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It seems like it's impossible for anyone to develop any new technology for trains without online commenters screeching "THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN". It seem

by woah 1y ago

It seems like it's impossible for anyone to develop any new technology for trains without online commenters screeching "THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN". It seems to generally be clustered with a sort of leftish, anti-AI, maybe anti-tech worldview. Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.

general1465 1y ago
Electrification of a rail is a thing since 1879 and 1881 in regular service. Techbros just figured out how to grasp technology of 19th century. A wire above a rail...
tsimionescu 1y ago
It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.
- woah 1y ago
  > Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    The key point here is improving. For example, the doodad the BBC is marketing here is clearly not an improvement, is it? It's much more costly than traditional electrical rail (solar panels are much more expensive to maintain than a pole with a wire), it requires massive new infrastructure (the railway company would have to create a whole solar energy management division), and the only benefit is that it allows the railway company to avoid dealing with the regular electrical grid that powers everything else - for no clear reason.

by woah 1y ago

general1465 1y ago

Electrification of a rail is a thing since 1879 and 1881 in regular service. Techbros just figured out how to grasp technology of 19th century. A wire above a rail...

tsimionescu 1y ago

It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.

woah 1y ago
> Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  The key point here is improving. For example, the doodad the BBC is marketing here is clearly not an improvement, is it? It's much more costly than traditional electrical rail (solar panels are much more expensive to maintain than a pole with a wire), it requires massive new infrastructure (the railway company would have to create a whole solar energy management division), and the only benefit is that it allows the railway company to avoid dealing with the regular electrical grid that powers everything else - for no clear reason.