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Joe Manchin, the senior Senator from West Virginia, has inserted language in the FY19 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies appropriations bill that will force Amtrak to employ at least one ticketing agent in every state that it serves.
His reasoning? "Amtrak has told me that most of their sales are now online, but West Virginians buy far more tickets at the Charleston station than most places around the country. That's not surprising, as nearly 30% of West Virginia is without internet access, and mobile broadband access is also difficult in my state's rugged, mountainous terrain, making online ticket sales difficult."
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Senator Makes Amtrak Hire Ticket Agents Because 30% of West Virginia Lacks Internet
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All of life is a blur of Republicans and meat!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:01PM (3 children)
That's still no excuse for it. This is the 21st century, and cable companies started out by dealing with situations like that where people were living without the ability to get TV broadcasts.
Yes, it is expensive, but it's hardly insurmountable, just place a tower on most of those ridges and run lines from there. It's not like in other parts of the country where you need to have actual environmental studies conducted prior to construction.
What's more, this is exactly the kind of thing that the UTF is supposed to be used on. Perhaps if those folks in those areas had access to the internet, they'd realize why it is that they're being forgotten and be able to more readily speak up for themselves.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:44PM
Spoken like a true consumertard, hypnotized by all of the marketing, so blinded you never see the disadvantage of cost, and so pinheaded that you believe everyone should do everything the exact same way as you.
Every piece of technology has a cost. Both up front and long term. Design, manufacutring, testing, planning, installation, maintenance, support, repair, upgrades, replacement, and so on.
There is always a certain cost-benefit ratio.
Some are quite obvious. Given availability and price of computer chips, it would be nuts to pay a staff of 50 people to process 100,000 financial transactions a month with pen an paper.
But would you spend millions of dollars on software development costs, server costs, and so on to automate some process that involves 3 paper forms a year, processed by one person in just a few minutes? I hope not, but some gung-ho clueless PHBs would love to do that, just because some advertising says they should. (Lets go absolutely paperless because paper doesn't grow on trees...)
So you want these people in west Virgina to pay a huge pile of cash a month either directly or in taxes to pay for all of this? If they are living out in the middle of nowhere, they probably aren't rich to start with. Now if you have the exact numbers and can show the costs are really low enough, then get back with us.
Personally, I hate it when the *only* way to do something truly important is either "on the web" or requires a retarded toy cell phone. Any exception at all, and there is absolutely no one to talk to! (If you can't get to our web then go to our web site and print out the PDF form... duuuh)
Oh, and BTW, increasingly people are living quite nicely without TV these days.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
Agreed. The phone companies service just about all parts of W.Va. There may be a couple little crossroads, where a small collection of hillbillies just never saw the point in having a telephone. Doubtful, today, but possible. But, the telcos have lines basically everywhere. Anyplace serviced with electricity and telephone, it's possible to run fiber. Expensive, sure, but no more expensive now, than running those telephone lines were back in the first half of the 20th century.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:36PM
This covered the whole region if not rural USA entirely, I don't really know WVA specifically but something sounds fishy here.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?