alt Hacker NewsThe incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
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Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why. The proprietary automatic brake system of Siemens was working fine for 30 years, but it was too old, maybe too expensive and being replaced by a different system (non proprietary?). This shouldn't had caused any problem, as stopping the trains when a problem happens in the railway is the by-default security protocol.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why this person didn't saw that light in the screen, or why in the age of mobile phones and internet, he/she was unable to warn about the second train.
And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near a train station before to crash into the Italian train, in a perfectly sunny day. It does not make any sense and, seemly, it goes directly against the security protocol.
We don't know still if the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or didn't even tried to stop the train (maybe suffered a dismay or a heart attack?). Survivors say that they didn't noticed a decrease of speed before the impact. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
For foreign journalists, to paint Spain as a third world country is practically a sport, and they love to write the word 'siesta' for some strange fetish, but the reality is that this is one of the most modern high-speed train systems in the planet, and worked like a charm for more than 30 years until now.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war, including strange delays and strange train accidents all around Europe in the last two or three years (Poland, France, etc). We can safely assume that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this another added source of chaos happened suspiciously close to the November Spanish elections with plenty of strikes and riots that happened to occur overnight.
Taking the whole context, the probability of all of that happening by chance at the same time before the elections, is basically zero.
Could it be cultural? I remember after the Asiana Airlines crash, the experts were saying part of the problem was due to culture.
I feel that mixing up best picture Oscars was a watershed moment...It sort of spoke to me that the whole world is going to shit....
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
Autonation is the only true way out of incompetence.
Eventually everyone will come around e/acc.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
The reality is very different: https://www.railway.supply/renfe-rejects-drivers-union-claim...
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.