API Evangelist Conversation About Trains, AI, Rich Fat Cats, Big Money, and Politics with Adron Hall

Howdy, howdy. I am Adrian, a API maker and user, etc, etc. And also transit nerd.

Yeah, definitely. So I always see a lot of parallels on anything big that starts to happen in the US because it tends to follow a little bit of a similar path. You know, there’s differences, but there’s a lot of core similarities because of the way we fund things, the way we govern around things or don’t in some cases and things like that, uh, to, to kind of place where we are in the tech industry [00:02:00] in general, like with computers, Yeah. And everything, not just a I, but just with computers, we’re still very early, even in that sense. Um, and a lot of those things or what is happening in a I, what is happening in technology, etcetera, is still in a very similar place to like what happened with the railroads. At the inception of that industry in the United States. And just to kind of tell that story real quick, back when railroading started in the United States, we, we first, like we got a steam engine from Britain, for example, but we started to build out little systems, which were small. Completely privately funded. It was basically like having a kit car in your, in your garage or something. Right. As far as these companies were concerned that we’re doing it and they slowly started to build out. So in the early days, very, very much grassroots kind of different companies, trying different things to see how it would benefit them. Cause that was the new technology at the time. And in many [00:03:00] ways, computers were being utilized the same way in the eighties and nineties, et cetera. You know, companies were bringing them in and doing various different things, whether it’s. Data analysis, reporting, or just trying to get people to use, uh, spreadsheets. You know, that was a big one that caused a lot of disheveled situations where accounting departments went from like, let’s say you had a thousand people, they all of a sudden became 200 people, drastic reductions in that because people could do things with spreadsheets and became. vastly more productive. Same thing in railroading. All of a sudden, a few companies started to build out these full systems and we’re like, Oh, now we can get our big mass produced product, whatever it might be, whether it’s coal mined out of somewhere or, uh, you know, cows to the, to the butcher or whatever, we can get them in mass. At high volume with the railroad to wherever we need, if we build out the railroad system. So they started to develop the technology and get more and more advanced. After that early fledgling era, though, government started [00:04:00] to get more involved and not always directly infusing money or anything like that, but saying, Hey, this is a national concern. We want to do X, Y, Z. And one of the first things, big things the government said was we want to be able to go from the East Coast. To the west coast. We want lines across the country. We want to develop the Western half of the country. So they put together efforts to build the trans cons, which are four major rail lines, which still exist today and are kind of the backbone of the country’s industry in tech. I feel like we’re kind of around that stage where the government’s getting a lot more involved and saying we need to be a leader in A. I. We need to be a late leader in this technology or that technology and kind of safeguarded in some ways, for example, like with Processors. There’s a lot of concern around that, and some of it being, for example, located in Taiwan. We don’t have the fabs here, etcetera. So there’s a lot of thought coming from [00:05:00] the government, and we’re kind of at that stage where they start to get much more involved in industry. To kind of regulate, but also push forward or even in some cases fund certain types of projects. So that’s where a lot of the parallels are that I’ve been drawing is I feel like we’re kind of at that stage where things are going to get a little spicy in that regard.

And sometimes I hope to see certain comparisons. For example, there was a gold, uh, G O U L D not the thing, even though I’m sure a lot of people were trading gold at the time too, when they could get it. But gold was, uh. A guy who became very rich investing in, uh, basically taking over railroads and then, then kind of cannibalizing them into [00:06:00] some degree, right? And he, he did fair amount of damage, but he also forced expansion of, uh, certain lines and then kind of overbuilding and then would cannibalize them and make a bunch of money. And for a part of his life, he became flat broke after becoming ludicrously rich. And, uh, eventually he would get back into it and do like weird investment tricks to get back into it. But he was a guy who did not actually invent technology, did not actually push forward certain technology. He just invested in people and things and companies that did that. And then ended up broke, disenfranchised himself to a whole bunch of people and then kind of got back into it, became not broke, but never really got truly rich again. And I, I almost can imagine Elmo falling. I’m sorry, Elon Musk falling into that same paradigm at some point because he does seem to be going off the edge of a cliff. Uh, and gold was one of those guys that did that. He, he, he didn’t have the same, I mean, he didn’t have ketamine or whatever, but he [00:07:00] had similar. Issues that kind of drove him off a cliff, even though he seemed to be very, very successful at one point. until he started to cannibalize his companies and kind of make them implode. Uh, and that was one element of drama out of the many, many different people that were starting railroads or running railroads and trying to take over territories and things like that. So one of the other big ones, though, and I immediately triggered in my head when there was the announcement of we’re gonna put 500 billion into A. I. I’m like, okay, cool. I guess maybe. And the reason my train of thought went with that, haha, pun intended, I guess, uh, if we go back into the history of the Union Pacific, which is one of the biggest railroads in America and also the world, um, when they first started building out the, the CEO of that company was a, just a wretched human being, very horrible guy. But basically what he was doing, he was taking. [00:08:00] Government money to expand the line and he would do it in the cheapest possible way. So it wasn’t always like the most efficient line, but he was getting it built. He would take money and basically he’d shave off a bit for the company, do more things that were real cheap and just trying to be as profitable as possible and sort of getting a transcontinental line built. Right? Well, he eventually ran the ground, the company into the ground. It went bankrupt. The government had to take it over and then figure out what was wrong and then unbreak it. And long story short, the country, the company still exists today. as union pacific, but they’ve had their trials and tribulations through this. And I feel like if if the government is going to dump 500 billion into A. I, they’re going to experience a lot of that same trial and tribulation because they don’t even really know. They didn’t have a desired outcome. They don’t have, they don’t have an idea of what they’re really investing in. They’re just like, we’re just going to, she’s just going to dump billions into it.[00:09:00] Maybe that’s good. Maybe not. You should probably have some idea of, well, one, what bucket that’s coming from, because it’s still not a small amount of money and to what, what do you hope to achieve? I don’t know with the U. P. Line. They had wanted it to connect into Sacramento to the southern Pacific smaller railroad at the time, and, uh, they eventually got there. But, you know, the line had to go bankrupt once before it actually made it all the way. to Sacramento. And then that was one of the lines to that was notorious for and hopefully I doesn’t do this today, but they managed to kill a whole ton of their workforce because they weren’t, they weren’t taking care of their people as they built across the country. It was, it was kind of horrible. But you know, when people need work, they do whatever they can do. And that was what U. P. Was taken advantage of. So lots of rough, rough spots there.

Yeah. And I think even, even in the sense where we had, we had cleaned up a lot of that over the. Century plus that that era had occurred. The things that the, the, the investment vehicles and the investment maneuvers and strategies and tactics that they use back in the day are a lot of things that are kind of either severely frowned upon or just straight up illegal these days. Um, They would do tricks with the actual stocks because they would go get the physical stocks and like fake print stocks and sell the, there’s all types of shady stuff that went on. And with the, a lot of those things are basically being reintroduced with crypto because it [00:11:00] can’t really be regulated or observed. So absolutely horrible things are being done with that. Considering that a whole lot of crypto money got put into Well, current election that just finished, but also the mechanisms that those, the people that are into that actually want to kind of use and unfold to finance things and to build out things. A lot of those same things are occurring just with crypto versus. You know, the U S dollar, um, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s very, it’s very interesting because also at a period in history, the, the very, very wealthy people, uh, actually bailed out the U S government because it went bankrupt. Um, and it almost seems like we could be upon that era again, too, which is kind of shady, uh, and, and very concerning because, you know, the government went through a couple of years where they were just flat broke and couldn’t figure out how to make money. [00:12:00] Couldn’t couldn’t get. You know, tax collection, all sorts of stuff was broken. And these bankers came in, said, here’s a giant bailout. Eventually you need to do something like have a central bank. Cause at the time there wasn’t a central bank. It was just a bunch of competing currencies, i. e. kind of like crypto, a bunch of competing crypto. Right. Um, so, you know, we, we could be in a similar situation like that, where all of a sudden the oligarchy, it bails out the U S government or something, because the U S government is not solvent. Right. Uh, but yeah. So all sorts of. historical parallels in that regard. And a lot of that was tied very directly to railroading and industrialization. So, you know, we could, we could be in that same boat and being that AI technology, et cetera, those are the high ticket, high dollar, high attention, uh, things in industry right now in the, in the, in the market and everything. So that’s where. A lot of that type of activity and behavior and everything is occurring.

Well, yeah. And so his. His efforts, which is really when like presidents had been pushing for it for like 20 or 30 years to let’s build lines across the country so we can get to the West coast. The country was basically the West coast and the East coast. That’s. That’s what the country was for all intents and purposes. There were people out farming, but it was, you know, like 15 people here, 20 [00:14:00] people here, very, very spread out. So the presidents, Congress, et cetera, wanted to be able to develop out in the middle of the country in places, you know, get places built like say Kansas city or St. Louis, which they exist because of the railroads. So presidents had been trying to push this through Congress was like, no, we shouldn’t spend any government money. We shouldn’t organize this. We should let. Whatever market forces dictate. However, any of these things had occurred, um, So Lincoln was the first one who finally coordinated Congress enough, amazingly, considering the other things he was having to deal with at the time, like a civil war, but he had coordinated, uh, Congress enough where they actually passed some bills, which said, all right, here’s, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to. Partially fun, but partially allocate just land and then do like a trade off where we give you land. We might fund some of the initial development, but then you have to pay back the loan and eventually you can use part of the land. The [00:15:00] other part is government and then they can sell it off and do whatever. And we’re going to set up. Four tracks, and I don’t mean in like railroad tracks, but like tracks of land, pathways to out west. And some of it still needs to be figured out, because at the time they didn’t know how the Rockies were oriented and things like that. But he set that up with Congress, and they finally put it forth, and that’s what really got The core railroads working on it. One was the Northern Pacific, which eventually, well, fast forward to today. That’s the BNSF that runs from basically Chicago up to, uh, Minneapolis and then out to Seattle and Portland area. Uh, that was one of the big railroads that took on the effort. Union Pacific was basically put together form to take advantage of that. Um, and then there was like Southern Pacific and I’ve, I’m drawing a blank on the other railroad that started to build out, but you got four transcon lines Companies are working on it and it was a competition who would get there first and the one that did get there first they [00:16:00] got to Do the big media event which you still see pictures around different places because everybody took pictures at the time of the event but they They drove the golden spike Into that connecting track and they had the two steam engines facing each other and a bunch of guys standing up on the steam engines And that was that was theoretically the first. Uh Railroad that connected across the country. It take you. It made trip times go from was it like if you took a wagon caravan, it take you about a couple months or something like that. A wild amount of time, just completely crazy amount of time. The railroad could get you out to the West Coast in A couple of days. So, you know, if you think you’re cruising along at 20 to 35 miles per hour back in the day, continuously without stopping. Um, so you get out there in a decent amount of time versus going an average of like two

Yeah. So one of the, one of the weird things, so since this, a lot of this started to occur right after the civil war, there were a lot of freed people, um, available to work. And the thing was, is you had to be partially educated to work on the railroad. You had to understand how the tracks needed to be built. So there was, there was a certain amount of education that happened. So there was a lot of freed people in, in one area of the country that could. technically be utilized for building some of the railroads. Um, the South had used slave labor to a degree before, but they actually stopped using slave labor at some, some point they kind of got built out. It was one of the reasons, but, uh, the South also, if you look at the railroads in the South, vastly underbuilt [00:18:00] versus the Northeastern us. And one of the reasons is they just built a few lines. Often with slave labor, et cetera, to build, you know, to go out to cotton fields and stuff like that and connect those. And that was it. The South never industrialized. And one of the reasons they didn’t industrialize is because they didn’t want to enable that population, the slave population, um, because that gave you too much independence. If all of a sudden you could make factory labor rate, then, you know, you’re, you’re kind of out of the need to be subservient. Um, or just direct slave or just subservient to the landowners at the time. So it was very messy in that regard, but as that happened, even in other ways, some really wild genocidal stuff happened. There was the whole, uh, Utah issue where. Some, uh, whatever you want to call them, colonists, settlers, whatever went out there and they frame killed, [00:19:00] framed, uh, some local tribes in, in killing off some of the local settlers, even though people from the church had done it and they were trying to build the railroad through there too. And they were like, oh, they were out there by that they were going to work on the railroad, but then that didn’t happen. And they killed them off and then they just blamed the local tribes. So the U S military sent in the military to go kill off. Not super ethical to put it mildly. Right. Um, but then one of the, you know, there’s all sorts of nutty stuff that was going on too. Uh, and not to say it was all completely negative either. Cause like one of the, one of the things that occurred was, uh, A small conflict, but then unionization occurred and other things of a positive nature kind of straightened it out. But some horrible things initially started where the railroad was getting built out in the Pacific Northwest out here.[00:20:00] A lot of Irishman had come in. And we’re working on the railroads and the leaders that were building the railroads were like, okay, these guys sort of come to work. They’re often drunk. Uh, and then they go and, you know, we’re losing 10 percent of our workforce to people going off and dying of various. Reasons, right? So they had this laundry list of the problems with the workforce and for various reasons, though, they were like that. Well, they’re only gonna hire the Irish. That’s the that’s the fellow white people that can work on the railroad. Well, speeding up a little few weeks there, some Chinese men showed up and said, you know, we, we’d work on the railroad for you. I’m paraphrasing of course, we’ll, we’ll work on this job and we’ll do it for like, you know, the team will work for three bucks a month less, which is like 15 percent less than the Irish workers that they had at the time. [00:21:00] Well, the Chinese men came in and started working on. The railroad and immediately the management noticed and said, okay, we didn’t want to hire the China men because we didn’t want to hire China men, right? Just pure kind of racist supposition. But then once they did that, they’re like, oh, dear, they’re actually more consistent because they get up and they’re doing two things. One. They’re not dying because they make tea in the morning. And in anthropological research here, all of a sudden they realized, wait, when they showed up and made tea, they were getting rid of something that was killing them. The Irishman, they were getting rid of the disease in the water because, you know, they would get, they would get bacterial diseases by drinking just water in the morning after having drunk at night and, you know, they’re trying to balance themselves out to go to work, but they’re actually killing themselves by accident. They didn’t, you know, nobody knew it, but the Chinaman also not realizing it, we’re killing the germs. So they would get to work fresh, they’d work the day [00:22:00] and then they would go gamble their money. They would gamble their money and then have to go back to work to make more money. So it became this, this thing, which kind of fed itself and then all of a sudden, like when you look through the history books, you realize a lot of the Western railroads from the Western side inland were built by, Men from China, right? People brought over here for whatever reason, however they got here, but they were built by that. So literally China built our Western side of, of the trans cons, um, which is very fascinating because it started out as racist, but then it kind of was like, Oh wait. That was stupid because these guys actually are very good, but then they realized these, these existing assumptions were detrimental to their existing workforce, but also sadly enough, at one point, uh, just here in the Seattle region, for example, the, the Irishman that were now pissed because they had their jobs taken [00:23:00] away, started a war. With the Asian populace. And it didn’t matter because they didn’t know any different. They’re like, we’re just going to kill Asian people. So they started kind of, I guess you could call it like a micro war or a riot slash protest where they were, they started fighting with the Chinese, but also other Asian populations that were in the area. And there was, there was open conflict, like in the streets of. Southern Seattle and some other areas in the area. And eventually, you know, the police came in and cracked down on everybody, beat the crap out of everybody. Cause that’s what they did back then, I guess, and things were settled. But what happened was the Chinese population was pushed off into a quadrant of Seattle, which they currently now also you, you see all the accoutrements in. Chinatown slash international district, but also the Irish population left the the area in Seattle and moved to a completely different area for a while and and that conflict happened, but things [00:24:00] did settle and then, you know, more employment increased in building out of the railroads and then, of course, 60 years later, everything got built out to a degree and mass, uh, layoffs started to occur in railroading consolidation

It’s, it’s kind of ridiculous. There’s always lessons in history. Even if things don’t directly parallel, there’s lessons to be learned. Like for one, I mean, I [00:25:00] feel like this shouldn’t need to be said at this point, but racism, bigotry, it’s just selling yourself short and selling the country short, like we’re ruining it for everybody when people are like that. So shouldn’t need to be said, but that’s obviously just. Just stupidity. We don’t, we don’t need that kind of thinking. You need to have an open mind and, you know, to be extra campy, kind of an open heart to people like try to see what they see, try to understand what they, they are going through, you know, and, and, you know, bring people in, open yourself up to that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of opportunities there to work with people on all sorts of things and different mindsets, et cetera. And that’s throughout history. You can see that those that close their minds or did have just You know, close minds or did horrible things to try to make a myopic vision of what they only wanted without including other people kind of just, you know, ended up being a train wreck.[00:26:00] So not good to have train wrecks. I can say that from firsthand experience.

that. All right. So, uh, 2017 in December, uh, Amtrak and Washington state department, transportation, et cetera, were opening up, uh, additional frequencies. On the Amtrak cascades between Seattle and Portland, in addition to those frequencies, they were opening a new segment of track that left South Tacoma and went a different way. Then the tracks they had been using went. So the engineers, et cetera, drivers of the train, um. Weren’t overly familiar with that part of the trackage. And at the Southern end of that trackage was a part where you needed to slow [00:27:00] the train down from 80 miles per hour to 30 miles per hour, because there was a 30 mile per hour S turn that went across the interstate and then back onto the main line where they could then go 80 miles per hour again. On the first trip, southbound out of Seattle, I got on the business class car and whipped out my little laptop and I was doing some computery stuff. And. We got to Tacoma. Everything seemed fine. We left Tacoma and we were cooking along at well, track speed is 79 miles per hour. So technically we were doing 79 miles per hour, but I would just say 80 cause it’s easier anyway. We’re cooking along at 80 miles per hour. And at the very end, one of the other problems, which they now realize where you see the mile posts. Sign was too close to the turn. And if you’re cruising along at 80 miles per hour, still, because you’re not familiar and you might’ve missed the point where you needed to start slowing down, if you see that sign, you don’t have time to turn down because the turn is literally like right there. Well, anyway, we were cooking along at 80 miles per hour. And [00:28:00] we went into the 30 mile per hour turn at 80 miles per hour. And the entire train derailed, except for the baggage car, my bicycle and the trailing engine had two engines, one on the front, one on the back. But all the other cars went off the tracks. They went off the bridge. The lead engine went into the middle of interstate and stopped interstate traffic for like, I think it was eight days. Trains are big. If anybody doesn’t know, especially in America, trains are very big and the engines are huge. So they had to get a special load. Truck and crane out there that you usually see for like building skyscrapers or something. And they had to load the engine on that because you couldn’t just put it on some arbitrary equipment. And drive it off. You had to get it on a big, big truck, the things like a hundred and 180 tons. So basically like four in one Abram tanks stuck together, right? Just massive amount of weight. And it was blocking all three lanes of the road. So the entire interstate southbound was closed for all those [00:29:00] days, but the other cars went off. Most people survived some pretty serious injuries, but we did have three deaths in that one. And I was, I was kind of sort of one of the first responders because I was on the train. So yeah, so trains suck when they wreck. They are not fun when they wreck.

Um, so I know how numbers work, so I knew that that didn’t technically, well, one, it seemed like an impossibility. It’s like, good gosh, 99 percent of people, more than 99 percent of people will never be in a train wreck period. You’ll probably be in a car wreck, but you won’t be in a train wreck. Um, so I was like, Oh wow. I’ve now experienced the freak, uh, experience of being in a train wreck. And it was a bummer, but I was like, Nope, I got to get back through this, [00:30:00] uh, because I like to ride trains too much. Um, so literally the next train I took was one of the trans cons, the empire builder route from, uh, Seattle to Chicago. That was literally the next train trip I took like a month later. And you’re on that train for 46 hours between Seattle and Chicago went to a conference, actually a tech conference. So it, it, uh, It kind of forced me to deal with the PTSD of the whole situation, which I will say was whole, it was gut wrenching being on the train every time it would wiggle or something. I’m like, ah, my body thinks we’re getting in a wreck, even though I know we’re not.