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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#651

Post by Yizahi »

nephihaha wrote: post #640
Yizahi wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Шановні пасажири, цей потяг який слідує від станції Івано-Франківськ Головний через Житомир до станції Київ-Дарниця буде розділено дві частини, вагони з першого по п'ятнадцятий прослідують до станції Київ-Головний, а вагони з шістнадцятого по двадцять перший поїдуть у пекло, муахаха. Дякую за вашу увагу.

To be fair, I'm sure the USSR insisted on Russian language announcements in the Ukraine. Look how that turned out... Language war in the east. If I went to the Ukraine, I would either pick up some Ukrainian or take some who did.

English is much more diffuse around the globe and can't be attributed to a single empire. There is no risk in dubbing in English and many benefits, from encouraging tourists and workers.

Also people are forgetting that railway announcements both at the station and inside the carriage are usually a complete incomprehensible trash tier. I honestly can't decipher half of the words in the Ukrainian or Russian announcements. Imagine needing to do that in the foreign language.

In my opinion it is way past time that EU has officially adopted English as a standard language for all communications. Especially with the crazies preparing for invasion right at the border.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#652

Post by nephihaha »

School-Cotton wrote: post #442
nephihaha wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Of course they’re under no obligation to do so. In fact, they’re under no obligation to let in foreign tourists at all, or to not make their lives arbitrarily hard in various ways. But not being obligated to not be a dick doesn’t mean you should in fact be one.

They aren't though. That's the point. English speakers are determined to force their language on everyone else. I've seen it abroad on many occasions. It is often painful to watch. Sometimes they even make fun of the person for speaking poor English.

You're also assuming the tourists themselves are all fluent in English, which is another issue. In some parts of Germany, many of their tourists are likely to speak French or Polish as a primary language, not to mention Mandarin etc from further afield.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#653

Post by garbagewoman »

apexalpha wrote: post #360
matrss wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfort…

> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, This is not true at all. The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc.. If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.

Do you know that the government has set those targets?

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#654

Post by adrianN »

mikkupikku wrote: post #399
bombcar wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had similar occurrences on Amtrak but there was a trick - the conductor could let people out of a stopped train to “smoke” on their own reconnaissance and risk. And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well, they never saw it.

I was in this sort of circumstance on a SEPTA train (using the same rails and stations as Amtrak fwiw) and they let us walk to the next station with no pretext. It was just the common sense thing to do and the SEPTA personnel running that train felt empowered to exercise common sense. The more bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more inhuman it becomes. An unwillingness to bend rules when the circumstance ratio…

I would expect a litigious country like the US makes common sense very expensive if somebody happens to get hurt. Train tracks are quite dangerous.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#655

Post by hopelite »

i_don_t_know wrote: post #337
raverbashing wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL

I'm German, I don't speak Dutch. But I was able to follow a Dutch tour guide in Den Haag just fine when she was explaining things in Dutch. She kindly repeated everything in English for my benefit (I was the only foreigner) even though I told her I understood her just fine in Dutch. You have to "adjust your ears" a bit but I think if you know German and English then you can understand Dutch just fine if it's not slan…

It also depends on the particular dialect a German speaks. Dutch is effectively old German before all the various alterations and "reforms" to the German language that were instituted to create fragmentation between the germanic people of Europe, i.e., English, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Belgians throughout the ~16th-20th century by aristocrats driving wedges between peasants between kingdoms and dukedoms in order to define their own nations/ethnicities through language and culture so their royal families could rule over and would find it difficult to associate with each other. It is one of the things that also contributed to the fragmentation of Germany before unification, language barriers that even created unique cultures between sides of a valley that were in different dukedoms.

A similar thing has caused the tension between the germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman border line N to S that separates Europe.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#656

Post by bratwurst3000 »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #622
scotty79 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.

That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to rele…

yes but there are so many cases where they took the worst of the worst and gave them high profile jobs with way way way to much power for high ranking nsdap members.

Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something that could have been prevented.

And so many high class nazis where in such good positions because they where experts on anticommunism. For the americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)

Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in secret service out

for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had entertainment partys where the guests could torture jews homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french opposition. Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on anticommunism

Germany didnt change much..

fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi chancellors!!

honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was because most people at power at that time where kind of nazis.

edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and didnt had as much nazis in high position.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#657

Post by adrianN »

tazjin wrote: post #534
sajithdilshan wrote: post #223

Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train. The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inef…

> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time. Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.

Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#658

Post by toast0 »

wolframhempel wrote: post #516
tdullien wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privatization of the train system in Germany was a particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years later, being undone/repaired. If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other. Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate struc…

It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder. Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a…

> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.

All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.

Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#659

Post by jonp888 »

em500 wrote: post #37
huhkerrf wrote: post #4

DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train." I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.

No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.

Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#660

Post by matrss »

ernst_klim wrote: post #610
matrss wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfort…

That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.

Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the state more often than not. I don't think their goal is actively loosing money?
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