from my familiarity with the writing of past generations and even past civilizations it seems reasonable to conclude that contradictions and hypocrisies are generally understood to exit. I don't think it's just down to the young people.
well one obvious contradiction is if you want peace prepare for war, unfortunately Bart Simpson's paradox doesn't seem to be in the commonly bemoaned list and I don't remember the rest of the paradoxes in that episode.
I mean that's not really what that says. There's multiple polls or multiple different groups ranging from Rich liberals to Hardline conservatives of which it's pretty much split down the middle plus or minus 5%.
And even then, I'd say that this is not really a good marker for like the general sentiment of the entirety of the population. But it's likely somewhat close as things currently stand, but you have to also recognize the current political climate, as well as that there has been no real counter narrative against trump's framing of politics. Democrats have done a horrible job of presenting any counter narrative whatsoever. And on top of that, a lot of people don't realise yet what these things are going to entail. I mean of course rich people want to downsize the government of course and of course they oppose tariffs. It's completely expected that trump supporters are going to be supportive of mass deportation. Boom my projection is that once people see how violent and cruel this is that a lot of them are going to be like. That's not what I wanted that I didn't know was going to be like this yada yada yada and quickly realise how a horrifying and stupid this is.
Whether or not degrowth can be made to work, what this guy is talking about is fantasy. For example:
...That creates some pressure on planetary boundaries. So that means that the Global North needs to consciously degrow because it is over-developing, and has excessive production and consumption.
This will not help. Emissions from the US and Europe now account of about 20% of global emissions and are going down. Emissions from the rest of the world are rising steeply.
> I think it’s [degrowth] in some sense utopian. But believing that capitalism will prosper in the decades to come is utopian too, because we will have more natural disasters, inflation, wars — and these will all accelerate with the climate crisis. So it’s naive to think that our way of life will somehow continue.
He admits several times that this isn't a concrete solution and that the global south will continue to grow but the point remains that we can't really continue what we're doing.
Not sure about this, as the 2 World Wars in 20th century and colonialism were a great source of deaths and disasters. But anyway, even if this is true, the point is that climate crisis probably will change this score, provoking lot more disasters and wars in the future.
Sure, there are all sorts of problems with capitalism. But as Churchill said about democracy, it the worst form of economic organization except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better. They're out doing the US in most important metrics, and they're trending more Socialist (though we'll see what intensifying climate migration and other climate change consequences bring).
I think that it is. Socialism is where the workers own the means of production. I think a democracy that's nationalized significant industries fits that description, e.g. France:
> 1982 François Mitterrand's proposals in the 110 Propositions for France and alliance with Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Socialist Party faction CERES, committed France to an explicitly socialist ‘rupture with capitalism’. Full nationalisation (100%): the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité, the Compagnie Générale de Constructions Téléphoniques, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann, Rhône-Poulenc, Saint-Gobain-Pont-à-Mousson, Thompson-Brandt. Partial nationalisation (51%+): Dassault, Honeywell-Bull, Matra, Roussel-Uclaf, Sacilor, Usinor. Thirty-nine banks, two financial houses, and the remaining 49% of the SNCF were also nationalised, taking the size of the French state to unprecedented levels within a year of Mitterrand's election as president in 1981.
>Socialism is where the workers own the means of production.
Clearly that is not the case in any European country.
>Dassault
Literally family owned.
I don't think you realize just how capitalist European countries really are. State owned corporations are usually quite rare and generally known for being run extremely badly. On the other hand many of the largest corporations are still controlled by the families of their founders.
> Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better
It is not an easy comparison.
They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2, 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe.
They also have the luxury of oil money which American "socialists" are totally against [4].
Edit: All of what I say is objective. Luxurious Western Europe and Nordic "socialism" can't survive without gullible US taxpayers footing the bill over decades.
Arguably the US caused the Russia problem with the aggressive expansion of NATO, and the failure to defend Crimea, so this seems fair. Also the US produces a bonkers amount of oil; dunno what your point is here.
EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?
Anyone who thinks that, say, Denmark is not a mixed economy with a strong bit of capitalism as well as a strong social safety net has never dealt with a kid who wants to buy lots of Lego.
> There are important differences between Denmark and the US though.
On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of the lists on economic power (adjusted for population).
The differences between them are political fine-tuning of the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population with the safety net, or to target those people in different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of economic systems.
When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
> On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words.
The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.
> One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet.
I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production.
So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are.
Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.
I don't know that is a great definition any more. A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong, but rather demonstrates that it's focused on yesterday's arguments.
Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption that large accumulations of capital symbiotically buy and benefit from.
> A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong
But it is wrong. The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country.
Meaningful ownership isn't a legal status, it's the power to do... well... whatever you want with the thing in question.
Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.
> Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption
And they can criticize all of that they want. I'd, frankly, like a less corrupt government along with a more decentralized world. But equating that to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
But capitalism is the only system of economics I'm aware of that doesn't seem to have periodic famines, which I have a vested interest in preventing (I enjoy eating). And until I see serious evidence to the contrary (and several smaller scale experiments), I'm going to keep pushing it.
Comparing absolute numbers isn't fair to China, but look at the percentage of the population that starved in each country during those relative time periods.
I just don't think any of that is related to the economic system. It's pretty clearly the result of China having a lot more subsistence farmers when they industrialized.
But it is, at least their political system. But those are pretty intertwined in China, especially in that period.
They imported Lysenkoism from the soviets (who also had massive famines while implementing it).
Which is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to give control of the means of production to the politicians. There are a lot of things that sound good to a politician, but are a bad idea in practice.
> The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country... Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.
There is plenty of this messiness in the US as well. Which puts the judgement solidly in "I know it when I see it" territory, leaving that definition pretty useless. This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
( considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis. We can then start criticizing things we don't like about their system within the context of capitalism, rather than othering it and pretending we can't have similar problems )
> But equating [corruption] to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
I'm not drawing this connection lazily in general, but rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself. I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons. But rather than stopping at creating the general concept, we get things like the DMCA that privilege large accumulators of capital over distributed individual ownership.
There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
And I haven't even touched upon "private" entities themselves promulgating paradigms that reject the concept of private ownership (eg "trusted" computing, SaaS/platform sharecropping). Those seem solidly in the realm of capitalism trumping/abhorring free markets and freedom in general.
In a different context I can see myself arguing that these things aren't "true" capitalism (the centralized vs distributed distinction I made elsewhere), and if only the government held truer to the concept of private ownership we'd be in a better spot. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves, despite those changes going against other people's private ownership interests. In a way it seems that corrupt legislation and precedents are themselves forms of capital that have been invested in because they facilitate rent streams, at the direct expense of our distributed societal freedom.
The general thrust of my critique is why should we put the philosophical focus on capital itself defaulting to the label of "capitalism"? Why not private property, free markets, the rule of law, personal freedom, etc? It feels like a propaganda push from large centralized capital holders to privilege themselves over those other ideals.
> This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
I'd rather go the other way, and give rule of law credit for capitalism. Probably one of its better effects. Capitalism requires an external neutral enforcer (for varying degrees of neutrality, but generally more neutral is better) to enforce property rights. Otherwise you end up with capital owners that need their own security forces, which morph into de facto states (see medieval feudal lords for an example). This state control of the means of production may work well on a 5-10 year period occasionally, but it's disastrous in the long term.
> considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis
I think you can look at them in that lens post Deng or so (and they've had significantly fewer famines since then). Although with the recent consolidation of power, I'm not sure if the lens of totalitarianism might yield a better light. The union of political, military, and economic power completely within a single institution has certain properties that don't hold true for any single one of those.
> ...rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself.
Might I ask you to elaborate on this? Because the failures I see in China tend to pattern match more towards the patronage networks you see crop up in public systems. But I'll admit to not having a perfect understanding of China, and am willing to hear a case be made.
> I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons.
I'll give you this one. Intellectual property is dumb, as there's no scarcity requiring an efficient distribution of goods. You can argue private ownership of (non-intellectual) property is an evil, but I would argue that it is a necessary one (on the level of taxation). And one we get quite a bit of benefit from.
> There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
So, I mean... let them fail. They've been trying to fail since the 80s or so with the bond crisis back then, and we keep propping them up. I'm gonna be honest, blaming capitalism for the actions of politicians feels like an unfair slight. Propping up ventures well past their point of usefulness because of political necessity is one of the hallmarks of a politically owned system, not a privately owned one. One that has happened over and over (see the soviet army's capture of the USSR's budget, or Lysenkoism).
You could say that the capitalists pressure the politicians, which is fair on some level, but seems like a symptom of a political system corruption. I would argue that as long as you have that, none of your economic systems are going to do what you want, though I will still argue that being as capitalistic as possible will, generally, still perform the best.
> But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves
This is probably the best argument here. Nobody, least of all me, argues that capitalists are supremely ethical. In fact amorality is generally one of the big points of it. There does need to be some sort of external arbiter.
I guess, the general avenue of my counter-argument is that it works well. Sure, it has downsides, but we have billions of lives riding on this. Show me a system that has a decently scaled example of working better.
> why should we put the philosophical focus on capital
Because capital + labor is how you make stuff, and we need a bunch of stuff made. And since the industrial revolution the majority of the advancement has been from the refining of capital rather than throwing more labor at the issue.
If people actually bothered to read the link I posted, it is all about the lazy blaming of a wide variety of problems with specific solutions on a very hand-wavy "capitalism".
I know a fair bit about about the housing shortage for instance, and it's not "capitalism". It's a specific set of rules and institutions that cause the problem.
Sure, but that's the strawmanning I'm talking about. Citing tweets from people trying to be edgy with Marxism and pointing out their intellectual laziness isn't actually addressing the legitimate complaints about late stage capitalism.
To me, the root causes of the housing crisis are zoning and the endless supply of newly created money from the Federal Reserve. Both of these policies are direct results of those who own housing (aka capital owners) politically insisting that the value of their "investments" continually go up. That's capital acting on the meta-system to optimize for capital itself. It's sensible to lay the blame for this on capitalism itself, and doing so doesn't mean I'm looking to somehow blow away the entire system in favor of some completely different -ism.
I'd personally make my own distinction of centralized capitalism versus distributed capitalism. But that's more of a constructive argument of how to specifically reform the system, while still sharing the general criticism.
There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
> When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results.
> There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
> I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
That may be your benchmark but it's not mine. I think permanently pulling 30m people out of poverty in the US would be a multi-trillion dollar multi-decade endeavor on the scale of combating climate change (you need housing reforms, education reforms, health care reforms, criminal justice reforms, etc). That may not qualify for you, but it definitely does for me.
> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
Besides being something of a no-true-scotsman, examples are India, Brazil, and Mexico.
> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism.
In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.
Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense.
That's not private ownership of the means of production.
That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days.
Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing.
The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.
Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.
> The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.
I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies.
And once you get past the Diocletian reforms, the large land owners have enough arms to shield locals from Roman military service. Generally in exchange for service to themselves in agriculture (I believe this is the basis for Europe's system of serfdom).
The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
> I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies
If you can't recognize that the Roman state had a monopoly on violence for the vast majority of its duration I can't help you. Obviously, it got weaker during its terminal decline - that's how state decline works. As soon as the monopoly of violence weakened the Empire started imploding, and indeed when it was healthy the state did enjoy it's monopoly.
The bucellarii, the private armies which were able to rival the Roman state, only became a thing in the late 300s. Rome fell only a hundred years later. For the vast majority of Roman history armies belonged to the State, and any mercenary formations were negligible - the regime you're describing was due to the Empire crumbling and is indeed what led to feudalism.
> The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
Westphalia formalized the modern Eufopean state. But there were a great many similar states before, with a monopoly on violence, a defined political system, since ~4000BC. They just didn't bother formalizing what being a state meant.
> No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.
Technology maybe, and only in the most basic sense, and Rome is the example. In 1100 years of Roman history, not a single basic scientific discovery was made, because it was completely unprofitable. Technology advanced, yes, but soon enough it was limited by the extremely primitive scientific understanding they had, so they barely made any progress for hundreds of years.
> Incentives are surprisingly powerful.
Practical technological is incentivized in every political economy.
A core element of socialism is that all industries and natural resources are state-owned. European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by being so.
Anytime this point comes up, someone on the right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap. You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really socialism so we can't use that as an example in this argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has specifically called them socialist.
Half of the country thinks "anything the government does is socialism" and campaigns to stop it, or get rid of it, or handicaps it, or how it is just evil and control.
Basically to the right: 'government' = 'socialism'.
And they haven't realized yet they are arguing for anarchy.
I thought republicans wanted to strengthen borders?
I do not follow US politics, but I never heard anyone advocating that taxation should be abolished. Seems a bizarre claim. Here in Germany parties publish the platforms they are running on, is there something similar in the US?
Libertarians typically don't get a candidate into the election, so they end up voting Republican.
In the Venn Diagram, Libertarians are a sub-set of Republicans.
Republican views are also administration dependent.
If there is a Democratic President then Republicans think government is evil, socialist and place a high value on reducing the debt, reducing the size of government.
But if a Republican is president, then debt no longer matters, increasing spending on defense, walls, and having a 'strong government of law and order' is the priority. So debt is ok, and the bigger the gov the better. It's a bit schizophrenic.
You asked? So it was relevant as an answer to the question.
But, agree, not relevant to the original story.
Just a little.
The original story was about 'elites'. In the US, any conversation on that subject gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'elite's are, and if they are Socialist. One side thinks the 'elite's are Socialist, the other side think the 'elite's are corporate CEO's.
This thread digressed to the discussion of Socialism (not the academic definition), and I was just following along with that tangent.
Minor quibble. The industries generally need to only be "socially-owned" rather than state-owned. Though I will admit that state-ownership is the most common in practice.
More of an academic point though, as Europe, as a whole, is still basically completely capitalist under this definition as well.
Edit: An example of a socially-owned company that is not state-owned would be an employee owned company.
> - European social democracies are trending more socialist all the time
Eh? Which ones? As a European this is very much news to be; not much seizing of the means of production going on. If anything, some divesting of the means of production; heavily regulated privatisation of state energy, transport etc monopolies has been going on all over Western Europe for a while.
I realise that in the US, the colloquial definition of ‘socialist’ these days is more or less “not actively going around kicking poor people”, but the idea that Europe is becoming more socialist by any reasonable definition is a bit out there.
There's a recent rightward shift for sure, but long term benefits are increasing, unions are gaining power, and you're seeing people use democracy to force industry to adopt green policies. This is the power dynamic described by socialism: people control companies, not the other way around.
This is a ranking of economic freedom which strongly aligns with capitalism. The U.S. ranks 25th behind European countries like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Iceland, etc.
I mean, fuck Churchill and that quote, constantly abused to protect a horrible system by people who are too deep in it to even conceive an alternative.
There are several fundamental differences between a democracy in a nation and one at a workplace:
- Someone owns the workplace. No citizen owns the nation.
- If you don't like a workplace, you can switch to another, or start your own. You mostly can't do that with a nation.
- There's nothing preventing people from starting workplaces with a "democratic model" (and there are a few around). They just don't seem to work very well.
Ironically it was once much easier to change nations as well. Or, under some limited circumstances to even start your own. Hard borders are a relatively new thing taking into account the breadth of human history.
Just wanted to add to the many voices who felt they got way more than the $25 they paid for the content on the site. Wonderful videos, and your passion for cars got me to working on my own car, where I've made several changes since.
Yes, they actually run at near main-line speeds in the UK (60-80mph). Riding one of those at that speed (particularly at night) must be an awesome experience.
It’s a bit pedantic, but on a fair chunk of the main lines trains can run at 125mph, so the 75mph limit for steam locomotives (barring Tornado, which can run at 90) isn’t that close. Various “box on wheels” trains like variants of the Turbostar and Desiro can easily outpace them, let alone real intercity trains.
(Cue nostalgia of the heyday of steam, before all these limits where every steam express definitely managed to hit a ton at some point).
Does this matter? There are up and down slow lines and passing loops to accommodate slower trains such as freight and preservation excursions on both the WCML and ECML. Also once you're into Scotland there's very little in the way of 125mph operations. The joy of a steam or historic diesel excursion isn't the speed, it's the being there and enjoying the nostalgia of olde world locomotion and carriages.
Also if you're paying 150-300 GBP for these outings you want the experience to last, not just four hours up the ECML at 125mph and then you're done. I kinda feel people miss the point of this as a thing.
The problem with the speed isn't for the passengers on-board—it's for the rest of the railway.
It's one thing to deal with the operational complexity of relatively slow services when they're freight—which provide a clear commercial and economic benefit—but it's another when it's essentially a luxury service (and I'm well aware plenty of the services aren't really luxurious: but they're certainly too expensive for many, which makes them a luxury).
Their acceleration is relatively poor even compared with many freight services, and when running up the northern ends of the WCML/ECML (both of which are two track railways) the challenges of timetabling _any_ slower services during the day are real.
Well these tour operators do pay for track access and pathing just like other TOC's and the rest of the railway will just need to get on with it.
Also when it comes to rail tours such as this there's at most two tours a day operating and they're very seasonal, and maybe running four or five times a year each. So a couple of these trains a day across the whole network isn't exactly impacting the network that much.
I remember the HST 125 as it was introduced. Go back to 1980. Two small boys (nine and 10) are stood on the east bound GWR platform at Newton Abbot in Devon, waiting for the Paddington train from Penzance. Will we get a sleek futuristic looking 125 or the usual boring diesel loco?
The rails made a clikkety click/clakkety clack or a CAtic/CAtac sound and more besides which sometimes enabled you to know where you were by the sound. You could also estimate speed with your eyes shut. [I could go on ...]
Anyway. 125mph is shit for something that runs on rails. There are quite a few examples of 180mph+ railway systems.
> I remember the HST 125 as it was introduced. Go back to 1980. Two small boys (nine and 10) are stood on the east bound GWR platform at Newton Abbot in Devon, waiting for the Paddington train from Penzance. Will we get a sleek futuristic looking 125 or the usual boring diesel loco?
Yes I know it was but it looked like it ran on rocket fuel. It must have had better exhaust vents too because when the old blunt yellow noses turned up they absolutely stank. The 125 smelled quite a bit too but only as being present rather than stuffing black soot up your nose. I was very young then and I would have been repulsed by anything worse.
Fast forward to today and GWR is a customer and the modern version of the 125 (I forget the Class number - I'm just IT) is still running. I've seen them in bits in Laira (Plymuff) and St Phil's Marsh in Bris'l. The power plant is a bit of a whopper. In the sheds there are dispensers for ear plugs, regularly spaced for quick access. You should try to keep a few in a pocket anyway - ideally all of them! They are quite handy when a technician fires up the motor and decides to run it at max chat.
Back in the day I saw the APT doing trial runs. Nowadays I can take a Pendolino ...
Even at 75mph this stuff is all unsafe and wouldn't be legal if it wasn't essentially a museum on wheels.
A modern multiple-unit is way stronger and built from things which are designed to bend and then once they exceed maximum load, tear into non-sharp pieces, which means when (not if) something goes badly wrong it's much more survivable for the occupants. At 5mph you aren't too bothered, but older coaches would deconstruct into sharp pieces in even a 50mph collision so the accident ends up more lethal than it would be if you weren't inside a vehicle at all.
Years back a cement mixer truck fell off a bridge onto a moving train. It was a modern design, and so even though obviously such a truck is incredibly heavy it just dented the train and the person directly below the impact inside the train survived (with some injuries). With the older carriages used on a heritage railway it would have demolished the entire carriage and turned everybody inside it into paste, the emergency response would have been recovering remains, not rescuing one guy with head injuries and a bunch of scared but otherwise unharmed passengers.
I have done this as a child with my grandparents, but I'm not sure there's that much difference from an old/worn (less smooth) commuter train at a similar speed.
For a child, I think a better experience is visiting a larger preserved railway. I liked visiting the locomotive works at Loughborough (Great Central) since age 8 or so I was shorter than the largest wheels of most locomotives. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but back then we could walk close enough to risk getting grease on our clothes. From Google review photos it looks like it.
(From the article, I'm still shorter! They're over 2m in diameter.)
It's very atmospheric, an absolute joy. But the best part has to be turning up at Victoria in the middle of the evening rush in an 80 year old steam train. The looks on people's faces alone are worth the price :)
This may sound crude, but I think is pretty close to reality. This is Indian activists trying to muscle in on the massive DEI industry in the US, from which they are currently excluded.
There is zero evidence that caste is a causal factor in the US, in the sense that those of lower castes can have signigicant discrimination imposed on them by upper castes. Of course there will be many casteist Indians in the US. There are many in India, so moving to the US will not make their numbers zero. But their ability to impose casteist discrimination in the US is pretty close to zero.
I moved to the US 40 years ago, have dozens of Indian friends, but have never heard of even a single significant case. There is a grand total of one case (the Cisco one) in court, and that's still to be decided.
> There is zero evidence that caste is a causal factor in the US ... There is a grand total of one case (the Cisco one) in court, and that's still to be decided.
The plaintiff in that case is presumably putting forward evidence, so "zero evidence" is putting this rather strongly. You say that you've never witnessed it, but I've never witnessed overt racial discrimination and I don't try to claim that therefore such things don't happen.
Here's what I see every time this topic comes up: I read plenty of horror stories from victims and from non-Indian witnesses, and plenty of fervent denials from admittedly-upper-caste Indian Americans. Could there be some massive astroturfing campaign propping up false anecdotes? It's conceivable. But a much simpler explanation is that there are lots of lower-caste people who are discriminated against and lots of upper-caste people who are blind to it or won't admit they perpetrate it.
The point was that there was just the one legal case, and even that isn't decided. Before creating a law to fight an evil, shouldn't there be some examples of the evil in operation?
That's my point: there's plenty of evidence (at least one ongoing court case and lots of personal anecdotes), and there are plenty of people denying that the evidence is real (lots of personal anecdotes). Governments have to weigh the evidence for and against and make a decision.
In general, when weighing evidence, negative evidence cannot be given the same weight as positive evidence.
For example, I have never seen an elephant in the wild, but it would be a very foolish process that takes my testimony as proof that elephants are extinct in the wild without at least listening to the people who claim to have seen elephants in the wild. A more likely explanation for my negative evidence is that I have never been in an elephant's natural habitat.
In the same way, if there are lots of voices saying that caste discrimination happens and lots saying that it doesn't, it would be irrational to listen to the negative evidence to the exclusion of the positive evidence.
This is exactly the kind of comment that leaves me more persuaded that the accusations are true. A single-purpose throwaway account appears and rambles for a while about how privilege is all subjective anyway, tries to distract from the question by crying "imperialism!", and throws out vague allegations about an anti-Hindu conspiracy.
If this is the best defense that can be mustered, Seattle is on the right track.
Caste discrimination in the US manifests more as social "discrimination", where people from a caste lean towards others from the same caste than others due to perceived brotherhood. I feel like this especially manifests in groups where there are already a large number of Indians, such that being Indian itself isn't enough brotherhood. Eg, when choosing between two equally qualified Indians, choosing the person from the same caste (which is slightly ironic since a similar idea applies to diversity initiatives).
As another commenter said, it's a sort of "fractal" discrimination.
