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0 pointsrayiner6mo ago0 comments

> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.

I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.

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majormajor6mo ago

That seems pretty wildly orthogonal to me.

Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.

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arendtio6mo ago

Well, for a single person, yes. But for most people on the train?!?

Sadly, this attitude of designing mediocre and over-complicated systems and then sticking to them no matter the cost is very German nowadays. And we hate it. But we can't help ourselves. And this does not affect trains alone; it also affects our tax system, every government process, and often businesses.

We are unable to design better systems; we are unable to design simpler systems, and improvising is a skill we have eradicated from our minds.

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