Adam Ford
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2016–2020
3:20 · 2M views · Jun 20, 2013
The 1990 Public Enemy song 911 Is a Joke from the album Fear of a Black Planet, about slow emergency response.
Commenters link it as a pun or ironic reference in threads about 911 and emergency services.
4 comments from Hacker News
Like most 5G articles that attempt to rebut 5G hysteria (5G causes autism, ...) it fails to realize that people are just right to be suspicious about a technology that has no credible benefits and no constituency other than equipment vendors. Telecom carriers have had no interest in 5G. From the invention of the internet to the 3G age telecom vendors felt out of control of their financial destiny (MCI Worldcomm's fraud forced them invest in intercity optic fiber capacity they never would have built otherwise. Most of that capacity lies fallow too because they've had an "investment strike" against building optic fiber out to the last mile) With 4G they got back on top and had no interest in capital spending to build out a new generation but carriers had to pretend they were caught up in the hype. So you can get 5G at one corner of Washington Square Park and it is so fast it doesn't matter at all that 99.99% of Manhattan doesn't have it, never mind the rest of the country.) Vint Cerf had made a career out of being clueless about the digital divide. The real problem in America is poor coverage of telecommunication services. Upstate New York has cell phone dead spots in it larger than some European countries, and because of that this video
Complaints about 911 have a long history; I'll point out the 1990 hit rap song "911 is a joke" by Public Enemy. The video seems extremely dated now, though: this video
> In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone shows up within an hour. And not necessarily only rural parts: this video
From 1990, these guys were so ahead of their time (yea, I know, institutional racism != IT infrastructure, but still...): this video