it can't happen, they only attack civilians in countries that have weapons of mass destruction or have a evil economic system of socialized healthcare and labor market
They also don't like states that threaten business by turning workers into a commodity that you have to compensate each month ; Spain sunk the Maine ; and they had manifest destiny given from God to get rid of natives
It's not simple with the "clock-face scheduling" system which is used which times the trains to all meet at the big nodes (Zürich, Bern, Basel) so connections work. To achieve this trains are supposed to fit into 30/60/120 minute beats which synchronise the entire system. See [1,2] for how this works.
Also many of the most important parts of the system are at capacity. Bigger trains can help but a lot of these gains have already been realised in the crowded areas. The current hope is digitalising signaling to allow density to be increased but that's not simple/cheap even if it's cheaper than working on the lines themselves.
I'm not saying this is wrong, that makes a lot of sense. But on the other hand why have I never heard of other, much more dense countries facing this problem? I just never hear of Japan, China, Germany, Taiwan, etc seeing overcrowded trains and raise their hands saying "there can't possibly be a solution!"
Germany's passenger rail is notoriously failing. China is big and empty compared to Switzerland so there's lots of room to build. Japan's population is stagnant, and so train use might be stagnant too. (No idea about Taiwan.)
What does it have to do with they way they have to manage way higher population density? Singapore is 2/3 Swiss population on 1/3 of the Canton of Vaud.. They are 18 Chinese cities with a population over 10 million.
It's not impossible, but Switzerland's geography means tunneling is involved in adding capacity which makes it very expensive. Also the beautiful synchronisation of a country-wide integrated timetable where you can reliably get between any two places in the country with connections that always make sense is a point of national pride.
Japan, Taiwan and China all added dedicated infrastructure which took a long time and cost a fortune (vs the shared tracks currently used for intercity/regional/European freight). Tokyo accepts famously absurd levels of overcrowding during peak hours. Deutsche Bahn in Germany is widely thought of a joke due to chronic underinvestment meaning on-time trains are surprising.
That said, these technical concerns have nothing to do with the 10 million proposal. It's worth asking why a camp that spent decades opposing sustainability legislation has suddenly discovered the word now that it can be pointed at immigration.
I have visited India, and if you ever travel on a train in Mumbai, you will understand what overpopulation really means. Your body will be pressed against other people’s bodies. To get on the train, you have to learn how to do gymnastics. They are absolutely not managing crowd better.
Nonsense. Rail 2035 is already planning on moving to 15min frequency. That increases capacity and makes connectivity better. 30 minute beats are not a law of nature. That's already planned for on the most important lines and could be done for more lines as well. Clearly you have not even spent 5min researching Swiss rail policy. Switzerland literally planning rail policy 20+ years ahead of time.
Rail 2050 plan has many improvements beyond that, and is still in discussion, and we could have many more if politicians were not afraid of large projects. And if parties like SVP would endlessly prevent good projects and instead want more money spend on idiotic highway expansions.
We literally just voted on blocking highway expansion only for the SVP to say 'sure we voted but all these projects should go ahead anyway'. Fucking insane.
They are blaming immigration for the problems their policy causes.
I could continue and give you a long list of bad choices they make that literally make everything worse, only for them to blame immigration. All the buses are full, but we wont allow any bus lanes to exist because car drivers need priority. City is full of cars but can't have people on bikes and use less space because that could mean subsidized parking would go away in a city where few people own cars. The list goes on and on.
Our problems are dumb polices, not immigration. These polices would be fucking dumb even if we did not have migration.
And it is in fact so full that traibs crossing over from Germany sometimes get denied entry into the Swiss networks because there's no room to fit them in the schedule.
uh they get denied entry if they are late because german trains often are and it wreaks havoc on swiss timetabling where trains still generally depart to the minute and many commuters plan their day around making connections with a 2 minute change time. if the ICE from basel to zurich is late then switzerland runs their own replacement in its spot and denies entry to the german train to avoid knockon delays.
yes the schedule is full but its not just no space for more trains, more no space for unpredictable trains
The Netherlands should do this as well, maybe DB will then at some point figure out how to run a train on time. The ICEs from Germany are more often late than on time, which then causes delays for other trains using the same tracks.
Jup, quite common in the Netherlands. There are 10 minute trains from Utrecht to Amsterdam. And form Rotterdam and Den Haag to Schiphol. And from Utrecht to Den Bosch and Eindhoven.
Most of these are double decker trains and long platforms so they move a lot of people at once.
On a weekday at peak hours, there are up to 20+ trains an hour, with commuter trains continuing directly into Metro systems, and directly onto different commuter lines on the other end.
Seems like it's 4 per hour on Rotterdam/Utrecht, seems similar to Geneva/Lausanne with 6 per hour.
In any case, I think commuters are fine with every 15 min, as long as there's enough seats. (for long distance like trains, my feeling is that frequency below 15min doesn't have a lot of impact, unlike shorter distance public transport like tram/bus/subway)
Correct. They will never not have a social bias. Which leads to the question of, who controls these tools, and what biases are they okay/not okay with specifically training for. Currently they can be seen more as a reflection of broader culture (and even that has problems) but as we're already seeing with Grok they can be tuned at a whim to display any specific ideologies.
Those are some of the questions it leads to, but there are other questions that situate agency outside of the labs and in the hands of users, like, what processes do you have set up to backstop automated decisionmaking?
It's not interesting to observe that Grok was successfully trained to be an edgelord; anybody paying attention knew that was easily achievable.
> what processes do you have set up to backstop automated decisionmaking?
The companies releasing these models actively encourage the act of automated decision making by them. The entire value proposition is the automation of decisions and knowledge work. It's rare to find a use case for them that isn't offboarding your thinking and therefore agency
The entire value proposition of the computer industry is the automation of decisions and knowledge work. We are and always have been in the business of automating away people's jobs.
I reckon we agree more than we disagree, but there is a dichotomy of expansive and contractive technologies. Much of the computer industry has given more agency, choice, and knowledge to people.
That's not in tension with the fact that computers have displaced enormous numbers of jobs. The pitch has always been that the displacement is accompanied by new opportunities elsewhere in the economy.
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?
The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing.
I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.
This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.
Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.
This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.
Double check what the AI tells you. Apply common sense instead of blindly trusting everything. If it's something technical in nature try to verify and test it.
I treat AI as any other information I see online with the added value that it's customized exactly to my needs and it works pretty well for me.
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