Weathering the Broken Links

I decided to design a little bumper sticker.  I’m not much for in-your-face slogans or things that scream party- or organization- affiliation.  They just turn people off and they won’t even consider the message.

I am, however, not shy about arguing for less government.  No, I don’t want zero government.  Nor do I feel that completely unregulated private markets are the solution to everything.  But far too many people expect the government to come up with a solution.  In other words, they feel that money should be taken from the private sector (that’s you and, for a lot of you your employers too) to fund some solution when there is often no viable solution, no real problem to begin with, and sometimes plenty of solutions to be found in the private sector.

My message is with less government, there are more resources for us all to use to do and make great things. We The People are the ones that truly make things happen.

If you agree, consider buying and proudly displaying one of my new stickers:

After February 17th, 2009, there are going to be a lot of upset people.  It’s not news that the US government is mandating that full power analog TV broadcasting after this date.  But it may be news to some people that they’re not going to be able to watch TV anymore.

The government has tried to make it sound like you just buy a converter box, plug it in, and voila, you’ve got digital TV.  That might work for some of you, but it’s not going to for others.  Here’s why:

If you don’t get good enough reception with over the air analog TV broadcasts, you can cope with it.  It’s visually noisy and it may even have ghost images from RF reflections.  But you can still make out the picture unless the reception is really, really bad.  But with digital broadcast TV, if your reception isn’t good enough, you often don’t get any picture at all.  You can sometimes get just the audio.  If the reception is moderate you might get a picture but it’s full of blocky areas where there wasn’t enough information received to display the entire picture.  Or it might be jerky, only showing some of the frames and hesitating frequently while it tries to compose new ones with from the poor signal.

Case in Point

I was out of town visiting relatives.  We stopped by my wife’s aunts apartment.  She doesn’t get cable service through the apartment’s cable because she doesn’t want to pay for it.  She’s been using rabbit ears for years and, while she doesn’t get a great picture, it’s more than good enough for her even with a little noise.

A month ago she decided to upgrade to a new TV.  She bought one with a digital tuner in it and a new “HDTV antenna” on the recommendations of some kid at the local electronics store. After hooking them up she couldn’t get any of the 8 DTV channels currently broadcasting in the area.

Now her building is a mere 2 miles from all the towers.  I checked antennaweb.org and confirmed that she was in the “yellow zone.”  This means a “small multidirectional antenna” should work.  But the small multidirectional antenna she had really didn’t.  We futzed with it and found that at certain angles it would indeed allow you to receive a couple of the digital channels.  But no sooner would you move your hand to scratch your nose and the TV was unable to decode the signal.  The signal quality was simply too poor to allow reliable reception.

I speculated that the issue is that her unit is on the far side of the building from the antennas.  Basically her building is in the way.  Well she has a friend who, incidentally, lives on the other side of the building and was having trouble setting up her converter box for DTV reception.  So we went on over there.  Her problem was one of connecting things properly.  Once we fixed the connections, we turned on the converter box, set it up and had 7 of the 8 DTV stations coming in great.  This supported the suspicion that the building was in the way of the signal.

Back in the aunt-in-law’s unit we tried a few other things:

1. a different type of indoor antenna
2. hooking the TV up to the building’s cable to see if that would magically pull in a stronger over the air DTV signal than her table top antennas did (we weren’t really expecting it to but we decided to double check.
3. Use a coverter box to do the DTV decoding and feed that signal to the TV.  She happened to have a converter box identical in model to the one her friend was having success with across the building so we used that instead of inconveniencing the friend.

Outcome: Very Unsatisfactory

She’s going to try and find yet another indoor antenna that has a good reputation.  The Zenith “Silver Sensor” looks like it might be better than most of the others.

I’m considering building her one of these coat hangar antennas to see if it works better than the store bought ones.  I’m not sure she’ll want to use it because of looks, but if the option is no TV on February 20, 2009 she might not have a choice.

The Larger Problem

Solving my aunt-in-law’s problem aside, I’m going to bet there will be a lot of people who are going to get screwed by this transition.  It’ll mostly be people of low means.  After all, aren’t the people who aren’t on cable or a dish, by definition, unwilling or unable to pay the cost of those technologies.  These people are going to lose a basic service that they’ve taken for granted all these years.   Many of them, particularly those living in more remote areas will not be able to receive TV over the air anymore.

They’ll either have to invest in much larger outdoor antennas.  Or if they’re out of reasonable reception range, they’ll either have to switch to dish/satellite, cable if available, or just go without.  Yep!  Go without a service that’s been available for some 60 years.

Now why is this happening?  The answer the government puts forth is to free RF spectrum for emergency services:

Why are we switching to DTV?

An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum for public safety communications (such as police, fire departments, and rescue squads). Also, some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

Consumers also benefit because digital broadcasting allows stations to offer improved picture and sound quality, and digital is much more efficient than analog. For example, rather than being limited to providing one analog program, a broadcaster is able to offer a super sharp “high definition” (HD) digital program or multiple “standard definition” (SD) digital programs simultaneously through a process called “multicasting.” Multicasting allows broadcast stations to offer several channels of digital programming at the same time, using the same amount of spectrum required for one analog program. So, for example, while a station broadcasting in analog on channel 7 is only able to offer viewers one program, a station broadcasting in digital on channel 7 can offer viewers one digital program on channel 7-1, a second digital program on channel 7-2, a third digital program on channel 7-3, and so on. This means more programming choices for viewers.

Arguably, the government mandate will wipe out TV reception to a lot of people in the name of improving public safety communications.  Would you not say that being able to see a weather forecast or monitor the state of a storm or other emergency incident via TV is crucial for the public’s safety?

I know there’s radio too.  But TV has been around a long time.  It’s a mainstream broadcast medium.  You can convey information much more effectively with video and pictures than radio alone   And it’s going to stop working in a lot of places.

But, but, but…it will “offer improved picture and sound quality”… if you happen to live near a broadcast tower.

In short, thrifty and poor people are going to have their access to a valuable piece of public infrastructure mandated away by their own caring government.  How thoughtful.

Add: I happened across this article from last month pointing out the same concerns bached up with some study data.  It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out.

MostlyGenius has it mostly right with these Top 10 Self Defense Myths.

A few weeks ago I had a birthday. I sort of knew it was coming, but then completely forgot about it. I was almost caught flat-footed with no gift to give to myself. But thankfully livejournal’s automated systems gave me a timely reminder.

Thank goodness, embarrassment averted.

* No…I’m not actually Joe Smith.  I’ve [poorly] photoshopped in the name to protect the not so innocent.  Please don’t email that poor guy with the email address joesmith@gmail.com.

UPDATE:

In the spirit of doing something about issues rather than just venting, I submitted a support request.  And the fine support folks at livejournal, very quickly informed me that:

“You have added yourself to your friend’s list, so when the system goes to send out the birthday notifications to your friends, it sends one to you too.”

It’s certainly a very good answer.  But it does beg the questions:

• Why does their friend system allow me to be my own friend?
• Still, why won’t their automated systems recognize that it’s sending this notification to yourself?

Oh, I remember.  It’s software and, while it’s easy to develop for the common/average case, coding for the exceptions is troublesome.

The residents of the Bay Area are going to be footing the bill for a 40- to 50-million dollar metal net to help stop suicides of those who would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate Transportation District’s board of directors approved the project last month.

Discussions here and here attempt to refute the possibility that this expensive project will serve no effect as it will drive those contemplating suicide to make their attempt somewhere else or in some other manner. The problem with the numbers in the latter link is that they conclude (see this study) that because only 6% of the 515 thwarted Golden Gate jumpers eventually committed suicide, that static barriers to suicide will have the same effect. The authors of that paper state that a liability of their methodology is it doesn’t consider those who may have eventually committed suicide outside of California.

But I think it has a much, much larger liability: it only considers individuals who were “restrained.” In other words, the people who were studied, had been actively thwarted; they experienced an intervention of some sort. A static barrier (metal net) is much different than an intervention by law enforcement or health professionals. You cannot assert that the metal net will help convince suicidal people from taking their lives as well as compassionate human beings can.

Sadly, I don’t have any studies to challenge the claims that the nets will work. It stands to reason that these studies likely cannot exist as there almost certainly is a massic paucity of data from suicidal people who decided to abort an attempt because of a physical barrier and instead did or did not move on to another method. The people, by virtue of their willingess to end it all as opposed to seeking help from others, are not likely to report their change of heart upon seeing the sight of a metal net.

Now, I’m not saying I’m right. I’m saying that the study seems to suggest ONLY that of those who experienced a compassionate intervention when trying to jump of the Golden Gate Bridge had a low rate of subsequent suicide. I’ll go out on a limb and assert that an expensive net will not have the same effect. It may have a positive effect, but not as extreme as the supporters will have you believe. And lucky for them, they’ll no one will be able to disprove them.

It is sad that so many people think that preventing access to things (edges of bridges, guns, etc) will prevent suicides. What actually does seems to work is people paying attention to eachother and helping out when they see warning signs.