• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • JordanZ@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•health care in North America
    1·
    4 days ago

    Just trying to schedule a run of the mill physical exam. That thing you’re supposed to do every year. Those wait times are like 2-3 months out. I have great insurance it’s just the doctor offices are being run like businesses in the US now so they’re perpetually short staffed and over booked. Allowing investment firms to own hospitals and the such was such a mistake. These things should not be seen as investment opportunities.

    Edit: There’s actually a tracker for hospitals owned by private equity firms.

  • JordanZ@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL that full automation of subway systems is illegal in the United StatesEnglish
    17·
    5 days ago

    I don’t necessarily disagree with automation. I think the article is being disingenuous with their reasons for it.

    To start off, the posts headline is inaccurate. It’s not against any law to have automated transport systems. The US has had automated train systems for 50+ years. They were designed that way from the start though. The article is complaining about systems that were not designed with automation in mind. They are not being retrofitted because of this particular regulation that was designed to protect existing workers.

    From the posted article:

    Yet no legacy US heavy rail system has been retrofitted for full automation. Many legacy US systems already use automatic train control (ATC) technology that can operate trains without a driver — San Francisco’s BART trains have run under automatic control since the system opened in 1972, and WMATA’s trains in the DC-Maryland-Virginia region are similarly automated. But no legacy system has removed onboard operators and transitioned to unattended operation.

    Since they mention BART, their own website says removing train operators does basically nothing to solve their financial issues. It just moves costs around and ignores the insane cost to retrofit it in the first place that would likely take decades to recoup.

    Train Operator salaries and benefits (including overtime) makes up 7.8% of the FY27 Preliminary Operating Budget $1.05B.  That is $81-$83M ($71.5M in wages and benefits and the overtime budget is about $11M). The structural deficit is up to $400M per year. If regulations allowed BART to remove Train Operators, there would be costs associated with no longer having train operators on board such as increased operation control center staffing and more at the ready staff presence for incident response etc. – and that’s not even considering the significant upfront capital costs.

    From budget data I could find, the BART police department was a larger slice of the budget than the train operators.