| I don't the parent comment you replied to is saying "if Russia hasn't killed our radios yet than pirate radio is fine". They're wondering if it's a potential attack at all - and if you don't know much about radio then that's a perfectly reasonable thing to think. It's only after you learn about energy dissipation and so on that you realize that the hostile power needs to be pretty close to the actual thing they want to jam. Though it's not like Russia hasn't already tried anyway[0]. I'm pretty sure most people here are going to at least know what ham radio is. That's not the reason why people here are sympathetic to pirate AM/FM radio broadcasters. It's moreso because the AM and FM radio bands are basically a cultural dead zone: ClearChannel and friends bought them all up in decades past and turned them into garbage. This is the sort of misallocation of resources that economists tend to have a blind spot for. According to them, efficient markets[1] are perfect allocators and anyone not having their tastes satisfied are just harbingers of failure[2] angry that their Crystal Pepsi got discontinued. The reality is that there's literally no reason to have eight stations all playing the same mainstream format in one market, and the FCC has dropped the ball on maximizing public utility of the spectrum. 'Cause here's the thing: yes, radio is "available for use" with proper licensing and certification, but that's basically an elaborated no. It's sort of like saying "copyrighted material is available with proper licensing". Nobody is going to be able to afford the licenses, if they're even offered, because the FCC runs on an auction system. And it turns out that that the mainstream station formats are really, really profitable to the point where you can outbid everything else. Is this an actually worthwhile use of the AM/FM bands to have what are effectively duplicates of the same station on every band in every market? [0] Ok, it was a radar system, not a jamming system, but that's just a difference of intent. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbi6eoh63ZQ [1] Fun fact: did you know the Efficient Markets Hypothesis implies P = NP? It's true - if markets are perfectly efficient then they can solve boolean satisfiability problems, which are NP-complete, and thus you can break all crypto. On the other hand, inefficient markets also imply all those finance soothsayers with their technical analysis can actually beat the market. [2] "Harbingers of failure" are people who are unusually good at buying doomed products. See https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu... |