums it up quite nicely. https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/nobody-knows-the-identit...
It also allows users to mark themselves as "safe" if they were in the affected area.
Kinda hard to avoid the log in.
EDIT: I'm not the grandparent poster, I wouldn't have written it like that, just trying to explain that I was puzzled about what this all meant.