Hacker News
points by andy12_ 1 day ago | 0 comments
Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:

> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."

Very funny minister...

[1] https://www.lasexta.com/programas/cara-show-marc-giro/oscar-...

[–] theinfamousmobb 1 day ago
It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.
[–] lejalv 1 day ago
Remember who disinvested in the rail system maintenance: the previous right-wing government.
[–] andy12_ 1 day ago
We are 8 years into Sanchez's government. Ridiculous scapegoat.
[–] hnbad 1 day ago
It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.

Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.

Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.

[–] andy12_ 1 day ago
> worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.

The rail infrastructure is already publicly maintained via a government agency, ADIF. ADIF is not a goverment-owned for-profit corporation, its primary mandate is public service, not profit maximization, and ADIF doesn't compete with anyone, it's a state monopoly.

[–] DemocracyFTW2 1 day ago
That's a sweet excuse until you understand that even state-owned nonprofits these days are run the way a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking private-sector manager would run it. Because there very probably is a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking public-sector manager running it.
[–] andy12_ 1 day ago
They are very bad capitalists then, because ADIF high speed lost 200 million dollars last year.

By the way, don't act as if the Japanese high speed network is not the best on the planet. It's much more liberalized than the Spanish one.

[–] renehsz 2 hours ago
Let's not jump to conclusions. Funding rail infrastructure is important, but it's not clear at all whether that would have helped prevent this accident. Malfunctions can happen even in the most advanced newly-built systems. Often the overall safety level depends more on how you deal with degraded states than how the system performs in its fully functional state.