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Comment by sksksk | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it's a dire , expensive mess. But it doesn't seem like low hanging fruit at all...

Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve.

And "short-term cost, long-term benefit" is kryptonite to the average politician. "We get the blame, the next guy takes the credit"

Which is why the mess of American healthcare won't be fixed anytime soon.

One of the reasons China gets things done.

china has elections you know

Sure, "elections", that's why Xi has been president for how many years already? I lost count

When the key criteria for leadership selection is alignment with a specific ideology, and that ideology is defined by a specific person, it's almost tautological that said person will end up in charge for as long as they'd like to be.

Mao Zedong: 1943 - 1976 (various titles?). He was sidelined around 1959 and staged a successful coup, retaking actual power, in 1966.

Hua Guofeng: 1976 - 1981

Hu Yaobang: 1981 - 1987

Zhao Ziyang: 1987 - 1989. Removed from office for reasons related to the Tiananmen protests.

Jiang Zemin: 1989 - 2002

Hu Jintao: 2002 - 2012

Xi Jinping: 2012 - present

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_of_the_Chinese_Communis... )

So far he's in third place for length of service.

Any elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

It's not the same, and as a consequence of being one-party; means (like the parent suggests) they can be more long term focused, which seems to be working.

There's still blame, but it is attached to people, not "the party" (at least not in terms of action taken to enforce blame).

prefer this to allowing conservatives to have any power. why should guys doing the heil hitler salute get a turn at the wheel

There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.

Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.

Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.

That's why we focus on the important stuff like spending several million to call lines suffragette and lionness.

> Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve

Only if you do it properly.

I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.

Paying train workers what they are demanding is expensive

British train drivers are the best paid in Europe by a staggering amount.

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/12/23/train-strikes-the...

And the average UK citizen seems to have a huge problem with that, but seems to be completely happy with private train company executives getting paid obscene amounts and train companies paying out huge dividends when the services are so bad.

Why do people resent train drivers getting paid well?

Because the media tells them to.

When train workers demanded inflationary pay maintenance the highest train driver pay was splashed all over the media in an attempt to get workers to hate one another and ignore the execs and shareholders walking off with all the money.

There shouldn't be any money to walk off with whilst services are more expensive and less good than most other countries.

Creating a market for a natural monopoly like train travel should always include simulated competition against other remote geographies (ie. France), and financial penalties for losing that competition.

This is 2021 figures. Wondering how this would change for cost of living and especially rent/housing inflation.

Of course, train drivers aren't the only rail workers, and pay isn't the only reason for strikes.

You don't understand how this works, do you? By paying workers because of strikes, you are increasing the number of strikes.

Any evidence for that, or is this entirely opinion?

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