[whatastory]

How else are you to evaluate an emergency alert from the government that disaster is about to strike?

People who think they're "good at evaluating information" and ignore emergency notifications can and do quite often end up dead.

[donw]

I live in Japan, and long ago disabled emergency alerts for earthquakes on my phone... because they trigger whenever somebody closes a door a little too forcefully.

The core rule for any alerting system is to trigger if and only if those-to-be-alerted must take some sort of action. In this case, I was tired, pardon the pun, of being blasted out of a deep slumber at 3am for an earthquake that was so weak I could not feel it.

The only action I needed to take was to try and fall asleep again, which isn't terribly easy after your phone has jacked itself to maximum volume with urgent news of impending doom.

After the fourth time in something like two weeks, that alarm was disabled. It was useless.

Kudos to the designer for the earthquake alarm sound, though. That bit does its job brilliantly -- it instantly grabs your attention without deafening you, and you know exactly what is going on.