from Hacker News

The United States needs to learn how to learn

by ruddct on 4/28/21, 10:23 PM with 124 comments

• by sokoloff on 4/29/21, 1:13 AM

  I’m not convinced that bringing in European managers will solve the distances between cities, the fact that the rails and right-of-ways are almost entirely privately owned, and the fact that Americans are generally comfortable with an auto and airplane model of transportation.

  I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I also don’t see a reasonable path that is “we need better managers” but instead “we either need to pour gigantic piles of money into buying railroads, which is either an eminent domain taking or a massive giveaway to freight companies who own the rails now, only to find that no one wants to spend every bit of a whole damn day getting from Boston to Las Vegas and so will fly anyway.”

• by nicklecompte on 4/29/21, 1:22 AM

  I don’t necessarily disagree with the gist of this post but there was one minor comment I found odd. It might just be my ignorance (I am not a transit person and have always been bad at algebraic geometry):

  > Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans. But then middle management will still think it knows better and refuse to learn what a tropical algebra is or how it is significant for rail schedule planning.

  Are transit middle-managers in Europe really applying tropical algebra to rail problems? My understanding is that the mathematical field of tropical algebra didn’t really exist until the 80s, and the research application to control theory is a 2010-era development. It strikes me as very strange to expect anyone who isn’t a PhD in math or operations research to even understand the algebraic geometry required, let alone apply it to a real problem.

  But I suppose 30 years ago people would have said the same thing about linear programming. So maybe I am behind the times.

• by tims33 on 4/29/21, 1:38 AM

  There is no doubt that America needs to get much better at rail and other mass transit and that there is a lot to be learned from the rest of the world. The challenge is that America is not Europe in many ways, but particularly in geography. And yet there is a certain condescension that America has to do it like Europe. That is a message that will never be well received delivered in that way.

• by TheMagicHorsey on 4/29/21, 3:03 AM

  European and Asian public transport planning can't be imported to America without the urban zoning needed to support the necessary density to make such networks economically viable.

  Its not viable to just import EU and Asian transportation planning here ... it doesn't work because we lack density.

  I would be happy enough to fund the transport networks before the density exists, as long as the zoning allows density, as the density would follow as a natural course once the transportation links are established. But that can't happen if the local regulations forbid density.

  So this author is completely clueless.

  Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves. The public planners have no choice but to figure out how to do microtransport, because we lack the density.

  Anyone who doesn't understand this is completely clueless, and demonizing Uber is popular, but ultimately idiotic.

  I'm a big fan of trains and I think Uber is a dead end evolution. But America needs to identify the right cause of our problems. Its not Uber.

• by juegos on 4/29/21, 1:35 AM

  I recall as a kid being told our European counterpart's curricula focused on teaching people how to "learn" -- critical thinking etc. from an early age, and remember thinking how that made sense, and wish I was taught that as a kid. I think the root of this problem stems from the structure of us American's educational system.

• by throwawaysea on 4/29/21, 2:47 AM

  > This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies.

  Why is the same logic not leveled against other institutions, like teacher's unions? Their tenure-based worker protections, unwillingness to be measured on performance, and other negative behavior is exactly what deserves a full workplace replacement. American K-12 schools are funded exorbitantly but the quality of education is absolutely terrible.

• by giantg2 on 4/29/21, 1:58 AM

  The thing that's missing is that there's no incentive to learn. Will doing a better job make for better pay? Will people actually believe in and use an improved system? Will the government adequately fund the system?

  At least the other systems have a history of performance, leading to worker pride. Like just about everything else in the US, the Amtrak workers are basically corporate drones who have been stripped of their craftsman pride.

• by m0llusk on 4/29/21, 3:18 AM

  Speaking of learning from other countries, the US should learn from Europe that high speed rail tends to replace cheap rail which serves wealthy customers while locking out others. The current plan to move forward with rail should tap into experience while avoiding groupthink.

• by BurningFrog on 4/29/21, 2:37 AM

  Americans know how to learn. They're in general great at it!

  Federal US agencies OTOH, only know how to keep existing. They're also very good at that.

• by petermcneeley on 4/29/21, 1:46 AM

  This is a modest proposal to replace some Americans (senior managers of Amtrack) with other better future Americans from europe. Then we have a stronger modest proposal "This percolates down to planners and line workers, and I don’t think Americans are ready for a conversation about full workforce replacement at underperforming agencies."

  What is missing is the proposal to replace All Americans with better future Americans. Perhaps thats the next post.

• by danschumann on 4/29/21, 2:35 AM

  Technology is toolmaking

• by cletus on 4/29/21, 2:35 AM

  It's actually worse than that: it's not that the US doesn't know how to learn (from others), it's the US increasingly takes pride in its own ignorance. I remember a friend years ago telling about the rise of anti-intellectualism in the US. I said he was wrong. Boy was I way off.

  Stephen Colbert in 2005 was disturbingly prescient with this [1].

  As for anything regarding public transit (intercity or intracity) in the US, sadly I think it's pretty much a lost cause. People just don't want it. They want their 1-2 acre lots within a city (which I still find crazy) and their cars.

  The US is more than twice the land area of the EU. The EU has people concentrated in fewer cities (just look at how many airports and flights there are between the two). Barring some historical exceptions in the Northeast, American cities are generally much less dense. All these factors work against public transit. It's not impossible but it's harder.

  As for Amtrak... it's pretty much a victim of a fairly disastrous nationalization. Amtrak shares the lines with freight that can often delay it. Just having the track and the rights-of-way doesn't mean it's easy or cheap to upgrade or replace it for high-speed rail. There's lots of opposition to this for of public infrastructure spending. And so on.

  [1]: https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-...

• by andrewmcwatters on 4/29/21, 2:01 AM

  Europeans just don't know how to make money. We should ship some of our best Americans to Europe, replace their senior leadership and show them how to learn, and then migrate their capital to the United States, where it rightfully belongs.

• by dumpsterdiver on 4/29/21, 2:18 AM

  Dense and incompetent writing can only fool so many people. Some will be bullied by incomprehensible prose, but others will call you out on your complete lack of form. I call bad form. Speak clearly, and stop with the bullshit.