Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.)

> 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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.

Your reasons are unconvincing. A rail company that burns out its engineers now has to either deal with a low performing engineer or come up with the costs and delays of retraining another engineer.

And a derailment sounds like a massive cost to a rail company. You need to clear the tracks (which can't be used until you do), probably pay higher insurance costs for the material you are transporting that is lost, etc, etc

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.

It's both a Wall Street problem and incompetent/corrupt government problem.

Why is it a Wall Street problem?

Publicly-held corporations, and earnings.

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.

Do you want wishful thinking or solutions? Wall St has no conscience, it never has and it never will. Let's move past that and build a structure of laws that enforces the ethics we care about.

Sure, of course we need the laws and enforcement agencies.

I can't see what's wrong with calling out people for unethical, shitty and harmful behaviour however.

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

What's so complex about this situation? I see no problem with mandating a maximum train length.

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?

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_Transportation_Safe...

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.

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.

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.

The spaghetti metaphor tells part of the story, though I’ve never seen spaghetti somewhat coupled (constrained) to some kind of path (analogous to a track).

> Longer trains are harder to stop, harder to control, less robust to disturbances.

All other things equal, this seems plausible, but I’m no expert on trains. So if I studied it, I would likely agree in most cases.

However, I do wonder if longer trains, being more massive, do offer some benefits in some cases. Perhaps a disturbance affecting only one car would have less effect because the other cars have more inertia and resist change.

This of course relates the question of the design criteria. Clearly trains should be designed with a cost benefit analysis such that more common disturbances can be handled. What kinds of disturbances can and should be planned for?

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.

Why do you think I’m not commenting in good faith? And what do you exactly mean by that?

> not whatever vague "complexity" you keep going on about

Hopefully you can see (in retrospect, at least) that this language is not going to build goodwill or help understanding.

Some people dismiss complexity theory without giving it a chance.

I respect the mechanical engineering point of view.

> As a mechanical engineer, my professional opinion is that trains should not be derailing, period.

I was also trained as an engineer. Part of that training is understanding probability and risk. There is going to be some risk of derailment. How do you go about deciding the acceptable risk of development? Have you done such a calculation before? What is it based on?

You seem to have one view about what the article is about. It appears to me that your comments are anchored in that one point of view. It also appears that you dismiss other’s comments that don’t align with your view, sometimes even thinking they are in bad faith.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Are you claiming any other company does things differently? Even the greenest of companies have externalities that end up as someone else's problem. Wind farms kill tons of birds, electric cars require lithium mines, etc etc. Was it MBAs who failed to deliver clean water in Flint? I'm not defending destroying the planet or ignoring health and safety concerns -- I'm pointing out that everybody, from financiers to yes, engineers, tends to dismiss the negatives in whatever industry they derive a living from.

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.

Read it again more carefully. They were suggesting, perhaps not directly enough for some, that these long trains are too long, and increase derailments. Because:

- they are harder to start and stop, because size. One mistake.. Shorter trains are easier to control, physically

- Crews are exhausted by these trains because they take too long in infrastructure not built for them (1940s yards), and adding to waiting time, making it much slower to add / move carriages / trucks around, and other logistically disproportional wastes of time

- The trains are too long for communication purposes too. radios don't have the distance. Safety and important messages get missed

...among other things.

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.

This is not an accurate description of any recent MBA curriculum. To learn optimization, yes. Taught to treat workers as "tools", to ignore safety, to skip ethical guidelines in pursuit of profits? Not true. And anyway, so what? Don't you have independent agency? If you disagree with a professor, raise your hand and challenge him or her.

I got my MBA in '08 so I'm sure some has changed since then. We had an ethics class which focused solely on ethical financial reporting (ala Enron). But for sure we were taught to look at the majority of workers as one might look at machines in a factory.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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_.

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.

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.

> Long term investing is de rigeur on Wall Street

On what do you base that? My immediate reaction is that you are being naive.

To my knowledge, there's plenty of funds who place investors money for the long-term into low to moderate risk assets. Pension funds, municipalities, businesses with cash surpluss or individual people who invest for their retirement aren't into the thrills of short-term speculation.

Hardly "de rigeur"

The above-mentioned investors represent the bulk of the money in the market

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s puzzling to me why you would defend these companies.

I suppose you don’t live near one of these lines or have to worry about some terrible accident or even a town-destroying explosion. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disas...)

My uncle worked for one of the large railroads for 32 years. He retired last year, along with every eligible employee in his division. The workplace injury rates in that division had climbed to the point that it didn’t make sense to do the job and risk death or serious injury.

> 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.

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.

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.

Strange that protocol wasn't to move the train to somewhere an ambulance could reach

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.

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.

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!)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

It can't be factually wrong, it was explicitly made up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story), I was just illustrating how market forces can lead to seemingly irrational decisions.

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.

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.

You’re talking about economic profit, not accounting profits. Accounting profits just take the use of capital that can be employed at normal rates of return.

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?

Just guessing, but maybe it allows more throughput in single track territory (that often used to be double track but... efficiency).

Its just "outsiders evil insiders good" where local politics can finger point to external politics as the source of all their woes.

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.

If you carry an egg carton a day from the producer to the market to make 50% profit, you stand to gain much more in aggregate by increasing your throughput to two egg cartons a day, even if this introduces a 10% risk of dropping them both, losing both the profit and investment.

If there is some kind of a moral incentive not to drop eggs, it is not reflected in the profit incentive.

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Let me guess. They did not send the railroad a bill.

For what? Their poor city planning?

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.

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.

Didn't think I'd see another PoCo resident on HN!

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.

> pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves.

I’m not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com