The only thing that “needs robber barons” is an empty guillotine.
[“Angel” by Sarah McLaughlin starts playing in the background]
[Fade in: B-Roll of sad, emaciated, juvenile guillotines doing chores in a squalid shanty town.]
Narrator: [Voiceover] For less than one dollar per day, you could help feed a starving guillotine like Pierre, or Jacques or Gabriel. They haven’t done anything wrong except be born into a community without access to the nourishing blood of the ultra wealthy that they so desperately need. So please, call today. You’ll be glad you did.
The private-public partnership that was responsible for building the US’s original railroads also depended on work camps / slave labor on stolen land.
I wonder how they made them so cheaply?!
Plenty of work to be done, but this country doesn’t actually want to pay labor. Money goes to speculation, not work.
Billionaires: “So you’re saying we either have to give up gambling with other people’s money or labor laws? Hmmm…So, uh, how many slaves you need?”
“Maybe we need industrial tech bros telling us how to live so we can get one progressive change?”
“Okay, I just got this great new idea. You know how freight by truck is so much more expensive than by ship? I think I figured out a way to get the costs down and apply it not just to freight, but transit too. I just saw a YouTube video on physics. We need to reduce the rolling resistance, for starters. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking hard, smooth wheels would slide all over a road of the same material. However, I took one of my private jets to lunch yesterday and took a walk on the Via Appia Antica. It has these cool little grooves carved by centuries of wagon use. They would even help guide the carts! Now you might say that still leaves the problem of having a big, expensive road. I got you covered. We take the inverse of that arrangement. Instead of recessed, curved groves and flat wheels, we use raised, flat strips (or rails, if you will); curved, convex wheels and ditch the rest of the road entirely. We’ll save billions on this road made of rails and that’s just a start! What’s the most expensive part of the truck? The tractor, that’s right! So now that our rolling resistance is down by a lot we can pull more trailers. I call them “Carry-All Retention Sytems” or “CARS” for short. Also, the harder surfaces means we can use bigger, more powerful engines. We could have a tractor trailer arrangement longer than several trucks, kinda like how a bridal train is sometimes longer than the dress itself.”
“Do you hear yourself? Rail, Road, cars, train.”
“Uh, oh. Did I just invent trains again?”
“Yeah, it’s like the third time you’ve done it. Unless you can come up with something that’ll add value to trains, I think we’d better move on.”
“Umm…AI? We put an AI on the trains, in the trains or maybe in the control centers?”
“Ugh, goddammit! I’ll assemble the investors.”
Yeah, definitely need to run some more high speed rail through the middle of towns that don’t have the safety guards to handle it.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article308679915.html
Edit for the people who still think Brightline is fine:
Do you even know how many people are killed by cars each year? This is nothing compared to that. Most cases cited here are because people acted completely recklessly. The same can’t be said about many car accidents.
Do you know how many people were killed in car crashes before seat belts were introduced? Before crash testing was done?
Saying you shouldn’t bother to make the highest death rate percentage rail operator be more safe because people will still find another way to die…
Romero saw a slow-moving freight train and drove around the gates to try to beat it. A police report said Romero was ‘oblivious’ to the fact that a much faster Brightline train was approaching from the other direction.
I wouldn’t say a lack of safety guards nor the train itself is to blame in this instance.
I was going to say, of all places, Florida has got some of the worst geography and city planning for this type of project.
