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Henry Ford needed hundreds of people to build a car in his Factory a long time ago. Now you can build a factory with robots and staff it with 100 or a few hundred repairmen and bean counters.It appears with the recent closures of autoplants that large car makers are groaning under the stress of pension and retirement funds. Is it possible they are trying to eliminate this cost by eliminating the workers and have it all done by Robots just for assembly? I think that they are doing it while waiting the 15-30 years or so for the current costs (People) to literally die off.I have seen housing costs go very high for tiny homes. Take California where you spend 500K or even a million for a 1000 square foot home. You cannot expect workers to maintain these homes unless they are part of our Government making adequate wages. Certainly not minimum wage workers.. oh no.The forums fill up every day about railroad space. Rooms 9x10, 17x15 a part of a garage etc etc. I remember homes that were built just after world war two and grew up in a few that featured several floors, a full basement with fallout entrance, strong construction and large spaces for different purposes.Today the homes in my neighborhood are half houses and half carport. The total space taken up by the properties can be swallowed up in a good sized basement of the old post war homes. Maybe Im learning how to live in the south I dont know.The railroads are more than happy to run on the mainline and they DO have some locals operating in several areas. Hard to imagine that they may actually gather up enough cars for revenue to another part of the USA but they are able to do it.I remember back home we had a team track where there was a lumber car parked for two days while a big flatbed truck shuttled the lumber to another town a few miles down the road that did not have rail service. I sit there at my workplace and watched this truck patiently run back and forth until all the lumber was gone. Soon after the locomotive showed up on a night train and took the flatcar away.What happens if Big Railroad fell out of bed in the morning and stubbed it's toe over all the little towns around the usa and started to serve everyone including commuters? I bet there will be a bit of a freedom from dependance of West coast-east coast traffic. But they will face large increases of manpower, motive power (It's all pool power on leased rates anyhow...) and infrastructure to support it all.But no. They want to run two trains manned by robots under remote control with zero cost and 100% profit. And will not stop until they reach this goal. Never mind that yard that eats into transit time or ton miles. Every effort must be made to inflate the numbers high enough to please everyone, especially the shareholders on Wall Street.I offer to you that our Government is no longer in Washington. They are on Wall Street. I remember a steady flow of paper products that literally dried up one year when the cost of paper got too much. The locals started having other sources of thier paper shipped in bypassing the local trucking company's accounts because paper cost just went up one day on Wall Street.Today I can sit down and type this out in a few minutes, I hardly remember what it is like to write on paper except a occasional check to the store which is being replaced by fancy "Beep" cards that might, just might make the old US Dollar in my wallet a number on someone's imagination somewhere deep in the Federal Treasury system some day.
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