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National Park Service Says Tech Is Enabling Stupidity
theodp writes "The National Park Service is finding technology to be a double-edged sword. While new technologies can and do save lives, the NPS is also finding that unseasoned hikers and campers are now boldly going where they never would have gone before, counting on cellphones, GPS, and SPOT devices to bail them out if they get into trouble. Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"
A bill for a helicopter may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to afford to go there the next year.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I really don't get articles like this; of course tech can provide some new versions of the same old store; but the fundamentals still hold true - some people are just going to go through life stupidly, trusting that someone else will bail them out. You want an answer; hold them accountable for their actions. For the idjits with the Salty Water; fine them the Rangers time, the fuel in the vehicles, plus a 10K punitive fine.
The leader was issued a citation for creating hazardous conditions in the parks.
Also, your reasoning that this is the 'same old story' doesn't work when this evidence is presented to you
The group’s leader had hiked the Grand Canyon once before, but the other man had little backpacking experience. Rangers reported that the leader told them that without the device, "we would have never attempted this hike."
Emphasis mine. If the National Park Service claims this is increasing their encounters with such idiots then this isn't the 'same old story.' As technology is further exacerbating the age old idiot complex.
My work here is dung.
A lot of these devices seem to prevent planning in general, even for little things. If you had to look up an address and stare at a map ahead of time to know where you were going, then you'd think of other things in the process. Now you can just hop in your car, type what you want in to your phone (e.g. bike shop), and follow its directions. Maybe you'll end up where you want, but people who do that often seem to be unprepared. And I've seen people doing that get lost in the process -- those directions aren't perfect, and if you don't have some general idea of where you're going, its still easy to make wrong turns. (Dedicated GPS devices are better, but not perfect, and I've heard that their sales are down due to smartphones).
Of course, it's not like in the old days everyone planned ahead and knew where they were and where they were going at all times. My family was big on planning routes, always having maps, and knowing how to read them. This is clearly not the case for many people I have met. I still think technology isn't helping.
Have them insure it.
No doctor could afford the potential millions of a malpractice claim, so they are practically required to get insurance, and the climbing/hiking issue can be handled the same way. Some mountain ranges (if I remember correctly, including Everest) do practice this already.
no matter how insignificant the event called it was.
This is a classic "Boy who cried wolf" problem. During an emergency, responders need to take calls seriously unless there is overwhelming evidence that the call is a prank. After the second time the Grand Canyon SatPhone hikers pushed their emergency button, I think they ought to be put in the "sorry, you're on your own from here on out" category, giving bears uninterrupted access to eat their faces.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
load "$",8,1
Here's another idea. Permit anyone to go up the mountain, but don't provide them rescue services if they don't get the insurance first. I'm tired of all this protecting people from themselves, crap. Let's just protect society from people. Meanwhile, preventing poor people from hiking is not a good solution. Those mountains belong to everyone... and carrion eaters need food, too. Won't someone think of the animals?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thereby ensuring that only those who can afford this kind of small-pool high-risk insurance are permitted to use the parks. Not an idea I can get behind.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And thus the American frontier was closed forever. Having a family gathering in park just outside of town that happens to be wooded and have a small lake? $450 for six hours of indemnity covering no more than twelve people. Cant pay it? Stay out of the park.
The National Parks are America's greatest natural treasures, but they come with the downside of the unpredictability of nature and the inherent hazards thereof. Regulate medicine, regulate markets, but let wilderness be wilderness. Park Rangers should hand out copies of Nash's "Wilderness and the American Mind" the way Gideons hand out the Bible to hotels.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
No. Stupidity enables Stupidity.
blaming tech for stupid people doing stupid things is well......stupid
When I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, we had to learn to read topographical maps and use a compass. Maybe we had a cell phone, maybe not. hand-held GPS was kind of expensive and not particularly advanced. Besides, GPS needs batteries and adds weight.
Hiking with a map and compass and no "please, come get me!" beacon is like programming in C or Assembler. You're closer to the metal and have to have a deeper understanding of what you're actually doing. Going out with GPS is like jumping right in with a language like Ruby which makes things really easy at first... until the first time you forget to properly define a base case for a recursive function and hit a stack error message.
The tools are great, but are always going to work way better for people who understand the basic principles of what's being automated for them, and have some "old school" experience to fall back on when necessary. Easy tools that take all the hard work out of a lot of necessary tasks lead to a false sense of security.
As with programming, where high-level, dynamic languages make it much easier for people who might otherwise not take the time to learn to program do so, going "here's a GPS... and this rescue beacon!" encourages people who probably don't really want to learn how to tie proper knots go out in the woods, get themselves in way over their head, and then basically hit that stack error. But, never having had to address memory by hand, they don't really know what that means or what to do about it.
I go hiking fairly regularly, and I don't even own any of that stuff. You can get USGS topo quads easily enough, and a good compass. Sturdy boots, balanced pack, and my leatherman. Carry enough water and some spare granola bars in case I get out farther than I had really planned. If I'm in the woods, its 'cause I don't want to be attached to the computer anymore. But maybe thats because I work surrounded by them all day.
The $450 came out of my ass. The problem is the holy grail of "Marginal cost = Marginal Revenue" that every student of economics is taught to chase. Unfortunately such equilibrium as well as the cool graphs seldom exist in real markets with the Kantian level of absolutism in which the texts lionize them. The other problem is the aversion generally felt to allowing preventable deaths to occur. As a result agencies have to navigate a fussy middle ground, and market solutions often fail in problems constructed outside of specific market friendly environments.
The best solution to this problem would involve education, but considering as an American my nation's failings decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King to provide equality of opportunity to primary and secondary education the only reasonable solution to wilderness stupidity is to continue to allow people to dare to be stupid while offering compassionate and occasionally billable solutions to consequences of stupidity..
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Cheaper an even more profitable idea is to publish all the stupid people rescue stories. If a person is rescued from their own stupidity they give up any rights to profits made from their story on the mountain or whatever and the park services can rake in the dough. Name and shame them on a TV show and/or YouTube. This will have the added effect of educating the public to be less stupid as well since the entertainment can also be edutainment at the same time.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Start charging a fee for services. Set the rates make sure they are known in advance. Outsource to a private company to provide the service (can't have emergency personnel tied up on a catering run). Done and done
Brilliant. Outsource to a single private company. Grant a monopoly. You can choose to die or to go bankrupt.
Oh, no, wait... outsource to multiple companies so that service suffers, maintenance on resque equipment is reduced, the pilots are underpaid and you have to agree to the terms first (stay only in open places, on paved paths and within 500 meters of the coffee house).
While I agree that everyone who gets into trouble in national parks is basically asking for it (nobody lives there, everybody entered by free will), a big improvement can simply be made by warnings that the rangers can't always resque you. It's not so much the gadgets which make people trust that they get resqued, it's the fact that they don't know that the rangers will let you actually sit it out for a night if it's not so serious.
Get an alarm number with someone answering the phone who judges how serious the siuation is.
Actually... the Dutch coastline does the same. Beautiful beaches, but treacherous sea currents. Thousands of swimmers get into trouble... and it's always the stupid ones who get into trouble (those who swim away from the beach, rather than parallel to it).
Should we tax all the tourists, because they may go for a swim, and may get into trouble?? Fine the stupid ones so they never come back?
No, we chose to try to inform as many as possible... and have resque services for free. Tourists keep coming (we don't scare them away with crazy fines, and they love the beaches). That brings in money, and part of that money is used to have a couple of hundred men and women in the resque servives, who are out on the water and in the air all the day.
Tourists always get into more trouble than the locals... no matter where you go.
I see a lot of knee jerk responses about charging EVERYONE for using emergency services or making it some type of crime to be calling emergency services.
We all pay for the park service to be alert in case something goes wrong. It's their job to provide help. Just, because some people abuse the service, doesn't mean you should mess it up for everyone.
It doesn't matter what technology you provide or don't provide, stupid people will do stupid things and end up being a cost to society. If we didn't have SPOT, someone idiot will bring flares and "accidentally" set a forest fire while signaling for help. You simply have to allocate for stupidity. If you try to make the world idiot proof, then we'll all be living in misery.
Here in Arizona, there is no fee to those that we rescue. We're all volunteers with the exception of DPS Ranger. SPOT beacons have saved several people's lives in the last couple of years. The first in the county was a guy who slipped off the edge of a steep trail and broke both ankles. Luke AFB got the first ping in 45 minutes. That's a damn sight better than waiting an unknown number of hours before someone notices that the subject is missing. Cellphones also help us direct ground units to the subject. That being said, SAR teams do not rescue peoples' vehicles and we have gotten into shouting matches with people from Phoenix who got stuck in the snow and are stunned that we will take them to safety but they're going to have to arrange for a paid tow service to get their vehicle out.
That being said, the NPS is somewhat hypocritical about things. First off, in Yellowstone, there is no cellphone service in most of the park despite what the movie 2012 would have you believe. Second, I have witnessed the ancient diesel noisy belching shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon blow right past people on the side of the road who may be injured or in trouble simply because they weren't standing at a designated pick up point.
Furthermore, technology isn't the only thing that can get people into trouble. The US Forest Service often doesn't maintain roads that appear on published maps and GPS databases as good roads so people end up in trouble. And then there are the outdoor magazines. We had a rescue here of a man who read an article that said you should hike up one trail and bushwhack over to another trail to come out. Really really bad idea if you don't know what you're doing.
I was the disaster preparedness officer in the National Guard for a bunch of years. Whenever I did an evaluation (and some of these were full-scale deoployments with aircraft and 1,000 personnel) I'd start taking away all of the high tech stuff.
You depend on radios? I'll figure out a way to compromise them. Somebody will be careless and leave one laying around. I'll disconnect your computer network, jam your wireless. I'll steal cars, hide your keys. If nothing else, I'll overwhelm your digital network with too much information.
The good units had paper-and-pencil backups and runners. The bad units came apart.
Same with hiking; never let the technology override your ability. We hike with a GPS, but we always carry a paper map and and a compass. Last time we did this, my kids were 100' off from the GPS coordinates - after 3 hours of bushwhacking over broken terrain. You can stay found if you know what you are doing.