[HN Gopher] "It Is Getting Worse. People Are Leaving"
___________________________________________________________________
"It Is Getting Worse. People Are Leaving"
Author : mik3y
Score : 474 points
Date : 2022-05-09 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.railwayage.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.railwayage.com)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't know the facts, but I do know a few WSJ reporters and
| read their paper every day.
|
| Unlike most of what passes as "journalism" these days, these
| people actually do still practice journalism. So if monster
| trains are derailing, or even causing major delays, they will be
| on it. And people in Congress all read the WSJ.
| cybadger wrote:
| This just in: the Surface Transportation Board is requesting
| additional data from the Class Is for reasons that sound highly
| relevant to the original article.
| https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_r...
|
| My time in rail was all related to positive train control (PTC),
| which is a safety overlay that stops the train before anything
| bad happens, at least in theory. The railroads generally despised
| the idea because it would slow down overall network velocity. It
| was only when it was mandated that they really got started with
| it beyond science projects.
|
| I'm pretty far from rail these days, so I know I'm out of date.
| But as I recall, the prediction algorithms didn't work as well
| with distributed power (locomotive in the middle of the train,
| almost required for trains this long). So it's entirely possible
| that these super-long trains aren't able to predict unsafe
| conditions. I also vaguely recall they didn't predict anything to
| do with buff and draft forces (or other in-train forces) that
| could lead to the kind of derailments the article discussed.
|
| This seems odd given the safety culture of railroads (every
| meeting I attended as a vendor, even if it was just a handful of
| people who had known each other for years, started with a safety
| briefing that included evacuation instructions and who was CPR
| qualified, along with tripping hazards and such). But around the
| time I was leaving the industry, CSX was spending lots of
| millions of dollars to bring the (now-late) Hunter Harrison in to
| implement Precision Scheduled Railroading. That led to a rush for
| other roads to implement it, to the point where I believe BNSF is
| the only Class I that does not do PSR. And PSR is all about
| reducing costs, cutting manpower, mothballing locomotives--which
| absolutely could lead to the sort of stuff this article is about.
| And, because it is (at least was) so fashionable in the industry,
| a road moving away from PSR (whether announced or just in
| practice) would likely see a stock price plunge and a CEO change.
|
| Makes me wonder if, stuck between a rock and a hard place
| (ballast and the rail?), the roads are hoping the STB steps in
| and makes a rule to stop their game of chicken.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| There are several hot takes on the accuracy of various numbers
| (train derailment, for example), but that is not the most
| striking point of the article. The article is raising alarms
| about labor shortages and the effect on safety and deliverability
| of large loads (monster trains). It is another data point to
| bolster the idea that the US supply chain is under a lot of
| stress.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm struggling with the first paragraph:
|
| > A fellow engineer passed along information from another
| engineer, who I have never met, Mike, 17 years an engineer, like
| me, with a degree, like me (art, English), which has led to
| writing this body.
|
| Am I reading this right? The content of this article is hearsay
| twice removed?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Talk with locomotive operators, read their feeds on Twitter.
| This shit has been circulating all over the world, even here in
| Germany we have issues of that kind (not the massive length of
| the trains or double stacking because both is illegal here, but
| how staff is treated).
| sophacles wrote:
| When his bosses come after him for being a dirty scumbag
| killjoy (they won't use those exact words, but whatever words
| they use mean that), he can point to that sentence and say "I
| was just passing information, that's what I'm supposed to do -
| see employee handbook section X" (or similar).
| [deleted]
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I was much more offended by the abuse of commas.
| [deleted]
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm a bit rusty, but I think they are technically correctly
| placed-- they separate many dependent clauses, interruptors
| and a time phrase from one independent clause at the
| beginning. The sentence is too structurally complex, though.
| My very strict undergraduate intro to expository writing
| class required using commas like this but it's definitely
| passe.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I have no opinion on the technical correctness of the
| sentence. But I know I would do a lot to avoid writing such
| sentence in my own writing, and that I would stop reading
| anything that hits me with such a monstrosity in the
| opening paragraph.
| chefandy wrote:
| Right. It's too structurally complex but it's not the
| comma's fault.
| zaphar wrote:
| The genesis may have been hearsay but the claim itself is
| verifiable. Are trains of the size he is describing derailing
| on a higher frequency? Are train lengths exceeding the safety
| margins of the yards and equipment?
|
| Hearsay can be a valuable tool in prompting that process of
| verification.
| its_ethan wrote:
| For what it's worth, there's another thread in these comments
| that point to data supporting that the length of trains is
| going up (+ ~25%), but derailments have gone down, by more
| than 25%. So maybe fewer trains derailing, but the ones that
| do are having bigger negative consequences.
| zaphar wrote:
| yeah, I did a _very_ quick look at some literature, most of
| it was behind paywalls so my search wasn 't comprehensive,
| but it looked like a large train was _more_ susceptible to
| derailment but the reduction in the number of trains
| running actually resulted in a decrease in total
| derailments.
|
| To me this suggest a much more in-depth analysis is needed.
| hammock wrote:
| You may be onto something.
|
| >The Surface Transportation Board already knows this; the FRA
| knows this, the shippers know this; the car owners/lessees know
| this, the executives know this; and certainly the front line
| knows all too well
|
| If all these people know about it, why haven't we heard of this
| before?
| dogleash wrote:
| >If all these people know about it, why haven't we heard of
| this before?
|
| Information hardly ever travels as fast as information _can_
| travel.
|
| We've had arguments on HN about whether or not open secrets
| _in tech_ are true. Some posters assembling a laundry list of
| reasons the assertion seemed unlikely or implausible. And
| other posters with first and second hand stories of it
| happening.
|
| Why the fuck would we know anything about trains?
| sophacles wrote:
| I bet there are tons of things in every industry that are
| "widely" known that you've never heard. I bet this is true of
| your industry. Why would I make that bet? Because it's
| extremely unlikely that you know everything, and I will take
| that bet for any person in any industry about any industry.
|
| I'm certain your ignorance is a sign of something suspicious
| - just not about this topic.
| pooper wrote:
| > If all these people know about it, why haven't we heard of
| this before?
|
| While I submit that the article has probably no value on its
| own, I don't think your argument makes sense either.
|
| I think it is expected that people in position of power don't
| publicly speak about everything. I mean on one end of the
| spectrum nobody talked about dragnet until someone did. On
| the other end, "no one" talked about the problems with Boeing
| 737 max problem until planes started falling off the sky in
| the sense that we didn't pay attention.
|
| I think why haven't we heard of this before is not an
| argument.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I've heard it _shrug_. My brother tried working for the
| railroads. He quit within a month. It 's lonely, it's
| dangerous, and you don't want to know how reckless the trains
| are being run in the US (around the midwest). There are train
| overpasses in my area which are cracked and falling apart (I
| can send you pictures).
|
| The number of derailings, the amount of hazardous material
| (chlorine is a blip), and the skill drain has brought the
| rail industry to a crisis point. We're just waiting for its
| Hindenburg moment.
| phil21 wrote:
| I follow industry news and talk to folks employed by Class
| I's, and this is not recent news. I would generally agree
| with the statement - if your job is to be aware of railroad
| industry issues, this will be at the top of your list or
| you'd simply be incompetent.
|
| This article is strange in that it's focusing on a single
| issue of "PSR", but in general terms anyone casually
| following the industry even as a fan would be well aware of
| the labor vs. management conflict that has been brewing and
| escalating for decades. You can only squeeze so much
| efficiency out of systems before they break.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I presume we all here work at some kind of tech firm?
|
| Do you think railroad engineers / conductors would know about
| a crappy API being pushed by Microsoft or Apple that would
| affect application development over the next 5 years?
|
| Its not like we computer-engineers/software-engineers air out
| our dirty laundry each day to the public.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Or how many of us know about a terribly unreliable internal
| database that backs a product critical to core business
| functionality?
| bombcar wrote:
| One difference is that when the HN crowd screws something
| up, twitter goes down for a few minutes, GitHub is
| offline for hours, not much to really complain about.
|
| A PSR leaves the rails and people can very easily _die_ ,
| and at some point there _will_ be a major event.
| [deleted]
| mattbee wrote:
| No, I took it as "asking for a friend"
| dragontamer wrote:
| Buy the rumor, sell the news.
|
| Rumors aren't admissible as court evidence. But rumors are
| worth looking into, they might have insights into communities
| we otherwise are ignoring.
|
| If railroad engineers have a well known issue, such as the
| sudden loss of engineer/conductor skills due to retirement
| and/or quitting for other jobs, that's something that can be
| verified by other railroad engineers.
|
| We all know that last year was "The Great retirement". I can
| imagine that a large number of skilled people have left the
| workforce... and their replacements are going to have to learn
| all of the problems and take years to retrain to their level.
| blkhp19 wrote:
| What's with the early 20th / late 19th century style of English?
| Entertaining for a moment, but ultimately just frustrating for me
| to read. Is it done purposely because trains are an "old" piece
| of transportation infrastructure?
| folkrav wrote:
| Hmm, funny how as a non-native speaker, it didn't strike me as
| having a particularly notable style.
| [deleted]
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It didn't read like a Twitter 37/355 thread, but it didn't
| sound a bit old-fashioned to me -- unless reasonably formal
| English is hopelessly out-of-date now.
| opan wrote:
| All that's sticking out to me is a lack of contractions and
| overly formal or dramatic text, but probably because it's
| written as a letter to someone.
| kar1181 wrote:
| I get the feeling the person that wrote it is not of the
| generation many here are.
|
| I really enjoyed the style personally (millennial...).
| throwanem wrote:
| The writer may himself be far from young.
| jcpst wrote:
| It is mentioned that this letter was commentary in a hearing
| with the CEOs of BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific.
| I imagine they wanted to use a more formal style to address
| these business leaders.
| alfor wrote:
| Yes the style is overly complex. It distract from the message.
|
| It feel like the opposite of a PG essay.
| blueatlas wrote:
| The advancements in equipment to clean up after a large and/or
| complicated derailments contributes to these "acceptable" number
| of derailments. This includes roadbed, rail, and specialized
| equipment to move cars and locomotives. There are even 3rd party
| companies that specialize in railroad derailments.
|
| Large wrecks can be cleaned up in 24 hours.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA
| sullivanmatt wrote:
| I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less
| than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and
| operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this
| author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of
| the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably
| gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are
| moving faster.
|
| A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the
| tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I
| interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company
| will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was
| very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every
| single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The
| company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-
| related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those
| views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are
| being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing
| profit.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| That same UP line goes east into Illinois. They aren't running
| 3-mile long trains out here at the edge of the Chicago metro. I
| wonder where they draw the line.
|
| I actually thought that this article was going to be about the
| inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is
| run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is
| operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't
| added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On
| my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a
| fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting
| to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to
| stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.
| dhosek wrote:
| I live along the UP west line and saw, for the first time in
| my life a week or so ago a mid-train locomotive. I think they
| are running longer trains than you imagine.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| That is interesting, I will have to pay more attention!
| paulmd wrote:
| Part of the problem with train crews is the Department of
| Transportation's antiquated laws on cannabis. You can't hire
| anyone who's used it in the last 90 days, that's a pretty
| huge fraction of the country. Actually you can't even hire
| them with the understanding that they need to stop
| immediately and be clean in 90 days, they have to have been
| clean for 90 days before applying on the DOT form or their
| application will bounce immediately.
|
| Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal
| with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend
| the safety laws instead.
|
| Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI
| has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone
| smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring
| pipeline.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Are you sure a significant percentage of the target
| demographic they are wanting to hire regularly consumes
| cannabis and will gladly miss an opportunity for ...
| cannabis ?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Freight train jobs involve long hours, bad hours (middle
| of the night, very early morning, etc), and a decent
| amount of physical labor. Very few people will take the
| job just due to lifestyle issues alone. Further limiting
| your job opening by mandating against cannabis certainly
| doesn't help the job appear more attractive. Railroad
| salaries are quite high given the necessary education,
| but the job conditions often are not worth the money to
| many people.
| paulmd wrote:
| The question isn't "would you prefer a job or cannabis",
| it's "what fraction of the population is ineligible for
| consideration during the period when they're job-
| seeking". We have an extremely tight job-market right now
| and you're talking about adding a massive frictional
| force to employment in that job-market.
|
| What is the average time a high-skilled professional (or
| even blue-collar) worker is unemployed between-jobs these
| days? Probably a lot less than 90 days, I'd think. And 2
| years might as well be forever in this job market.
|
| CDC numbers put the number of people who used cannabis at
| least once in 2019 at 18%, and it's probably only gotten
| higher over time. It's probably more like 25% nowadays -
| and sure that's "once a year" but the real number is
| likely also higher than a voluntary survey would find.
|
| In market terms, reducing your supply by 25% or 30% is _a
| lot_ and would significantly push your prices upwards.
| And if you don 't let prices swing upwards enough, you'll
| get shortages.
|
| On top of that it's just a generally undesirable job.
| Lots of time away from home, and extreme responsibility
| and stress, even in the best-case scenario, and they're
| making it even more unpleasant (the ever-popular "dead-
| sea effect") as they run out of people to do it. We're
| already seeing that showing up in similar jobs like
| nursing.
|
| And then _on top of that_ you 've got the DOT
| requirements that exclude another big chunk of the
| population from consideration. So they're competing for
| an even smaller fraction of the job market, and they just
| aren't paying salaries to keep up with it all.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| You seem to be assuming that the 25 or 30% of people who
| have used cannabis are all people that would otherwise be
| both interested and qualified as recruiting targets?
|
| It's not clear to me that the requirement to be drug-free
| is excluding a lot of people who the railroads would
| otherwise want to hire.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| No, they seem to be saying that people eligible and
| interested in railroads probably smoke weed at the same
| rate as the general population. There's nothing to
| indicate that people who would be open and qualified are
| far more abstinent than the population at large.
| worik wrote:
| The role of cannabis in hazardous jobs is very
| interesting.
|
| Here in Aotearoa I had a glimpse into that world as we
| had a referendum on legalisation (that we lost 52-48%,
| weep) that I was involved in.
|
| Work testing is a big issue, with experienced workers (I
| personally know a ocean going boat captain in this
| situation) being treated dreadfully and made to urinate
| in a cup under close supervision.
|
| In the meat processing industry it has become
| competitive. I heard of two meat processing companies
| close enough to be in competition for workers.
|
| Works A used urine testing. Smoking a joint put you in
| danger of getting fired for a week, or three. Works B
| used a sweat test which means 24 hours after your joint
| you are clear.
|
| Works B has a line of hard working butchers.
|
| Works A has a chain of drunks
| lovich wrote:
| Who wants to take a job that has so much control of your
| life they are dictating what you do in your personal life
| just to interview there?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| As much as I'd like to agree, no. It's rapidly declining
| quality of life. Class 1s and especially BNSF is notorious
| for hiring, training, and then laying people off for what
| can be years, or training them in desirable locales, and
| then offering them work in shitholes. Beyond that the union
| negotiations are at a standstill, BNSF hasn't offered
| meaningful pay increases for years, the contraction of the
| labor pools means more work and less time off. Precision
| rail has made every craft increasingly uncomfortable, from
| the Surface Transportation Board hearing, the deposition
| given by every union sure makes it sound like every branch
| of every railroad is running a skeleton crew. Word of mouth
| goes a long way, and back in the day you had to know
| somebody to get an in on the railroad. They can't even get
| full training classes these days they've sullied their
| reputation so badly.
|
| But _most_ people will take the $100k plus over weed. And
| even once you 're hired, you don't instantly get terminated
| for pissing hot or even coming in intoxicated. They'll send
| you to rehab and put you on probation, and even if one
| violates that probation one doesn't necessarily get fired.
| Plus you can afford cocaine on the railroad budget, or
| meth, or heroin. Anything but weed.
| curiousllama wrote:
| That's super interesting to me. It'll take a disaster to fix
| it.
|
| I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were
| pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, "you'll be fired for
| not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell" pathological. It
| was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade
| off.
|
| Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for
| disaster.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I
| understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > It'll take a disaster to fix it.
|
| It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste.
| ..
| wiredfool wrote:
| When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was
| over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class
| from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do.
| The first thing in the class was that they noted the
| e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door,
| to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the
| room).
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of
| my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally
| to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and
| second floors of my office.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron
| employees once, and we had a strange number of
| conversations about employer liability should someone
| injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your
| comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that
| team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with
| it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by
| slip-and-fall lawsuits?
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily
| on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig
| Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear
| they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
| rfrey wrote:
| It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites
| have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a
| contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over
| (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two
| violations by your people will get your whole company
| kicked off site.
|
| Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
|
| And yet...
| squigg wrote:
| And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile
| environments and typically operate safely.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks
| is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving
| heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all
| the time.
|
| But those incidents cannot easily be characterized,
| quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior
| paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed
| limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
| acs wrote:
| I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the
| "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired
| for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories.
| Wild how memes like that must have spread through the
| industry.
|
| 10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without
| instinctively grabbing for a handrail.
| oh-4-fucks-sake wrote:
| I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the
| Deepwater Horizon spill.
|
| I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was
| like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the
| office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you
| know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from
| space.
|
| I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but
| for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like:
|
| 1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial
| infrastructure failures.
|
| 2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're
| out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection
| schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking
| discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair.
| Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to
| understand so it's better if we just don't think about
| it.
|
| 3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and
| we _must_ project that we 're a safety-minded
| organization.
|
| 4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other
| about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is
| simple enough for everyone to understand.
|
| 5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that.
|
| What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip
| hazards weren't even the biggest risk _in the office_.
| Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office
| refrigerator wasn 't assigned to any staff. It was
| cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up
| with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues
| are bad enough. But, _one day_ , this gross fridge was
| apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that
| one resting against the refrigerator bulb began
| smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and
| received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-
| on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I
| guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still-- _can
| we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the
| room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf
| of Mexico_.
| sp332 wrote:
| > I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the
| Deepwater Horizon spill.
|
| Then you'll remember that they were given an industry
| award for safety that year. Yes, after the disaster.
| newsclues wrote:
| Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's
| too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass
| everywhere because people don't understand fluid
| dynamics.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Actually having an adult discussion about safety
| tradeoffs at scale in this day and age of "but if it even
| saves one life" isn't possible. You simply can't go on
| record having acknowledged tradeoffs. Wherever you draw
| the cost:benefit line, no matter how generous, someone
| looking for a few quick points will try and make you look
| like the bad guy for not setting it a little more
| conservatively.
|
| And that's why they talked about charger cables and not
| the oil spewing elephant in the room.
| squigg wrote:
| I was consulting at BP back in 2002 - even back then the
| health and safety environment inside their offices (I was
| all over the world with them) was the same as their oil
| rigs ... no trip hazards go unreported, always hold the
| handrails, always cover a hot drink, no calls in the car
| even with handsfree, very low speed-limits (with cameras)
| on-site etc - it's lived with me all my days and is very
| valuable safety advice TBH - none of it was theatre.
|
| Also, every meeting would start with a safety
| announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've
| also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same -
| drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is
| reduced
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers
| who profess to care.
|
| In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z
| because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-
| ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell"
| becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is
| everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the
| work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the
| rampant safety policy violations).
|
| Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the
| workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do
| this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE,
| equipment interlocks and guards helping them out. They
| disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors
| that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet
| feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive
| structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under
| and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to
| be.
|
| My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore
| and maple syrup land may be different.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to
| be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability,
| and _nothing_ more.
| taurath wrote:
| In the modern world, it'll take a disaster for anyone to pay
| any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few
| weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
| falsenapkin wrote:
| I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical
| industries and experienced similar.
|
| One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to
| walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it
| was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to
| take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator.
|
| Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat
| when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats?
| What year was this written?
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were
| always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the
| industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were
| considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At
| the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with
| profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network
| speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.
|
| There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
|
| - Wheel Impact Detectors
|
| - Hotbox detectors
|
| - Acoustic bearing detectors
|
| - Truck performance detectors
|
| To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the
| railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
|
| - Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount
| of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
|
| - Top of rail friction management
|
| - Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is
| you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain
| parameters)
|
| I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts,
| overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics.
| One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For
| each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the
| entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
|
| I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I
| never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos.
| However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains
| meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they
| could get away with that is they were running a straight shot
| from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the
| north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
|
| I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have
| changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten
| longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large
| increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact
| on average network speed and thus profit.
|
| As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of
| single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to
| sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole
| corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to
| reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using
| different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're
| interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good
| perspective on the overall issues:
|
| https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Can you perhaps summarize?
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| > I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase
| in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on
| average network speed and thus profit.
|
| That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's
| well known from the investor side that what the railroads are
| doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of
| regulation.
|
| CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no
| amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial
| results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of
| debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return
| on equity.
|
| Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact,
| abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so
| that they can raise the freight rates even more.
| mym1990 wrote:
| That was an interesting comment in itself, thanks for the
| insight!
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| It's a shame this type of operation is so common.
|
| The people at the top that have no experience of work on the
| ground making decisions that affect people doing that important
| work.
| foxyv wrote:
| The American workforce has been redlining on poorly staffed
| overworked jobs for decades. It's not surprising that we're
| losing workers left and right to fatigue. They treat the
| equipment better than the people who are doing the job and that
| is saying something because the equipment is poorly maintained as
| well. Nurses, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, truckers,
| clerks, salespeople, developers, builders, contractors, and
| everyone else.
|
| However, with our current political system, the solutions to
| these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions,
| socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time,
| overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away.
| Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human rights
| and attacking children while placing migrants into concentration
| camps.
| [deleted]
| ta8645 wrote:
| > Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human
| rights
|
| Please remember that this isn't just about women's rights,
| gender is a social construct. Transgender men get pregnant too
| and have as much right to an abortion as anyone else.
| comeonnoww wrote:
| foxyv wrote:
| pasque wrote:
| No they're women.
| foxyv wrote:
| Asooka wrote:
| slothtrop wrote:
| This post breaks the rules.
|
| edit: it also improperly projects that anyone who'd have
| downvoted said post would only do so to oppose inclusivity.
| piaste wrote:
| I believe (hope) Asooka's post was satirical, but I am no
| longer as confident in such judgements as I used to be.
| btrettel wrote:
| There are way too many jobs where management doesn't give the
| front-line worker an appropriate amount of time and/or
| resources, and when things inevitably go wrong, the front-line
| worker is blamed, and the problem is studied as if the only
| factor was the front-line worker.
|
| I saw that regularly as a patent examiner. Examiners aren't
| given a lot of time, and when a bad patent is issued, tons of
| ignorant people on the internet start insulting the examiner.
| They have no idea what the job is like, and I strongly doubt
| they'd do better than an experienced examiner, even given a lot
| more time than an examiner gets.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think you are a bit overstating the situation. No matter
| what's your opinion on how the pandemic was handled, I think
| it's safe to say that the measures were unprecedented and
| caused a massive, massive shock in almost every corner of the
| economy and society in general. That we are still doing...fine
| (!!) After entire sections of the world's economy were put on
| hold, on and off for years while other portions were , as you
| said , overdriven by necessity is a testament to how resilient
| the US and the world are.
|
| In hindsight, it's tempting to try to frame the recent events
| as just the logical ans predictable results of a bad system
| that was slow crumbling anyways... But I just completely
| disagree that this was just the result of decades of neglect,
| in no small part because workers were actually doing much
| better now than they did a decade ago. The pre pandemic times
| were extremely prosperous all things considered, real wages
| were actually getting higher, infrastructure was worked on,
| etc. I wouldn't describe that period as a slow decline, and we
| were steadily revving down from the "redline" of the early
| 2000s. Even in my poor home country, that historically has been
| pretty devoid of opportunities, things were looking really good
| and people were optimistic.
|
| But then the pandemc hit. And there has been an insanely
| massive contrast between how, say, an office worker was
| affected by the pandemic versus how a healthcare worker
| experienced it. Imo, that obviously lead to unprecedented
| fatigue and not just physically. Both of my parents are nurses,
| and I remember them being almost completely burnt out while
| everyone else was almost enjoying the perks of WFH and not
| having things to do. But once the decision was taken to
| lockdown/shutdown what were the options? Food still had to be
| moved, patients had to be treated, etc.
|
| But again, imo we are still doing surprisingly well and while
| sinking into doomerism can be tempting, I'm acrually more
| optimistic now than ever before. Because beyond the culture
| war, the punditry, the push to divide and the moments that
| genuinely scared me (like when when normal people started
| rabidly turning in- and on- their neighbors)... we still kinda
| made it through?! And we all kind of made that possible, though
| some more than the others!
| foxyv wrote:
| It's easy to be optimistic when your friends aren't starving
| and struggling to afford transportation or find work. I'm not
| talking from a doom-scroll, I'm talking from lived
| experiences where I'm seeing people drop like flies in a
| system that is rigged to wring every drop of their energy and
| time from them for the least amount of compensation.
|
| How many people do you know who work for Wal-Mart? How are
| they doing right now? How many unemployed people do you know?
| People who are getting evicted? I know at least 5 and they
| are all doing terribly. The cost of living has nearly doubled
| for the poorest among us and wages have barely budged. They
| can't afford to live close to their jobs because of
| skyrocketing rents and can't afford cars to drive to work.
| They have no savings and are a hairs breadth from
| homelessness which is becoming a bigger target for police.
| dominotw wrote:
| > developers
|
| > socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation
| time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all
| lightyears away.
|
| do you mean software developers? I don't see why developers
| need all those. Developers are one of the highest paid people
| on the whole planet, like top 10% in USA. Most people not in
| the know think levels.fyi must be fake.
|
| This seems like ridiculous entitlement to expect even more. Why
| can't they spend their own money to buy the things they are
| lacking.
| mtberatwork wrote:
| Software engineers can buy worker rights, overtime limits,
| etc? That's news to me. Also, goes without saying, not every
| engineer is making FAANG-level salaries.
| dominotw wrote:
| what overtime limits? Its a myth that software developers
| in usa are working overtime. I've been a developer for last
| 15 yrs and must have worked overtime < 20 days.
|
| Do you really think developers at banks and insurance
| companies are working overtime? If they really have problem
| with overtime at current job they can switch to one of
| these under the radar jobs at banks.
|
| And yes you can "buy" overtime limits by hiring a nanny,
| getting catered dinners, hiring a tutor for your kids,
| hiring a personal trainer ect.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A _huge_ number of teams and companies have 24 /7 oncall
| rotations. While it is still possible to say "I'll never
| work on a team that has continuous oncall" it is becoming
| harder and harder.
| dominotw wrote:
| > A huge number of teams and companies have 24/7 oncall
| rotations.
|
| Ah yes. Thats true. Not sure how govt regulations can
| solve this though. Someone has to be on call.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Businesses can hire more people. They can hire in
| different time zones. They can simply not have oncall and
| accept downtime.
| foxyv wrote:
| It's the same with railroad engineers. Their average salary
| is just near $100k.
| josh_p wrote:
| I'm sure a lot of enjoy cushy, well-paid, low-stress jobs
| (myself included) but its not all of us.
|
| Game development is one area that could benefit from these.
| People in that industry suffer from a lot of stress and high
| rates of burnout due to overwork. edit: they're also paid
| significantly less than people working in web-dev.
| dominotw wrote:
| Developer job market is insane now. Why can't they just
| switch to one of the cushy jobs at an insurance company or
| something?
| josh_p wrote:
| You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers
| because their employer or government is treating them
| poorly.
|
| You'd tell the employer to stop treating people like
| garbage.
|
| I know this is mostly about developers but not everyone
| is able to just make a job change like you're suggesting.
| We should be giving people the things they need to be
| happy and successful in their current jobs.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's an employer change, not a career change. And you
| should definitely leave a bad employer if you are a
| teacher or a nurse.
| dominotw wrote:
| > You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers
| because their employer or government is treating them
| poorly.
|
| yes i am only talking about software developers.
|
| > not everyone is able to just make a job change like
| you're suggesting.
|
| why though? Those cushy jobs are dime a dozen everywhere.
| I don't see why someone is forced to work for a gaming
| company at low pay.
| siliconunit wrote:
| Also I think the real estate disaster is one of the main
| culprits of most 'common people' problems. One cannot afford an
| early retirement from a taxing job, cos guess what mortgage is
| a criminal 10-15x their yearly salary..so good luck pensioning
| before 70...if at all. Here in the UK this has reached absurd
| levels and nobody in the goverment says a word about it in real
| (and no, 'easier access to credit' is absolutely not the right
| answer)... pay 5-6 pounds for a filter coffee and a plain
| croissant.. cos the tiny shop has to pay 100k / year in
| rent.... it's just a road to civil war... hopefully soon.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > However, with our current political system, the solutions to
| these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions,
| socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time,
| overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears
| away.
|
| All of those (except the UBI) exist in most developed
| countries.
|
| There are many problems, from taxes (the poor already pay zero,
| the rich avoid them, the middle class gets fucked), to
| foreign/illegal worker (why pay a fair pay to a local worker,
| if you can employ a foreigner for cheaper), to widespread
| corruption, anti-covid measures (mostly printing money and
| giving it around, bringing high inflation), to political
| sanctions (eg. ukraine war - it's no different than eg. the war
| in afghanistan or iraq or libya, syria, etc., but somehow we
| act as if it is, and with many political steps inbetween, the
| gas prices and food prices are soaring high), to people abusing
| all the buzzowords you've mentioned in countries that have
| them.
|
| Honestly, if just the police and courts did their jobs, and all
| the corruption was punished (from heads of government, to
| paying plumbers under the table and people abusing social
| benefits), a lot of the problems would be solved.
|
| In my country, we just had an election, and the two most
| pressing matters were healthcare (fscked) and housing prices
| (double fscked). Noone on TV ever mentioned how much an average
| worker pays for healthcare (it's automatically deducted in two
| different ways from your "gross-gross" paycheck), because
| people would get mad and ask where does all the money (a lot of
| it) actually go,... and also noone asks why we can have
| cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and
| even more prime development land in other cities, and the
| government (from national to local) doesn't allow building
| there, to bring the prices down.
| tifik wrote:
| > it's no different than eg. the war in afghanistan.
|
| I agree. But that doesnt mean that we should care less about
| Ukraine though (which still makes sense bc its closer to
| 'home'), it means we should have cared way more about the
| same war happening in the middle east.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But you didn't care back then... also noone cared about
| yugoslavia/serbia in 1999, and it was even closer,... you
| just justified it the same way putin is now justifying the
| attack on ukraine. Yes, including bombing school, bridges,
| busses and trains full of people, etc.
|
| The current sanctions are hurting european people a lot
| more than they are hurting putin, and thus should be
| removed. European/american/NATO soldiers should go home,
| since they are currently occupying more than one sovereing
| country (the same way putin is), and preferably do it a bit
| better than they did when they left afghanistan. Only after
| all of yours and ours (since my country is a part of nato
| too) soldiers are back home, can we point fingers at putin.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| First, 1999 was a generation ago (about 25 years).
| Priorities are allowed to change in a generation, in this
| case for the better. Sorry that your first response to
| drawing a line at bombing schools, bridges, busses in
| Ukraine is to shout 'what about...' instead of to be glad
| people are willing to you know, be against bombing
| schools, bridges, and busses in at least one situation.
|
| Second, do you believe in preventative maintenance? In
| this case, Ukraine is preventative maintenance for future
| actions Russia will take (Russia has already shown from
| 2014 to now that it will make a peace deal, build
| strength, and attack again) that will result in more
| lives lost and worse economic impact. While the price is
| painful now, it is much less than it would be in 10
| years.
|
| Third, what countries meet the definition of being
| occupied by European/American/NATO soldiers in Europe?
| Definition: control and possession of hostile territory
| that enables an invading nation to establish military
| government against an enemy or martial law against rebels
| or insurrectionists in its own territory. Your twisting
| of you know, the actual meaning of words shows your
| comment is nothing but propaganda, in this case
| propaganda promoting the bombing of schools, bridges,
| busses and trains full of people because it has been done
| in the past and appeasing violence because it impacts
| your pocket book.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| We from the balkans still remember nato plans flying
| above our heads bombing a country 400km away. The problem
| is that, when americans do something like that (dorne
| bomb a wedding), people treat that as "ok", and the
| bombers even get a Nobel peace prize.... if it turns out,
| that the people they kill are eg. Reuters journalists,
| they punish the leaker and the person who publishes
| that... there was sam public backlash for wikileaks, but
| practically zero sanctions from any country against
| americans killing civilians, even if it was cought on
| video.
|
| Nato is currently not occupying any european country
| (unless we count kosovo US base as an occupation), but
| currently even ours (slovenian) soldiers are in quite a
| few countries as a part of nato, eg. Syria being one of
| them.
|
| So yeah... why does Obama get a peace prize for bombing
| weddings and occupying sovereign countries, and we get
| expensive gas when putin is saving their minorities in
| ukraine (atleast this was the narrative when nato bombed
| serbia)?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in
| prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime
| development land in other cities, and the government (from
| national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the
| prices down.
|
| For one, healthy good soil is rare and expensive. We're
| already wasting too much of it.
|
| And as for "prime development land" - I know the thoughts as
| a Munich resident and every time I see a rare piece of land
| that's not been built I always think "just how much housing
| could be built there". The thing is, a city _also_ needs un-
| obstructed green space for local micro-climate reasons [1].
| You can 't just build up everything and expect livable
| temperatures, especially not with climate change looming.
|
| We should ask politicians instead why they let the rural
| areas rot to hell and beyond and people are forced to coop
| together in extremely dense unhealthy urban monster areas.
|
| [1] https://www.local-
| energy.swiss/dam/jcr:0471327e-8fe2-4f9f-ac...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I'm literally talking about an area inside the city highway
| ring or on the outer edge, with high congestion, where
| noone wants to eat food grown there.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum, we have rural areas,
| where locals have been basically thrown out by airbnb (have
| kids, want them to live in your village? Good luck, no
| way), and we still don't let people build more houses
| there, even with a ban on airbnb.... one example, city of
| "lesce" where a friend wants to live, but can't neither buy
| or build anything there, nor extend his parents house:
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/JV9aEBLEQS8aTsgM8
| aantix wrote:
| You saw it with Covid.
|
| Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals
| are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any
| ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Hyper efficient?
|
| MRI coats me 1500 deductible. Plus whatever they bill
| insurance. Cash price $750. Is really screwed up.
| eatonphil wrote:
| That word is being used in a different way in this case.
| Maybe it's an economic definition of "efficient" but I'm
| not sure. It means they are spending bare minimum on
| staff/expenses to achieve whatever goals they have. Like
| "lean".
| postalrat wrote:
| Efficient money making machines.
| aantix wrote:
| Meant that they're only employing the exact number of
| doctors/nurses to meet their current capacity.
|
| It's great for profitability, the tradeoff being when
| there's increased demand, it's inflexible.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Hyper efficiency isn't about you, it's for the corporation
| and, to no small degree, the insurance company.
|
| I'd have to imagine that the amortized cost (millions?) for
| the MRI machine, it's operation and storage, and the
| trained personnel isn't free, but obviously much less than
| you and your insurance pay.
| floren wrote:
| The sickest part is the "billed to insurance" value. You
| get a medical bill that looks like this:
|
| Cost: $1000
|
| Paid by patient: $200
|
| Billed to insurance: $800
|
| Paid by insurance: $150
|
| Remaining to be paid: $0
|
| I get statements that look like this all the time, where
| the provider "bills" the insurance for $N, but the
| insurance pays a fraction of it, and apparently that's
| "good enough".
|
| But when they tell _me_ "that'll be $200 today, please, we
| take Visa and Discover", _I_ don 't have the option to say
| "actually I'm gonna pay $50 and that's good enough"
| 8note wrote:
| Have you tried?
| floren wrote:
| I have heard that for a birth (since you have some
| advance notice), you can go in to the hospital, sit down,
| and say "I will be having a baby here, and I will pay in
| cash, in full. Let's hammer out some costs" and maybe
| actually negotiate something acceptable.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Millions of covid relief dollars sent to states just to be
| vacuumed up into poorly funded city and state pensions.
| aantix wrote:
| Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce
| that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much
| money saved. Am I getting this correct?
|
| What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are
| too profitable?
|
| I'm being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with
| discussion.
|
| Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it's a dumb idea. I've
| had dumber.
| lowercased wrote:
| > What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they
| are too profitable?
|
| Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for
| medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'?
|
| 'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd
| end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the
| time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be
| bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.
| Zigurd wrote:
| It's an excellent analogy: The triumph of beancounters turns
| out to be brittle and costly when, in this case track
| maintenance, unprofitable but necessary activities and capex
| are reduced. "It worked fine this quarter!"
| efitz wrote:
| I regularly see executives incentivized and rewarded for
| short term thinking.
|
| I never see executives pay a price for the results of years
| of short term thinking - they only get punished for failing
| to meet quarterly targets.
|
| Execs often jump around before the results of their
| shortsightedness bear fruit.
|
| I dream of a world where the performance of leaders and
| decision makers is linked with the long term performance of
| the organizations that they used to manage as well as the
| one that they currently lead.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _never see executives pay a price for the results of
| years of short term thinking - they only get punished for
| failing to meet quarterly targets_
|
| Are we watching the same securities filings detailing
| multi-year stock and cash awards based on long-term stock
| price and operational metrics?
| btrettel wrote:
| What are the options for incentivizing long-term
| performance?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Difficult. You need strong, diverse boards. You probably
| need worker representation on boards. You need a cultural
| change that's not very American.
| durnygbur wrote:
| The yachts will not build and anchor themselves in Caribbean.
| So-hated Russian oligarchs would be starting somewhere at the
| 30th place on the list with the American billionaires. So you
| want a nice yacht for your oligarch or not?
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| These are not politically impossible to accomplish. Americans
| just don't want them.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| It's more that a critical mass of Americans have been duped
| into believing such things come with evil strings attached.
| Money buys voters, because the more eyeballs you put in front
| of overly emotional arguments which appeal to the mythologies
| people were raised with (along with their egos) - all very
| easy to construct - the more likely you are to win. The
| ability to influence is disproportionately granted to those
| who already have wealth & power, regardless of their actual
| agendas.
|
| By nearly any measure, we are in a new Gilded Age at least as
| bad as the first one, only with way more people and way more
| sophisticated tools of manipulation. Yet almost anything we
| try to do to reduce the wealth gap is easily batted down by
| armies of idealogues who often don't even realize their
| opinions have been bought. There is no easy answer to this I
| can see, it may take a massive crisis and unthinkable loss of
| life (history doesn't repeat but it rhymes) before we're able
| to adjust course... which will also be temporary.
|
| The battle for anything resembling equality will never end
| for this species as we know it.
| foxyv wrote:
| This is what boggles my mind. My parents that worked
| government jobs, both worked in a union, both on pensions,
| both with state sponsored medical care, and on socialized
| health care now after they retired; they are both Republican
| conservatives.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| It's a very strange political time.
|
| As you noted, the elderly receive massive amounts of
| government welfare and handouts while advocating the
| strongest against it for anyone else.
|
| Young people don't seem to realize that they have a massive
| cudgel that they could whack the elderly with.
|
| I am not looking forward to the looming funding crisis with
| social security and Medicare
| jamesredd wrote:
| Maybe the problem is that the workers are worse, including
| management and CEO's. The quality of the American workforce is
| declining. This also puts a burden on unions because qualified
| and motivated people do not want to unionize with lazy and
| unproductive people.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I would love to take all your money, put you back to living
| paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get after the
| daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no way to get
| ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel.
|
| It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it
| hell to be a front line worker.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I would love to take all your money, put you back to
| living paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get
| after the daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no
| way to get ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel.
|
| Been. There. Done. That. And now I have an office job.
|
| He's onto something. I can't quite put my finger on it but
| it seems like a pervasive societal problem at all levels,
| or at least all levels I've experienced. It's like society
| has developed some weird way of denying people their agency
| when it could benefit them but hold them responsible when
| it is bad for them.
|
| >It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make
| it hell to be a front line worker.
|
| It's out of touch. People like _you_ are why it 's getting
| worse and not better.
|
| You tell me how to flip my burgers. You tell me doing it
| this way is for my own good or it's the efficient way, or
| it delivers the optimum burger, or whatever. But I can't
| meet my stupid KPIs doing it the approved way. So I have to
| do it "wrong". If I fail to meet my KPIs doing it "wrong" I
| get fired. When I do meet them I don't get anything for it.
| The best I can hope for is get lucky and not get unlucky
| long enough to use my "experience" to get some better job.
| In our effort to make everything consistent, risk free and
| all those other buzzwords that the MBAs and the clipboard
| warriors jack each-other off to we've done the opposite,
| we've made everything reliant on luck instead of skill. In
| your quest to quantify everything, minimize the bad and
| maximize the good you've denied everyone any possible
| upside that could come from putting in any extra effort,
| owning their work, taking pride in their craft, whatever
| you want to call it. And this Kafkaesque situation seems to
| have permeated every industry and every profession. (I dare
| one of the people who will inevitably take issue with this
| paragraph to rebut it.)
|
| The parallel to some freight train engineer barreling
| across some flat state with a train that's too big and too
| fast who's just hoping it all works out should be obvious.
| twh270 wrote:
| > It's like society has developed some weird way of
| denying people their agency when it could benefit them
| but hold them responsible when it is bad for them.
|
| For every task in corporate America there's a Process
| that defines how the work should be done. The goals are
| twofold: increase corporate profit, and reduce corporate
| risk. Both of these are harmful to the individual.
| Autonomy and innovation are at best limited, at worst
| punished. When something goes wrong blame is directed at
| the individual, who can then easily be fired (the
| cheapest 'solution'). Process benefits the individual
| worker only to the extent to which it can clearly be
| shown to increase profits and reduce risk.
|
| And, to your point, it's nearly impossible to meet the
| expected KPIs unless you find a creative alternative to
| the approved Process, or simply work your fingers and
| mind to the bone in order to keep up.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| You are actually both right.
|
| There are a significant number of workers who are not
| even trying to better themselves. Some are just lazy, but
| part of the reason some people are that way is because
| they see that the game is rigged. A huge percentage of
| executives spend their time ensuring that they don't get
| blamed for fired when something goes wrong and ensure the
| low level employees get the blame.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Thank you! Great point!
| depaya wrote:
| Why must there be an expectation for every worker to
| strive to better themselves? Why is it not acceptable for
| a person to show up to work every day, complete their
| work, then go home?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| In context of the above discussion there is a general
| idea that fewer people are trying to get better at their
| job or career, leading to lower quality work as fewer
| people are trying as hard as before.
|
| I'm not saying those people are wrong for not trying
| harder or should be trying to meet my expectations, it is
| their lives to do with what they want.
| yifanl wrote:
| Okay, let's buy into the idea that across the board,
| workers are worse than workers of the past, for whatever
| definition of worse you like.
|
| In what way is this a tractable problem? Like, what
| solution is there that wouldn't involve massively
| importing workers from other societies where workers
| aren't worse?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The workers are the same. The situations they find
| themselves in are different. People phone it in because
| that's what we incentivize.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what solution is there that wouldn 't involve
| massively importing workers from other societies where
| workers aren't worse?_
|
| Yes. (Not agreeing workforce degradation is the biggest
| problem. But opening spigots on skilled immigration would
| help.)
| tragictrash wrote:
| Getting a bit off topic here, but I agree it's fully
| fixable with policy changes.
|
| I'm not disagreeing that it feels like the workers are
| getting fed up, leaving and putting in less effort. It's
| why, and you can't blame them for feeling exasperated.
|
| I mean I fully support increasing immigration. More tax
| revenue, more growth, everybody wins.
| foxyv wrote:
| The workers ARE worse. But not because this generation or
| that generation doesn't have the correct moral philosophy or
| some such nonsense. It's because in general, employers are
| not training or maintaining a competent work force. Instead
| they spend all their energy on exploiting existing talent to
| the fullest before they burn out.
|
| No training is creating new work force and terrible working
| conditions are destroying the existing hard core of competent
| workers.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _To run even a, say, "simple" traditional grain train--6,700
| feet, 28 million pounds--through the ice fog of a late February
| night, applying the physics of the horsepower and weight to a
| landscape you cannot see, but must know--every inch of, every
| hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast is something no
| office worker can imagine._
|
| Why are train engineers expected to know every nuance of the
| route, when it should be trivial to do fine-grained GPS maps of
| the tracks and provide moving map displays that could show every
| hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast. This shouldn't
| be left up to the memory of the engineers.
|
| There's already automation that could enforce speed limits, but
| for some reason it relies on track-side equipment so isn't
| universally available:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-pos...
| mediaman wrote:
| The government data I am able to find does not seem to support
| the idea that there is a massive (or any) increase in
| derailments. And this letter never provides any data supporting
| the premise either.
|
| According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were
| 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in
| 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to
| 1975.
|
| Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was
| over 2,000 derailments.
|
| In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in
| derailments per year.
|
| Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a
| career in fiction?
|
| Data: https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-
| ac...
| foxyv wrote:
| I think the author was trying to explain the risks they are
| taking and saying that it's only a matter of time until we
| start to see disasters similar to the one in 2004 but 100 times
| worse.
|
| https://cen.acs.org/articles/82/i27/TRAIN-DERAILS-
| CHLORINE-L....
| wheelerwj wrote:
| a few other people have made a few suggestions about
| interpreting the data, but i would also like to add that the
| writer is specifically citing "Monster Trains" and that may or
| may not affect the interpretation of data.
|
| still, awesome that you went to check the source.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there
| were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the
| US in 2021
|
| The key word here might be "US". The letter writer is
| specifically talking about Iowa; are state-by-state statistics
| available?
|
| If you've never spent time in the Midwest, you probably have
| never seen a train that's a mile or longer. Endless cars of
| agricultural products, often high fructose corn syrup. I saw
| this often growing up in Iowa, never in California. In the Bay
| Area, freight sometimes moves along the same tracks as Caltrain
| at night, but the trains are tiny in comparison to those of
| Iowa.
|
| For a while, I think trains in Iowa were limited by how long a
| train was allowed to block a roadway (IIRC 10 minutes). I think
| trains were sized so at least in theory they could comply with
| the law when at speed. The law might have changed since, and/or
| maybe there aren't as many at-grade crossings anymore. (A
| painful intersection in my home town recently got grade
| separation.)
| dhosek wrote:
| Other than a few years in L.A., I've lived my whole life
| within a mile of a rail line. It's only in the last month
| that I have _ever_ seen a mid-train locomotive. Something is
| definitely changing.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| They started this process a long time ago. 2018 was when
| they first started talking about it, locally they did the
| first pilots about 2019 if memory serves.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Out here in the west, I have seen longer trains in the past
| few years, but I've been seeing mile-long trains for _years_.
| I never saw trains with more than 150 cars before the last
| few years, though.
| beamatronic wrote:
| Perhaps there are different definitions of "derailed".
|
| After all one of the communication problems in this pandemic
| was that even technical, medical professionals could not agree
| on the definition of "airborne" as it relates to the public's
| best interest.
| pas wrote:
| Is there comparable data on other countries? What is this a
| proxy for? (Track upkeep problems? Trains are too fast for the
| load? Signaling issues? Mechanical issues?)
|
| Rail safety seems a lot less complex and pretty much as
| regulated as aviation safety, how come there aren't just ~1-2
| per year? Is it just because fatalities are luckily fewer (due
| to the nature of these derailments) so no one really gives a
| shit?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| It's just the forces of the trains. When it's not a
| derailment it's breaking them. They're doubling the running
| room for slack action^, for one. That's the least of the
| concern, but there's more potential for breakage because
| there's more potential for greater differences in velocity
| from one end of the train to the other. Topology also
| matters, previously consists here average 135 cars, but range
| from 115 to 150, they're 53' each. Usually they'll have 4-5
| motors at 74' each. Suffice it to say, depending on the
| territory there can be huge force differentials generated
| which can break trains or rail, think cresting a grade on
| undulating hills. And you can "stringline" trains too,
| literally pull cars off the tracks, and it's exactly those
| forces that'd do it.
|
| And then there's the human element. Nobody knows when they're
| going to work, how long it's going to take, what kind of
| bullshit they're going to run into. You can get stuck for
| long periods of time away from home terminal, and the Class 1
| doesn't care. And there's things like rules on how to walk.
| The environment that's been constructed isn't meant for human
| consumption and it's taking a toll on the workforce. There's
| reams of other shit to whinge about.
|
| And the derailments always matter, it's a total clusterfuck.
| They're not easy to fix, you've got to "bad order" and set
| out the car, at least by regulation. This involves rerailing,
| finding a set-out track, and making all the moves to get
| everything back in order. You've also got to wait for carmen
| (who are understaffed) and management, which depending on the
| route, could be a long sit. If it's bad enough it'll shut
| down traffic for a couple of days, requiring significant
| diversions around it while the Class 1 pays out the ass for a
| third party to come clean it all up and rerail shit.
|
| None of the current infrastructure is built to deal with
| these train lengths, either, so everything moves slower. The
| fact the Surface Transportation Board had a hearing with the
| Class 1's, I think, is a pretty good indicator they're about
| as interested in moving goods as GE is in manufacturing.
|
| ^: Each coal car has two draw bars with +/- 2-3" about the
| same for shipping container cars (from eyeing it) of run
| built in. This varies with car, auto racks have way more run
| out. Opposing forces in the trainline will pull it apart, the
| more run to build the faster the opponent acceleration...
| This typically results in broken knuckles. But it is possible
| to just push cars off the rail with these forces, which is
| exacerbated by the doubled length.
| pas wrote:
| Thanks for the interesting details!
|
| > None of the current infrastructure is built to deal with
| these train lengths, either, so everything moves slower.
|
| Is it due to extra freight demand caused by the recent
| surge in consumer demand?
|
| Or this was long way in the making, but the system's
| capacity seems to have basically topped out? (And any
| effort to move even more freight on this network will cost
| a lot more _and_ cause a lot more pain and very likely
| fatalities for the humans involved?)
|
| What's the "solution"? Building more tracks? Running more
| but smaller trains? (But I guess the trains are already
| long to keep fuel costs down?)
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Here's the STB hearing. Timestamped to one of the more
| articulate old-head:
|
| https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300
|
| I think their new-fangled methods are crippling their
| ability to service the surge. I think their reputation
| and their current working environment has cost them
| people. I think all this has exacerbated the problem. If
| you Google Surface Transportation Board you'll find
| several articles about C1s being implicated in
| kneecapping business.
|
| The megatrains are pretty old hat, they were being
| discussed while I was still in, 2017 or 2018. Shortly
| thereafter they started piloting the program. The problem
| is they just can't be accommodated, period. 150 car
| trains are bad enough, 270 cars and 6 engines is way
| worse. Sidings, yards, and loading facilities aren't
| built for it.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Well in the UK there were 11 derailments total in 2020-21.
| The UK has roughly ~10,000 miles of railway and the USA
| ~150,000. Probably not a good comparison tbh. EU wide would
| probably be more appropriate but I couldn't find anything.
|
| https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1999/rail-
| safety-2020-20...
| hardware2win wrote:
| Indeed, 5 derailments per day sounds like a lot
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I don't know if there's comparable data, but I can tell you
| the mining companies in north west Australia would routinely
| run 300+ car trains without incident. But these were very
| much a straight line from the mine to the port without much
| civilization in between.
| TimPC wrote:
| Derailments could be getting worse even with fewer of them. The
| author of the letter is talking about the trend towards monster
| trains which suggests fewer trains being run. Is the number of
| derailments per train going up? Is the impact of the larger
| trains derailing leading to more overall impact because each
| individual derailment is larger even though there are few of
| them?
|
| If I run half as many twice as large trains I'd expect fewer
| total derailments even if these monster trains derail more
| often than the more normal trains of yesteryear.
| scythe wrote:
| The gross number of derailments isn't very meaningful, what you
| need is the derailments per train-miles-traveled, analogous to
| the collisions per vehicle-miles-traveled that is used for road
| safety. If we're running fewer trains, obviously we should
| expect fewer derailments.
|
| As some other commenters have noted, it might be even more
| useful to get the total weight of derailed cargo, per (mass
| times distance), I suppose.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Isn't there a third option that both your interpretation of the
| data and the letter are wrong? The letter specifically mentions
| the derailment of monster trains. These trains have more cargo
| and so one derailment can lead to a more severe delay in
| shipping times.
| maxmcd wrote:
| You can see the ratio here: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-
| vehicle-miles. Breaks down car miles vs train miles.
|
| I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take
| the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience,
| the executives running the show have their perspective as
| well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found
| data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data
| wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a
| very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This
| situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those
| fears are being considered.
| mediaman wrote:
| That data is great - thank you for posting. It looks like
| rail-car miles have held somewhat steady, down a little
| bit, except for 2020, which I assume was COVID related.
|
| I am being a bit facetious with the fiction comment.
|
| However, I do believe there are a lot of problems in the
| rail industry. With the introduction of "PSR" (precision-
| scheduled railroading), trains actually have no schedule,
| and only leave when they're full. This maximizes
| efficiency.
|
| It's very hard on rail staff, because it means they, too
| have no schedule. They work a train in one direction, do a
| staff change, and then go to a hotel while waiting for a
| return trip. They get as little as 90-120 minutes of notice
| for the return trip. So it's a lot of time away from home,
| with very little ability to control one's schedule. I
| imagine that this source of frustration emerges in a lot of
| different places, and it's possible that this letter was
| one of them.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >It's very hard on rail staff, because it means they, too
| have no schedule. They work a train in one direction, do
| a staff change, and then go to a hotel while waiting for
| a return trip. They get as little as 90-120 minutes of
| notice for the return trip. So it's a lot of time away
| from home, with very little ability to control one's
| schedule.
|
| This is a major frustration in a nutshell but you have to
| know that in addition to the short notice that they are
| about to get out for the return trip back home all the
| time they spend off duty in the hotel room counts (to the
| railroad) as time off, in other words it counts as if it
| totally belongs to them to do with as they please going
| about all their normal business. In reality they are in a
| hotel many times with limited meal options, with no way
| to visit family or to help out around the house, to
| conduct any of the other normal household business. Their
| time in the hotels is not their time at all to the point
| where the actual time they spend on a run (a round trip)
| can be multiple days and only a part of that time is
| compensated.
|
| A recent text I had from my relative currently with a
| railroad gives the railroad's perspective quite clearly
| during a Zoom meeting - "Y'all hired out to work
| 24/7/365, we are going to make good employees out of you
| all."
|
| I am part of a fourth generation railroad family. Three
| of the last four generations, beginning in 1942, have
| worked on the railroad. It skipped me because I went a
| different direction.
|
| EDIT: I forgot to mention that the ultimate goal of the
| railroads is to decrease train crew size to 1. Each of
| these trains will be driven by a one-man train "crew". A
| couple decades ago normal crew size was three - engineer,
| brakeman, conductor. Brakeman positions were eliminated
| leaving the engineer and conductors rolling the trains.
| The railroads were supposed to be using PTC, positive
| train control a long time ago but were able to dodge the
| upgrades to track and infrastructure in the typical
| American corporate way by delaying using a standard set
| of excuses. PTC would bring about a single man crew by
| automating almost everything. That would mean huge loss
| of jobs and a huge investment in infrastructure upgrades
| since many thousands of miles of tracks have speed limits
| that are in place due to trackage that can't handle
| higher speeds safely. There's a lot going on here and
| it's always deeper than one single argument.
| gilbetron wrote:
| > I forgot to mention that the ultimate goal of the
| railroads is to decrease train crew size to 1.
|
| I think you mean "0". Full autonomy is 100% their goal!
| [deleted]
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I would presume the ultimate goal from the perspective of
| the railroads is totally autonomous trains with no human
| crew. There may be reason not apparent, but that seems
| like a much more practical goal than automating trucks
| and cars on roads. The track steers the train, the
| switches and signals are (almost) all interlocking, an
| autonomous train would never miss a speed change, a
| signal, or need to stop because the driver is out of
| hours.
| kbenson wrote:
| > I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found
| data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data
| wrong?".
|
| I don't think it's that people are jumping to it as much as
| people are trying to identify what's actually going on. The
| solution for "this problem is happening more often" is
| different than for "this problem appears to be happening
| more, but is actually happening less". Applying a process
| change for what was a perception problem might actually
| make things worse. It's important to identify the problem
| so the correct fix can be determined.
|
| Even if this actually is a problem but the national data
| belies that, that could be useful in pointing towards the
| problem being more localized to Iowa, and differences in
| that area can be looked for.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think the other important piece of data you would need to
| find is average train length over that same period of time.
| Fewer derailments could have just as much or a larger impact if
| the train length is growing.
| simulate-me wrote:
| The average length isn't enough because the likelihood of
| derailment might be a function of train length. It's possible
| shorter trains have gotten safer and monster trains have
| gotten more dangerous due to their increasing length.
| mediaman wrote:
| I did find a GAO study that said that trains increased in
| length by 25% since 2008.
|
| But the number of derailments dropped by more than 25% during
| that time, so the probability of a given car being involved
| in a derailed train still decreased.
|
| There's been other coverage of the ironically named
| "precision scheduling" in the rail industry causing a lot of
| labor problems, because it makes for nightmarishly
| unpredictable schedules for workers. They never know when a
| train is going to leave until it is full, so after working a
| shift, workers stay in a hotel waiting for a return trip that
| they won't know about until 90-120 minutes ahead of
| departure. I am guessing that the claims around increased
| derailment may actually be about frustration with the work
| environment.
| foobarian wrote:
| Right, given same car count and derailment rate, 2x train
| length could appear as 1/2 the derailments.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Depends on if the probability of a derailment is K per
| train mile, or K per car mile. And I suspect that the
| answer is "some of both". When a car has a mechanical
| failure that causes a derailment, that kind of derailment
| is going to be proportional to the number of car miles.
| Some other causes (misaligned switches, say) will be
| proportional to the number of train miles.
| temp8964 wrote:
| kodah wrote:
| > For myself: I believe it is Wall Street greed and investor
| demands. 16,450-foot trains weighing more than 42 million pounds
| are gratifying someone with power. Someone who wants it all and
| more. I believe it is those few, who live nowhere near here, who
| own their own private islands and jets. This is far removed from
| laissez faire economics, or the neo liberal model, coming out of
| the 1980s.
|
| This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the
| Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love
| the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a
| nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class
| I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling
| anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves.
| That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has
| changed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains
| that derail to ones that don't? (The machismo argument, sure, I
| get, though it's unsubstantiated; one could just as easily try
| to pin it on urban environmentalists.)
| btbuildem wrote:
| Presumably because cost of derailments is less than amount of
| profits that would not be made if everything wasn't pushed to
| its breaking point.
|
| I think the point of the article is that given the hazardous
| nature of much of the cargo being transported, there's no
| room for such gambling here, and yet it's being done
| routinely.
| brightstep wrote:
| Derailments are a red herring here. The real issue being
| raised by the writer is: shifts on these "monster" trains are
| too long and employees are burning out.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It may not be obvious that the size of the trains are causing
| derailments, or at least not to the "Wall Street People".
| Your comment assumes that everyone has perfect information
| and asses the available information in an unbiased purely
| rational way, but in reality that's often not the case.
|
| (No opinion if this actually _is_ the cause, or what the
| dynamics are here; I don 't know anything about trains or the
| businesses surrounding them.)
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Why do automotive industries sell cars that they know to be
| defective?
|
| They calculated that the cost of lawsuits from people hurt by
| the car defects will be lower than the cost of fixing the
| defect itself.
|
| Simply put: if they can externalize costs on society, they
| will.
| Beldin wrote:
| You might as well ask why Wall Street doesn't prefer trains
| with 3 cars and 1 loc. Much safer - but not optimising their
| profits. A guy who hitches a 4th car beats everyone.
|
| So trains are optimised for profit. Now if your trains never
| derail, that means you may still have safety margin. There
| may be profit for the taking!!!
|
| So keep optimising till it goes wrong. Then, figure out the
| cost of "going wrong". Figure that into your margins. If you
| get 99% delivery with 110% profit, does that beat 100%
| delivery for 100% profit?
|
| TL;DR: that's how free markets work in capitalism. They
| optimise for profit.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Railroads are an old business where the safety and other
| operational considerations are well known.
|
| The equation here is more like "I can increase margins 3%
| this quarter to get my bonus, but increase the risk of an
| incident that may harm or result in the death of an
| employee or disaster affecting the public by 15%"
|
| The long game is that the railroad will lose money when
| they create a 9-figure incident. The short game is the
| management makes their money.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It's more than just profit. We _need_ to move goods
| around. We use airplanes, trains, and trucks. All of
| those vehicles have imperfect safety. We accept that
| because we need a functioning economy.
| supergauntlet wrote:
| > The long game is that the railroad will lose money when
| they create a 9-figure incident. The short game is the
| management makes their money.
|
| Even if they do (and this is a BIG if when we see how
| many companies get bailed out of their bad decisions)
| they still have caused a 9 figure incident. Which could
| be a chemical spill or any number of other things that
| could cause serious environmental damage to the local
| communities. A fine that results in the destruction of
| the company is great and all, but they've still made the
| planet markedly worse through their negligence.
| [deleted]
| amluto wrote:
| Why are these monster trains preferable at all? They
| apparently need distributed locomotives, which means that the
| number of cars per locomotive isn't actually substantially
| larger than a group of smaller trains. So they save a couple
| engineers per monster train at the cost of lower utilization
| (due to inefficiencies of loading and unloading)? What's the
| corresponding benefit?
| [deleted]
| shkkmo wrote:
| > why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to
| ones that don't?
|
| Because they can offload most of the costs of the derailments
| as externalities while pocketing the money from larger
| trains.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they can offload most of the costs of the derailments as
| externalities while pocketing the money from larger trains_
|
| Are derailments cash-flow neutral? (Honest question. Could
| be, if the public foots clean-up and insurance the train
| and lost revenue.)
| shkkmo wrote:
| Even if not "cash-flow neutral", if any significant
| portion of the cost of a derailment is externalized, then
| carrier's appetite for derailment risk will be higher and
| there will be larger trains.
|
| The solution here would seem to be penalizing derailments
| using a large fine that is proportional or progressive to
| weight or length.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'm not sure what portion of derailment costs _are_
| externalized. I 've seen a few in town, none that
| involved hazmat spills thankfully, mostly coal trains.
| But the repair of the rail and track bed, hiring of
| services to lift the derailed cars back onto the track,
| repair of damaged cars, etc. is all going to be on the
| railroad. Loss or damage to the cargo would be on the
| owner of the cargo as in any shipping scenario, but they
| should be insured for that.
|
| If there was damage to private property, a hazmat spill
| contaminating private land, or injury or loss of life,
| the railroad is going to get sued.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The major specific externality called out in the letter
| is engineer burnout. I would be surprised if other costs
| are not significantly externalized, but I don't have data
| to back this up.
|
| Not all the externalities mentioned are specific to
| derailments, but also apply to the general difficulty of
| our infrastructure in supporting such long trains.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I don't see this as a Wall Street problem though; they
| should be able to optimize for their incentives within the
| rules structure. It's the regulators fault for allowing
| trains to be this long.
| xpe wrote:
| Assigning fault (or blame) to only one party is most
| likely foolish and unwise. The world is not that simple.
| It is complex, as in a complex _system_ -- not the same
| meaning as in "throw up our hands because it is too
| _complex_ to handle! ". Untangling the interrelated
| factors is complex. Making sense of a complex system
| honestly is key to finding workable and fair solutions
| Invictus0 wrote:
| What's so complex about this situation? I see no problem
| with mandating a maximum train length.
| xpe wrote:
| Are you asking what is 'so complex' about public policy,
| safety, and economics?
|
| Even if this is only about maximum train length, which it
| isn't, the underlying dynamics, as they are perceived by
| and affect all the stakeholders, are complex.
|
| This is what I mean by complex systems:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
|
| Is this what you mean?
| xpe wrote:
| Imagine that you were a regulator, such as a member of
| the National Transportation Safety Board [1]. Put
| yourself in that position. How would you go about
| deciding the appropriate regulation?
|
| Of course that is not the only stakeholder in the
| situation. Now for each key stakeholder, including
| railroad companies, railroad employees, shipping
| companies, the purchasing public, and landowners near
| tracks, what would be your professional opinion on the
| correct outcome?
|
| It is pretty clear that what you see depends on where you
| sit.
|
| Now step back even further and imagine you are an
| omniscient being that can truly comprehend all of the
| above perspectives. How would you go about deciding the
| correct outcome? It will depend on your notion of good
| and fairness. I think for many definitions of good,
| you'll find that considerable analysis is involved.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportati
| on_Safe...
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It feels like you're not commenting in good faith but
| I'll respond in good faith anyway. As a mechanical
| engineer, my professional opinion is that trains should
| not be derailing, period. The trains should be allowed to
| be as long as possible so that they can safely not
| derail, and perhaps also not dramatically interrupt
| traffic in towns. It's hardly a question of "should we
| ensure that trains do not derail": the answer is
| unambiguously yes, it is not acceptable for them to
| derail. I accept that asking "what is the appropriate
| maximum length for a train" might require some deeper
| thought, but the article is very clearly stating that the
| problem is that trains are too long and are derailing,
| not whatever vague "complexity" you keep going on about.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| But it's a matter of probabilities. It's not like a train
| _will_ derail if it 's over some length, and _won 't_
| derail if it's shorter. A 10-car train can derail, it's
| just less likely at least for causes that are related to
| train length.
|
| There is no regulation that will prevent all derailments
| with 100% effectiveness.
| butlerm wrote:
| The normal way engineering is done is to create a safety
| margin so that the probability of a serious problem under
| normal operation is vanishingly small. Airliners do not
| fall out of the sky on a regular basis in the United
| States for that reason. Serious problems have become rare
| through serious application of serious standards.
|
| Engineering rail systems so that derailments do not
| happen at all is a reasonable shorthand for almost never.
| It is engineering malpractice to run things so close to
| the edge that fatalities or serious property damage are
| to be expected next month instead of sometime in the next
| few decades or so.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| That's true, but there are also engineering principles at
| play unrelated to probability. If I squeeze a piece of
| hard spaghetti on it's ends, would it be easier to break
| a 20cm piece of spaghetti or a 1cm piece of spaghetti?
| 20cm, obviously, and that same principle applies with
| trains. Longer trains are harder to stop, harder to
| control, less robust to disturbances. Likewise, if I
| squeeze a piece of soft spaghetti on its ends, it's
| harder to predict how it will bend if it's really long
| than if it's really short. You won't see a 1cm piece of
| spaghetti contort itself into loops, but a 20cm piece
| certainly will.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It's _both_ a Wall Street problem and incompetent
| /corrupt government problem.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Why is it a Wall Street problem?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Because you cant do unethical and societally harmful
| things and say it's not your fault cause it's not
| illegal.
|
| I mean, sure you can legally, but you're still a harmful
| entity with a problem.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Publicly-held corporations, and earnings.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| Well, part of what the article alludes to is an erosion of
| decency and safety culture. I don't remember the specific
| rules, but I do remember that trains had to be cautious
| making a ton of noise in cities, so they'd have entire areas
| where they can't use their horn, or where they can _only_ use
| their horn, they have automated speed and brake checks, they
| have limits on the length of trains for certain tracks,
| etc...
|
| When he's saying he's backing a 3-mile train into a depot,
| that's nothing to shake a stick at. That means nearby
| residents have to endure rail noise for the entire time the
| train overshoots the entrance and while it backs in, it means
| signals within a given radius must be down, even though a
| train may not be inbound, it means that the heavier a train
| gets the more unstable it's load can become on certain track
| and when it derails can cause catastrophic devestation to the
| environment (he mentioned carrying hazmat).
|
| These all used to be pretty blueprint safety evaluations from
| what I knew. If things have changed then our perspective or
| priorities have changed, and I think that's what the author
| is getting at.
| paulmd wrote:
| Yep, in college I was taking the train home, and an earlier
| train had a passenger who had a heart attack, but the
| ambulance couldn't get to the train because all the
| crossings were blocked and there were cars everywhere that
| couldn't move out of the way.
|
| Took about 45 minutes for the ambulance to get the lady off
| the train and the hospital was literally a 5 minute drive
| away. They just couldn't get to her.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Its just "outsiders evil insiders good" where local politics
| can finger point to external politics as the source of all
| their woes.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| I suspect it's related to a lack of immediate cost to the
| largest companies.
|
| Derailments are still infrequent enough that the company can
| be insured against the losses, so if derailments happen,
| there's effectively zero cost to the company.
|
| That would change if this class of train made incidents so
| frequent that insurance companies were no longer willing to
| sell insurance for derailments incidents involving this type
| of train. At that point, they'd be phased out of the fleet
| (as they crashed out of service) and then individually
| written off as a tax-deductible loss.
| specialist wrote:
| This is my guess too.
|
| Bonuses are paid quarterly, insurance premiums are
| negotiated yearly. PHB gets their cheddar before the bill
| comes due.
|
| The long term fix is to properly reconnect incentives, so
| that PHBs making risky decisions also carry that risk.
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| They don't prefer trains that derail, but (if the article is
| to be believed, which I can't say) they prefer to chip away
| at the safety margins (which cost money) until it's only the
| experience of the (train) engineer that keeps the train on
| the tracks. Of course, you could say that's always the case,
| but I can imagine that it gets harder and harder to do it the
| longer the train is.
| jerf wrote:
| Obviously, they don't prefer them in that sense.
|
| But if the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of
| the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for
| those, especially if the costs of the derailment to the
| environment, communities, and employees and such are
| externalized away from the MBA making these decisions, then
| they may decide it is worthwhile.
|
| This is one of the reasons so many people have varying levels
| of distaste aimed at "MBAs"... it's not that hard to train
| people to push numbers around in any number of industries.
| It's easy to equip somebody with an MBA capable of doing
| that. Heck, based on what I've seen of MBA training, it's
| trivial compared to an engineering degree, no offense
| particularly intended, but it really isn't that hard to tell
| whether this number is bigger than that number, even with
| some statistics thrown in. The problem is that there is no
| way to scale up understanding all the details that are not
| and perhaps even _can_ not be in the numbers, and that 's
| where the MBAs can go trampling over companies.
|
| I'm sure the numbers on these jumbo trains look great, even
| accounting for the derailments. I'm sure of that because the
| fact they're running them is pretty much proof of that. If
| the numbers weren't good, they never would have become
| popular enough to be worth writing about in the first place.
| The question is, what about the things not in the numbers?
| That I can't speak to and must defer to people with
| experience in the industry. So must the MBAs, but they are
| trained, deliberately or otherwise, not to.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I studied both engineering and management as part of the
| same degree. I can tell you everything the techies think
| about MBAs is correct. (The undergrad management degree
| overlapped with the MBA quite a bit, esp as the MBA was
| only one year).
|
| Somehow if you take two thirds of an engineering degree and
| two thirds of an econ/mgt degree, two thirds of the work is
| the engineering degree.
|
| Most of the reading in management is discovery channel
| style: lots of interesting things, there's no doubting
| that, but not real skills. They raise simple ideas to a
| level of respect that is not warranted by the content. Eg
| Porter's Five Forces can only really be a superficial
| checklist for strategy, it doesn't actually tell you
| anything about what matters in some industry, and you might
| come across some business where those five items are not so
| clear cut. Same with SWOT analysis and various other
| acronyms, they are simply trivial things that cannot stand
| next to the content of a technical degree.
|
| There's also an inherent problem with MBA training: it
| assumes that there's a general training that is useful to
| every business. If you're going to apply the material,
| every grad will end up putting a round peg in a square
| hole. Fortunately there's not really anything to apply, you
| get the cool jobs because you're showing that you're smart
| and ambitious, not because you are qualified technically to
| do it.
|
| Engineering on the other hand is quite hard to BS. We built
| a crappy radio in the first term, but it was a radio and it
| played the radio when you turned it on. You had to
| understand how radio spectrum worked and how to solder the
| little RLC components together to make it work.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > f the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of
| the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for
| those
|
| You managed to figure it out, so why blame unknown, unseen,
| unnamed "MBAs" when virtually anyone of modest competency
| can realize that achieving 100% perfection is not cost-
| effective? And certainly not isolated to rail
| transportation. Do FAANG (or any software companies)
| produce 100% bug-free software? Do stores attempt to
| achieve 100% theft reduction? Virtually everyone knows that
| going from 98% success to 99% is very expensive, to 99.9%
| even more so, and 99.99% ridiculously so. 3, 4, 5, 6-sigma,
| and all that. If lives are at risk in these derailments,
| that's an issue. But these are freight trains.
| np- wrote:
| I think that's the point of the article. If you just look
| at the numbers like an MBA would then maybe it makes
| sense. But all of the negative externalities are being
| bore by the local communities where the derailments are
| happening, and those don't show up in the balance sheets.
| So if they're not in the balance sheets then why would
| someone in the corporate big city office care about it at
| all? That is now totally someone else's problem. The
| numbers still look great.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful
| moment in time we created a lot of value for
| shareholders."
| gsibble wrote:
| I can tell you as someone with an MBA, we are not taught
| to think about workers, or safety, or anything except the
| bottom line. We are taught to stretch everything to the
| absolute breaking point, supposedly within the law, all
| in the name of shareholder profits. Even our management
| classes were under the moniker "human capital." We were
| never told to look at employees as anything beyond tools
| to be used to their maximum potential. We were taught
| that they were a cost to be minimized as much as
| possible.
| chefandy wrote:
| The article wasn't taking issue with the conceptual idea
| of derailments-- _people_ operate freight trains; they
| carry huge loads of toxic chemicals through populated
| areas; the environment can be impacted.
|
| However, the author didn't definitely show that insanely
| long trains increase these dangers. They seemed
| frustrated that driving these trains sucks and talked
| about how frequently derailments occur and seems to
| believe the two things are related. The NHSTA numbers
| seem to indicate the trend for derailments is going down?
| Perhaps as train size increases, the number of trains
| decrease and the risk to the individual conductor goes
| up? Don't know enough about the subject matter to
| knowledgeably infer an answer, so I won't.
| gsibble wrote:
| I have an MBA and a computer engineering degree, both from
| Vanderbilt University. I had never thought to compare the
| difficulty of achieving either for some reason.
|
| Looking at both......the MBA is indeed trivially easy
| compared to my engineering degree. By an order of
| magnitude. Thanks for opening my eyes to that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is one of the reasons so many people have varying
| levels of distaste aimed at "MBAs"
|
| And the other is that _a lot_ of the decisions that bring
| up anti-MBA shitstorms and flamewars make it more than
| obvious that ethics were not much of a part of the MBA
| program the offenders attended.
|
| The most obvious example of ethics getting railroaded was
| Boeing, and look where it got them to.
| dralley wrote:
| And the fact that nearly every company that has ever been
| lauded by the MBA industrial complex has collapsed (or
| was seriously damaged, or caused serious damage to
| society) as a direct result of the very same management
| practices and fads that the MBA industrial complex spent
| years or decades trying to cram down the throats of the
| rest of the country.
|
| * Enron
|
| * General Electric and the lord and savior of MBAs, Jack
| Welch
|
| * Valeant Pharmaceuticals
|
| * Sears
|
| * IBM
|
| * McDonnell-Douglas (and later Boeing)
|
| * Intel
|
| * Stock buybacks in the airline and retail industries
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Or how many companies got broken up into small, stock-
| sized chunks to be profitably sold... and then once covid
| and the delivery chain issues hit, they were too small to
| survive on their own without government assistance.
| pbourke wrote:
| Liability is the other side of the ethics coin.
| Professional Engineers have liability and carry insurance
| as a result. MBAs? Not so much.
|
| Look at the Boeing MCAS and VW emissions scandals.
| Individual engineers and test pilots were named and faced
| repercussions. The MBAs that sustained the environment
| where this poor decision making happened? Aside from the
| very senior executives, we have no clue who they are.
| They were able to stay in role or slink off to another
| opportunity. They might not even think they had any
| culpability.
| nmeagent wrote:
| Note that most engineers in the US are not licensed (IIRC
| about ~20% are), are not liable for things like this, and
| do not carry such insurance.
| astrange wrote:
| I remember a VW executive going to prison, but the news
| reported him as an engineer, and so everyone thought the
| execs got away with it.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm curious what changed recently to make this worse. I
| appreciated the article, an insider's ideas on what is
| going wrong (and somewhat nuanced), but what change is
| causing this newer race-to-the-bottom? Labor shortages?
| Fuel costs?
| supergauntlet wrote:
| Presumably the same forces that cause the rate of profit
| to decline everywhere. It's not anything new, it's just
| the latest step along the cut-costs-at-all-costs
| staircase.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| To be fair, there was probably a fair bit to cut or
| optimise in the very beginning of it all; but Jack Welch,
| the prototypical MBA CEO, started being CEO of GE in
| 1981.
|
| 41 years later, we are probably now cutting bone instead
| of fat.
| beardedetim wrote:
| > Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer
| trains that derail to ones that don't?
|
| I don't know if it is true that they _prefer_ trains that
| derail vs ones that do not. I can try to understand their
| _incentives_ though.
|
| I would assume that they are incentivized to make money _this
| quarter_ or _this year_. I would also assume that they aren't
| really _caring_ about consequences that are not _fiscal_.
|
| Given these two incentives, if someone asked me "Should we
| ship this train that might derail?" I wouldn't say "no". I
| would ask "what are the fiscal consequences if it does?" and
| "How much does it cost to not?"
|
| Famous Fight Club quote about recalls and such. Same thing
| with companies breaking the rules in exchange for some sort
| of fine. It's not that they _want to break the rules_ it's
| that it's they are _incentivized_ to make the choice that
| _increases their odds of fiscal growth_.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Because the feedback loops of Wall Street optimize short term
| gain over long term investment. They do so by actualizing
| risk.
|
| A railroad engineer is going to value longevity/consistency,
| and lives to minimize (rather than capitalize) risk.
|
| The two are not going to make good bed fellows.
| FredPret wrote:
| I disagree. Long term investing is de rigeur on Wall Street
| - everyone from Warren Buffet to index fund investors are
| doing it.
|
| Sure some people do trading, but a long term view is both
| the right one and the most profitable one.
| worik wrote:
| > Long term investing is de rigeur on Wall Street
|
| On what do you base that? My immediate reaction is that
| you are being naive.
| sophacles wrote:
| They don't prefer trains that derail. The just hate the
| measures which prevent the derailment. I assume the reasons
| are many, but here's some reasonable guesses, based on things
| I've heard in similar scenarios:
|
| * The people that live along the tracks should be grateful
| that the trains are crashing and spilling stuff on their land
| because they "create jobs" (hundreds of miles away not
| affecting anyone associated with the normal land use).
|
| * The religion of "regulation is always bad". Usually
| associated with blame that the existing regulations are
| really the problem - the increase in accidents after
| loosening the regs is just coincidence.
|
| * The cost of derailments is less than the extra profit of
| running unsafely. Anyone complaining about their dead
| overworked family members can be pointed at a different
| exhuasted worker making a mistake, so it's not like they have
| any culpability.
|
| * Maintenance costs too much and would hurt our bottom line!
| (also look over here instead: record profits!)
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Though uncharitable, these pretty plainly fit the pattern
| we've seen over an over again for this sort of crisis,
| which makes it likely that one or most of those points is
| in play.
|
| Which makes it particularly strange that the author asserts
| that they are "far removed from laissez faire economics, or
| the neo liberal model, coming out of the 1980s", since
| every one of these is a natural consequence of the
| incentive structure created by that economic model. (Unless
| I'm misunderstanding and the author is using "far removed"
| in a sense approximating "left to fester", but laissez
| faire incentivized those things even when fresh)
| astrange wrote:
| The author appears to be claiming that they're running
| gigantic trains because the investors think owning a
| gigantic train makes them manlier, even though the
| derailment makes them less profitable.
|
| I think some businesses out there do a lot of things
| because it personally entertains the men who own them,
| but not sure about freight trains.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Market forces can, temporarily (but temporary can be any
| length of time that isn't forever), lead to impossible to
| sustain behaviors.
|
| Here is a just so story:
|
| Lets say you are CEO of a train company. You need $500M in
| income each quarter to pay salaries and stay solvent. You are
| barely breaking even, and if you have to borrow money it will
| be at terrible terms that you realistically can't afford to
| pay back. Your competitor starts running trains that are 3
| times longer, and therefore can undercut you on price. If you
| don't lower your prices you will get almost no business and
| you will have to lay off workers or take a loan you can't pay
| back to meet payroll. If you lower prices you will lose money
| on every shipment and will have to take a loan. You decide to
| just start running the longer trains as well. You may have a
| suspicion that this is unsafe and that long term the costs of
| increased insurance and repairs to tracks and lawsuits to
| dead workers will cost far more than what you save running
| longer trains, but also you aren't sure of that. It will take
| years to know for sure, and you don't have the capital stay
| in business long enough to bet that your competitor will go
| bankrupt.
| sophacles wrote:
| It should be noted that the railroads have been profitable
| for a long time, many reporting record profits for 2021.
|
| This scenario is plausible in isolation, but not really
| related to the rail industry in the US.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If I had a tail, I wouldn't need a chair, as I could hang
| from the ceiling, saving my company money.
|
| Great story, except everything you said is factually wrong.
| Railroads have monopolies in their corridors, are printing
| money, and are challenged only by trucking companies who
| _are_ struggling to survive due to labor and fuel problems.
| ouid wrote:
| There are two main source of profit in the modern world. The
| first is exclusivity of market opportunity, through monopoly
| (including those "partial" monopolies provided by network
| effects), copyright, patent, regulatory capture, etc. The
| second place that profit comes from is in taking on
| liabilities that either you will not be required to pay, or
| not be able to pay. Uninsured borrowing doesn't really evoke
| the kind of evil that is really at play here, but it's an
| appropriate term.
|
| More subtle is when the people making decisions (ie in the
| c-suite, board) have payoff curves that are substantially
| different from the company's payoff curve. Risking train
| derailment strikes me as being in this category. These
| schemes can be deeply convoluted. The author implies that
| there is substantial, uninsurable risk to cities that is
| implicitly taken on by any freight carrier. Holding
| everything else equal, increasing revenue while increasing
| the potential damage to a city is a potential source of
| profit.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This part stood out to me also, but mostly for the fact that it
| seemed poorly substantiated.
|
| The fact of the matter is BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and
| Union Pacific are majority owned by institutional investors
| (Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, Capital World Investors,
| etc.) Those institutions are managing these investments on
| behalf of large capital pools-insurance company float, pension
| funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who
| are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely
| included? The author himself!
|
| While I have no particular interest or knowledge of the rail
| industry, I am moved by the issues highlighted by the author.
| However, I think his call to conspiratorial instincts ("a few
| rich people are working us to death to fund their nth private
| island") is bad, dangerous logic.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf
| of large capital pools-insurance company float, pension
| funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or
| who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely
| included? The author himself!
|
| The Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances shows that
| the majority of equity is held by a small percent of people.
|
| Various shifts by corporations and government over the years
| have happened to raise the social security age, disrupt job
| security, unions and pensions, and shift middle class
| retirement funds into the stock market. None of this have had
| much impact other than that ownership of equity on the
| minority side of the equation may now be more widely
| distributed.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's even worse than that - a single person working you to
| death for his private island could be sated, could have a
| change of heart, could reduce the workload.
|
| Everything is managed by managers for the same managers -
| there's literally _nobody_ in charge; the bureaucracy
| perpetuates the bureaucracy for the sake of the bureaucracy.
|
| http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/08/n...
| paulmd wrote:
| Corporations are a form of memeplex, a _living entity_ that
| sustains itself with a set of rules and incentives.
|
| If you consider a beehive or an ant colony to be a single
| living entity, then a corporation probably is too, it's a
| single larger entity with its own homeostasis and agency,
| even if it incorporates individual organic actors into its
| being.
|
| "profit-seeking" is the goal we have chosen to encode most
| of them with in their bylaws. Non-profits (in principle)
| have different pro-social goals (I'm ignoring the Komen
| Foundation-type "mimics"" here). And that's what they do.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare.
|
| They are especially a nightmare when you get stuck at a
| crossing with no other way around them (no bridges). I sat at a
| crossing for over 15 minutes waiting for a extremely long train
| to pass.
|
| It gets even worse when you live near a place that has the
| train come to a compelete stop so that cars can be unhitched,
| taken off to a side rail, then have the engine reverse to
| connect back to the rest of the cars, for it to finally slowly
| pull away. The small town I lived it was forced to build a
| second fire department as the only one would get stuck behind
| trains delaying help. They evenutally built a new access road
| with a bridge over the tracks.
| brewdad wrote:
| There's an area in SE Portland where trains regularly take an
| hour or more to pass. Many of the streets that get blocked
| are one-way or really have no alternate once you are on them.
| It takes the cooperation and coordination of a lots of
| drivers and vehicles to prevent the effective shutdown of 40+
| square blocks when these crossings happen a few times a day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| After 15mins, I turn the car around and go back home for an
| hour. I'm not sitting in my car stationary for an hour for
| the train to pass. Trains aren't allowed to stop during
| commute hours. They have to do that in certain windows.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Didn't think I'd see another PoCo resident on HN!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Willing to guess this happens across pretty much every
| Smalltown, USA.
|
| The train came to town, and all rejoiced! The trains
| continued to get bigger, but towns did not anticipate this.
| The mayor doesn't live on "that" side of the tracks, so
| doesn't ever think about it. People complaining about it
| are from "that" side of the tracks, so doesn't rate highly
| on the TODO.
| euroderf wrote:
| Let me guess. They did not send the railroad a bill.
| dylan604 wrote:
| For what? Their poor city planning?
| mwint wrote:
| > pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers
| themselves.
|
| I'm not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?
| kodah wrote:
| Yeah, tracks have little huts every so often next to the
| track. These huts provide an uplink and various routing
| equipment that connects to track side safety equipment eg:
| there's big microphone arrays that listen to the wheels and
| brakes for deformities, automated switches will generally
| link into these if there's a switch nearby. Any change
| _could_ influence a derailment, for instance if the track
| didn 't switch and the train was going too fast for it's new
| destination. Therefore, anyone with their name on a change
| within a radius of the crash site gets interviewed, the
| dispatcher is removed and interviewed immediately.
| varispeed wrote:
| > I have given up enormous amounts of home and family life for
| insurance, for a living wage, for a trade that is respectable.
|
| I think this is the problem - paying people in respect that you
| can't make a meal of. And what does the living wage mean? That
| you can come back from work, eat a meal and have somewhere to
| sleep? It's interesting that people are happy to be taxed to
| teeth, having very little in exchange and do nothing about the
| fact that corporations their work for don't pay much and if their
| bosses pay taxes, then it means they got lame accountants.
| [deleted]
| mwattsun wrote:
| So if I understand this correctly, shorter trains are better
| because when they derail they take down less cars? Or are super
| long trains harder to control in varied terrain? Both probably.
| yifanl wrote:
| Based on my uninformed reading, these super trains are beyond
| what the existing rail infrastructure was designed for, and
| therefore are significantly more likely to derail, while also
| being more expensive to clean up when they do detail.
| bombcar wrote:
| Long trains don't "exist" in a way - because the couplers can't
| hold the weight, so you take a number of shorter trains and
| mash them together, and then "drive" it like that. It results
| in all sorts of "fun" that means if everything works perfectly;
| you save the cost of a crew or two - if anything goes wrong you
| have a derailment or worse.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Shorter trains are better on a lot of metrics except the number
| of crews you need driving trains around, basically. Except that
| everything ends up taking longer with the longer train, so you
| have a bit of a false economy, although I'm guessing it's not
| false enough to make it undesirable.
|
| To mention an issue that I don't think was well-touched upon in
| the article -- in a lot of places, you have single tracks
| running from point A to point B, with the occasional side track
| a train can park on to let another train past.
|
| But these side tracks may only be a mile or so long -- what
| happens when two three-mile trains need to pass each other
| using a 1 mile side track? A fun puzzle, but not very fun to
| implement the solution in real time.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| Well it's not really fun nor a puzzle, they simply can't pass
| each other, and the dispatcher will have to look for the next
| suitable sidings.
| eesmith wrote:
| As a puzzle, suppose ABC is going that way -> and and 123
| is going <- that way, each 3 miles long, broken into
| segments A/B/C and 1/2/3, respectively. Let '-' be the
| siding, able to hold a mile-long set of cars.
| ABC ... 123 `-'
|
| Move C into _, uncouple from AB, and back AB to return to
| the mainline. AB ... 123 `C'
|
| Move AB and 123 to the left, past the siding:
| AB123 ... `C'
|
| Uncouple 1, move 23 into the siding to couple to C, and
| return C to the mainline: AB1 ... 23C
| `-'
|
| Uncouple 23 from C, pick up 1, and move back to the right
| side of the siding: AB ... 123.C
| `-'
|
| You've now gotten C past 123. Repeat with B then A, leaving
| the track as 123 ... ABC.
|
| This solution limits the maximum length to 3 miles. A 4
| mile long solution would keep 1 coupled to 23 while moving
| C from the siding back to the mainline.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| - Shorter trains need less engines (or rather, they can be run
| with one or two locomotives). That means when one fails the
| conductor can immediately hear this and halt the train. When a
| mid- or end engine fails, it may escalate to catastrophic
| failure
|
| - long trains have issues with brake apply speed - remember,
| train cars are _dumb_. No electricity, all they have (at least
| here in Europe) is _one_ main brake line where the transmission
| speed is the speed of sound - that means, for a 700m long train
| a drop in pressure at the front is only registered after 2
| seconds at the last carriage.
|
| - long trains are a nightmare to shunt around. Not just because
| you have immense distance between the engine and the conductor
| at the end, but especially if the train has to run over a
| street level crossing. Old shunting yards simply were never
| estimated to run such long trains.
|
| - long trains are a nightmare for residents along the lines for
| the same reason
|
| - long and especially double stacked trains put up a hell of a
| lot more stress on the infrastructure than it was constructed
| for - remember again, this infra is sometimes well over a
| century old!
| advisedwang wrote:
| No: they are more manageable and rely less on crews working
| 12hr shifts regularly so less mistakes happen.
| hristov wrote:
| Longer trains derail much much easier. For example consider the
| "straight lining" phenomenon. Straight lining is a major cause
| for derailments. The straight lining forces are pretty much
| proportional to the weight of the cars behind the car that is
| subject to the straight lining forces.
| btbuildem wrote:
| What is this "straight lining phenomenon"? Google yields
| nothing.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| It should read "stringline".
| m2fkxy wrote:
| This is the "stringline" phenomenon, not "straight line".
| w-j-w wrote:
| Shorter trains are better because they are lighter and easier
| to control. The additional cars don't just make derailment
| worse, it causes the derailments to happen at all.
| joko42 wrote:
| Atlas shrugged, it's happening!
| orangepurple wrote:
| adbachman wrote:
| Because they use public infrastructure and in their passing
| almost exclusively move through spaces we share with them. This
| is a story, in part, about those externalities.
|
| As this author describes, linking extremely dangerous chemical
| cars onto an already overwhelmed structure means it's not _if_
| you will have another mass-casualty event[1], it 's _when_.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1997246/
| orangepurple wrote:
| Your response and the sibling response is much more concise
| and sensical than the rambling article. Thank you.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| As mentioned in the article, any one of these railcars is
| capable of destroying an entire town. You, presumably, may live
| in such a town.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You're getting flagged because it's hard to tell if you're a
| troll or just, ehm.... what's the hacker news euphemism for
| stupid? A startup dev with no equity?
| volkl48 wrote:
| The most concrete thing I read in the article seems to be:
|
| "These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very
| cars themselves."
|
| This seems like something that can be explicitly proven true or
| false, so I would be interested to see whether that claim is true
| on investigation.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| A side-by-side study of American and Chinese railways, perhaps a
| compare-and-contrast investigative journalism article, would make
| for interesting reading. China seems well ahead of the USA here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China
|
| > "China's railways are the busiest in the world. In 2019,
| railways in China delivered 3.660 billion passenger trips,
| generating 1,470.66 billion passenger-kilometres and carried
| 4.389 billion tonnes of freight, generating 3,018 billion cargo
| tonne-kilometres. Freight traffic turnover has increased more
| than fivefold over the period 1980-2013 and passenger traffic
| turnover has increased more than sevenfold over the same period.
| During the five years 2016-2020, China's railway network handled
| 14.9 billion passenger trips, 9 billion of which were completed
| by bullet trains, the remaining 5.9 billion by conventional
| rail."
|
| I'm assuming that in the USA the major rail owners don't want to
| invest in infrastructure upgrades, and longer trains mean lower
| labor costs? The US government doesn't want to raise taxes to pay
| for massive infrastructure projects (FDR New Deal programs are
| not on the horizon for either party), so nobody will pick up the
| required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to
| Third World status?
|
| The only new rail development being backed by the federal
| government looks like oil export trains in Utah... not exactly in
| line with Biden rhetoric on climate and renewable energy.
|
| https://grist.org/politics/an-oil-train-is-set-to-destroy-pr...
| m0llusk wrote:
| There is evidence that Chinese rail operators have deliberately
| hidden accidents and their costs. That makes Chinese rail
| transport extremely difficult to compare to American rail
| transport especially when the specific subject is the
| accumulated cost of accidents.
| jhugo wrote:
| > nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will
| just continue degrading to Third World status?
|
| Laos, the poorest country in South East Asia which I guess
| would qualify as Third World, has a brand new Chinese-built
| high-speed railway. So I guess US railways are already worse
| than "Third World status".
| phgn wrote:
| This reads like it's straight out of Atlas Shrugged.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Except that for Rand, this is utopia.
| javert wrote:
| I would encourage people to read Rand on their own instead of
| going by untrue comments like this one.
| evandale wrote:
| Hah, had to chime in here. Unfortunately everyone is so
| poisoned by untrue things about Rand that people still come
| out at the end of the day thinking she's a libertarian. Or
| complaining that the characters are totally unrealistic
| without realizing the characters are meant to represent
| ideological extremes rather than real people.
| javert wrote:
| The characters are not meant to represent ideological
| extremes. Rand was a novelist primarily and a philosopher
| only secondarily. She got into philosophy because she
| wanted to figure out what humans at their best would look
| like and be like--- _so that_ she could put them into a
| novel.
|
| In Atlas Shrugged, the characters do come across as
| ideological extremes and not real people, _if_ you go
| into the book expecting them to be that way. The book has
| a lot of depth that is missed by people who go into it
| _for_ the philosophy.
|
| Within philosophy, Rand was _least_ concerned about
| politics and the economy, and _most_ concerned about man
| 's mind and emotions and man's relationship to reality
| and to other men. Sure, you can read Atlas as some kind
| of political treatise, and the characters will come
| across as flat, because you are missing the point
| entirely and not picking up on 95% of what's in the book.
|
| In The Fountainhead, the characters don't come across as
| representing ideological extremes regardless of your
| approach to the book, IMHO. Anyway I'd recommend The
| Fountainhead over Atlas for someone new to Rand.
|
| Agreed that Rand is not a libertarian.
| evandale wrote:
| I'll have to admit I've never read all of Atlas Shrugged
| (not even close btw; I made it a bit past Dagny's
| introduction) but I have read Fountainhead twice and a
| most of her non-fiction stuff. I'm not sure if it's my
| age but The Fountainhead got me hooked instantly when I
| read it at 23. I didn't even try to read Atlas Shrugged
| until 10 years later but it felt like such a slog and I
| can't manage to read it.
|
| My view of the characters has evolved into considering
| them ideological extremes because of how common it is for
| people to dismiss her on the basis that the characters do
| things no normal person would do.
|
| So I've just given up on considering the characters
| people you can _be_. Like you said, the characters are
| people at their best. IMO that means the characters are
| meant to be perfect and by accepting the characters are
| perfect people, and that nobody is perfect, I'm ok
| considering the characters are extremes of their
| ideologies their meant to represent. So when the "not
| real people!!" arguments come out it's just "they're not
| supposed to be, they're ideologies and a person can't be
| an ideology".
|
| btw I think we mostly agree and I'm enjoying reading your
| other comments in this thread. I also recommend The
| Fountainhead and then using the Ayn Rand Lexicon or her
| non-fiction to learn more. The nice thing about those is
| there's quotes from Atlas Shrugged and as long as you
| know the characters and overall story you don't need the
| entire book.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| _Atlas Shrugged_ is characteristically dystopian. Reading
| the book will not change this fact:
|
| >The book depicts a dystopian United States in which
| private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome
| laws and regulations. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and
| her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against
| "looters" who want to exploit their productivity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
|
| Prodigious nationalization and planned labor is the entire
| premise for Rand's arguments in the book.
| javert wrote:
| Right. We are not in disagreement.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I have tried, but life is too short for that kind of self-
| flagellation.
| javert wrote:
| So you are a typical Rand nay-sayer in that you haven't
| actually read the book.
|
| Lots of people love her books and don't view reading them
| as self-flaggelation, including myself.
|
| On the other hand, lots of people view reading a basic
| calculus textbook as self-flaggelation, but that doesn't
| mean it's _wrong._
| Finnucane wrote:
| No, but calculus is demonstrably valid and has real-world
| benefit. Rand, on the other hand, is fantasy for
| assholes.
| javert wrote:
| > No, but calculus is demonstrably valid and has real-
| world benefit. Rand, on the other hand, is fantasy for
| assholes.
|
| I've put up with your rude and relatively empty comments
| nicely and patiently for 2 comments now. But calling your
| fellow commenters on this site assholes is crossing a
| line.
|
| _Especially when you admitted you didn 't read the
| book._
|
| Instead of having a graceful intellectual conversation
| you just double down on being a jerk.
|
| There's nothing I have to say to argue against that.
| Because it's obvious to all that when you replace
| discussion with incivility, you have no argument.
|
| I hope you will find a community that is more suitable to
| your style of communication.
|
| Flagged.
| gsibble wrote:
| Not in the slightest.
| alkaloid wrote:
| Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions.
|
| To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking
| with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these
| unions, for whatever that is worth.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| > To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable
|
| ? To someone in the EU, it sounds bizarre that they would NOT
| have a union.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Americans are taught to find them terribly unreasonable by
| default. This teaching used to be done with bullets and
| clubs.
| rexpop wrote:
| How's this lesson been taught since then?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Us Americans have been brainwashed against unions. We have TV
| shows portraying "the lazy union worker". We have an entire
| political party dedicated to talking about how unions raise
| costs, are corrupt, and have burdensome dues. Any shop in the
| US that starts talk about unions will hire union busting PR
| firms and shove anti-union propaganda and fear mongering down
| employee's throats.
|
| Americans hate unions because big business here has been
| effective at demonizing them.
| keybored wrote:
| This is an American board so we're supposed to gasp in
| disbelief and/or be intrigued when someone says that a
| particular kind of union is not inherently evil.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| Could you give examples of any kind? At the end you say "for
| whatever that is worth", but its worthiness is low given there
| are no specifics and I don't know you.
| alkaloid wrote:
| Sure, a couple different ones.
|
| The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off
| the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to
| bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and
| protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at
| fault, but without the union he would have had no
| representation or recourse against the train company at all.
|
| A number of others involve injury: the unions make it
| difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job;
| we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The
| article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles"
| down the track at the end of train.
|
| That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily
| have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my
| own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these
| super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and
| that is some scary stuff.
|
| Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from
| their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get
| a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry
| seems so have some regulation games going on at the
| governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these
| guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without
| union bargaining and playing interference with government.
| [deleted]
| markhahn wrote:
| I've always been puzzled by the rail industry, since in spite of
| having incredible potential for efficiency, it seems stuck in so
| many ways by history.
|
| In this case, the impression I get is that we're seeing the
| result of too much hands-off self-organization. Sure, it's
| capitalism, but the Invisible Hand has never been conceived as
| the _only_ factor driving behavior. Perhaps we should be
| reluctant to involve government, at least in making standards.
| But all industries have endo-regulation - internally decided
| protocols. Does this industry just need encouragement in that
| direction? Something like the ISO /ECMA/IETF bodies that have
| produced so much computer-related standardization?
|
| Three-mile trains sound like a problem - but surely this is an
| empirical issue. I think part of what's missing is a clear, full-
| throated statement about where the industry is going. That it's
| not obsolete (which many people assume), and that it could use
| some further development in basics. Too often, public discussion
| on trains devolves into finger-pointing about why the country has
| no fast commuter routes (and the prodigious amounts of cash that
| have been poured onto that issue...)
|
| Containerization was one of the best things to happen to the rail
| industry. But surely this sort of evolution would benefit from
| stewardship across industry, institutional and governmental
| groups. I'd love to know what the state of the industry is with
| respect to things like tracking, logistical responsiveness,
| smart/iot instrumentation, human interfaces, etc.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Capitalism struggles when there are shared resources like
| geographies. In the UK they just assigned a private rail
| operator to each region, and measured them. Not exactly an
| environment in which capitalism can do well.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| This calls for (not really) malicious compliance. There is a
| phone number at all train crossings (at least in my state) to
| call and let them know if there are issues or if a train made you
| wait too long. The amount of time you can be made to wait at a
| crossing varies by state. Find out that time, and call the number
| posted at the crossing or look it up in advance and complain
| every time your wait violates the law/rules. You will get train
| size reduced. Get everyone you know to call in and enforce the
| rules. I call every time I have to wait longer than the rule.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Idaho law says so long as the train is moving, it can take as
| long as it likes :( [1]
|
| They put up a 15 minute limit, but then put in "Oh, but so long
| as the train is doing 'SOMETHING' then that limit doesn't
| count".
|
| [1]
| https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t...
| thebetatester wrote:
| While I don't disagree with anything mentioned here, it reads a
| little like Atlas Shrugged fanfiction
| mgdev wrote:
| Came to say this. When life imitates art.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Huh. People who find themselves abused and at risk on a job,
| walking away from the job, is now "Atlas Shrugged fanfiction"?
| I'll be sure to notify all the labor unions of their new
| patron.
| brundolf wrote:
| Unionize, unionize, unionize.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| BNSF already has a union, but they can't strike due to a
| federal court's ruling [1], so more creative solutions will be
| required.
|
| [1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/federal-court-rules-
| unions...
| mywittyname wrote:
| Sounds like their "creative solution" is quit.
|
| Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the thirteen
| amendment will stand, and exceptions won't be carved out to
| force these people back to work. I acknowledge that recent
| events may have people questioning that supposition.
| euroderf wrote:
| Cops have always had "the blue flu". Why is there not more
| co-ordinated "sickness" ? Does it invite some kind of RICO
| prosecution ?
| mywittyname wrote:
| This letter/article raises some great points. However, the
| writing style is kind of obtuse. The whole commentary-on-a-
| letter-I-received shtick makes this difficult to follow. It
| doesn't add anything either; you can read only the quoted
| paragraphs and understand the entire message while reading only
| half the article.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if this sort of stuff would already be
| banned in the USA had the Lac-Megantic disaster happened 35km or
| so further south.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
|
| https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Okay but Lac Megantic had nothing to do with "monster trains"
| iirc. Understaffing maybe, but not monster trains.
|
| AFAIK, the Lac Megantic disaster happened like this: A train
| was parked at the top of a hill, the locomotive that was
| powering the pneumatic brake was failing and smoking, and the
| conductor did not manually set enough of the manual back-up
| hand-brakes to keep the train in place if the failing
| locomotive was shut off and brake-pressure was lost, and he
| failed to properly test the hand brakes before leaving for the
| night. The brakes failed and so it went down hill while
| _trying_ to break, which naturally led to sparks, fire,
| derailment, and ultimately explosion.
|
| More manpower or supervision could've prevented the disaster,
| or better maintenance on the locomotive. Or better automation
| on brakes.
|
| But it was not a matter of length, which seems to be the main
| thrust of this article.
| DrBoring wrote:
| Trains derailing regularly is consider acceptable and to be
| expected, infrastructure being tasked with jobs for which it was
| not designed, calls for more resources ignored, policy makers
| prioritizing profit over safe and efficient transportation of
| goods.
|
| This sounds like something from a fictional dystopian novel.
| orwin wrote:
| During the first covid summer, with a friend, we studied two
| interesting points for the future: oil consumption relative to
| GDP (irrelevant here), and what is sometime called demographic
| dividend, or how infrastructure spending during time of growth
| will allow an aging population an easier life in the future.
| Since we thought western countries to be all the same, we studied
| France and its infrastructure cost, then China, then the other
| Brics, plus Turkey and some ex-colonial nation that got f*cked
| off their own demographic dividend by the west.
|
| What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than
| construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and
| improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of
| magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing
| an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty
| year actually was a net positive operation for the French
| government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a
| mistake.
|
| My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political
| leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be
| a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is
| loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your
| infrastructure, or to forget about it.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| There's also a really good Freakanomics on this:
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/
| teekert wrote:
| Ah well, who is John Galt?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Just this guy, you know.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| People are also leaving because the schedules they have to keep
| are unpredictable and horrible. My brother-in-law worked for a
| bit as an engineer, and as a person low on the totem pole, got
| bad assignments (all of the more senior people took the decent
| ones) and often didn't have a schedule until a day or two before
| the train was scheduled to leave. It hurt his social life
| substantially, because he couldn't plan on anything. Then COVID
| hit, and even though the company has hurting for people to run
| the trains, he was furloughed "until further notice" with no
| potential return date. Honestly, the companies are doing this to
| themselves with poor management.
| ericmay wrote:
| The good thing about this particular problem is that it _will_ be
| corrected by the market mechanic regardless of what the
| government does. Companies have to compete for labor now - the
| landscape has changed. Some will not adapt and they 'll go out of
| business. That's not to say that we shouldn't also explore policy
| action, but when workers have the upper hand it's probably best
| to let the market just figure it out, and then come in with
| policy after that.
| tgv wrote:
| > it will be corrected by the market mechanic ... it's probably
| best to let the market just figure it out
|
| What evidence do you have for that? Let me guess: none,
| whatsoever. Just a religious belief in Adam Smith' invisible
| hand.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The letter describes undisturbed market forces increasing this
| problem. Unless something changes, there's no reason to expect
| market equilibrium points to change.
| cheschire wrote:
| Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything,
| this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to
| find other employment.
|
| Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the
| market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the
| policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies
| that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of
| strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a
| regulatory moat further blocking future competition without
| significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the
| issue in the first place.
|
| Instead, an up-front regulatory limitation that prevents short
| term profiteering over long term sustainability seems required.
|
| How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the
| population majority before significant regulatory limitations
| sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free
| market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you
| don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless
| ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources,
| natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc.
| ericmay wrote:
| > Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If
| anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse
| other than to find other employment.
|
| Well yea. I'm not sure what the issue is there. Right now
| almost every company in America is struggling to attract
| workers and they're being forced to raise wages, increase
| benefits, move to 4-day work weeks, etc. Everyone is
| impatient. They want changes _now_ but these things take time
| to evolve. It 's much better for companies and people to
| organize democratically and organically - that's a
| fundamental principle for me, and then if those organizations
| in the long run are trending toward a negative outcome,
| that's when we need government to step in. Right now I see
| trends moving the right way, so I'm reluctant to support
| adding government intervention just to speed things up. It's
| a cost and inefficiency. I support government intervention
| and regulation, but it has to be used as a reluctant tool for
| great good. Environmental regulations, for example, are
| fantastic and I wholly support them. Mandatory 4-day work
| weeks when we are already trending in that direction doesn't
| seem like a good use of regulatory resources.
|
| > Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the
| market mechanics will result in business failure, and then
| the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail
| companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a
| bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again,
| creating a regulatory moat further blocking future
| competition without significantly changing the corporate
| culture that led to the issue in the first place.
|
| The correct thing to do is not to implement policy action
| here and let the businesses fail. That's the missing piece.
| Too Big to Fail is a government failure, not a market
| failure.
|
| > How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of
| the population majority before significant regulatory
| limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand
| the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great
| assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed,
| limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited
| resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc
| etc etc etc.
|
| I really, _really_ can 't stand this type of mentality. It
| makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Poor government
| in, say, America doesn't change the success of capitalism -
| ask Sweden and Denmark, for example. Both countries are
| staunch free-market capitalist economies. You're mistaking
| government failures for market failures. You should be asking
| why your government is not curbing excessive population
| growth, not Pepsi or Google.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm not trying to change your mind so hopefully this comes
| off as supportive and interesting.
|
| Issues can rarely be broken into a clean dichotomy of
| correct and incorrect. Math formulas have correct and
| incorrect answers, but socioeconomic issues lay on a
| foundation of unpredictable and unforeseeable chaos. No
| matter the control mechanism created, it cannot account for
| every variable. And I believe on that we agree. The
| divergence seems to be in what to do once that basis has
| been accepted.
|
| The regulated market approach seems to be to legislate and
| regulate to prevent the known worst-case scenarios. The
| free-market approach seems to be to accept that chaos is
| unpredictable and to build a support structure that
| empowers success. This whole paragraph is necessarily
| reductive, but hopefully it's respectfully so.
|
| But again, I don't claim to understand free market. Quite
| the opposite! I don't know how you could say there's a
| "correct" action to take when my understanding of the free
| market is to just let things play out. Clearly, I'm missing
| something.
|
| I also don't know how one could rightfully compare the
| socioeconomic situation of Sweden and Denmark to the USA
| without blatantly ignoring significant historical events
| that led to the current situation. Sweden is a variable
| pointing to an object in memory that has a wildly different
| behavior pattern than the object behind the USA pointer.
| Just because they implement many of the same interfaces
| does not mean that they implement all of the same
| interfaces. They also use vastly different amounts of
| system resources, and are used very differently by other
| objects.
| viscountchocula wrote:
| The market did figure it out. The status quo is what it settled
| on.
| swader999 wrote:
| Perhaps, but this doesn't give much to the people in Lac-
| Megantic.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-09 23:01 UTC)