News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
tl;Dr fuck off and eat shit, idiot
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It's publicly subsidized, but it's not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You'd have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.
Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it's a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven't been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years
USPS is not publicly subsidized. All of their operating costs come from the services they sell.
It's quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don't think it's even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.
I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.
Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s
I'd be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.
They really can’t. They inherited hundred year old falling apart infrastructure that is one of the things keeping them from providing good service. There’s no way to make enough profit to rebuild all that infrastructure enough to become profitable on most routes in the first place. They are literally slower in places than they were almost 100 years ago
If they are re-investing revenue, it's not profit. I would want them to be able to expand, pay employees better, etc. What I wouldn't want is for them to make money and just pay dividends to shareholders.