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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

Totally. Art and meaning doesn't come from "efficiency". And try stressing a totally "efficient" system - one which has no contingency. Take the uk school system, NHS or social care right now. These are systems that an "austerity" government has tried to make "efficient" by cutting down to bare bones. Add in a stressor like a pandemic? Things break very quickly. Same with individual mental health. We're here for a limited time. Enjoy it rather than optimising all the time. That doesn't mean sit on the sofa, it just means have balance.

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Interestingly these cuts always affect social things that exist for the benefit of all: healthcare, education, environmental protection, art.

Meanwhile we truck our goods around while trains would be much more efficient. Trucks are only cheap because we subsidise them through the roads they are using. Few people are aware that road wear increases to the fourth (!) power with axle weight. That means cars or bicycles are even ignored in the calculation because they do so little damage, while trucks are responsible for nearly all of it. But they don't pay for nearly all of it – we do.

In the meantime trains have to maintain their own rail system.

That's a weird area to to want to de-socialise costs! If trucking costs go up to cover wear, urban end-users probably won't notice much cost difference (bit of change to last-mile infrastructure at most) while remote communities would be bled dry then cutoff (where the "last-mile" location is impractical for tracks). And probably the same fate for small and medium agricultural concerns who won't necessarily be able to privately link up to the network.

How comes 100yr ago it was practical to build narrow gauge everywhere (in the mountains nevertheless - in hungarian carpathians, to haul lumber and ore, but once built it was used for passengers too) but now suddenly it's a problem?

Similarly with electricity - long time ago it was possible to electrify remote communities but now pulling fiber there is such a problem that we view satellites as better alternative?

The physical and public safety requirements on railroad tracks demands different parameters. Also, there was significant community and government buy-in for lack of alternative. Cost-of-living adjusted, those tracks you mention would cost astronomical sums by todays standards.

> Art and meaning doesn't come from "efficiency".

Indeed. Efficiency for what purpose and by what metric? We all know that once a metric is applied things not covered by the metric get squeezed out.

Someone on here used the phrase "self-Taylorism" to cover this kind of activity, which I think is very apt. Taylorism was the beginning of manufacturing productivity research, but we've moved on from there.

It's also reminding me of the failures of high modernism and Corbusier's "the house is a machine for living"; the result of which was houses that were neat but inhospitable and inevitably customised in "inefficient" ways by those that actually lived in them to make them livable.

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