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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."
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
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.