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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33827 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Comparing this to UBI seems weird to me. My understanding is the point of UBI is that it's approximately unconditional. You get the money whatever your income or whether you have a job. By contrast, according to your budget link, the WMATA provided something like 268 million trips for its budget. Maybe you think the $19 or so per trip that works out to is not a good use of money, but it seems pretty far from the "nothing" the government gets in return for UBI! Maybe a better comparison would be some kind of guaranteed job program? No idea what the economic efficiency of programs like that work out to.

The thing you have to understand is the WMATA jobs aren't real jobs. They are UBI. Nobody there actually works. There was a major accident maybe 10 years ago. When they went over the inspection logs, they discovered that the same log had been photocopied for decades. I don't think they even updated the dates on the forms. It was shameless, haphazard, and nobody caught it, nobody cared, even after there was an accident and people died, nothing changed. A few people immediately responsible got fired. But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.

If The System Is What It Does, WMATA is UBI with a rotting piece of infrastructure from the 70's attached as a hostage.

Well, I suppose it also lets criminals from DC spread throughout the countryside and victimize more people.

I mean, some of them presumably do their jobs. If I go to a WMATA operated stop a bus or train will come. With an operator who is a WMATA employee.

Based on reading your two links I don't think this characterizes the situation accurately? According to the second link:

1. Not updating measurements when the new measurement was within 1/8 of an inch was standard practice going all the way back to the 1970's.

Yet the panel found Metro had never rooted out a practice begun as official policy when the system opened in the 1970s that had inspectors only update measurements on monthly switch inspection forms if the new measurements were at least 1/8 inch different. If not, the same numbers were simply carried over from month to month and year to year.

“It’s understood by everyone that that’s how we do things. Otherwise, we would have gotten accused of falsification prior to this,” Bell told the arbitration panel. “It was understood that each inspector’s eyes are different, and 1/8 of an inch is negligible.”

2. The issue that ultimately lead to the train derailment was flagged by inspectors and had been for years.

In Metro management’s initial response to the derailment, they noted 12-14 buttery ties that had allowed tracks to slip too far apart — right where the inspection reports had reported 15 defective ties month after month, year after year.

Bell’s termination letter acknowledged the problem had been reported over and over.

“The records reflect there was a recorded defect on the Defect Database that was at the ‘Point of Derailment’ and another entry that was allowed to remain on the database since 2012,” the letter said.

3. They did change their training and practices after the derailment to improve them.

After the summer 2016 derailment, Metro changed inspection procedures to no longer provide the previous measurements pre-typed in on switch inspection forms, and retrained track inspectors to record the actual measurements they took.

I applaud your deep reading of the article, because it shows how bureaucratic thinking can infiltrate any job.

Notice the language of Bell - "everyone did it this way", "I was just doing what I had been told" - It's the "I followed orders and The Process" defense. I'd be much happier if a technician or supervisory one at that actually had a technician's mindset and pride in his/her work that would lead them to think "You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own." No, instead, there's citing of reports and approvals and procedure.

This is your brain on PMC+Bureaucracy. This is how they want you to think because then capital-C Compliance is the way to a "respectable" job.

Even if that job is making sure everyone is in alphabetical order before going into the culling machine.

I am not an expert on railway safety but presumably there is some tolerance for these gaps, below which changes are not concerning. I am not sure 1/8 of an inch is the correct number but there is some correct number. It makes sense to me that the process for inspection incorporates these tolerances. In this specific context Bell is contesting his being fired. In which case whether he was doing the thing he was trained to do is relevant. "I was following the procedure my employer trained me to do" is, to my mind, a pretty good defense against "this employee acted negligently in their role." Or, at least, it shifts any negligence off the employee to the employer.

"You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own."

Is it a bad thing, though? How much are these gaps expected to change naturally? What is the inter-inspector accuracy? I do not have the domain knowledge to answer these questions but it seems plausible to me the mentioned 1/8 inch is a tolerance below which variation is not worth worrying about.

Relevantly, 1/8 inch is the threshold below which it becomes very difficult to measure without specialized equipment. If these guys are measuring stuff with tape measures ordinary human error would make a ridiculous number of changes to the logs.

I am not an expert on railway safety but presumably there is some tolerance for these gaps, below which changes are not concerning.

Changes are essentially summed vectors. 1/8" or less of a change from month to month is almost never going to be a problem. 10 of those negligible movements in a row, in the same direction, is a massive problem! But if you didn't update the documented measurement, because each time you checked, it had changed 1/8" or less, you would never even know that your position had drifted by an entire inch from your documentation. The only non-negligent way I can think of to track the sum of many small vectors is to record the actual measurement every time.

But ten of those movements would be noted, because they weren't updating the logs when it moved 1/16 inch.

I am making some assumptions about the procedure I suppose. I'm imagining they measure a gap of some size, 1" say, and that's what they record. Then, on subsequent inspections, if the gap measures less than 1-1/8" they just leave the measurement at 1". So not updating the measurement over months and years implies a net change less than 1/8". If they reset the baseline they are measuring the gap against on subsequent measurements then I agree that is a huge problem.

If the measurement is supposed to be 56 1/2", and you measure it and it turns out to be 56 17/32", and then the next time you measure it it's 56 19/32", and then 56 21/32", then you'll now note that 56 21/32" is more than 1/8" from the nominal 56 1/2", and you'll record that. It's only if

  1. You DO record the measurement each time and

  2. You compare against the previous measurement, not the nominal correct value

that creep will get you.

True - I was assuming for some reason they were only recording deltas but it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be some measurement against a baseline. ETA: I guess if that's the case, then I don't understand how it would be possible to disregard measurements under the "less than 1/8 inch" policy and have them end up moving to the point of failure, unless through complete dereliction.

What makes you think the procedure was bad?

(And no, "obviously the technicians should care about 1/8 inch" is not enough to show that the procedure is bad. Especially since the problem had in fact been repeatedly reported! That's a management problem; the technicians were just being used as patsies for the management problem.)

had a technician's mindset and pride in his/her work that would lead them to think "You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own."

Technicians are all about tolerances and making things work. That’s bureaucrats demanding measurements.

Better phrasing than mine, for sure.

Maybe it's more the tyranny of metrics as product. If the point of measurements, and tolerances is to "make things work" that's fine. It seems to me that, in this case, the point of measurements was to point at the measurements.

The measurements were almost certainly intended to make sure that technicians caught stuff proactively rather than reactively; that technicians just photocopied it for decades because eh good enough is what the bureaucrats were trying to prevent.

This seems more a human factors problem than a technical one: "within tolerance from install time" is probably fine from an engineering perspective: many complex systems manage by just painting alignment marks on bolts to spot movement. That lazy technicians might just photocopy it is a QA issue: even if they had to write it, they could just rewrite the values without actually taking measurements.

Setting up systems like this is its own art. There are plenty of watch clock systems to make sure your security guards actually patrol your facility and don't just nap at the desk and sign the forms. Otherwise "establish a high trust culture" doesn't seem scalable, but maybe works in a few life-critical industries (airplane mechanics). There are probably some modern computer-driven solutions (see electronic charts in medicine?), but even then those are pretty modern takes on a process they've been doing for decades.

But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.

If you read your link it explains that measurements did not have to be updated if they were within 1/8 inch, so copying the old measurements is permissible.

That's their side of it.

What actually happened was a railroad tie was ignored until it was completely rotted out, and then a train derailed and people died.

"Within 1/8 inch" my ass. Just because that's the preposterous excuse they offer doesn't mean you have to believe it. Too much charity.

UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.

You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.

I explicitly said that in my original post.

I think a fake job that you never work and are entitled to no matter what and UBI are the same thing. What possible difference can you point to? They are both entitled to your money, do no work, and the right can seemingly never be revoked. The only difference is that one is a fiction to trick you into it, and the other is just straight forward. But since nobody can agree to UBI, the liars version gets rolled out instead.

A couple of major socially relevant features of a UBI are that it gives people time to pursue their own ends (for good or ill) and lets them decide where to live independently of work opportunities.

A fake job doesn't allow for these unless it's so fake that you can never show up, move halfway across the country, and keep getting your checks. My guess is these WMATA jobs aren't quite that fake; they're more like 'sit in an office slowly plodding through useless paperwork' or 'stand around on a job site with your six buddies watching the one new guy work.'

That sound more like a standard Communist job than a UBI

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us".

The "U" in "UBI" is Universal. Not everyone can become a no-show WMATA employee.

Then there can never be a test or a pilot for an UBI, because it was only tested in this small city or during this timeframe so no true UBI. This is just nitpicking. The OP is right, the situation he describes is at least on par with pilot version of UBI when it comes to actual results.

Yes. The "U" part of UBI is load-bearing. It is at the least extremely difficult to test it validly. Fake WMATA jobs, however, do not even come close.

Then there can never be a true UBI. In the end it will always be subject to political whim and so it can be cancelled overnight. UBI is not a natural law, so it can never truly be universal. Right?

You're right. WMATA jobs are actually reparations for the permanent underclass of Washington DC.

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