Comment by ffsm8
1 day ago
You're actually misrepresenting it with that imo.
DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
DB‘s quality decline started when this move to privatization happened. They didn’t put money into maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There’s an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed up till that’s resolved.
I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)
That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope).
losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses.
But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things will improve..
" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . " That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied. Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.
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