The intent wasn't to make you feel guilty because of your attitude toward a system for locating abducted children, but I fear that is exactly what we have done, as you now seem obsessed with vilifying the Amber Alert system.
If "obsessed with vilifying" is giving 2 links, then, yeah, I'm obsessed.
And you have pretty low threshold for obsession.
So. I offer a report with statistics and concrete flaws, and all you answer is about feelings. Guilt for me, satisfaction for everyone else, joy for the parents. (Oh the irony! In the report I linked, you'd see that Amber Alerts are actually most effective when the child is abducted by a
parent in custody cases - that is, exactly when the child was actually not in danger. Well, no, about 25% of alerts were for children that actually didn't get abducted, so those were still in less of a risk, but let's not count those. See, I'm generous.)
At this point you're not only purposefully uninformed, but also self-righteous about it. I don't get it. Instead of spending time playing internet psychologist and assigning gilt and frustration, why don't you at least browse the cracked.com summary I gave? It's less than a page and even has jokes and pics. It's not hard reading, seriously. We're already wasting more time here than it'd take you to check it.
The summary is: you don't care about those poor, poor children and their oh so joyful parents. If you did, you'd want a solution which actually works. But no, you care about your feel-goody and being right against any odds – which is also all about feel-goody and avoiding introspection.
And since we're in different planes, we're not going to find any agreement. Well, so have a good, good day, my good-y friend! May you get an Amber Alert to keep your spirits high through the day!
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And yeah, there is work to be done in improving the implementation of the system. But two things:
1) The article you linked to concerns a study involving statistics before the existence of modern smartphones, which was a while ago
Amber Alerts were available through SMS until 2012.
2) The system has demonstrably saved at least one child. Which means I'm still totally fine with it's creation.
If the only goal is to save "at least one child", then one can do all kind of silly things and still reach that really poor goal.
Heck, what about making every cell phone explode when it gets an Amber Alert? I'm sure some child, somewhere, will be saved by it.
The question should be rather "is this the best that can be done, considering everything"?