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Comment by mngnt | Hacker News Reader

I would expect this kind of pictures from a third world country...

How come no one is incentivized to fix this - protect the trains, prevent this loss of property? Who pays for the stolen goods? I presume it would be the retailers, is it just a drop in the ocean for them?

In some more dystopian movies there were trains crossing vast areas of postapocalyptic hellscape protected by soldiers with machine guns and flamethrowers. In these pictures, the "responsible" just gave up. I find that simiarly dystopic.

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> I would expect this kind of pictures from a third world country...

By many measures, the US are a third world country. Here's an article from 2014 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/six-ways...

The problem with "winner takes all" culture is that "losers" still have to eat, and you can't jail or shoot them all. Hence, this.

This kind of blantent theft wouldn't happen in a third world country. The contents of the train would be much more meaningful to the sender and recipients and they'd raise hell with the shipping company over the loss, which would cause the shipping company to hire an army of underpaid security guards as deterrents (if you've spent most of your life in an economy with minimum wage/universal education, you haven't fully experienced the way the global south can point an army of people at the most trivial problems). In US, much of the value of these containers could be restored to the shipper or recipient with shipping insurance or credit card chargebacks. Additionally, higher GDP means these packages (even the medical ones) are just too small an expense to the recipients to rile them up. I have a hard time believing developing country shipping companies can insurance their operations and remain as profitable as US companies can

Once the trains insurance company/fund (or UPS? Amazons?) starts to take a hit, they will respond swiftly with a solution somehow. It'll probably take a few more months of this to hit their bottom line.

I'm pretty sure Buffett's company, which invests in both Union Pacific and insurance, is incentivized to resolve this.

This photojournalist probably just helped him make a bunch of money by identifying a prime location for an ongoing problem. The fact that we saw it before UP did doesn't mean they aren't incentivized to stop it. It's obviously bad business if their deliveries are missing packages.

I just can't imagine that the train operator isn't aware of this. Why is it allowed to go on for days / weeks, or even months? If they know where it happens, what's the holdup? Just waiting there in a hiding spot until the perpetrators come and start looting, arrest them, rinse and repeat.

> If they know where it happens, what's the holdup?

As long as sum(value of goods lost) < sum(priced-in value of goods lost/damaged)+sum(expected cost of health/liability/life insurance rate hikes after robbers maim or kill staff), nothing will be done, it would simply be more expensive and risky.

I think Berkshire Hathaway owns Burlington Northern and not Union Pacific.

I believe they've invested in UP in the past. I don't know how to look up how much.

From 2007:

>A May SEC filing revealed Berkshire owned 10.5 million shares of Union Pacific unp and nearly 6.4 million shares of Norfolk Southern nsc.

>Berkshire omitted those investments from a quarterly summary of its stock holdings filed earlier this month because the SEC allowed the company to keep them confidential, so it's not clear how much Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern stock Berkshire currently owns.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3550477&page=1

Berkshire's 2022 ownership of UP (if it exists) is less than 1%.[2]

[2] https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...

I think protecting the train line is just one small aspect of this, what sticks out to me is how desperate people are. They're robbing trains in downtown L.A. now. You can see the skyscrapers.

That's the real dystopia here. Not that they need more armed guards.

Escape from LA will become a documentary soon.

It's so hard to have this discussion with people that live in California but a lot of the scenes in SF and LA are literally out of developing, corrupt countries.

I think people just don't want to admit how bad it has gotten because then they have to face their fears and take some action to change their future.

Homelessness, crime, theft, lack of security, mentally ill people in droves on the street, "do not go areas" like the tenderloin in SF and skid row in LA... These are not exaggerations, these are real, growing problems.

At some point, you won't be able to ignore it and all the money in the world that we earned won't help us.

SF city government provides housing for about half of the city's homeless people. The homeless and mentally ill people in SF come from all over USA. You see them SF, but I don't think SF shares much of the blame for their suffering. American voters are to blame, mostly Americans who voted for Republicans who reduced government spending on social services.

Yes, I still know people who blame the Republicans who ran the state in the 70s for the homeless problem. That was 50 years ago, but it still makes a good narrative.

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Protecting these specific network of rails falls under the jurisdiction of the special agents of the UP, and not the LAPD which has experienced increased funding through the years. The UP police are headquartered in Omaha Nebraska.

I live in California and people admit all the time how bad it has gotten.

I'm surprised to hear that as I've spoken with extremely wealthy people ($5M+ homes) to people renting a room (That have lived in CA almost their entire life)and a common narrative I hear is "Oh California is the best, there's no other place like it so these problems aren't really that important".

People will lament on Nextdoor, Reddit, Facebook, forums, but in the end, the people I spoke with, won't leave the state or make drastic changes.

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