Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#131

Post by logingone » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 12:35 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

hkmurakami wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, they (the headline) say "Japan", but this only happened because it's way out in the countryside where people have a "village mentality" of helping each other out (but the trade off is that everyone sticks their nose in your business). Japan railways itself split into several separate companies upon privatization. This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (i…

Ah, the gray reality strikes again :). I understand what you're saying and I agree. I am definitely not going to define the entire country by this single act. And you're right - I think that keeping the station open for this girl was only possible because it was a rural area and not a large city. Villages generally tend to be more laid-back, there is a lot more of space to introduce little inefficiencies without caus…

the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl

I don't see it as that big a deal at all. A single train in the middle of nowhere stops for 20 seconds. This is cute, nothing more.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#132

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 12:36 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #118

rangibaby wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). The driver going too fast from being late was the cause of a (100+ fatalities) train accident about 10 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_rail_crash > It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths…

> The rail operator will also send a large bill to the jumpers family. Isn't this the case in most countries? I suspect they do it to discourage other jumpers, since if you jump you know you're saddling your family with a debt. As a society we could avoid these things if we provided a legal path to requesting to be euthanised, a legal self-determination on the end of your own life. In my country you can request it, b…

> Isn't this the case in most countries?

I don't think so. Personally, I only heard about it in Japan, because this particular method of suicide is so endemic there.

About US, on the other hand, I read a different story. Gun-inflicted suicides are more common there, and there are reports that often, police officers purposefully misreport those as "gun-related accidents", so that the family can still get life insurance of the deceased person.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#133

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 12:39 PM UTC

logingone wrote: post #131

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the gray reality strikes again :). I understand what you're saying and I agree. I am definitely not going to define the entire country by this single act. And you're right - I think that keeping the station open for this girl was only possible because it was a rural area and not a large city. Villages generally tend to be more laid-back, there is a lot more of space to introduce little inefficiencies without caus…

the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl I don't see it as that big a deal at all. A single train in the middle of nowhere stops for 20 seconds. This is cute, nothing more.

See the many comments here that enumerate economical reasons for why not closing this station is a waste. They are totally right. And that's why I think this is more than just cute :).

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#134

Post by logingone » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 12:56 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #133

logingone wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl I don't see it as that big a deal at all. A single train in the middle of nowhere stops for 20 seconds. This is cute, nothing more.

See the many comments here that enumerate economical reasons for why not closing this station is a waste. They are totally right. And that's why I think this is more than just cute :).

Actually, there are not many, and some of them have misunderstood the story, so they are not totally right, making it seem the big deal it's being made out to be. I hope this line doesn't have as many reasons to stop between stations as British trains do, in which case the stopping is even less of a deal.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#135

Post by rms_returns » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

Yeah, most developed countries are like that. I remember visiting England in 2010 for my company work and the city buses used to ply even with two passengers on board!

OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#136

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #100

canthonytucci wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetary cost, sure. What about the cost on the environment to slow the train down and bring it back up to speed?

Way less than the cost to the environment of her parents driving her to school in a car

And definitely safer, too.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#137

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:14 PM UTC

7952 wrote: post #120

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count Europe out of it for now. If I'm to believe the things I see and read all the time, most of the EU population is rapidly turning against immigration. It's a huge issue on the continent now, and it causes tensions between people and local governments - the latter are being painted as giving out free aid to immigrants while not being able to care for their own people. Population pyramid is a distant concern, when…

It seems to me that the labour market issues we face would exist regardless of how many immigrants are let in. In the long term jobs are at risk from automation. We have fewer middle income people who can afford or are willing to pay high income tax rates.

True - but machines tend to sneak in unnoticed, while immigrants, and for us especially Muslim immigrant, are obvious boogeymen. They are human, they are there on TV and newspapers, you can point your finger at them and say "it's their fault!".

It's yet another topic that lets public avoid having a discussion about real, coming issues.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#138

Post by hudibras » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #7

Only girl in the village? They are going to close the line when she graduates. Therefore we can surmise there aren't any other younger girls. So much for having a social life. There are parts of Japan where children just aren't around anymore. Towns are becoming extended retirement homes. That's the truly depressing side of this story. At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations c…

As mentioned elsewhere, they're not closing the line, just this station.

It's also important to point out that it's not uncommon for Japan high schoolers to travel far to attend the school of their choice. So it's very likely that there's a high school in or near the village that most of the other kids go to, but this girl is attending a different one.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#139

Post by code4life » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

qrendel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble seeing it this way. The money spent running the train could save or improve many other lives instead. It's heartwarming and all, but consider the other people who are being left to die or suffer malnutrition or some other malady that could have been fixed with the resources used to get this girl to and from school. It could be argued that the hope and inspiration and good feels justify it as a utilitar…

Yes, there are many ways this marginal money expenditure could be put to a better use. Most of those scenarios, however, would never happen, because human organizations are nowhere near that efficient. The most likely outcome of closing the station would be the money getting distributed between organizational overhead and bumping up someone's salary a little bit. Or maybe another company project would get finished li…

> Most of those scenarios, however, would never happen, because human organizations are nowhere near that efficient.

Actually, taxes are taken to pay for this, right? By simply not taking the taxes, people could be free to make better decisions with that money.

Re: Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

#140

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jan 09, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

canthonytucci wrote: post #65

c3534l wrote: post #14

Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.

I had a very similar thought. I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution. I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts. I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves o…

It is an inelegant solution. It's not something you want to scale up. It's not something "right" by Kant's categorical imperative. The lesson to take from this story isn't "keep every train running, no matter how little economical sense it makes it". Such an attitude, universalized, would indeed be a disaster for the world.

No, the lesson is that when running and optimizing systems, we should not forget why are we having them in the first place. They are there for us. Our willingness to make an occasional exception to cater for another human in need, at the cost of efficiency, is what makes us human.

Think of all those tourists who regularly get injured or lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by helicopter S&R teams. From purely economical perspective, this is burning money. We should leave them to die, because the costs of fueling a chopper and risking its destruction, not to mention lives of highly-trained personnel, are great and the money could be better spent elsewhere. And yet we train S&R teams and fly the choppers, because we chose to. Ruthless economic efficiency is not the end goal.