I don't think the issue is really just localization, though, but also timing. The alert went out at 4:50 AM. I think even if it were highly localized, for what is basically a missing persons alert, most people would be pissed and just go back to bed.

Texas definitely can localize their emergency alerts. This alert got sent over the same channel as emergency weather alerts, which get localized per county. It's more that they choose not to localize the alerts.

It's a conscious choice. More alerts makes you think there's more crime.

Nothing any government or any elected official does anywhere is by mistake. It just doesn't happen.

Oh boy, having worked w government/elected officials a lot, I can tell you that this is just for sure not true.

Sometimes bad behavior really is just incompetence

Sounds like a common occurrence, maybe we should give it a name...

Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track.

As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power.

And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.

Sometimes bad behaviour and incompetence are indistinguishable partners in crime.

Such as the Hawaii missile alert.

Ever since we decided that that was just an unfortunate example of bad UI, we only encouraged more public fuckups.

Hm, that's not my experience with California. I disabled amber alerts pretty quickly because I got them for LA despite being in the north end of the state. I wasn't the only one in my social circle complaining about it, either. This was pretty early into amber alerts showing up on the iPhone. Maybe they've improved since then?

Sounds like Ontario. They sent our amber alerts at the nuclear war level and refused to change.

Illinois is awful with this too. I disabled Amber Alerts after too many alerts for someone in the St. Louis area when I'm in northern Illinois.

You, too? Fortunately, disabling those doesn't disable the severe weather alerts, and those have worked well for me, most recently in that July tornado.

Yeah I share the same experience in IL, I turned my Amber Alerts off after being woken up by one at around 2am for some incident at the far end of the state 350 miles away. Like you say though, the weather alerts have worked pretty well for me, too.

Similar to your earlier experience, I have only ever gotten alerts that were proximate to my present location, though I do live in a state smaller than Texas.

I probably get about one amber alert per quarter, and severe weather alerts a few times a year. I’ve never gotten a “blue” alert in my life.

California had a state-wide Amber Alert once, well over a decade ago. Some department on the fringes of LA sent it, and woke up the whole state, including Northern California, 400 miles away. Millions of people annoyed. Much negative publicity. Didn't happen again. There are still Amber Alerts, but with much shorter ranges.

That's auxiliary. Distance for most of these alerts should be 0 (read: not at all)