I have my choice of three bus routes with frequencies of 15 minutes or 30 minutes (depending on route) that give me literal door to door service, and *less* walking than there is from the parking garage downtown. I still drive, because the monthly parking garage fee is the same price as the monthly bus pass, and the car even with the extra walking gets me there 20-30 minutes faster. This is because the bus deviates into either a shopping plaza, a college campus, or both depending on which route. The bus cannot deviate from its route for heavy traffic, which my car can. The bus will not take the highway on the rare morning there's no accident fucking it up, which I can do to save even more time.
Make the bus free (or at least cheaper than the drive) and suddenly that extra hour a day commuting might be worth it. Step 2 would be running all of the routes on weekends and earlier in the morning, so that driving to the airport and leaving the car there for a week while on vacation isn't cheaper than the single direction cab fare when I return on a Sunday (why does an otherwise good bus system not run anything to the airport on Sunday??) or leave on a 6AM flight.
There was a study done in NYC in the 80s that said that people who jog for 1 hour in Manhattan were doing the equivalent of smoking 1 cigarette pack a day. This was in the era of gas guzzlers so things may have changed since then. But, it explains why the so-called fit people who treated "transportation as exercise!" ended up having far worse health problems than the sedentary...
Homeless have shelters. Problem is, shelters do not allow alcohol, or weapons. Neither does public transit, but they're not checking you at the door. Homeless thus elect to stay "outside" on public transit. In NYC there's one subway line which is 100% indoors, runs 24/7, and does not kick people out at the end of the line - the E train. It is a rolling homeless shelter at night with 2-3 "residents" in each car. Some of them very, very stinky. There's at least 10 stops along the way with restrooms, for the few that still have enough self respect to opt to use them.
If you want to make shelters more attractive, let them bring all of their possessions with them, and do NOT let them ride for infinite amounts of time on public transit.
In high school NYC, we'd bum around on the subway after school to go to some random place. Student MetroCards have 3 free rides + 3 transfers each weekday. You need one to go to school and one to go home, so that third ride meant a free trip from school to the mall, Coney Island, museums, ball games, whatever. If it were free for everyone all the time, holy hell would it get crowded. They'd deploy extra cops (some posing as homeless to blend in) to ticket students using the pass on holidays, since it wasn't allowed and the computer system is too primitive to handle the concept of a holiday. A giant yellow light comes on on the turnstile to make it obvious to anyone up to 200' away that a student card was used. I later learned a red light would come on for disabled, and a green one for employees and the aforementioned cops. Good times.
The JR Rail Passes (I assume that is what he used) are an interesting thing. For less than the cost of a single round trip on the abovementioned Shinkansen, tourist* can ride anything that says JR, except for the fastest Shinkansen train (the local Shinkansen are also in the 'included' category), for one full week. They will get the same choice of seats that could have gone to paying customers. I believe they are limited to selecting their seat on the day of departure, so they usually get the scraps such as middle seat, or unreserved seating. The high speed trains run every 5-10 minutes between Tokyo and Osaka (similar distance as NY to DC), so there's usually room for everyone.
*They know you're a tourist because you must have a foreign passport to purchase, and until recently could only purchase the pass in advance outside the country for the specific week desired. Presumably a dual citizen could go to their "other" country, buy the pass, and come back, but the flight costs are probably a lot higher than whatever savings could be had from the pass.
Linux does make it remarkably easy to get into trouble that a lot more effort is needed to get out of. 1. A general example is GUI utilities which make modifications that cannot be undone with those same utilities. As in, distro-default config files have certain settings necessary to work with the distro, that are removed or overwritten silently by a distro-agnostic GUI utility. 2. A specific example is a mistaken chmod command. Everyone hopefully is careful with rm -rf * in the root directory, but less so about chmod. Someone who "innocently" chmod -777 -R's the / directory will have a fantastic number of broken commands as this wipes out the setuid bits of key system commands (including important ones like sudo, su, and the like... and I don't think logging in even worked except for root from the console). Yes someone has done this at my workplace, I had to restore to the previous night's backup. Fortunately the only person who's work was lost was the dumbass who did it.
Even in places with flex time, few places extend that earlier than 7AM. One standard work day has one leaving at 3PM (if you're lucky), 3:30 PM (if you're normal), or 4:00 PM (if you're really unlucky). And even if the workplace allows arriving earlier than 7AM, there's those commuting by public transport. Unless you can get the bus companies to have the first bus arrive in the CBD before 6:30 AM, same issue.
So when the sun sets at 4:30, still useless. Having the sun set at 5:30 during the short days is far more preferable.
Shift the time zones by one (enter DST) and never go back. Quality of life for most people (and animals!) improves.
In the northern half of the US at least, our commutes are long enough and the winter days short enough that we're waking up in darkness regardless. The only sun I see is through the windows at the office, may as well be an LCD panel showing sunlight for all I know. Sun at the end of the day is better.
Tl;dr - Circadian rhythem is already f'ked, might as well get some sunlight after work out of the deal.
They get kindof icky after a while anyway (humidity from breathing in them) so I changed them out a few times a day while ill in Asia. No idea if the locals did the same, I'd imagine they would. They come like 10 to a pack, and unless you plan to be sick for 10 days there's no point in being stingy with them...
People could wear those face masks when they're sick, Asian-style. Then they can still go to work/school while ill without infecting others. That would require a cultural shift that Western society is just not ready for, though (You mean, I gotta keep my germs to myself? WTF is this bullshit?).
Does Facebook allow you to see the likes and dislikes themselves on everything?
By clicking on each "reaction" class (like, funny, love, angry, sad) you can see exactly who picked what. Which is funny because you can easily find people who "like" their own posts/messages.
Except the best disease it seems to be useful for is opiod addiction. The thing everyone in politics claims to want to address without actually addressing. And which is caused by the FDA in the first place. Prescription pain pills are cut off while people are addicted, and the cheapest / easiest thing to get their hands on is fucking Heroin, because getting Oxy / Vicodin on the black market is more expensive. Why were they on those opiods in the first place? Because Acetaminophen, Asprin, Ibuprofen are not strong enough, cannabis might be helpful but it is banned.
So now they're hooked on something, they find this Kratom which might help, and now that's banned too. People were using Imodium to get off their addictions, so some states started to limit how many can be sold to one person at a time. Can't be using it for anything other than diarrhea, no matter how impossible it is to get high from.
The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the epidemic of opioid addiction is completely intentional.
Did you try Loperamide (Brand name Imodium)... it's an opioid that does not cross the blood-brain barrier (the only reason it is OTC). Off-label use for sure, but some people cut off from prescriptions have had success with it ("poor man's methodone").
The malls here have Tesla Superchargers (yay), but aside from those the only charger I have seen in all the office & transportation parking lots around here is a single one inside the garage the NY state Senate and Assembly get to park in. Though I'd imagine running for office on the platform "so I can get an electric car and use the single (unused) charger in the Legislative parking garage" would be an interesting experience...
I am stuck with electric heat in my apartment. For some reason a bunch of upstate NY houses/apartments built in the 80s have only electric heat. When looking around at houses I was surprised that of the few with gas heat/cooking, all had the gas retrofitted in later.
Electric is a terrible way to heat anything, which is why I don't see 100% electric cars making much of a foothold in upstate NY/New England. It reduces the range of EVs and takes longer to warm the car for human occupants. Not an issue at the beginning of the day since you can presumably keep the car at a comfortable temperature while its charging overnight, but definitely an issue after it's been sitting in the lot at work all day, or at the mall, etc. Meanwhile, the waste heat of an ICE makes winter heating of cars free.
I see your sarcasm, but it's completely wrong. We do not have strict sentencing on the level of Singapore. There's "deals", "parole/good behavior", and "release due to overcrowding" which all allow violent offenders the chance to get back out there and do it again. Our prisons are also a lawless place - they do not rehabilitate but instead breed worse criminal behavior. As for the death penalty, there's reluctance to use it, and no such thing as a speedy, mandatory, no-pleading-out death penalty. The US implementation is a reverse lottery, rather than a sure thing.
As for culture, there's at least 4 separate cultures in Singapore that manage to get along.
As for economics, that's a failure of the US social safety net. Singaporeans have government provided jobs and housing as a safety net. The US cuts low skill government jobs every time there's a financial crisis (the NY Subway got rid of many train cleaners in the late 2000s). So we have dirty trains and homeless people while they have clean, well landscaped everything and employed people.
It's not death penalty for everything, but proportionately high penalties for everything. Fines for seemingly common things like fare evasion or littering reach into the S$1000s. Thus, no littering and no one dares jump a turnstile. For price perspective the cheapest adult train fare is less than 80 cents.
A few years ago Singapore was listed as the #1 safest country for women to travel alone. This is a country where four completely opposite cultures live peacefully (Chinese (Atheist and Buddhist), Islamic, Indian (Hindu and Buddhist), Western/Christian). If the high penalty / high enforcement system did not work, it would be a lot worse than America's minor white/African American/Hispanic friction (which all fall under Western/Christian).
Singapore would be a good counterexample. Consider crimes in the rest of the western world that are met with relatively light sentencing, like drug trafficking and "illegal firearm trafficking" (defined as being in possession of 2 or more illegal guns). In Singapore they are met with a mandatory death penalty, and not surprisingly there's (1) remarkably low occurrence and (2) even lower recurrence of those crimes.
Heck the German dudes who were jailed for 9 months for spray paint graffiti on a train there probably thought "what" *WHACK* "the" *WHACK* "fuck" *WHACK* during the three cane whacks preceding the jail term (fun fact: caning causes permanent damage). It made international news and trains are still 100% graffiti free, with few daring to try since.
The same is said of NYC. A few times I rented cars at a place ~150 miles from NYC and they said "we get a lot of cars from NYC, where bumpers live up to their name, so we ignore scrapes there". Sure enough every rental form had the bumpers circled as "pre-existing damage" before either of us knew which car I would get.
While researching into proper etiquette for a US parking-related ding, I stumbled on an article in a travel blog aimed at Americans driving in Germany / Western Europe warning us that dinging a parked car is a much bigger deal there. Perhaps they were just trying to scare us into being more responsible than the locals?
Either way that's where I came up with my own personal code: if the damaged part was already damaged, leave cash. If it was pristine, leave contact info/insurance. Neither consideration was given to me when I found my headlight smashed one morning, but whatever...
It seems to be particularly worse in Europe. A minor scrape to a bumper while parking is cause for police reports and waiting around, whereas in the US a note with contact/insurance info under the wiper (or just a pile of cash obscured by a note) is the standard response.
The only reason I can see the legislature needing to get involved is if there's procurement laws that contradict the order. For example, things like "must pick the cheapest of 3 bidders". Even then, in the interim the theoretical net neutrality violating company would lose the state contract and have to fight it in court, which could take over a year. So not only are they not getting income from the state contract, but they're now paying lawyers and legal fees. In the meanwhile, the new contract winner has purchased and installed their equipment, a cost which was baked into the contract. Once neutrality violating company wins the legal battle, the contract goes out for bid again. The guys who got in in the interim, unless they're morons, will be able to handily underbid the other guys simply because the capital expenditures have already been made, installations completed, etc. It's just the incremental cost of keeping the lights on for another few years, versus a new install.
And in a fantastic role reversal, another dead-of-night legistlation deal, in 2012 Democratic Governor Cuomo went to extraordinary lengths to woo the Republican legislature (he allowed them to gerrymander the districts) to pass his "Tier 6" retirement plan, which massively gimped future public employee pensions. News article: Tier 6 Passes Assembly. The article reads like the twilight zone. In NYS, the Republicans are pro-union and the Democrats are the Scott Walkers. Keep in mind the NYS pension has no opting out, or option (for most) to use a matched 401k instead. The state comptroller (also a democrat) point blank told the governor that the pension fund was already projected as fully funded with the Tier 5 changes that were instituted in 2010 which fixed the glaring problems with the pension system (people contribute forever instead of only 10 years, retirement age raised by 7 years, overtime limits installed). Everything Cuomo added was convoluted nickel-and-dime shit, pages and pages of new rules and exceptions, removing incentives to get promotions, raising the retirement age by one year, tying things to his salary, doubling contribution rates, and yet somehow managed to create a new way of gaming the system - the old system reduced percent increases to 1.5% per year after 30 years. The new law forgot this and left it at 2%. It is now possible for someone to live / work long enough to receive a pension over 100% their final salary. Great job pushing that one through!
Archaic union contracts are the problem for public sector transit, and to a certain degree commuter rail, but not private sector freight.
For freight railways it's simple cost/benefit - while there's a lot of mainline track out there with the volumes that could justify automation, many of those trains end up in places where there's dark (unsignalled) territory, or track maintained to the bare minimum (15MPH or less speed limit) that sees one train a week, where having a pair of eyes to see a washout from 100' away is cheaper than maintaining the tracks to a higher standard (forget a system to notify when damage has occurred).
And the super long trains on the mainline tracks? One of those earns the railroad close to 100k in profit. Paying two guys to babysit it is literal chump change.
Slashdot Mirror
I have my choice of three bus routes with frequencies of 15 minutes or 30 minutes (depending on route) that give me literal door to door service, and *less* walking than there is from the parking garage downtown. I still drive, because the monthly parking garage fee is the same price as the monthly bus pass, and the car even with the extra walking gets me there 20-30 minutes faster. This is because the bus deviates into either a shopping plaza, a college campus, or both depending on which route. The bus cannot deviate from its route for heavy traffic, which my car can. The bus will not take the highway on the rare morning there's no accident fucking it up, which I can do to save even more time.
Make the bus free (or at least cheaper than the drive) and suddenly that extra hour a day commuting might be worth it. Step 2 would be running all of the routes on weekends and earlier in the morning, so that driving to the airport and leaving the car there for a week while on vacation isn't cheaper than the single direction cab fare when I return on a Sunday (why does an otherwise good bus system not run anything to the airport on Sunday??) or leave on a 6AM flight.
There was a study done in NYC in the 80s that said that people who jog for 1 hour in Manhattan were doing the equivalent of smoking 1 cigarette pack a day. This was in the era of gas guzzlers so things may have changed since then. But, it explains why the so-called fit people who treated "transportation as exercise!" ended up having far worse health problems than the sedentary...
Homeless have shelters. Problem is, shelters do not allow alcohol, or weapons. Neither does public transit, but they're not checking you at the door. Homeless thus elect to stay "outside" on public transit. In NYC there's one subway line which is 100% indoors, runs 24/7, and does not kick people out at the end of the line - the E train. It is a rolling homeless shelter at night with 2-3 "residents" in each car. Some of them very, very stinky. There's at least 10 stops along the way with restrooms, for the few that still have enough self respect to opt to use them.
If you want to make shelters more attractive, let them bring all of their possessions with them, and do NOT let them ride for infinite amounts of time on public transit.
In high school NYC, we'd bum around on the subway after school to go to some random place. Student MetroCards have 3 free rides + 3 transfers each weekday. You need one to go to school and one to go home, so that third ride meant a free trip from school to the mall, Coney Island, museums, ball games, whatever. If it were free for everyone all the time, holy hell would it get crowded. They'd deploy extra cops (some posing as homeless to blend in) to ticket students using the pass on holidays, since it wasn't allowed and the computer system is too primitive to handle the concept of a holiday. A giant yellow light comes on on the turnstile to make it obvious to anyone up to 200' away that a student card was used. I later learned a red light would come on for disabled, and a green one for employees and the aforementioned cops. Good times.
The JR Rail Passes (I assume that is what he used) are an interesting thing. For less than the cost of a single round trip on the abovementioned Shinkansen, tourist* can ride anything that says JR, except for the fastest Shinkansen train (the local Shinkansen are also in the 'included' category), for one full week. They will get the same choice of seats that could have gone to paying customers. I believe they are limited to selecting their seat on the day of departure, so they usually get the scraps such as middle seat, or unreserved seating. The high speed trains run every 5-10 minutes between Tokyo and Osaka (similar distance as NY to DC), so there's usually room for everyone.
*They know you're a tourist because you must have a foreign passport to purchase, and until recently could only purchase the pass in advance outside the country for the specific week desired. Presumably a dual citizen could go to their "other" country, buy the pass, and come back, but the flight costs are probably a lot higher than whatever savings could be had from the pass.
Linux does make it remarkably easy to get into trouble that a lot more effort is needed to get out of.
1. A general example is GUI utilities which make modifications that cannot be undone with those same utilities. As in, distro-default config files have certain settings necessary to work with the distro, that are removed or overwritten silently by a distro-agnostic GUI utility.
2. A specific example is a mistaken chmod command. Everyone hopefully is careful with rm -rf * in the root directory, but less so about chmod. Someone who "innocently" chmod -777 -R's the / directory will have a fantastic number of broken commands as this wipes out the setuid bits of key system commands (including important ones like sudo, su, and the like... and I don't think logging in even worked except for root from the console). Yes someone has done this at my workplace, I had to restore to the previous night's backup. Fortunately the only person who's work was lost was the dumbass who did it.
More the east end. The west end isn't bad.
For example, sunset in Buffalo today is 5:44 PM. Sunset in Boston is 5:14 PM
It's annoying enough that Boston officials keeps half-studying if they can join the Atlantic time zone.
Even in places with flex time, few places extend that earlier than 7AM. One standard work day has one leaving at 3PM (if you're lucky), 3:30 PM (if you're normal), or 4:00 PM (if you're really unlucky).
And even if the workplace allows arriving earlier than 7AM, there's those commuting by public transport. Unless you can get the bus companies to have the first bus arrive in the CBD before 6:30 AM, same issue.
So when the sun sets at 4:30, still useless. Having the sun set at 5:30 during the short days is far more preferable.
Shift the time zones by one (enter DST) and never go back. Quality of life for most people (and animals!) improves.
In the northern half of the US at least, our commutes are long enough and the winter days short enough that we're waking up in darkness regardless. The only sun I see is through the windows at the office, may as well be an LCD panel showing sunlight for all I know. Sun at the end of the day is better.
Tl;dr - Circadian rhythem is already f'ked, might as well get some sunlight after work out of the deal.
They get kindof icky after a while anyway (humidity from breathing in them) so I changed them out a few times a day while ill in Asia. No idea if the locals did the same, I'd imagine they would. They come like 10 to a pack, and unless you plan to be sick for 10 days there's no point in being stingy with them...
People could wear those face masks when they're sick, Asian-style. Then they can still go to work/school while ill without infecting others. That would require a cultural shift that Western society is just not ready for, though (You mean, I gotta keep my germs to myself? WTF is this bullshit?).
Does Facebook allow you to see the likes and dislikes themselves on everything?
By clicking on each "reaction" class (like, funny, love, angry, sad) you can see exactly who picked what. Which is funny because you can easily find people who "like" their own posts/messages.
Except the best disease it seems to be useful for is opiod addiction. The thing everyone in politics claims to want to address without actually addressing. And which is caused by the FDA in the first place. Prescription pain pills are cut off while people are addicted, and the cheapest / easiest thing to get their hands on is fucking Heroin, because getting Oxy / Vicodin on the black market is more expensive. Why were they on those opiods in the first place? Because Acetaminophen, Asprin, Ibuprofen are not strong enough, cannabis might be helpful but it is banned.
So now they're hooked on something, they find this Kratom which might help, and now that's banned too. People were using Imodium to get off their addictions, so some states started to limit how many can be sold to one person at a time. Can't be using it for anything other than diarrhea, no matter how impossible it is to get high from.
The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the epidemic of opioid addiction is completely intentional.
Did you try Loperamide (Brand name Imodium)... it's an opioid that does not cross the blood-brain barrier (the only reason it is OTC). Off-label use for sure, but some people cut off from prescriptions have had success with it ("poor man's methodone").
The malls here have Tesla Superchargers (yay), but aside from those the only charger I have seen in all the office & transportation parking lots around here is a single one inside the garage the NY state Senate and Assembly get to park in. Though I'd imagine running for office on the platform "so I can get an electric car and use the single (unused) charger in the Legislative parking garage" would be an interesting experience...
I am stuck with electric heat in my apartment. For some reason a bunch of upstate NY houses/apartments built in the 80s have only electric heat. When looking around at houses I was surprised that of the few with gas heat/cooking, all had the gas retrofitted in later.
Electric is a terrible way to heat anything, which is why I don't see 100% electric cars making much of a foothold in upstate NY/New England. It reduces the range of EVs and takes longer to warm the car for human occupants. Not an issue at the beginning of the day since you can presumably keep the car at a comfortable temperature while its charging overnight, but definitely an issue after it's been sitting in the lot at work all day, or at the mall, etc. Meanwhile, the waste heat of an ICE makes winter heating of cars free.
I see your sarcasm, but it's completely wrong. We do not have strict sentencing on the level of Singapore. There's "deals", "parole/good behavior", and "release due to overcrowding" which all allow violent offenders the chance to get back out there and do it again. Our prisons are also a lawless place - they do not rehabilitate but instead breed worse criminal behavior. As for the death penalty, there's reluctance to use it, and no such thing as a speedy, mandatory, no-pleading-out death penalty. The US implementation is a reverse lottery, rather than a sure thing.
As for culture, there's at least 4 separate cultures in Singapore that manage to get along.
As for economics, that's a failure of the US social safety net. Singaporeans have government provided jobs and housing as a safety net. The US cuts low skill government jobs every time there's a financial crisis (the NY Subway got rid of many train cleaners in the late 2000s). So we have dirty trains and homeless people while they have clean, well landscaped everything and employed people.
It's not death penalty for everything, but proportionately high penalties for everything. Fines for seemingly common things like fare evasion or littering reach into the S$1000s. Thus, no littering and no one dares jump a turnstile. For price perspective the cheapest adult train fare is less than 80 cents.
A few years ago Singapore was listed as the #1 safest country for women to travel alone. This is a country where four completely opposite cultures live peacefully (Chinese (Atheist and Buddhist), Islamic, Indian (Hindu and Buddhist), Western/Christian). If the high penalty / high enforcement system did not work, it would be a lot worse than America's minor white/African American/Hispanic friction (which all fall under Western/Christian).
Singapore would be a good counterexample. Consider crimes in the rest of the western world that are met with relatively light sentencing, like drug trafficking and "illegal firearm trafficking" (defined as being in possession of 2 or more illegal guns). In Singapore they are met with a mandatory death penalty, and not surprisingly there's (1) remarkably low occurrence and (2) even lower recurrence of those crimes.
Heck the German dudes who were jailed for 9 months for spray paint graffiti on a train there probably thought "what" *WHACK* "the" *WHACK* "fuck" *WHACK* during the three cane whacks preceding the jail term (fun fact: caning causes permanent damage). It made international news and trains are still 100% graffiti free, with few daring to try since.
The same is said of NYC. A few times I rented cars at a place ~150 miles from NYC and they said "we get a lot of cars from NYC, where bumpers live up to their name, so we ignore scrapes there". Sure enough every rental form had the bumpers circled as "pre-existing damage" before either of us knew which car I would get.
While researching into proper etiquette for a US parking-related ding, I stumbled on an article in a travel blog aimed at Americans driving in Germany / Western Europe warning us that dinging a parked car is a much bigger deal there. Perhaps they were just trying to scare us into being more responsible than the locals?
Either way that's where I came up with my own personal code: if the damaged part was already damaged, leave cash. If it was pristine, leave contact info/insurance. Neither consideration was given to me when I found my headlight smashed one morning, but whatever...
It seems to be particularly worse in Europe. A minor scrape to a bumper while parking is cause for police reports and waiting around, whereas in the US a note with contact/insurance info under the wiper (or just a pile of cash obscured by a note) is the standard response.
The only reason I can see the legislature needing to get involved is if there's procurement laws that contradict the order. For example, things like "must pick the cheapest of 3 bidders". Even then, in the interim the theoretical net neutrality violating company would lose the state contract and have to fight it in court, which could take over a year. So not only are they not getting income from the state contract, but they're now paying lawyers and legal fees. In the meanwhile, the new contract winner has purchased and installed their equipment, a cost which was baked into the contract. Once neutrality violating company wins the legal battle, the contract goes out for bid again. The guys who got in in the interim, unless they're morons, will be able to handily underbid the other guys simply because the capital expenditures have already been made, installations completed, etc. It's just the incremental cost of keeping the lights on for another few years, versus a new install.
And in a fantastic role reversal, another dead-of-night legistlation deal, in 2012 Democratic Governor Cuomo went to extraordinary lengths to woo the Republican legislature (he allowed them to gerrymander the districts) to pass his "Tier 6" retirement plan, which massively gimped future public employee pensions. News article: Tier 6 Passes Assembly. The article reads like the twilight zone. In NYS, the Republicans are pro-union and the Democrats are the Scott Walkers. Keep in mind the NYS pension has no opting out, or option (for most) to use a matched 401k instead. The state comptroller (also a democrat) point blank told the governor that the pension fund was already projected as fully funded with the Tier 5 changes that were instituted in 2010 which fixed the glaring problems with the pension system (people contribute forever instead of only 10 years, retirement age raised by 7 years, overtime limits installed). Everything Cuomo added was convoluted nickel-and-dime shit, pages and pages of new rules and exceptions, removing incentives to get promotions, raising the retirement age by one year, tying things to his salary, doubling contribution rates, and yet somehow managed to create a new way of gaming the system - the old system reduced percent increases to 1.5% per year after 30 years. The new law forgot this and left it at 2%. It is now possible for someone to live / work long enough to receive a pension over 100% their final salary. Great job pushing that one through!
Archaic union contracts are the problem for public sector transit, and to a certain degree commuter rail, but not private sector freight.
For freight railways it's simple cost/benefit - while there's a lot of mainline track out there with the volumes that could justify automation, many of those trains end up in places where there's dark (unsignalled) territory, or track maintained to the bare minimum (15MPH or less speed limit) that sees one train a week, where having a pair of eyes to see a washout from 100' away is cheaper than maintaining the tracks to a higher standard (forget a system to notify when damage has occurred).
And the super long trains on the mainline tracks? One of those earns the railroad close to 100k in profit. Paying two guys to babysit it is literal chump change.