- Western Industry.
- The blue-collar middle class
- The Middle Class
- Our health care system
- Our education
- Western Economic Leadership.
- Social Mobility
Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest.
They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?
They convinced us to exchange our pensions for the privilege of being the mark on a market where the sharks like them do whatever the fuck they want, from blatant insider trading, to pump and dump schemes, to outright fraud, having for all practical purposes bought the SEC a long time ago.
What they will kill next?
How long are we going to transfer wealth to those slimmy sweet talking ignorant greedy bean counters?
Our daily work is like being in a mad house because almost everything is subordinated to the the most sacred goal of cooking the next quarter numbers to ensure we maximize executive bonuses, and fuck the long run! crazy projects started, spin offs, merges, projects cancelled, company killing layoffs, fuck long term value generation! they want more and more, and more, and they fucking want it right now! the fucking bonus gollums.
Everything is fucked in our society but executive compensation. Xerox, HP, IBM, Boeing... How many other proud symbols of our economy and civilization are we going to let them destroy?
So we end up gradually converting our productivity to the measurable outputs because we can more safely trade them. But then unmeasurable values get shafted.
The non-fungible values get shafted even harder. For example, it's inherently impossible to trade for true human relationships because the bidirectional flow is where the value comes from and that flow must be built. But that means two people must simultaneously choose to take a mostly unknown level of risk on building a relationship that could fail or even be a net negative. Our relationship drive is pretty strong. The people making AI chatbot friends and SOs, not even to mention dating apps and relationship-commodifiers like Meetup or old Facebook, are doing their best to commodify relationships, though. The sheer level of social toxicity caused by online mass social media has been correspondingly enormous.
I had professors explain that war is profitable because people are employed building tanks etc. and they use their wages to stimulate the economy. When I asked 'what if instead of sending a few million dollars of steel and circuitry to the desert to get exploded, those workers used the same resources on a hospital?' I recieved the answer that if the NPV of the tank is higher than the hospital, it must be the better use of the resources.
Our universities may be in worse shape than I thought.
In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintains the profitability of domestic capital.
War is really that simple. If you had a war for any other reason, everyone involved would see the stupidity after the first few skirmishes.
What better alternatives are you thinking of? An intelligent, compassionate, eco-friendly and forward-thinking dictator would be great I guess, but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.
We are mostly ignorant, and we vote, consume, act and live that way. We choose to be that way, and so good things won't last long in our collective hands.
no, it would benefit the shareholders. The regulations imposed by the gov't (which is meant to be representitive) would reign in the excess externalization. Everyone would benefit from competition, when it does happen.
Not even kidding. There are villages around where I grew up, a good number of adults have one kidney only.
Now if they manage to kidnap and kill a person, now they got two kidneys, a heart, a liver and other stuff.
You can add governance for as long as lobbyists have been writing law.
You can add accountability for whenever MBAs and investors come in contact with news orgs.
Yep, they started with our eye balls. In exchange, we are getting "relevant ads".
Also our frontal lobe. In exchange, we get depressive dopamine releases.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen a study that tried to prove opening up the organ trade would help the economy and hinder the black market.
The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.
If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.
already happening, look at the american food industry
* https://www.npr.org/2015/01/25/379787274/howd-a-cartoonist-s...
It's an extortionist scheme. Every additional industry or vertical is not only proof that capitalism continues to provide "value" and move society forward, but it makes more millionaires and inflates our GDP. Currency wants everything to be traded with currency. Healthcare, water, land, sex, breathable air.
Also, this ultimately benefits the Fed and other massive financial institutions. If they get together and decide policy, they can do almost whatever they want. Then that small cabal of people can scheme with the government or military to exert control. This is mostly extra-democratic.
We'd have to switch out our entire government with un-bribable ethically driven heroes in order to even put a dent in this system.
In truth we are playing pretend with democracy. Like a little game for the peasants to play pretend. While economic and military policy is decided outside of that system.
Every inch financiers can gain, is another system under the control of economic fascists.
And to claim that it is dictated in some way by profit or merit is laughable. It is only dictated by those things when they want it to be. Another game.
> “According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. [...]
Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been hit particularly hard by management that doesn’t value tenured, expensive employees.
"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."
They pay a solid 30% below market. ( 100k for a senior eng position )
You’re building rockets and complaining about the cost of skilled labor?
The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
Like, from every angle, it's ill-conceived.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
We've let everything go to rot for the sake of a giant financial ponzi scheme that we call the U.S. economy.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
They’re not. You must be one of those people that hears something once and quotes it as gospel. My BIL did that yesterday: “nfl viewership has been down because of all the different platforms, and it’s been trending down for years.” As it so happens, last year was their second-best year of ratings since ratings were tracked. But, it fit his narrative, facts be damned.
“We all see the welding school advertisements: Make Over $100,000 As a Welder! And while it’s true that skilled welders are among the most sought-after workers in the job market, the average welder is bringing in $48,000 per year, a far cry from six figures.” [0]
[0] https://primeweld.com/blogs/news/how-much-do-welders-make-in....
Welding is an art and at a certain required level of performance it's not something you teach, but find the folks who have the drive to be that good and want to weld for high precision requirements.
What you've linked is a run of the mill welder. My Dad machined classified parts for USG and NASA. When they'd get those jobs they would go to the guys who had a reputation to be able to produce the die to the spec required. Messing up a multi-ton die of a specific quality could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost material and time. You don't make $48k on those tolerances, even back in the 80s.
He got shipped around the country.
Not exactly a trade-school C-student.
Had a better house than mine, but I’m a cheapskate.
Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.
> Can anyone pull Boeing out of its nosedive?
Apparently the answer is a sound no.
They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.
The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!
Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.
They would have to be stupid to deliver in time.
They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.
(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)
That should die. This is what happens when you allow monopolies, you can’t even let them die because you’ll be left with nothing.
They face no competition , and have no reason to improve
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-ma...
I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
RIP Jerry. A Step Farther Out is one of my all time favorites.
SLS is the thing that launches Orion, which is the capsule with humans inside. SLS isn't capable enough to get that capsule into lunar orbit. Orion also isn't landing by itself though, it just transfers the astronauts to a landing vehicle (SpaceX Starship, currently...), which lands and then starts again.
The thing brought up in that video is that the rendezvous point should probably be in lunar orbit, but isn't.
Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
The USA of the 1960s was very different from the one that exists today.
At least until SpaceX starts to feel a bit too comfortable... o_O
The Chinese are currently in their Apollo phase in which every engineer dedicates their life to the mission.
But I like to think we will.
Starship has fewer engines than Super Heavy, it likely won't be landing at full throttle either, and lunar lander Starship could have landing legs as well. The lower gravity on the Moon means that you can carry more hardware with you. Maneuvering in 0.16 g is nowhere near as fuel intensive as in 1 g.
I think those two things combined means your logic is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
He argues that there should be clawbacks to managers that harm a company to the degree Boeing’s current management has.
He invokes The Code of Hammurabi to illustrate how ancient civilization used to deal with such class of professionals.
Interesting that instead of commenting on engineering or technology issues, this is basically NASA bureaucrats complaining about Boeing bureaucrats' procedures. The whole SLS program is so bureaucratized it's amazing they can get anything of the ground, and not surprising that Space X is beating them in performance and cost by 3X.
>“According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. “The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that Boeing will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards.”
> DCMA also found that Boeing personnel made numerous administrative errors through changes to certified work order data without proper documentation
and
> Some technicians reported they had to hunt through layers of documentation to identify required instructions and documentation of work history and key decisions related to the hardware
It sounds like the focus is more on making documents and reading documents and complying with documents than "will this thing fly?"
They wanted to make things for sales, not for use. Usability is the side effect for sellable for them apparently: sometimes happen, sometimes not. While they were pushing on with sell sell sell sell sell, sell nooow! Instead of making something that is needed and is usable, so people would want to buy.
The legacy defence contractors have been watered with a hoover dams worth of taxpayer money for far too long and have little to show for it.
Chinese peer pressure might achieve what years of lobbying hasn't managed to achieve: a sense of urgency. The Chinese establishing a moon base without US boots on the surface would be a major embarrassment. They've done a few unmanned landings now. So, they clearly have the capability to pull this off now.
I think it's safe to say at this point that Boeing is hindering Americans. Full stop.
I'm a very proud American, my grandfather worked on Apollo, and was a submariner in WWII. Recently Boeing has not made me proud.
We want our grandchildren to one day also be proud Americans.
Cheers, A friend from abroad who still believes in America
Thanks for the offer, but we have plenty of highly-skilled workers in the US already. Unless you're a medical doctor, that is.
Cheers!
The Unemployed (and Forgotten) Masses
(Note: I'm not unemployed, but was for a several months until earlier this year.)
If half your best people leave every few years when the gov hits its next debt ceiling, your company is gonna have a bad time.
This vision is the last thing that the people profiting from conflict want you to see.
Boeing appears to have simply collapsed under its own hubris.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...
That money and time could be spent building better rovers. We could likely send 10 +rovers to different planets for exploration at the same time + cost factor.
Spirit & Opportunity spent ~21 years combined on Mars.
We could have an army of rovers for years on Moon and build habitable bases. It'd be cheaper than sending a few human astronauts to the Moon for a few hours of "we did it" videos.
People have to behave this way just to survive.
How do you extract value from your land? There are many ways.
Your government will soon find a reason to sue Airbus (corruption, unfair competition, etc.) in order to extract its secrets and supply them to Boeing, and voila, Airbus' technological lead will be wiped out.
See Alstom's story for a manual of the perfect economic imperialist : https://www.economist.com/business/2019/01/17/how-the-americ...
Boeing and its proponents love to talk about things like "spaceflight heritage", but none of that means anything when most if not all of those employees are gone and nothing was done to transfer the knowledge.
You: "and give them money in exchange for services rendered?!!?"
If outside contractors and suppliers are causing delays while you pay them, the poor manager is you.
Boeing failed to meet the basic standards, but has been given a pass by NASA up til now. Bad welds? Sternly worded letter. Inadequate heat shielding? Well, it didn't get too hot so let's try with people. Bad valves? Just replace the broken ones, In sure there's no borderline valves from a systemic problem. Leaky tanks? Not a problem. Flaky thrusters that might not be able to make it to re-entry? Hold on there!
The person you are voting for has fantastically small power. Which, is not what we were taught, but it does seem to be the fact.
Upper management decisions are seldom made for good technical reasons.
> SLS's existence has nothing to do with upper management. This is the child of Congress who funded it without any sort of mission.
Which is a big part of why Artemis is kind of messed up - neither SLS nor Orion was designed with the mission in mind. So Orion has to go to a relatively high near "rectilinear halo orbit" instead of Apollo's "low lunar orbit" because the SLS/Orion system doesn't have enough delta-V to get to the superior orbit and back.
Can we please stop giving my tax dollars to them? Maybe it's better than building functioning weapon systems?