Palacegalleryratio [he/him]

This is disgraceful.

I am sure Labour under Keir is doing everything it can to lose my vote.

Profit must go up though. It’s the entire systems basis. Unless you want to change the system…

To add onto my previous reply, buying trains isn’t like you or I buying groceries or even the NHS buying pharmaceuticals. If you or I don’t like Tesco’s products or prices we can cross the road and go to Asda (or Morrisons or Aldi or Waitrose etc) with no consequences or interruption of supply at all for us.

Likewise for the NHS if they don’t like the terms for a drug from generic supplier A, they can buy from generic supplier B. And for many drugs produced as generics there are large manufacturers who are kitted out to do this at reasonably short timeframes with shortfalls from switching suppliers that can be covered from strategic supplies.

Trains on the other hand have working lifespans in decades (sometimes too many decades!). We don’t have spares just sat about as they’re hugely expensive assets, so if you want a different one you have to buy a new one. Buying new ones is a lengthy process that takes years for development, manufacturing, testing, driver training and modifications to infrastructure (power requirements, clearances, platforms alterations etc). You can’t be without trains either as the country requires the trains to run reasonably reliably for a huge amount of economic activity. So it isn’t a simple matter of deciding one is leaving of one train supplier and just going to another. So they kind of have you over a barrel in that sense. It’s a very poor negotiating position.

They kinda already do though. The government tells them what trains they can buy for which routes, and then tells them what they can charge. And they’re still drawing a profit today.

So the rail infrastructure (tracks, signals etc) is owned by network rail. The government tried having it run for profit by a company called RailTrack. However it turns out that rail infrastructure maintenance and the profit motive are not easy bed fellows and the profit motive part won out, and then Ladbrook Grove, Southall and Hatfield rail crashes happened due to railtracks negligent maintenance. So now it is run by the government owned and funded network rail. However Network Rail contract out most of the maintenance to other civils contractors to actually do the work.

The train operators compete to run trains on a route. They take revenue from ticket sales. On the route they are obliged to maintain a minimum service even on unprofitable lines (e.g. rural commuter lines), their reward for doing so is they get the profits from the productive lines e.g. intercity lines. However post COVID contracts have been restructured away from a share of ticket sales, towards a ‘cost plus’ system that is independent of passenger volume.

The trains and other rolling stock are owned by Rolling Stock companies and leased to the Train Operating Companies. This means if the government wants to strip an operator of its franchise they can without having to get the franchise to sell the trains to their successor/competitor, they just re-lease the same trains from the Rolling Stock Company. However mostly the rolling stock operating companies exist to extract value from the system and deliver it to shareholders, they add no value over if the trains were owned by network rail. It’s wild that that is the bit Labour doesn’t want to nationalise, it’s a pointless rent seeking middle man.

The Train Operating Companies run the stations in their regions (with some exceptions for the busiest, most important stations that are run by Network Rail) however the stations are owned by Network Rail.

What a fantastic election… You’d struggle to get a rizla between the gaps in their policy positions and both parties are supporting genocide in Gaza. Which means in this election your choice is: you get to pick the colour of tie of the guy who uses your taxes to support the massacre of civilians. Red or blue.

Great. Democracy in action. What an opportunity to steer the nation. I’m so motivated to go vote.

Go? Was the west’s humanity here before?

I don’t get it. From what I can remember from history classes and reading Wikipedia (so not ideal sources!) the victims of the holocaust numbered some c.6million Jews out of the c.14m total victims including, amongst others, c.7.8m soviet pows and civilians.

Surely what Germany should have guilt for is its genocide against humans, not specifically just its treatment of Jews. So unless we’re saying the treatment of communist, Slavic, Romani, gay and disabled people etc by nazi Germany was not such a bad thing actually and it’s just the Jews that Germany regrets killing (and surely we are not saying that!?) then it would seem to me that Germany should be speaking out against any and all genocide, including that of Palestinians?

I’m legitimately confused about this point of view.

You’ve gotta feel like since he was already there and presumably undetected he could have disassembled the gun, and covertly disposed of the components in Hong Kong, told no one, and saved himself a lot of trouble.

Suggestion, when the mines close, the workers should be given a golden handshake (not the execs as is usual), generous enough to live on for their lives in dignity.

Ideally this should be paid for by the coal mining companies that exploited the coal workers to extract coal and profit, at the cost of the environment and often their worker’s health, the same companies who having made their buck are now pulling out and leaving their workers high and dry. But even if the golden handshake is paid for by the government it seems to me that compared to the $Bns that it costs for a new generation of nuclear power plants (before even considering running costs, waste management costs and decommissioning costs) paying off a few coal miners is a reasonable investment to prevent sudden decline of the coal mining communities and the types of resentment that decline and abandonment causes towards a greener future and the rise of reactionary politics we see on the back of that.

Unusual conclusion of my post. I was suggesting that you’re being pretty callous with respect to people with limited options available to them, who are about to experience some hardship.

You didn’t address the many non American workers that are affected (there is a world of people outside America). Even within America, though training for IT might be a slightly flippant example even talking about training for solar or other programs; for the vast majority of workers the retraining is for jobs that don’t exist within their communities, near their families and responsibilities and is often not appropriate for their skills. It’s nothing to do with being scared of change and everything to do with real world material conditions.

Nobody said anything about banning alternative energy, that’s your moon logic, not mine. I was just suggesting a little compassion for these workers who have provided an important service to society (you want your hospital to have electrical power right?) in unpleasant conditions and who are vilified for wanting to keep earning the money that they need to exist when no other option is given them.

Maybe in America, and that’s with the word maybe doing some heavy lifting.

But if you live in a coal mining town in Columbia or Kazakhstan how many training programs do you think are being paid for to reskill those workers? What other opportunities do you think they are being offered?

And even if you do live in America how realistic do you think “retrain to work in IT” is for a 40yr old coal miner?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the coal industry at all, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support the workers who get left behind.

The fact this fuckwad could just have shut the fuck up and lived in luxury for the rest of his life, but couldn’t resist running his mouth.

Only when it pulls out “works fine on my machine, must be user error”

I’m not even 50% convinced this is satire.