Comment by potato3732842
1 day ago
>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world.
When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for.
Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers.
>The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.
> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
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