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Comment by netdevnet | Hacker News Reader

> While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

This is about US policies. The US has a high dependence on cars so it makes sense that it is being singled out

And cars are used for evacuations. Where communications is important.

Really, if you are isolating in your house, and loose power. What are you doing? A lot of people would need to go out and sit in the car with the AM radio to get any information.

I suppose to make it fair, every house should also be required to have an AM radio.

Maybe just to prevent digital lock in.

I'd hate to be in an Emergency, and suddenly I can't get any information because all I have are digital devices, An app on the phone, and the app was discontinued, or no longer supported.

This will be interesting as young people don't listen to the radio as much as they used to.

So you probably want to enforce a check on having am radio and that it actually works because young folk won't notice it not working as they won't be using it. This means that the enforcement will likely fall at least partially on the car owner. I wonder how younger folk, who have less financially stability and are not as interested in the radios as the previous gen, will react to this potentially new requirement.

This being the US, I would expect the kind of people that argue against socialised healthcare to also argue against on the basis that each person should be capable of purchasing a $10 am radio receiver and keeping it with themselves, their emergency bag or their car for emergencies without needing the state to play nanny

Maybe just make it part of the car inspection. The car already has to have things like headlights and wiper blades checked to be working to get a license.

That sounds like the most likely direction. I would imagine the price will of the inspection will increase slightly to account for that but adding it to the inspection makes the most sense

This is obviously a US thing. Here in Europe, it isn't necessarily so because you can walk anywhere. During the last evacuations in my region, virtually no one evacuated by car and radio wasn't needed. But it makes sense that if you live in car-centric areas, you would need a car and ways to communicate across vast distances

There's lots of handheld emergency radios that work with AM. They've usually got added doodads like built in lights and strobe patterns and maybe a flint and steel striker or something.

Nothing about this is car specific except it makes for a good example, and people like to whine anytime cars are mentioned.

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