With apologies to Patrick McKenzie: the optimal amount of dead kids is non-zero, and I think the revealed preference of america as a whole is that we are comfortable with quite a lot of dead kids if it brings political stability and a modicum of personal comfort.

School shootings, policing, our medical system, our political system itself (the uneven distribution of power between states), all of these suffer from the fundamental problem that we've got a system that's a solid 3/10 and we have no institutional interest in improving that. And yeah those systems grind up some dead kids every day and we shrug and move on. Thoughts and prayers is the meme, right?

Nobody wants to mess with the rail system because it will make the amazon packages stop. Let alone if there's a feeling (or a reality) of tipping back into the supply-chain issues of 2020 again. Can you imagine the reaction to a rail strike during midterm elections? People would legitimately have flipped their shit and voted in some completely vile motherfuckers who promised to at least make the amazon packages keep coming. So the union had to eat shit, and now your kids have to eat shit, because the union wasn't wrong about what they were saying, but it was all a complete political loser two months ago. Name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden picks the union over america and christmas".

And it works - people keep voting for this, based on actual revealed preference through voting patterns, people feel it's way more important to keep fighting the war on egghead intellectuals, this year's installement of the war on LGBT, and the war on climate science than to fret about some dead kids. Biden's doing a good job of understanding what america really wants - which is my god damn amazon packages to show up.

America is open for business, people want Norfolk Southern jobs and Duke Coal jobs and whatever else, and we're far too scared to make even those small leaps let alone reforming our whole healthcare system or retirement or redistributing power between states to something a little more sane. Those are truly big changes and we're not even willing to handle the little stuff. Jumping to the next thing is always scary, whether it's a job or anything else, even if the train is on fire it's the train on fire we know. Everyone has lingered too long in a job that was failing or with a partner that wasn't going to work out, but it's safe.

And America is the same way, by geographic and political coincidence we are essentially immune to external geopolitical pressure so there's nothing that's going to push us down. Which has allowed us to ignore underlying problems that would have pushed down other countries. A system that's designed to gridlock is fundamentally broken, people say "when you're not in power you'll appreciate it!" no actually I want someone always to be in the driver seat and empowered to make decisions, and we can go from there to making the political system actually represent what people want. Excessive checks-and-balances and a division between the executive branch and the legislature and not inherently positive things with no downsides, the PM being the leader of the ruling party is an overall positive feature of parliamentary systems.

The underlying problem is that this is not an issue the heartland of america wants to address, and the american system has (by historical circumstance and coincidences of fate) distributed a disproportionate amount of power to the heartland. The heartland wants to fight LGBT and thumb their nose at egghead intellectuals who want you to buy smaller cars to fight climate change, and they certainly don't want the unions to "win". That is what actually motivates people's votes. Again, name an ohio republican who would have "supported Biden and the unions" two months ago during midterms. It's fucking hard to make a system work when a group that has at least 49% of the power at all times is intent on being a deadweight or outright contrarian, if someone is willing to let your kids die to make bigger gains in midterms, and people keep voting from them, what exactly do you do about that? And not just on the trains either, it's all across american society.

But pulling the lever and diverting the trolley would decrease the political power of some farmers in Iowa, and deep down America is just not comfortable with that. "States should be equally represented" because haphazard admission of states across 200 years is a sacrosanct political bond even if it leads to 30% of the population controlling a supermajority of the political power. And if they do dumb shit with it oh well, shikata ga nai. The rest of the country has tried, we really have. What more can be done, could be done, that the heartland would possibly accept? The war on intellectuals and sexual freedom is just way more personally compelling than some dead kids who you probably didn't even know anyway. People just want their amazon packages to show up.

More kids will die next week, they always do. Shikata gai nai - thoughts and prayers. Nothing that can be done, says only country where this happens regularly.