Edit clarified car radios are battery powered
Why can’t the Android manufacturers just be accountable by themselves?
Otherwise if that's the drum you want to beat, android makers were the first to push bigger and bigger screens ("phablets") and opened the door for Apple to also inflate it's devices, to the point where 6" is considered "small" by today's standard.
It’s irrelevant to Android phones whether Apple made the choice first or how they did it. Android manufacturers are able to be accountable for their own decisions.
it’s even more irrelevant that Android phones had larger screens first, unless people on the Apple side are blaming Android manufacturers for the push to larger screens.
It seems like something that ought to be technically doable, but perhaps the market isn't there compared to just selling standalone little radio-things?
I guess it could make sense if the phone is driving your wireless earbuds or you want to change stations using Siri, but yeah other than that, I dunno.
It was true at one point - I owned at least one phone with a disabled FM radio.
Some cursory checks on my current phone suggest it's got one (just doesn't work for some reason with FM Tuner apps).
But, there are folks complaining about how Samsung broke FM tuners with an update on this phone a few years back. Who knows what that is about.
The story goes that analog radio receivers are built-in to nearly every smartphone, but most lack the app or drivers to access them.
I imagine adding analog FM radio isn't a major selling point on a phone where you can already stream the digital feeds from most FM stations – not to mention Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music, etc.
That will use up your data.
By contrast FM radio is free, and we have some bloody good BBC radio stations in blighty.
American culture leans “against the feds”, it really is wackamole trying to shut them down, on the other hand it drives more subscriptions to satelite radio which is good for the gdp, so win win.
Hell I believe this is even the case in London, just not as extreme.
Unfortunately my antenna can't pick up the FM signal, and iPlayer is geo-blocked, but... I do seem to be able to stream some BBC radio stations and program[me]s via the magic of the internets.
https://ipodwiki.com/wiki/IPod_Radio_Remote
Shows Apple can do FM if they put their mind to it.
RIP iPod Classic (2007-2014).
Where do you live that you're worried about data? Is this an American thing?
I've lived in Asia and Europe and data is so cheap and plentiful that I'm never changing my behaviour to save a few MBs.
Or are you not worried about data but you're trying hard to make a case for this FM antenna that no one wants in their phones?
On the other hand, everyone can get their own personal "radio station" via streaming...
An AM radio doesn't even need a battery, I built a crystal set as a child.
Or, you can just use the old wood stove in my childhood home. We had some wire racks for drying gloves and mittens supported above it, and the whole contraption played the 670khz radio station broadcasting about 15 miles away, sometimes at an annoying level of volume. You could quiet it down with some wet gloves, though.
It also would shock you when it was being loud. Somehow, the demodulated signal ended up at a pretty high voltage. I’ve often tried to imagine the circuit that was going on there between the stove, grounded at the bottom and with a 30 foot high metal chimney, the aluminium foil backed insulation in the house, the two metal pipe penetrations connected to the huge foil planes 9 feet apart on the first and second stories, the gasketed top of the stove that was somewhat insulated from the grounded base, and attached to the chimney at the top, and the corroded bolts that held the bottom to the top.
If you are in an emergency that requires evacuation, and you have means to evacuate, there's a good chance that means will be a car. In such an evacuation, having a universal way to communicate would be pretty useful. Although, it's not clear that people would know to listen to it.
Also, plenty of existing travel advisory systems rely on AM radio, so it's a mess if a new generation of cars can't tune to AM 530 when lights flash. The vast majority of existing cars in the US have an AM radio receiver, and there's a generation of classic cars that never upgraded to FM radio.
From dealing with so-called "policy wonks" over the years, having a solution that requires people take action ahead of time and buy something new to replace something they had in the past is a non-starter. They most likely won't listen to anything after that. They are extremely risk-adverse in general so any change is seen as bad unless proven otherwise. It's easier (in their mind) to just force things to stay the way they are since they don't trust people to make decisions.
Do we have studies that test this hypothesis? Did people actually fail to replace the old thing by the new, or did it turn out okay?
I think this number is waaaay smaller than anyone thinks. Especially with modern buttonless car systems.
And a common use case for this would be people evacuating a disaster area. Being able to put up a simple transmitter with localized instructions would be a very good thing. As it stands there are government transmitters out there running looped broadcasts with general information and closure information.
Sitting in your house you have all sorts of options that aren’t available when you’re 30+ miles from the nearest town without any significant supplies on hand in your car.
I’m not far from places where you’re legally required to use tire chains in bad weather. You have to provide your own.
Also, in grand scheme of things, AM tuner is probably a fraction of a dollar. Optimizing it out is weird.
> I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.
I don't have a disaster bag in my trunk, and I know exactly two people who do (they are volunteer SAR people, so big surprise there). You'll get very little compliance for this requirement. And if you want to try to enforce compliance, doing so will be incredibly expensive.
And that brings us to the other part: cost. Every (or nearly ever) car out there in the US today already has an AM radio, from my 2-year-old car to some restored antique from the 1960s. Most people don't have a standalone AM(/FM) radio these days, and basically no one has one built into their home. Can you imagine how expensive it would be to require all homes in the US be retrofitted with a built-in AM radio? Even requiring homeowners to purchase a standalone AM radio would be massively expensive. Especially when compared to the cost of $0 to require that all cars have them in it... because they already do! And for car makers planning to drop the AM radios: it will be at most a few tens of dollars added to their cost to continue to include them. A cost they can continue to pass on to their customers.
In Germany, the inspector would fail you pretty quickly. Consequently compliance is very high, and somehow not very expensive.
Or where you talking about what would happen if such a mandate existed?
It's a first aid kit, as well as accident signaling cones and reflective vest.
Forcing manufacturers to keep an AM antenna hooked up to the infotainment they're already including is pretty cheap, easy to enforce, and will have high compliance. Moreso because they already have the engineering expertise for doing so.
It also forces at least one AM radio into the hands of >90% American households, and since for most disasters there's some kind of an evacuation you'll likely be in your car rather than your home.
Could we draw a line in the sand somewhere else (e.g., building codes)? Sure. It'll be a higher cost solution that grandfathers in most homes as not having an AM radio though. Could we mandate disaster bags? It'll probably devolve into a cottage industry of the cheapest thing that's maybe legal with low compliance of households even buying something to that standard, but sure, we can do that too. A "greedy" (as in greedy algorithms) utilitarian perspective might be valuable here though. Instead of bikeshedding, does this bill help make people safer at an appropriate cost? If so, pointing to other lines in the sand is reasonable insofar as we want to make the law better, but not to refute the law in the first place. If not, we ought to be able to point to those reasons instead of other lines in the sand.
And note that AM is much more forgiving of terrain than FM. You can still be shadowed but the lower the frequency the less likely you are to be shadowed from the transmitter.
Example: https://xdaforums.com/t/diy-fm-antenna-with-3-5mm-audio-jack...
If only we had legislation to bring those back...
Meanwhile commercial FM is like ~3.5M wavelength; you're pretty close to a quarter wave with a normal headphone wire (~3ft).
You mean half-wave, right?
If >1/3 of Americans lived in tents every day and >90% of them were in tents every year, then you can bet they'd have more such regulations around tent living, yes.
Cars are already nearly universally equipped with sound systems that include 99 percent of the components to make a good AM radio, and the cost of adding this capability to existing designs can be less than a dollar plus the antenna.
While following popular guidelines for emergency preparedness is a great idea, this is an opportunity to create a public good and a means (listeners) to maintain the required infrastructure for a robust, improvisable, resilient, nation-scale emergency communication system that will be there regardless of the level of preparedness of the average, clueless individual.
You can use a crystal radio for that case [1].
There are probably more homes with a charged USB power bank that could power an FM or DAB radio than homes with a crystal radio or the means to build one.
We're talking about the USA here. Probably a higher fraction of Americans have a car than have a home!
If where you are at, nobody has cars.
And you loose power. Does everyone just huddle at home with zero information while some tidal wave is coming at you?
If you say, well we keep a battery powered Radio handy at home. (and we are so prepared we replace the batteries every year)
Well, then that is the answer. Cars already have radios, so keep the AM option available.
Legislation is about cars specifically? Many already have AM radios. So it’s not about forcing motorcycles, houses, bus stops or bicycles to add radios just to keep the feature in the cars.
However that is not the only point of the proposal. It might be about the economics of running all the AM stations. So it’s a lobbying effort from that front. The emergency part just sounds more wholesome.
This is about US policies. The US has a high dependence on cars so it makes sense that it is being singled out
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.
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
Nothing about this is car specific except it makes for a good example, and people like to whine anytime cars are mentioned.
For cars there is a limited amount of manufacturers and imports can be checked, too. Also there are regular inspections for cars.
And then there is a big density of cars, thus even for people who don't own a car it's likely there is a vehicle not far.
Thus it is quite efficient place to regulate.
Cars are expensive to modify if possible at all. My recent make Audi and Porsches, aside from being completely unreliable, have no ability to have a third party head unit due to module coding lock in. Gone are the days of slapping a double din head unit where the LCD and AC controls went and wiring up to the CAN bus and analog audio cables.
However, it’s cheap to add in/enable a feature on a chip that’s already installed.
Similarly at home there’s probably already an AM radio somewhere even if you don’t think you have it. My home theater system has an AM radio. I have a clock radio somewhere. An older phone does AM radio. And unlike a car, an AM/FM radio is a $20-50 expense.
There is already mature roadway infrastructure that provides localized announcements via AM - tunnels, bridges, mountain passes, low-vis areas, flood prone passes, hurricane evacuation corrodors, etc. I would imagine the cost of pressuring automakers to keep AM pales in comparison to the cost of updating public emergency communication infra.
I'm also a ham but I'm also a person who sometimes forgets there's an air compressor beneath my trunk floor.
And it also had the added benefit of being easier to control, as the receivers could not be used to listen to western radio like regular radio receivers.
Older phones used to be able to play FM, requiring a headphone cable to be used as an antenna.
For the purpose of emergency broadcasts, maybe using both AM and FM would make sense.
We’re talking about the USA. Cars are not special cases, they are the central case around which society is structured, at the expense of many other things.
I do have an emergency AM/FM/WB radio at home that I take on camping trips.
There is often a nice antidote to the "why is this a special case?" argument that consists of two questions:
1. "What is your alternative?", and
2. "Is this alternative going to solve the problem better than what I proposed?"
In other words, if you don't like the current special-casey-ness of this policy, what alternative will you support that we can _actually_ put into practice?
If the person/organization does not actually support some workable alternative that will solve the problem better, that is quite telling! It suggests that solving this particular issue is not really a priority for them. Some people really are pedantic in the sense that they care about some logical consistency criteria more than solving particular problems. When one sees this in an individual, one might suspect various forms of confusion, poor prioritization, and maybe even some mental pathologies. When one sees this in an organization, particularly one making a public "argument", one should probably suspect they are deploying whatever argument suits their purpose, which is often just to derail progress on something they don't like.
Of course the meta-issue here is far from simple. It would be better if laws were enacted at the right level of abstraction, using some semblance of reasonableness. I often groan at the patchwork of laws that we see here in the US. But don't forget that in a democracy, the will of the people is far from rational, and the political will is even more mercurial. Very often one is better off taking what you can get rather than waiting for something better that may never materialize.
P.S. I find these sorts of discussions are interesting (in a sense), because it is hard to say to what degree someone is trotting out whatever logic simply suits their purpose. I've found this applies both to established interesting making "arguments" in public as well as individuals of all ages trying to defend what they have already decided is the best course of action. (Both are tiresome, frankly -- a part of human nature that I find rather counterproductive -- a suboptimal strategy that we've landed on.)
So much the worse for being you.
Because this is about America, a large and sprawling country where most residents can be safely assumed to own a car and would use it in the event of an emergency or disaster.
Obviously if you have the foresight to have a (AM!) radio in your home and your camping gear that's even better.
We mandate seat belts in cars when they could be aftermarket, too.
(In practice, I like any car I ride to have seat belts. But I support the argument that since there's no externalities from other people not using seatbelts, we shouldn't force them to have some. And in any case, the orthodox way to deal with externalities is via a tax, not via a ban.)
That argument is wrong. There are absolutely externalities to allowing other people's car rides to be less safe for them, even if no one else is injured or killed because of it.
Every injury or death makes health care more expensive for everyone, even in a place like the US that don't have socialized health care. The costs of these emergencies are largely borne by health and car insurance companies, and those costs mean everyone's premiums are going to be just a little bit higher.
Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.
Insurance is a bet between you and the insurance company. If you decide to engage in extra risky behaviour, then a competent insurance company will charge you extra. (Or rather, more PR friendly but equivalent: your insurance company will offer you a discount, if you can prove that you are exercising, don't smoke and always wear a seatbelt, etc.)
Realised average accident rates for certain parts of the population can help you fine tune your risk models, but they aren't mathematically required.
That's why insurance companies can profitably insure one-off events just fine. Eg have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for example where you can get bespoke insurance for your one-off novelty promotion. Golf course A making their golf holes wider won't affect the hole-in-one insurance premium that Golf course B has to pay.
Of course, that's all unless there's some regulation that forces insurance companies to set premiums a certain way. But then, blame that price control regulation.
An insurance company that prices risks accurately will outcompete an insurance company that solely relies on population averages. The latter will overcharge less risky people who drive with a seatbelt on (so they will move to the competition), and will undercharge risky people without seatbelts, and thus lose money on them.
> Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.
You are proving too much here. Yes, this argument could apply to driving without a seat belt. But it could apply just as much to any driving at all. Or to lazing on the couch instead of exercising, or to living in the New Mexico instead of Maine, or to drinking or smoking, or working as a lumberjack.
---
Just to be clear, on the object level I'm ok with smoking bans (instead of just high taxes) and laws requiring seatbelts. But that's just because they are convenient for me. They aren't properly justified.
Only if the price of costing risk accurately is less than just using population averages. So they look at cheap ways to cost risk, like credit scores and driving records.
All our lives are interconnected and interdependent. Most untimely deaths will leave a financial, practical and mental health crater in many lives around them. When children are involved the fallout can last generations. Not to mention the lost investment of parents, the education system, etc.
Compare and contrast https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democrac...
No it isn't. Very false dichotomy.
The benefits of doing something have to be balanced against its costs. People's longevity and freedom both matter.
And something impossible can't have valid arguments for it. No independent decisions is an unattainable scenario even for maximalist autocracies.
What, that I actually said, do you disagree with?
In any case, even if you discount energy conservation, the extra danger to other people from you becoming a projectile is likely tiny. You can run some cost benefit analyses, and I'm pretty sure you'll come to the conclusion that a Pigouvian tax of something like a dollar a year is enough to offset this.
> One persons dumb choice to not wear a seatbelt can have potentially fatal consequences to others riding in the car who are not responsible for that decision.
Are you talking about people in the same car as the guy not wearing a seatbelt? Then you can exactly identify the other parties, so the transaction costs for Coasean bargaining are very low. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem Basically, if you think it's dangerous to ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt, then don't ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt.
As a pedestrian you can't opt out of what drivers are doing. That's a real exernality. But as a fellow passenger, you know exactly who else is in the car, and you can refuse to ride with them.
If I understand your suggestion right, it's like marrying someone with bad breath, and then asking the government to make a law to make your spouse brush their teeth?
Extremely slightly less. What, 170lbs compared to 4,000lbs+? Is 4% weight reduction after the collision starts, minus the energy imparted to the seats and other passengers and the windshield and what not, really going to make much impact to the overall collision calculus here?
In the UK they ran a campaign to raise awareness that during an accident a passenger riding in the back can injure the passenger in front if they don't wear a seatbelt. That seems like a serious externality to me. I don't know if you just hate seatbelts or love arguing but there are absolutely reasons that people should wear seatbelts and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE&pp=ygUeVWsgc2VhdGJ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/359am5/ysk_i...
If you are a driver, and you want people in the back to wear a seatbelt, just ask them to wear a seatbelt. Duh.
> I don't know if you just hate seatbelts [...]
Why would I hate seatbelts? I wear them all the time, whenever I have to take a car. I just don't buy the usual justification for forcing other people to wear seatbelts (or have AM radios..)
> [...] and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.
I'm all for people wearing seatbelts, too. Just like I'm in favour of people eating their vegetables and flossing their teeth. Voluntarily.
It's a quirk or random fact of history that they got put into cars but not houses, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of it. It's smart and reasoning people like you and me that look at this and think "ugh, no need to have it in a car, we can have it in a bug out bag and it'll make cars cheaper, etc". But that kind of thinking is wrong for society past a certain point.
Before we know it, we'll own nothing, we'll rely on Daddy Government for everything, and we'll be happy! Maybe they'll let us own a Digital Government-Issued Codec-Infused Satellite Radio®, so they can reach us at all times.
Our government should step in when it makes sense. We determine if it makes sense via cost analysis and risk analysis. This is why the communism slippery slope argument doesn't work.
For example, banning public smoking along with other measures have saved millions of lives in the long run. Of course smoking is a personal choice, but it's also addictive and dangerous. It is sometimes beneficial to override people's "personal choice" if the benefit is big enough and the cost low enough. Ultimately, pretty much everyone is now grateful public smoking is gone.
I ham a ham extra license. I like radio and see its value. I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.