N-TV gave a decent update this morning.....over the topic of sirens.
Before unification, there were around 80,000 warning sirens in the towns and villages of East and West Germany. In the 1990s....it was decided they weren't really needed. Some stayed, and the number today is around 15,000.
From the past week....this topic has gotten hyped-up.
So the government says....as of this morning....they are going to build a national warning system that can pump out text messages to your smart-phone, depending on where you are located.
How long? Well....it's pretty complicated (rocket-science stuff) and they figure it won't be fully operational until summer of 2022.
Now, I'm not the type to usually dump bad news....but I sat and lingered over this chatter for a while, and finally asked an important question.
In my village of 4,000 folks....how many have smart-phones? Kids between 12 and 18....it's about 100-percent that have a smart-phone. Most adults? I'd say it's around 98-percent (even folks on Hartz-IV or welfare typically have one). But then you get to senior citizens....which I would suggest that it might only be 50-percent with a smart-phone, and maybe another 40-percent with those old-fashioned flip-phones. So I would take an educated guess in my village and say around fifty folks have no such phone.
The anti-technology crowd? One of my wife's former co-workers survived all the way to around 2016....without a cellphone/smart-phone. Then one day....the boss said 'enough' and forced the guy to carry a company phone. It was a sort of pride that he hauled around for twenty years of his life.
There's no way to estimate this but I would guess of every thousand German adults....you probably have ten anti-technology folks....without a PC, laptop, tab, or smart-phone.
So it's never ever going to be a complete warning to an entire village? Yeah, I'd go and suggest that they will eventually agree to fund the siren business and bring the 1940s siren back into our lives once again.
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