When hundreds of 999 calls came in from fans at the Download festival two years ago, the emergency services must have thought a disaster was unfolding at the three-day heavy metal gig in Leicestershire.
In fact, the calls were made automatically from smartwatches and other devices worn by fans because “the tech assumed that people in moshpits had been in a collision”, according to Leicestershire police.
Now the force is appealing to those attending the festival this weekend to turn their devices to airplane mode or disable emergency alerts to avoid unnecessary 999 calls.
But it does show the limits of a planned economy, doesn’t it? Who would have, could have, did, predict such a thing? Therefore there are effects of a thing which are not predictable. Some level of interactions which planning cannot deal with.
Thus a fully planned economy is not possible, is it? Which brings us back to where we alkl really are, which is well, how much should be planned and how much market? That my answer is, in order, “less and more” is fine etc, but it’s not something disproved by someone saying “more and less”. We’re all arguing over the where, not the whether….
To be fair, last mosh pit I was in (The Damned, late last year) was like being in a car crash. There was a 20+ stone guy in denim dungarees who bounced everyone about.
I wonder what other information plus location our smart devices are programmed to send to our government without asking?
A planned economy wouldn’t have this issue.
1) None of them would have been there. They would all be less than 15 mins from their home.
2) None of them would have a need for any technology like this. Who needs a watch when a siren would blare when it is time to get up and go to bed.
3) None of them could afford to try or own anything.
BiG,
I don’t know what they were wearing but I had to activate the feature on my watch and it doesn’t send any information until it needs to. A couple of times its asked me if I’ve fallen over and been in the process of starting a call. Once I was struggling to get my waterproof trousers on and nearly missed cancelling it.
As I do a lot of hiking on my own I think its a great feature.
“Who would have, could have, did, predict such a thing?”
The makers of said smartwatches, after the first incidents… It’s generally in the Do’s and Don’ts in the manual of the bloody things: “Don’t turn/have this feature on if you expect [X] as part of your activities.”
Liabilities and stuff.
I believe the first Issues with emergency autocalls were with rollercoasters…
But RTFM is a lost art….
it doesn’t send any information until it needs to
And you know this how?
Thus a fully planned economy is not possible, is it?
That rather depends on what you want the planned economy to achieve. Pol Pot’s planned economy did rather well for a time by his lights. Hitler had economic plans which achieved what might otherwise have seemed impossible, encouraging Germans to murder each other at scale. The Holodomor achieved what Stalin wished. And so on.
Covid unfortunately turned me from a fairly cynical bloke, who has seen state fuck ups even in organisations you’d think wouldn’t allow or experience them, but who thought it was all largely down to incompetence, into a raging conspiracy theorist.
(I know there are a few of us on here now, and that there are others who subscribe to the cock up theory – I think it’s both, in that I still think almost everyone involved in all the various ‘fuck ups’ is incompetent, I just think they have been selected for incompetence and the conditions created which allow their incompetence inevitably and ineluctably to bloom in the right direction of travel, over many decades, frog boily style. The usual rejoinder to this is ‘there isn’t a group of people planning everything’ – unlike I guess the people planning the economy.)
In other words, if you want your planned economy to provide food, housing, meaningful lives, and lucrative opportunities for its people, in safety, under the umbrella of the rule of law and a reasonably benevolent state, then no, that is not possible.
But if your planned economy is set up for less benign purposes then history clearly shows it’s entirely possible.
Thank goodness there are no psychopaths, evil liars, double talkers, frauds, ideologues and twisted, maniacal Malthusians at the top of world governments, with the capability of at least theoretically surveilling all of us all the time, because then we might really be in trouble.
A big problem that no-one thinks about with trains and trams is that you only find out if you’re right when you’ve spent a colossal amount of money.
National Express can pay for a couple of extra drivers and coaches and see how it goes. Do the research but your hunch is wrong, it’s probably a couple of hundred grand to find out.
Also, the timescales on train projects mean that the world might have changed. Remote work, working on trains. But also, maglev. You want to improve rails, don’t go a bit quicker to 200mph, go big and go 300mph. This is like government investing in silkworm farms just as Dupont starts licensing nylon.
Interested, that’s reasonable. We’ve had at least four generations of Long Marchers now. They share an ideology and do it for a reason: to take over the apparatus of State without going through the bother of trying and failing to get elected. They have plenty of official and unofficial channels through which to co-ordinate: WEF, UN, Common Purpose, Twatter; even good old email; etc. etc.
That they are not a secret cabal is beside the point. As rhoda said a while back, if the result is indistinguishable from that of a conspiracy, it’s a conspiracy even if organisation and action is distributed rather than centralised.
What we’re actually seeing is a wannabe progressive universalist autocratic world government trying to coalesce. There are plenty of people who make no bones about desiring that, and are working towards it. Everyone in the Berlaymont, f’rinstance.
it doesn’t send any information until it needs to
And you know this how?
because it’s an Apple Watch and :
1. Apple has fought lawsuits against the Feds to protect user data
2. It would be the biggest marketing disaster in their history if they were found to be secretly sending data to the government
3. If the government really wanted to know where I was they could buy most of the information
Western Bloke wrote:
” You want to improve rails, don’t go a bit quicker to 200mph, go big and go 300mph. ”
Maybe it would be more-effective to first ask riders what they would consider to be the most-significant improvements to their ride. Maybe speed alone is not the sole measure of “improve(ment)”.
llater,
llamas
@ llamas
Reliability – will the bus or train actually come?
Before British Fail was privatised my policy if I had an important appointment was always to catch the train before the one that I “needed” to get there on time. Socialist London’s red buses were even worse (Tees-side’s were good and Oxford’s, which I rarely used, seemed good when I did use them).
@ llamas
Sorry – should have added policy 90+% successful but I did, very rarely, arrive late as a consequence and once had to apologise for completely missing a meeting because two successive trains were cancelled without warning and the third was very late as at every station after the second anyone trying to get off had to struggle through the other passengers and there were crowds trying to get on.
I bethink me of the gas station chain Buc-ee’s, which is primarily located in the Southern
US states but which is rapidly expanding.
Their success does not come from having lower gas prices – although they are competitive. It does not come from their convenient locations – being always on major freeways, they are not easily-accessible to suburban motorists. It does not even come from their barbecue brisket sandwich, which I’m told is stunningly good for the money.
It’s none of those things. It’s their bathrooms, which are vast, modern, and – most-importantly – scrupulously, constantly and fanatically cleaned. Paulie Gualtieri’s comment about ‘maple walnut ice cream’ springs to mind.
Being a closet socialist, I also like that they post their wage rates – which are highly-competitive, especially for the Southern states – on every pump.
The metrics used by customers to assess success and improvement are often at odds with the metrics used by managers and (more-importantly) by politicians. Politicians and lawmakers drool over “high-speed rail” – why can’t we have super modern whizzy fast futuristic trains like the Japanese do? – while overlooking the real secret of Japan Rail’s success – as John77 alludes to, it is clean trains that run on time to the second and which go to and from places people want to go to and from. The Shinkansen is indeed a modern marvel, but 99.875% of JR’s customers only ever ride boring, conventional, slow commuter trains – and that is where their success lives.
llater,
llamas
“But if your planned economy is set up for less benign purposes then history clearly shows it’s entirely possible.”
It’s worse than we thought!
Wannsee Economic Forum’s objective is to change the world. Not change for good. Not for bad, either. Their members, with more money than God, want a legacy, which all their wealth hasn’t given them. So they drive change. For change. For their legacy. That they can be laid to rest knowing they changed the world. That the masses will believe that the change is for the worse is completely irrelevant. They will sleep just fine.
I still think almost everyone involved in all the various ‘fuck ups’ is incompetent, I just think they have been selected for incompetence and the conditions created which allow their incompetence inevitably and ineluctably to bloom in the right direction of travel
Incompetent at what though? They may be incompetent at doing what they’re doing but they maybe highly competent at getting in the position of doing what they’re doing. It’s understanding what’s required to clear the hurdles in the modern world. And they’re not often what they should be. Credentialisation’s a good example. Someone may have passed an examination. But all that shows is a facility for passing the examination.
I was looking at this one today:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/15/mi6-gadget-chief-becomes-first-female-spymaster/
Cambridge graduate. Daughter of parents who 47 years ago thought it a good idea to name a daughter Blaise. Oh, and of course, good at sport! What’s the odds in 20 years she turns out to be a traitor? She has all the qualifications. Cambridge has form. for a start.
He’s a Cambridge man, up the wrong end of a punt;
He’s a Cambridge man, and we really must be Blunt:
If you think the Secret Service have been looking rather nervous,
Just remember that Guy Burgess was a Cambridge man.
He ignores the girls of Girton (he’s a Cambridge man);
He has crossed the Iron Curtain (he’s a Cambridge man)
And we’ll all discover later that he’s been a long-term traitor
Funded by a red dictator (he’s a Cambridge man).
@ BiS
Incredibly good at sport – I should have expected to hear of a woman rowing in the Boat Race!
(One of my wife’s cousins rowed for Blondie so her family would have kept up with the performance of exceptional women in Cambridge sports)
because it’s an Apple Watch and :
1. Apple has fought lawsuits against the Feds to protect user data
2. It would be the biggest marketing disaster in their history if they were found to be secretly sending data to the government
3. If the government really wanted to know where I was they could buy most of the information
Lawsuits? Ooh I bet the CIA/NSA are scared. (Since not long ago they were found to have been gaily and unconstitutionally spying on everyone in the US, and nothing happened to them, I actually bet they’re not scared).
No, the marketing disaster would be if they hadn’t ‘fought’ the government.
The point is not whether the government can buy the information if it really wants to know where you are. That’s bad enough (though your Apple Watch contains a lot more data that it can’t buy).
The point is that you have no idea whether or not your data is being stored, just a faith in the system.
You’re probably specifically right, it doesn’t give a fuck about you. But the power to suddenly be interested in you is the point.
llamas,
“Maybe it would be more-effective to first ask riders what they would consider to be the most-significant improvements to their ride. Maybe speed alone is not the sole measure of “improve(ment)”.”
Oh yes. I think the biggest problem with rail in the UK is bad pricing and then reliability. It was just that if are upgrading speed, go big.
No-one cares about getting to Manchester a bit quicker. But you make it quick enough that you can see a client, do a meeting and be back the same day instead of paying for a hotel room then it adds a lot of value.
BIS,
“Incompetent at what though? They may be incompetent at doing what they’re doing but they maybe highly competent at getting in the position of doing what they’re doing. It’s understanding what’s required to clear the hurdles in the modern world. And they’re not often what they should be. Credentialisation’s a good example. Someone may have passed an examination. But all that shows is a facility for passing the examination.”
The thing that will instantly trigger a public reaction is a public servant caught talking like they’re in a Tarantino movie. Or having a glass of Scotch at their desk. Ending the office Christmas Party in a strip club will get you in deep trouble. What the public care about most is propriety. They complain about waste now and again, but they don’t ignore lack of politeness “who gives a fuck as long as things get done”.
It’s different to the private sector. You work in a 6 man computer company, no-one cares what you do as long as you do the work well. You might get a telling off and “FFS just get a room at the Travelodge” for shagging a receptionist. The Christmas Party can end up with someone snorting coke off a strippers tits and no-one cares.
The demands for propriety extend to qualifications, which is why we have queues in the NHS. Because everyone wants an overtrained GP and an overtrained nurse. Oxford computer science includes “decolonisation” which is useless when you want to fix some code at 3 in the morning. Which is why we run our own tests, and I’d rather trust the Microsoft exams.
All of this is why there’s more girlies doing degrees and men are stepping away and why the public sector so much more female than male. You want to do shit (outside of the stuff that is forced by government) you probably don’t need a degree. The only reason to do a computer science degree is a piece of paper that gets your foot in the door to your first bit of work. If you can figure out another way in, you just saved £27K and wasting 3 years. Seriously, there used to be some value when there wasn’t much knowledge around and getting access to a DEC PDP-11 was hard, but now, a cheap laptop and Udemy courses do the job. Few of the lecturers can teach you anything about the job because they never left university.
It’s the same with filmmaking. Spend £10 on Masterclass and watch Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese and David Mamet tell you about screenwriting and directing. Or spend £30K on a bunch of lecturers who once made a 5 minute short film about trannies.
No-one cares about getting to Manchester a bit quicker. But you make it quick enough that you can see a client, do a meeting and be back the same day instead of paying for a hotel room then it adds a lot of value.
25 years ago I would take the down Manchester Pullman from Watford and catch the up back in the evening, and get a bloody good breakfast and a decent meal into the bargain.