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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 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.

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