An awful lot of people died too, and still do, because they were in serious trouble and could not call for help.
Even with a beacon people still die because the rescue team can't be sent to where they are soon enough.

It is a really hard call. The way the media reports these events does not help either. Successful rescues which were justified might only get a few lines of press. Tragic deaths and bonehead stupidity which waste resources get over reported.
It would be nice to know how many idiot calls there are in relation to serious ones.
If it is fewer than 1% is it really a concern?
What if it is less than 5%?
There is the question there of how many false alarms are acceptable when balanced against the real alarms and against how many would die if the service was not available.

Maybe the idea of keeping track of the rescue calls and doing some statistical analysis would be a good idea.
Maybe doing a statistical analysis of the media reporting would be a good idea too.
Unfortunately such studies are not usually reported in the media.

I think the people who abuse public services should face fines and I think the SPOT service should be paying for a lot of the rescue costs in cases of abuse.
SPOT does charge for insurance to cover rescue costs, so maybe if they were actually paying for it they could figure out a way to reduce the number of false calls without impairing the service too much.

I do still think SAR should be there as a public service, but I think it is like other public services.
I mean we don't go setting our fire alarms off without expecting a serious fine if it was just a joke.
Yet at the same time we don't fine people for accidental false alarms.

There is a serious problem in addressing this problem of "Yuppie 911s" because it is easy to decide on a zero tolerance policy which would be counterproductive instead of a commonsense policy which would unfortunately require common sense from everybody enforcing it.