Rail Monopolies

It was not good news how SCOTUS ruled on gerrymandered voting districts in South Carolina.  North Carolina is stuck with gerrymandered voting districts after several appeals and a ruling by SCOTUS.  The Supreme Court is moving to the right, and while they are hedging on a decision about Donald Trump's candidacy, you can feel the ball rolling into his court.  I have given up.  I will not see America turn around in my lifetime, so I have stopped diligently reading the news.  It is all inflammatory, bad, or propaganda.  It makes life that much more difficult living inside your own self-created bubble of morality.  So many things are against us it seems unbearable at times.  I don't think commercial jets should be able to fly so low over urban areas where people reside, and that includes Skibo Road, Cross Creek Mall, and downtown Fayetteville.  It is obvious the airlines' opinions of the Fayetteville citizenry.  They could care less.  The homeless, indigent, drug-addicted folks roaming the streets don't take the Red Eye to Charlotte demanding fast WiFi.  The elite few get the good treatment.  The poor struggling people further are persecuted.  They kick you when you are down.  Commercial aircraft never flew this route before, and Piedmont's new direct to Charlotte set the precedent.  Who will notice if they strafe your neighborhood at five in the morning?  Then six, then seven, and then eight.  By that time all the air has been sucked out and turned into carbon emission.  That is to what we wake up, the refuse of the important.  They shit on us.  No one shits on us more than Wabtec.  One only has to watch their professional promotional video about Locotrol to understand.  The only thing they care about is moving more freight faster to increase revenue.  Finally I have discovered that the communication platforms on these freight locomotives are what are so disruptive to everyday life.  They have WiFi.  They have Cell.  They have every imaginable kind of radio transmission available on a locomotive.  Why does a train engine need to be communication central?  There is an uplink.  There are engine diagnostics.  There is distributed power.  What they don't realize is that all of this freight operates in the back yards of America's citizens.  It would seem we are not important.  Their example is hauling long trains through winding passes, not the Eastern Seaboard from Florida to new Jersey.  The protocol is the same.  Twenty thousand locomotives equipped with remote control.  They can put a 4400 horsepower locomotive anywhere in the train with no engineer.  Less employees, more profit.  There is no mention of radiation, emissions, or adverse consequences to human health.  Finally I realized why my television reception falters and my WiFi is intermittent.  It is because these locomotives have all of these capabilities to control their trains, and they switch from one to another at liberty.  Their IGBTs and high voltage electrical processing could power a small city, and no one bats an eye that amount of power rumbling down the tracks.  North of Washington they use electric.  We, the South, are the rust belt where diesel is king.  There is no oversight, no government regulation, and no holds barred.  Freight rail is a nemesis.