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The "Presidential" alert is the level of alert. It's been named this for over a decade, but none have ever been sent.

The levels are :

AMBER alert

Severe alerts

Extreme alerts

Presidential alerts

I'll bikeshed this; I'd rather see the latter ones titled as "Local emergency", "State emergency", "National emergency". What sort of intuition are we supposed to have for the difference between a severe and an extreme emergency?

Same intuition needed for differentiating telescope aperture sizes

(context: https://xkcd.com/1294/)

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