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Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

This is slightly off-topic, but between this and the articles on raids on LA trains[1], I really do feel like we are living in a Snow Crash universe.

[1] https://theweek.com/crime/1008994/thieves-raid-rail-cars-for...

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This is interesting, similar issues in places like South Africa where RAMPENT theft from trains and of train equipment is common (equipment can often be sold for scrap metal value).

It can totally bog up commerce when these losses start to get high.

In South Africa one factor is that crime has in general very little consequence. I'm not sure what the prosecution and conviction rates are for these thefts here in California but if those are low enough there may be limited deterrent.

You hit the nail on the head. If the stolen articles are worth less than $950 it's a simple misdemeanor that may not even get prosecuted. Speaking of prosecution, San Francisco's Chesa Boudin is facing a recall election because of his prosecutorial policies and his apparent lack of concern for victims. His predecessor wasn't much better — and he moved to L.A. and is the District Attorney down there.

These are great days for criminals in California. Organized shoplifting, car burglary, & looting rings are raking in cash. Even if you do get some time behind bars, you'll almost certainly be either let out early because of the 'Rona, or your sentence will be suspended because the crime wasn't violent & nobody got seriously injured.

NYC is on its way to becoming a similar utopia for antisocial criminal predators. But hey, this is apparently what the voters want...

The train robberies and breakdown of civil order in CA remind me of Atlas Shrugged much more than Snow Crash.

I'm not really clear on why people are surprised about these thefts. Isn't train robbery a western film trope? Maybe we've culturally forgotten trains, but they're the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Train chicanery was even an integral part of the civil war.

In America, the train hasn't been that vital to infrastructure since the era that inspired the trope. Trucks move 7 times more value annually [https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num...].

Frieght rail carries a stupid amount of goods. If you use a carrier like Hub Group or JB Hunt to ship containers cross country odds are the bulk of the mileage is on rail. This is doubly true for bulk goods. Nobody is hauling bulk goods very far by truck.

If you live in a major urban area you'd never see it though because the intermodal facilities tend to be at or beyond the beltway (more efficient to truck the last 20-100mi).

Trains absolutely are vital, unless you think 2,500,000 tonne-km could be added to the highways -- already carrying 3,000,000 tonne-km [1].

Trains also do that with only 10% of the fuel [2].

I'm not sure what the table you link is showing. Is it $-km, or $-journeys?

[1] https://www.bts.gov/us-tonne-kilometers-freight

[2] https://www.bts.gov/content/fuel-consumption-mode-transporta...

that's because the majority of economic activity are near ports where train wouldn't be as useful. as a result the bulk of goods transported by train are to the lower populated areas where again the last mile is done by truck.

doesn't make trains not vital.

A manifesto pretending (lazily) to be a novel, Atlas Shrugged is a sophomoric work of prescriptive pretension, not the type which observes and reports in verisimilitude a plausible description of human affairs.

In short your comment is an insight to you, and only an insight to California in as much as one accepts Objectivism as a thoughtful (haha! is my opinion) framework for grokking reality.

"a sophomoric work of prescriptive pretension, not the type which observes and reports in verisimilitude a plausible description of human affairs."

Huh?

Isn't the literal plot of Atlas Shrugged trains being looted? Govt not preventing issues? Not sure the sophomoric work has to "reports in verisimilitude a plausible description of human affairs" to remind someone of a parallel?

The book itself sold 9M copies I think. I personally couldn't get through it as it's not my style particularly, but I could see how someone would find a parallel.

Well Snow Crash describes a world with VR where a "visual stimulus" can lock people into their own heads, or make them slaves to an over mind. There might have been an "auditory stimulus" too...

Based on summaries of Atlas Shrugged, I believe that it describes a world in which real physical objects and locations are targeted for theft and destruction.

So your comment is a bit aggressively personal.

I too found the response to Atlas Shrugged comment to be oddly agressive. I always find it curious whenever people hate on the book. I want to ask, what about the book was so offensive?

I would summarize the story of Atlas Shrugged as the collapse of USA caused by an incompetent government whose policies rob and persecute the productive industrialists who have the competency to keep the country infrastructure going.

One of the protagonists runs a railroad company. I don't think there was actually any train robbing, but towards the end of the downfall, gangs were extorting money to let her trains enter and exit stations.

I can't remember much from Snow Crash, read it too long ago. I think one protagonist was a courier, and the book took place in a distopian future.

I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal.

> I want to ask, what about the book was so offensive?

I would be dishonest not to admit my dislike's passion was conceived in frustration with the book's fans. "Offense," though I don't affirm the label, arises on interaction with Objectivists.

Atlas Shrugged eloquently explicates Objectivism's fundamental lack of empathy - its denial of carnality, passion, humanity, animism, pleasure, pain, misfortune, fate: all sense, no sensibility. The plot, finding its villain in democratic government and indeed all society, and for its heroes a set of selfish, sexless, and statuesque Scrooges, is the denial. So is merely the style: the stodginess of conversation and thought, the relentless rationality of the action. It has no scene containing a believably real corner of society, be it a family, a friendship, or civil society. All argument is intellectual, all triumphs transparently ideological.

It is a badly-written novel for precisely the same reasons Objectivism is a poor philosophy. To see someone read it and embrace it as wisdom maddens.

And such someones abound in America! One might conclude every man (indeed, this is man's ideology) fancies himself a temporarily embarrassed John Galt. Rich Americans too love Rand's ideas - and are surely delighted so many of the citizenry affirm their own superiority. Rich objectivists mock openly their noblesse oblige, and have no qualms in setting the Republic against itself in pursuit of continually lower taxation.

Human social projects are not clockwork systems, but each, since the time we first surpassed the society of apes, is an idiosyncratic novelty. Humanity itself is a singular species, exceptional in our power of rational understanding but roundly unable to apply the talent when considering our own teleology. We overestimate the utility of our pattern-matching and are easily seduced by just-so reductionism.

Not incidentally, Marxism shares Objectivism's flawed empathy; the two philosophies are fastidiously symmetrical. That Rand's intellectual rebellion would reject her oppressor's dogma, but not its mode of analysis, seems unsurprising. We all struggle to escape the modes of critical thought we first learned, even as our conclusions mutate.

Rand might have been hoped to see this in herself, but then again, such self-awareness she implicitly rejected.

What do you actually hate about Objectivism and/or Ayn Rand? Can you be specific?

The kind of comment you've made only ever comes from people who have some deeper problem with the philosophy or the book. Actually, nobody who just reads it as a novel ever thinks it's lazy, prescriptivist, pretentious, etc. These kinds of critiques only ever come from people with an "axe to grind."

I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal. If you be so kind, see my response in another subthread. I promise there is no shortage of pretense!

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