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Comment by keepquestioning | Hacker News Reader

The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military.

The UK has a weird, self-important, order-centric hierarchical culture. Even down to the fact this event had a codename pre-planned in advance. "London Bridge has fallen".. just, why? This isn't James Bond. This is the real world, she's an old lady that everyone knows will die. Add to this is that she had no real power throughout the realm.

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Probably because mismanaged transitions are very, very embarrassing.

I think of how the only American President to take the oath of office on a Catholic missal was Lyndon Johnson - who mistook Kennedys missal for a Bible.

Not the biggest thing in the world - but people are watching and problems will be magnified out of proportion and talked about for centuries.

Nobody wants to be played as an incompetent civil servant in a Netflix tv show 50 years from now.

Faithfully… https://www.npr.org/2013/01/18/169739324/obamas-first-oath-o...

> Even down to the fact this event had a codename pre-planned in advance. "London Bridge has fallen".. just, why? This isn't James Bond.

Theoretically, it's to avoid jumping the gun. It's embarrassing if someone hears "the Queen is dead" and rushes to trigger the various announcements. There's a lot of queens in the world and in fiction -- this might be an unlikely mixup, but it's probably still better avoided.

That said, picking a phrase that's part of a well-known nursery rhyme probably didn't really help avoid that confusion.

>Add to this is that she had no real power throughout the realm.

It's in the Royal Family's interest that you believe that, and they have very good marketing. Unfortunately it is not the case. In fact the monarch gets effective veto power over almost any law, which they use to secretly negotiate favorable changes to the law, including generous exceptions to tax and labor laws.

It's simply naive to think that such a privileged and wealthy family, with such intimate connections to the machinery of government, who almost within living memory openly wielded genuine executive power and never explicitly relinquished it, does not still retain some of it.

That is some great trick if true

How difficult is it to imagine that every head of state around the world, figurative or not, have a protocol attached to his/her death? I would imagine this would be true for most of the countries around the world. No?

The different between the Queen, and the rest is, her plan has been discovered and published by the mass media, and eventually online.

> broadcast throughout the UK by the military. No it is not, for non-BBC, the obituary light is not only for the Queen, but the Royal family, and other major national/international figures. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Radio_News#Obituar...

Historically there was a risk of pretenders trying to seize the thrown. And it was important to have clear continuity to avoid this. So much of what you see is about securing the new king and the queen is coincidental. Just look at the announcement message for an example of this.

"The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon.

The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow."

The important bit is the second sentence where they proclaim Charles as king. And within 24hrs the key figures will have made an oath to him.

Also, prepping for this kind of thing is a good task for a slow day.

> The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military.

This sentence makes no sense.

Yes. It's almost genius. "required to a special light"? "this is broadcast... by the military"?

Not everyone's first language is English.

I understood exactly what they meant.

It's cool, I do this myself sometimes thinking people are talking about the US just because I live here.

Just try and be a bit more open minded?

Sure. Mind is all the way open. Pointing out that a sentence doesn't make sense isn't an insult. As a foreigner in Finland, I try to speak Finnish every day. Believe me, I am well familiar with constructing nonsense and being told so.

Anyway, the military broadcasts a light? What's going on there?

Ok, so every radio station in the UK has a special light. The light is turned on whenever a royal dies. And then there is a prepared message pre-recorded by the UK military that the radio station broadcasts? How does the station know which royal died? Is the light different colors? Blink different patterns? The station calls the military?

I'd like to know more too. I can understand that posters vagueness as most of what I can find about it (e.g Wikipedia) is quite vague on the technicalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Radio_News#Obituar...

From what I can gather a network of radio stations has pooled news bulletins and the organisation behind it provides this 'obit light' in it's members radio studios that signify someone important has died and to prepare for a bulletin, upcoming news programming will follow a certain format and the output should be changed to suit the mood.

Looks like it's a bit of a legacy thing. They also mention a serial channel that has a 'Major Story Alarm' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Radio_News#Serial_...

It'd be interesting to see how it works/worked from tech point of view - perhaps some kind of long wave radio signal on the frequency that the news broadcast is sent from?