Car alarms and smoke alarms: the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity
blog.danslimmon.com
blog.danslimmon.com
The car alarm owner is forcing an externality cost onto society; there is no incentive for an individual car alarm owner to reduce false positives so it is no surprise the products are so bad.
(Even in the true-positive case, the car alarm is extracting its value from the attention of third parties to the thievery, at no cost to the owner.)
Conclusion: every sounding of a car alarm should attract a substantial tax penalty.
I live in a poorer west side chicago neighborhood and car alarms go off all the time. I am jolted out sleep frequently by multiple alarms going off at the same time. I never experienced this in somewhat affluent neighborhoods, I think poor ppl are more sensitive(no pun intended) to theft so they turn alarm sensitivity all the way up.
So fining would affect poorer ppl more than rich ppl and might be politically sensitive much like the chicago soda tax that was rolled back for this precise reason.
Yeah but if you're getting woken up multiple times at night in a poor neighborhood, then it's poor people who don't own car alarms who are negatively affected the most.
If you are poor, you have significantly less agency to effect change to remedy your situation - so you have no choice but to tolerate things like these.
A rich person can move, install soundproofing, afford air conditioning to sleep with the windows shut, etc...
A poor person can have interrupted sleep.
I distinctly remember the day when I, as a young teenage boy, observed “Huh, the girls in my class are a lot better than the boys at doing work they don’t want to do. The boys complain and try to get out of it, the girls generally just do it whether they like it or not.”
Then I realised—oh, the girls feel like they’re expected to just do it. They don’t feel as entitled to a say in the matter as the boys do, because that’s how they’ve each been socialised.
And then I began seeing parallels everywhere…so that was the moment that set me on the path of social activism, really.
By the tenant, anyway. And any of the tenants' neighbors close enough to hear the shrieking.
> The car alarm owner is forcing an externality cost onto society; there is no incentive for an individual car alarm owner to reduce false positives so it is no surprise the products are so bad.
Modern smoke detectors also have extremely high false positive rates. I've lived in two buildings built after 2009 since 2013, and in both, if you so much as look sideways at a piece of toast the alarm goes off screaming "Fire!" at 120 dB. Nevermind trying to broil steak...
Large commercial facilities are required to handle small emergencies themselves by noticing 911 calls coming from their lines and directing public safety personnel to the exact location, training safety & security staff on AED and fire extinguisher use, etc.
Actually, I think it's because the potential consequences of ignoring a smoke alarm (vs a car alarm) are much more grave.
[1] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2014/12/17/350442...
Point is, yeah, car alarms likely had some effect, but was it more or less than the fact that cars are just generally harder to steal now? And I have no idea what the answer is.
Just plug in your ODB-II tool and press start :-).
Car alarms can deter joyriders but don't do much for the professional car thief [2] ([3] has more references). Also, as an anecdote, there's been a bunch of car prowls in my apartment building parking lot for the past year or so. The victims were high-end vehicles with valuables in-sight (briefcases, dashcams, etc..) and they all had car alarms.
[1] http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
[2] https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=1656...
[3] https://priceonomics.com/are-car-alarms-completely-fucking-u...
Most straight through mufflers are street legal because most states just have a law about X decibels at Y distance and don't care what you have as long as it's quiet enough. CA has quite asinine rules about car exhaust systems though and you could be considered not in compliance with emissions rules even if you somehow make your straight through exhaust reasonably quiet.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin_Johnson40/publica...
No, it means someone was making popcorn. The reason we leave is because they set the volume to a level that it causes people to feel pain, presumably to force us to leave.
The fire alarm at my apartment is effectively a bacon detector. Multiple residents have covered theirs because of how sensitive they are. Normal cooking will set them off. I'm suspicious they may actually up the risk of a fire, as someone may abandon their cooking to avoid the noise.
In the UK, new residential construction puts heat alarms in kitchens and smoke alarms everywhere else.
EDIT: If you have a dedicated central heating boiler room, that also gets a carbon monoxide alarm.
I cook bacon in the oven on racks, it is smokeless. The damn alarms still sing the song of their people every time.
No one uses them in the rural area I live but the title to this and a few of the comments here reminded me of how annoying car alarms could be when I lived in LA.
I learned to drive a beater there so I didn't have to worry about someone banging into or stealing my car. I saw too many people get way too stressed about that and it just wasn't worth it to me. It was really nice to not worry about it.