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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Today, my phone says "Red Flag (Fire Weather) Warning" in big, bold letters across the lock screen.

Imagine growing up in a world where your primary-computing device is constantly telling you to be afraid of darn near everything all the time.

This past summer - constant alerts about summer heat. Yes, we know it's hot outside, experts used to call it summer, but now it's "Heat Wave Alert 90+ Degrees in the Valley in the middle of August!" - duh...

We're training everyone to always be afraid. Then we wonder why our youth think the world is going to end in a couple years...

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Many of the most damaging fires here in southern California have been started by people doing things during a red flag warning that they absolutely should not be doing. Loss of property, loss of life.

More evidence that people get numb to the warnings and ignore them.

The problem really is that the baseline is adjusting so that formerly routine activities can quickly become dangerous, but people do not want to adjust their expectations on what they should do.

It’s a tough problem; people love campfires and they love fireworks, but it is legitimately becoming risky to do that without starting a large forest fire for large parts of the year in places.

Well, that, and your corrupt state's government squandering its unthinkably massive budget as usual, instead of spending it on adequate fire prevention.

(For those saying Californian forests are federally managed—what is https://www.fire.ca.gov ?)

The majority of forest in CA is federally owned and managed.

A non-trivial number of these fires in recent years have been traced to homeless encampments as well.

That can't be true—those are all responsible, upstanding Californians!

Yes, except that summers are hotter and hotter and hotter. The alert was there even during August, the difference is that the August weather is the baseline now

People say this very often - but government temperature charts do not support this notion.

If the average summer temperature has increased by about 1F over 30 years... can you even tell the difference? Can you go outside right now and determine the difference between 88 and 89 degrees? I think not.

So, what's changed? Constant fearmongering alerts on your phone and computer every day. You've convinced yourself, against all government evidence, that August truly is unbearably hot compared to years past. That's just not reality.

Though you're kind of right, some years have a hotter August on average than other years and I believe this one was hotter for much of America. As in noticeably hotter for many days.

I assume the government charts are aware of this, so that 1F degree higher is measured by averaging ~5 Augusts together thirty years ago and comparing them to the most recent few Augusts.

Not only in America. The Mediterranean boiled this year with an average of 30 degrees Celsius, which for a sea is a lot

The average is rather useless if weather gets more extreme.

One hand on the stove and one in an ice bucket is isn't so bad on average.

I grew up in a world being told marijuana kills and Halloween candy contains razor blades. At least these warnings are based on facts.

Facts? lol!

When a meteorologist says there will be unusually high temperatures, or unusually low temperatures, do you deny these facts? Do you just laugh with your silly little "lol" as the elderly die from these abnormally extreme temperatures? I do hope you respond and tell me, in great detail, the facts behind your gruesome and morbid laughter.

lol

It sounds like you're leaning into the trend and doing a large part of it to yourself? First with your phone running software that you apparently do not feel works in your interests, and then secondly using a tiny agency-limiting phone as your "primary computing device", or at the very least normalizing the behavior for kids/parents? If the lock screen of my desktop/laptop/phone were to start saying weird messages like that, I would investigate it as the security lapse that it is. And sure, the throwie devices I keep around to interact with stuff that requires the Doubleclick malware framework will show me those trash headlines if I scroll too far to the left, or I'll see them on the occasional insecure browser (ie no adblock). But that happens at most every few weeks, and so doesn't warp my larger perspective.

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