Showing posts with label train. Show all posts
Showing posts with label train. Show all posts
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
LibertyNEWS TV - "Nation Changer! The Border Busting Immigration Train Rolls On"
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LibertyNEWS TV - "Nation Changer! The Border Busting Immigration Train Rolls On"
Thursday, March 13, 2014
LibertyNEWS TV - ObamaCare Train Wreck...Only "Glitches & Bumps"?
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LibertyNEWS TV - ObamaCare Train Wreck...Only "Glitches & Bumps"?
Saturday, March 1, 2014
At least 28 die in "terrorist" attack at Chinese train station
BEIJING (Reuters) – At least 28 people were killed by knife-wielding attackers in a “violent terrorist attack” at a train station in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, and police shot dead five of the assailants, state media said on Sunday.
At least 28 die in "terrorist" attack at Chinese train station
UPDATE: Gang of knife-wielding men kill 27 at China train station...
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UPDATE: Gang of knife-wielding men kill 27 at China train station...
China: Train station attack an act of terrorism
BEIJING (AP) — China’s official Xinhua News Agency says authorities consider the attack by a group of knife-wielding assailants at a train station in southwestern China in which at least 27 people died to be an act of terrorism.
Xinhua did not identify who might have been responsible for the Saturday evening attack at the Kunming Railway Station in Yunnan province. But the news agency said authorities considered it to be “an organized, premeditated violent terrorist attack.”
Local television station K6 said that several of the attackers were shot by police and that victims were transported to local hospitals. Xinhua says 27 people were killed and 109 others injured.
The Communist Party-run People’s Daily reports that China’s top police official, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu, is en route to Kunming, an indication of how seriously authorities view the attack.
China: Train station attack an act of terrorism
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Texting comic run over by train finds the funny side
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Texting comic run over by train finds the funny side
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Train Carriages Explosion and Fire - Kirov
A train has derailed in the Kirov region derailed, with approximately 10 cars containing liquefied gas catching fire. More than 400 people were evacuated fro the area.
According to Ministry of Emergency Situations in the Kirov region, 10 wagons derailed causing an explosion and resulting in a huge fire.
The incident occurred on the 710 km of the Gorky Railway, Novovyatsky district in the Kirov region.
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Train Carriages Explosion and Fire - Kirov
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Spain Train Derailment
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Spain Train Derailment
US, S. Korea special forces train for guerrilla warfare in N. Korea - report
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US, S. Korea special forces train for guerrilla warfare in N. Korea - report
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Monday, December 2, 2013
VIDEO: NTSB looks at speed in NYC derailment
Federal investigators with the NTSB are trying to determine how fast a Manhattan-bound Metro-North passenger train was traveling when it derailed in the Bronx, killing four and injuring more than 60.
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VIDEO: NTSB looks at speed in NYC derailment
Sunday, December 1, 2013
At least 4 dead, 63 injured in NYC train derailment
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At least 4 dead, 63 injured in NYC train derailment
New York train derailment kills four, injures 63
NEW YORK CITY
NEW YORK CITY (Reuters) – A passenger train derailed early on Sunday in New York City when at least five cars from a Metro-North train slid off the tracks, injuring several riders, officials said.
The train derailed on a large curved section of track at 7:20 a.m. in New York about 100 yards (meters) north of Metro North’s Spuyten Duyvil station, said Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for Metro North, which is a subsidiary of New York State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
At least one rail car was lying toppled near the Hudson river and police and other rescue workers were searching for survivors along the shoreline and the waterway.
Dozens of firefighters were on the scene helping pull people from the wreckage. Many people suffered injuries and some were transported to area hospitals for treatment, said New York City Fire Department spokesman Michael Parrella.
The train was a diesel with seven cars. The locomotive was on the north end pushing the cars southward.
New York train derailment kills four, injures 63
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Moscow subway scare: Driver dies, but full passenger train heads on
Published time: October 20, 2013 14:40
A Moscow metro driver died after falling from a moving car, leaving the passenger-packed train to head to the station unattended.
The train without a driver arrived at Ryazansky Prospect station on Friday at 22:30 MSK, the police said.
It stopped as a result of emergency braking, according to the Moscow subway press service. No casualties or injuries among the passengers were reported.
The body of the driver, who was identified as Aleksey Morozov, was later discovered between the stations.
The police say that the man’s death was caused by “multiple injuries.” The electricity in the tunnel was switched off for ten minutes in order to extract the body.
The investigators blame negligence for the tragedy, with footage from a CCTV camera inside the car indicating that the driver was alone in the cockpit.
“Apparently, the driver was killed as a result of safety violations as he opened the door and looked outside,” the police said.
Lifenews.ru website claims the man had a heart attack and wanted to open the window in the car to get some air, but pressed the wrong button and opened the door – he fell on the rail-track while trying to correct his mistake.
But one of Morozov’s colleagues doubts this explanation, saying that it’s pretty hard to confuse the “door (on the left) with a window (on the right).”
“…Suicide? I don’t believe it. The tracks go up before Ryazansky Prospect and the speed of entry to the station is quite low. One has to be a masochist to opt for exiting an open door at such a low speed,” LiveJournal user metroelf wrote. “Nothing is clear. Only he knows why he opened the door, but, alas, he won’t say anything. How could he fall? People stumble on level ground, breaking their legs and here it was a shaking train.”
Moscow subway scare: Driver dies, but full passenger train heads on
Monday, October 14, 2013
The Obamacare Train Wreck
It is now common knowledge that the bugs in the Obamacare website have been embedded in the system from the start. For the past two weeks, not only have many individuals found it impossible to access the website, but they are often frozen in place once they pass through the initial portal. The problems will just get worse. The current law requires extensive communications between enrollees and their chosen insurance carriers, as well as massive interaction with both federal and state organizations. As a result, web traffic builds up behind bottlenecks and leads to massive frustration. As I warned last May, watching Obamacare unravel is a painful business.
The Bright Side of Bad News
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tried to put a positive gloss on the messy situation with the dubious observation that the system glitches are due to heavy consumer demand. Her statement subtly implies that the nation’s alleged need for the program is the cause of its momentary glitches. She claims that things are “getting better by the day.” Not so. The government site was not built for heavy traffic, nor was it tested before going live. It is no mean feat to try to fix a balky computer system on the fly.
As a result of these problems, calls to delay the implementation of the individual mandate are now reaching a fever pitch, such as Peggy Noonan’s to delay the individual mandate a year. The bugs need to be worked out before ordinary people are slapped with fines for failing to enroll in the derelict system before the penalty deadline now set for March 31, 2014.
Thus far, the Obama Administration has been mum on the sources and extent of the difficulties. But make no mistake about it: they reflect the broader structural weaknesses of the program, which were hidden from view by the disastrous launch. Nonetheless, the system’s basic design is flawed, and its gaffes will become only more apparent as implementation moves forward.
Republicans are howling to repeal and defund Obamacare. As a policy matter, that is surely the correct move. But as a political matter, the prompt repeal of Obamacare is just not going to happen over the uncompromising opposition of a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. So, if the first-best solution is not possible, more modest fixes for Obamacare are in order until Republicans start winning elections. Here are three areas of the law to change: the employer mandate for employees who work 30-hours-per-week; the coverage rules; and the medical loss ratio.
Part-Time Employment
As of January 1, 2014, Obamacare’s employer mandate kicks in with respect to employees who work thirty or more hours per week for a single employer. Just finding out who falls on which side of that line is no easy task. Much employment is seasonable, which could make it difficult to classify individual employees on one side of the line or the other without a close examination of their working history, which then has to be updated on a periodic basis.
But the larger difficulty is structural. As Andrew Puzder recently argued in the Wall Street Journal, the closer we come to implementation of the employer mandate, the stronger the pressure becomes for employers to hire part-timers who unambiguously work less than 30 hours per week. It will not happen in all cases. But in some significant fraction of cases it will be cheaper for a firm to hire more workers on a part-time base than fewer workers on a full time basis.
Alternatively, some employers will find it more efficient to hire fewer high-skilled workers with overtime payments in order to minimize the mandate’s burden. Both of these Obamacare-driven strategies are inefficient because neither would be adopted in a tax-free world, with higher optimal output.
The administration wanted to keep the hours exemption low in order reduce the number of employers who would avoid the mandate. What they did instead was to put the cart before the horse. In the effort to force-feed the healthcare market, they managed to cast a major pall over a struggling labor market. It is far better to expand labor markets in ways that create more wealth instead of restricting them for the sake of a botched employer mandate.
Obamacare’s Coverage Rules
A second major problem with Obamacare is how it sets healthcare rates in individual markets. The administration’s insistence that these be called “exchanges” or “markets” belies their coercive and confused nature. An open exchange is one that allows companies that meet certain minimum standards of probity and financial responsibility to sell their goods or services on terms and conditions that they choose to offer: think eBay. But none of that is tolerated on the Obamacare exchanges, as all parties are rigorously scripted to the kinds of services they can offer and the prices that they can charge.
In this case, the first problem is that the set of minimum benefits under the various plans is defined so generously that people will have to pay for services that they would never chose to acquire in a voluntary market. The clear implication is that the higher coverage generates social losses, not social gains. The inclusion of exotic items (e.g. habilitative care) not only raises the price of access, but it also makes it harder to get sensible benchmark pricing in what was, until the advent of the ACA, a non-existent market. Cutting back on these benefits should go a long way to controlling some of the price issues that have surfaced with the initial quotes, and bring healthcare costs in to greater alignment.
Under the current system, too many people make a beeline for coverage in the hopes of receiving huge subsidies—subsidies large enough to lure them away from private plans for which they pay market rates. That migration undermines private insurance companies that currently serve these people. It also requires cross-subsidies from healthier individuals to pick up the slack built into the system. The required revenues will not come from direct government payments, but only from other plan participants, namely younger enrollees now forced to pay above-market rates to supply the subsidy—if they chose to participate, which they often won’t.
This form of community rating has pronounced effects. Under the ACA, the maximum allowable rate differential is three-fold between a young person and a senior, but the market differential is about five-fold. Under those circumstances, the young person is likely to resist even movie-star exhortations to enroll in a plan that offers a net negative.
That tendency will increase because of the generous accommodations Obamacare makes for applicants with preexisting conditions. Most insurance plans design their enrollment and premium strategies to combat the constant risk of adverse selection. People have private information about their healthcare status, and thus are more likely to purchase healthcare at standard group rates when aware of their own precarious healthcare position.
Most traditional plans use various devices to control the risk of adverse selection. These include an individual disclosure, which allows firms to raise prices or exclude customers. With group plans, it is commonplace to require a minimum level of employee participation to prevent individual opportunism. But Obamacare goes in the exact opposite direction and requires insurers to enroll parties who know of their increased risk.
There is today a huge public ground swell that insists that no one should be excluded from healthcare on the grounds of their preexisting conditions. Nothing in the short run can stop that dynamic. But it is at least possible to slow down its effects. Thus, if open enrollment is allowed at any time, at least require all persons who enroll to remain in the plan for a year so that the insurer can earn back some of the money that it loses thanks to these strategic enrollments.
There is a limit to the size and quantity of subsidies that can be required. Pushing the balance back may well make access to the exchanges a more attractive proposition for those who right now are likely to stay out. Even if some community rating system is sacrosanct, its size is not. Tapering down on the program is a sensible mid-level strategy. The blunt truth is that the Republicans have to win elections in order to force a fundamental overhaul.
The Medical Loss Ratio
Ascurrently constituted, the ACA imposes extensive restrictions on the way in which insurance companies spend their premium dollars. In an ordinary business environment, the savvy firm is always making trade-offs at the margin between its medical and administrative expenses. Finding the right combination lets firms compete effectively in the marketplace. There is, moreover, no single ratio that works for all firms: much depends on the composition of its insured, the nature of its specialization, the local regulatory environment, and many other factors.
The medical loss ratio pays scant attention to these differences and limits the amount of “administrative expenses” that can be spent to 20 percent of individual plans and 15 percent of small group plans. Since 2012, firms that do not meet their respective targets have been required to issue rebates to their customers.
This boneheaded system is yet another example of how Obamacare forces private insurance companies to incur costly administrative expenses in order to deliver inferior services to their customers. This system is based on the peculiar belief that government agencies know, in the abstract, which expenses count as administrative, and how much they can be. It also assumes that governments should force firms into predetermined paths even though businesses, facing competitive pressures, have a far better grasp of how their cost structures should operate. These requirements are a back-handed form of price regulation, which should and could be eliminated right now without gutting the core of Obamacare.
Getting from Here to There
Repealing Obamacare should be a high priority for the Republicans if they can win national elections. But they can only get there if they play the short-term game well. The usual three imperatives for healthcare are to ensure access and quality while controlling price. I know of no top-down administrative system that can begin to reach those three goals. The efforts to force access and mandate quality are not only counterproductive, but they will also drive up prices in ways that undermine both access and quality.
The only viable counterstrategy treats deregulation as the first line of attack on the inefficiencies of the current system. Reduce costs and avoid regulatory nightmares, and access to care will rise as rates decline and quality of care improves.
There is nothing whatsoever in Obamacare that is congenial to innovation. In the long term, its baleful effects will only compound themselves. Once this is done, targeting subsidies at certain individuals to allow them to purchase healthcare plans that the market offers, such as the Healthy Indiana plan, without taking over management of the system, will result in greater access without compromising quality.
Playing hardball is a losing strategy. The Republicans will never get their turn unless they use today’s computer glitches and enrollment delays as a platform on which to propose modest market-enhancing reforms. This might give the public the confidence in the GOP’s ability to work on more substantial reforms down the road.
The Obamacare Train Wreck
The Obamacare Train Wreck
It is now common knowledge that the bugs in the Obamacare website have been embedded in the system from the start. For the past two weeks, not only have many individuals found it impossible to access the website, but they are often frozen in place once they pass through the initial portal. The problems will just get worse. The current law requires extensive communications between enrollees and their chosen insurance carriers, as well as massive interaction with both federal and state organizations. As a result, web traffic builds up behind bottlenecks and leads to massive frustration. As I warned last May, watching Obamacare unravel is a painful business.
The Bright Side of Bad News
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tried to put a positive gloss on the messy situation with the dubious observation that the system glitches are due to heavy consumer demand. Her statement subtly implies that the nation’s alleged need for the program is the cause of its momentary glitches. She claims that things are “getting better by the day.” Not so. The government site was not built for heavy traffic, nor was it tested before going live. It is no mean feat to try to fix a balky computer system on the fly.
As a result of these problems, calls to delay the implementation of the individual mandate are now reaching a fever pitch, such as Peggy Noonan’s to delay the individual mandate a year. The bugs need to be worked out before ordinary people are slapped with fines for failing to enroll in the derelict system before the penalty deadline now set for March 31, 2014.
Thus far, the Obama Administration has been mum on the sources and extent of the difficulties. But make no mistake about it: they reflect the broader structural weaknesses of the program, which were hidden from view by the disastrous launch. Nonetheless, the system’s basic design is flawed, and its gaffes will become only more apparent as implementation moves forward.
Republicans are howling to repeal and defund Obamacare. As a policy matter, that is surely the correct move. But as a political matter, the prompt repeal of Obamacare is just not going to happen over the uncompromising opposition of a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. So, if the first-best solution is not possible, more modest fixes for Obamacare are in order until Republicans start winning elections. Here are three areas of the law to change: the employer mandate for employees who work 30-hours-per-week; the coverage rules; and the medical loss ratio.
Part-Time Employment
As of January 1, 2014, Obamacare’s employer mandate kicks in with respect to employees who work thirty or more hours per week for a single employer. Just finding out who falls on which side of that line is no easy task. Much employment is seasonable, which could make it difficult to classify individual employees on one side of the line or the other without a close examination of their working history, which then has to be updated on a periodic basis.
But the larger difficulty is structural. As Andrew Puzder recently argued in the Wall Street Journal, the closer we come to implementation of the employer mandate, the stronger the pressure becomes for employers to hire part-timers who unambiguously work less than 30 hours per week. It will not happen in all cases. But in some significant fraction of cases it will be cheaper for a firm to hire more workers on a part-time base than fewer workers on a full time basis.
Alternatively, some employers will find it more efficient to hire fewer high-skilled workers with overtime payments in order to minimize the mandate’s burden. Both of these Obamacare-driven strategies are inefficient because neither would be adopted in a tax-free world, with higher optimal output.
The administration wanted to keep the hours exemption low in order reduce the number of employers who would avoid the mandate. What they did instead was to put the cart before the horse. In the effort to force-feed the healthcare market, they managed to cast a major pall over a struggling labor market. It is far better to expand labor markets in ways that create more wealth instead of restricting them for the sake of a botched employer mandate.
Obamacare’s Coverage Rules
A second major problem with Obamacare is how it sets healthcare rates in individual markets. The administration’s insistence that these be called “exchanges” or “markets” belies their coercive and confused nature. An open exchange is one that allows companies that meet certain minimum standards of probity and financial responsibility to sell their goods or services on terms and conditions that they choose to offer: think eBay. But none of that is tolerated on the Obamacare exchanges, as all parties are rigorously scripted to the kinds of services they can offer and the prices that they can charge.
In this case, the first problem is that the set of minimum benefits under the various plans is defined so generously that people will have to pay for services that they would never chose to acquire in a voluntary market. The clear implication is that the higher coverage generates social losses, not social gains. The inclusion of exotic items (e.g. habilitative care) not only raises the price of access, but it also makes it harder to get sensible benchmark pricing in what was, until the advent of the ACA, a non-existent market. Cutting back on these benefits should go a long way to controlling some of the price issues that have surfaced with the initial quotes, and bring healthcare costs in to greater alignment.
Under the current system, too many people make a beeline for coverage in the hopes of receiving huge subsidies—subsidies large enough to lure them away from private plans for which they pay market rates. That migration undermines private insurance companies that currently serve these people. It also requires cross-subsidies from healthier individuals to pick up the slack built into the system. The required revenues will not come from direct government payments, but only from other plan participants, namely younger enrollees now forced to pay above-market rates to supply the subsidy—if they chose to participate, which they often won’t.
This form of community rating has pronounced effects. Under the ACA, the maximum allowable rate differential is three-fold between a young person and a senior, but the market differential is about five-fold. Under those circumstances, the young person is likely to resist even movie-star exhortations to enroll in a plan that offers a net negative.
That tendency will increase because of the generous accommodations Obamacare makes for applicants with preexisting conditions. Most insurance plans design their enrollment and premium strategies to combat the constant risk of adverse selection. People have private information about their healthcare status, and thus are more likely to purchase healthcare at standard group rates when aware of their own precarious healthcare position.
Most traditional plans use various devices to control the risk of adverse selection. These include an individual disclosure, which allows firms to raise prices or exclude customers. With group plans, it is commonplace to require a minimum level of employee participation to prevent individual opportunism. But Obamacare goes in the exact opposite direction and requires insurers to enroll parties who know of their increased risk.
There is today a huge public ground swell that insists that no one should be excluded from healthcare on the grounds of their preexisting conditions. Nothing in the short run can stop that dynamic. But it is at least possible to slow down its effects. Thus, if open enrollment is allowed at any time, at least require all persons who enroll to remain in the plan for a year so that the insurer can earn back some of the money that it loses thanks to these strategic enrollments.
There is a limit to the size and quantity of subsidies that can be required. Pushing the balance back may well make access to the exchanges a more attractive proposition for those who right now are likely to stay out. Even if some community rating system is sacrosanct, its size is not. Tapering down on the program is a sensible mid-level strategy. The blunt truth is that the Republicans have to win elections in order to force a fundamental overhaul.
The Medical Loss Ratio
Ascurrently constituted, the ACA imposes extensive restrictions on the way in which insurance companies spend their premium dollars. In an ordinary business environment, the savvy firm is always making trade-offs at the margin between its medical and administrative expenses. Finding the right combination lets firms compete effectively in the marketplace. There is, moreover, no single ratio that works for all firms: much depends on the composition of its insured, the nature of its specialization, the local regulatory environment, and many other factors.
The medical loss ratio pays scant attention to these differences and limits the amount of “administrative expenses” that can be spent to 20 percent of individual plans and 15 percent of small group plans. Since 2012, firms that do not meet their respective targets have been required to issue rebates to their customers.
This boneheaded system is yet another example of how Obamacare forces private insurance companies to incur costly administrative expenses in order to deliver inferior services to their customers. This system is based on the peculiar belief that government agencies know, in the abstract, which expenses count as administrative, and how much they can be. It also assumes that governments should force firms into predetermined paths even though businesses, facing competitive pressures, have a far better grasp of how their cost structures should operate. These requirements are a back-handed form of price regulation, which should and could be eliminated right now without gutting the core of Obamacare.
Getting from Here to There
Repealing Obamacare should be a high priority for the Republicans if they can win national elections. But they can only get there if they play the short-term game well. The usual three imperatives for healthcare are to ensure access and quality while controlling price. I know of no top-down administrative system that can begin to reach those three goals. The efforts to force access and mandate quality are not only counterproductive, but they will also drive up prices in ways that undermine both access and quality.
The only viable counterstrategy treats deregulation as the first line of attack on the inefficiencies of the current system. Reduce costs and avoid regulatory nightmares, and access to care will rise as rates decline and quality of care improves.
There is nothing whatsoever in Obamacare that is congenial to innovation. In the long term, its baleful effects will only compound themselves. Once this is done, targeting subsidies at certain individuals to allow them to purchase healthcare plans that the market offers, such as the Healthy Indiana plan, without taking over management of the system, will result in greater access without compromising quality.
Playing hardball is a losing strategy. The Republicans will never get their turn unless they use today’s computer glitches and enrollment delays as a platform on which to propose modest market-enhancing reforms. This might give the public the confidence in the GOP’s ability to work on more substantial reforms down the road.
The Obamacare Train Wreck
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Train Passengers Too Absorbed With Smartphones to See Shooting
Associated Press
October 9, 2013
The man drew the gun several times on the crowded San Francisco commuter train, with surveillance video showing him pointing it across the aisle without anyone noticing and then putting it back against his side, according to authorities.
The other passengers were so absorbed in their phones and tablets they didn’t notice the gunman until he randomly shot and killed a university student, authorities said.
This article was posted: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 at 9:41 am
Tags: domestic news, technology
Train Passengers Too Absorbed With Smartphones to See Shooting
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Bus, train collide in Canada capital
Canadian emergency workers respond at the scene of a collision between a city bus and a passenger train in Ottawa on September 18, 2013.
A city bus has collided with a passenger train in the Canadian capital Ottawa, killing at least five people, emergency officials say.
The collision occurred in the west end of Ottawa on Wednesday during morning rush hour. Ottawa Fire Services spokesman Marc Messier said initial estimates indicate that five people have died and a number of other bus passengers have been injured.
The impact caused severe damage to the front end of the bus, and at least two of the train’s cars derailed.
According to witnesses, the double-decker city bus went through a closed crossing barrier.
“People started screaming, ‘Stop, stop!’ because they could see the train coming down the track,” said Tanner Trepaniere, who was sitting on the top level of the bus.
Rescue crews were called to the crash site and the injured who could walk were taken to a nearby second bus to be treated by paramedics.
Three of the injured, taken to Ottawa Hospital, are reportedly in critical condition.
This is the second deadly train crash in Canada since an oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic on July 6, which killed 50 people and destroyed the center of the Quebec town.
Canada’s two big railroads – Canadian National Railway Co and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd – have since the Lac-Megantic derailment launched a major review of the country’s railway regulations.
CAH/KA
Bus, train collide in Canada capital
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