I must be missing something.

Aircraft operate in 3 dimensions, trains operate for the most part in one - which implies that there is much less of a chance of 2 planes being at the same place at the same time than 2 trains being at the same place a t the same time. The airplane autopilot flies at certain altitudes depending on the path, and if the plane stays at the assigned altitude, there is almost no chance for crossing paths. Trains going in different directions share tracks in a lot of places, and they can't move out of the way of each other - timing is everything in train safety (hence we have a few time zones rather than hundreds of local times)

Well, if you couple the gps to the odometer, that should work most of the time, even with brief gps outages.

Most of the time isn't considered good enough for train safety. Unlike the interstate, there aren't dedicated lanes going each way - there are a lot of single tracks sharing traffic going in both directions.

Hell, they've dug up and rebuilt a 12 mile stretch of four lane highway in front of my neighborhood, including new bridge work in 4 different places for only 12 million.

I call BS on this one.
If I'm wrong, I'd recommend against driving across or under those new bridges.

Apparently.

The signalling and controls for trains are much more reliable than GPS and the simple programming exercise you envision. The issue is that automatic failsafes being installed for that section of track were not yet tested and given control of the trains, not that they could not be done.

Planes are faster bro, even with loading/unloading time, which is why they [sic] can actually make money on their own . . .

Which is why every major airliner (except Southwest) has gone bankrupt in the recent past?
(Also, planes are not always quicker for short distances, if there are actually trains going where you're going.)

Regulations most likely require that someone is on the train to oversee operation and help in emergencies anyway.

This is true.

I dislike driving.
Still, I probably couldn't stand being in a self-driving car, and would much prefer to drive it myself.

Obviously, this train's driver was confident he could overrule the engineers, architects, and the laws of motion.

I don't see how we could know such a thing yet, let alone call it obvious.

Stiff foams typically aren't any good at absorbing sound.

Plenty of dogs will consistently catch a ball out of the air - you want to tell me they don't know where it's going to land ? Children catch balls many years before we teach them the maths needed to calculate their curves.

The argument was that you don't need to understand the physics to predict it. And the dogs don't understand the physics, but can predict where it's going.
Although I must add, my older dog, whose running days are somewhat behind her, can predict the balls path much better because she actually watches it before going after it, while my younger dogs tend to immediately take off to where they think I threw it and take their eyes off the ball, though they still usually beat her to it even when they have to make a U-turn.

To be more accurate (or pedantic, depending on your point of view), only 20% of the deep well-injected waste water in Oklahoma is coming from fracking. The rest is coming from regular old traditional oil fields.

A lot of good that "voluntary" insurance will do when he has a 6x6 smashed into his head.

While Americans will understand "burro" just fine, it is a Spanish, not English, word.

When it comes to hauling hazardous cargo, chances are (state law may vary) it is illegal for your friend Joey who happens to have a pickup truck to haul it at all.