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sidereal

This actually comes from railroad workers talking in comments on a fb group. I just made the meme for them.

They were like "those trolley memes are stupid, we have to do this in our railyard like once a week when some intermodal runs loose."

10 comments
Chris Real

@sidereal

It's a really dramatic demonstration of the fallacy of the zero-sum game.

I wish David Graeber was still alive to read it. He loved real-life analogies like this.

mym

@sidereal why do they have so many people tied to the tracks in the railyards!

haifisch

@sidereal wtf what railway is this, first time I’ve heard of anyone doing this 💀 “kicking cars” is pretty metal but forcing them fucking derail because cars “run loose” is actual insanity. brothers this is why we have switcher locomotives. this shouldn’t even happen when a line is sitting without a locomotive. not unless they’ve let the car air reservoirs bleed out, which does happen after some time - and is why they’re supposed to set handbrakes on some of the cars.

OpenDNA⚙️

@haifisch @sidereal I'm guessing "intermodal" contains a lot of baggage. In an industry notorious for poor maintenance and under-investment, things with wheels suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons.

sabik

@opendna @haifisch @sidereal
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
--John Godfrey Saxe(?)

haifisch

@opendna @sidereal yea pretty much lots of cargo moving around, intermodal yards are usually where boxes get loaded onto cars, eventually get pulled to a shunting yard to get organized by destination in a long train. never heard great things about management from any line tbh, once described as the “Eye of Sauron”. Railroaders do have a lot of rules and the saying “every rule is written in blood.” most of the time the rule helps avoid fatal injuries while on the job.

PaulDavisTheFirst

@opendna @haifisch @sidereal this is your public service announcement that there is no, and never has been any, Tragedy of the Commons. Even Garrett Hardin walked back the concept. Commons were always managed. What there has been and continues to be is greed and selfishness that attempts to abuse the existing regulatory and mgmt structures.

OpenDNA⚙️

@PaulDavisTheFirst @haifisch @sidereal You're not wrong, historically.

...but the idea creates the behavior. MBAs are not like normal people. They act as if Econ models and parables are morally-imperative laws of nature.

DELETED

@sidereal
The fact they don't have derailers at the end of those tracks is not a good sign as to the state of those train yards.

Nartagnan ⏚

@sidereal

In France, their are securities forbidding to slip the switch when the tramway is not entirely gone.

Sorry for these railroad workers to have to work with an old infrastructure.

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