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Comment by kg | Hacker News Reader

If screwing up gets me killed I want the person doing that job to be paid well and I want them to be held up to a high performance standard. I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better.

Or if we replace that well-compensated train conductor with automation I sure hope it's high quality stuff and not lowest-bidder slop.

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> I don't see how cutting pay for conductors is going to make anyone's lives better

It's going to make passengers' lives better by making their train rides more affordable, allowing them to improve their lives by leveraging those funds.

Or, it's going to make shareholders' lives better by increasing their profits.

Either way, some people will benefit from it. The question is -- what is the real, practical tradeoff, and is the tradeoff worth it to the participants in the system.

Money, as a limited resource, means that money not spent on the conductor's wages can be spent elsewhere. In this hypothetical, fully automated trains can be run more frequently, so the money not spent on conductor wages means that the train comes every 5 minutes instead of every 15, and more stations.

It's going to make shareholder's lives better. And you better believe we're replacing conductors with lowest-bidder slop, that's the whole point. That's shareholder capitalism's playbook, it hasn't changed for the last 50 years.

What, you don't want to save a few bucks on a train ticket? Come on, you'll love it!

Automated trains have been around for nearly 40 years.

I want automate trains because they would make running trains more often possible

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