[HN Gopher] Boeing workers vote to strike
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Boeing workers vote to strike
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 514 points
Date : 2024-09-13 04:41 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019 while
| paying their CEO ~$30M/year.
|
| > To support its share price, the company under McNerney poured
| billions into stock buybacks instead of investing profits into
| the kind of research and development needed to stay competitive.
| McNerney decided not to spend billions of dollars building a new
| plane to replace the 737. Instead, Boeing tweaked and updated the
| existing model and called it the 737 Max, outfitting it with
| larger, more efficient engines for increased economy.
| Compensating for the resulting instability was a secretive
| automated system called MCAS that would adjust the plane's pitch
| without input from the pilot.
|
| > McNerney also fought to deeply cut costs. On his watch, the
| company opened its first non-unionized aircraft production line
| and initiated a program called "Partnering for Success" that
| pushed suppliers to cut their prices by 15 percent or more. Many
| feared that squeezing suppliers would harm the quality of their
| components, but McNerney was determined to recoup the cost of the
| 787's development; if the subcontractors complained, they could
| find their work taken away from them, as happened to landing-
| gear-maker United Technologies Aerospace Systems.
|
| > McNerney retired in 2015, handpicking his successor, president
| and COO Dennis Muilenburg. Over the next three years, Boeing's
| stock price more than doubled as it sold new planes the world
| over. (As Bloomberg News reported, Muilenberg and McNerney "had
| personal reasons to emphasize productivity and cost-cutting"
| because their compensation was tied to share performance.
| Together they took $209 million in total pay over seven years.)
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/boeing-planes-proble...
| hinkley wrote:
| They started new factories in new states to try to break the
| unions in Seattle.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Boeing fleeing Seattle while trying to cheerfully pretend
| they're a "Washington company" was absolutely disgraceful
| beaglesss wrote:
| Whistleblowers were pointing out that the union workers in
| WA weren't performing quality work, like tightening bolts
| on plug doors. I'm guessing Boeing wanted the death to end.
| sofixa wrote:
| They moved their HQ to Chicago and then DC to focus on
| government contracts (they suck at those too), so
| "Washington company" is extra funny.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I mean, any company based in DC can call itself a
| Washington company.
| hinkley wrote:
| Technically they also had offices in St Louis after the
| coup. The MD people moved to Chicago. And I hope every
| single one of them was a Cardinals fan.
| rob74 wrote:
| ...with resounding success:
|
| > _In 2019, following the discovery of exterior damage on
| planes manufactured in Charleston [the non-unionized
| factory], for a time Qatar Airways would only accept delivery
| of Dreamliners assembled in Everett [the unionized factory]._
| (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_South_Carolina#Qua
| lity-...)
|
| But then they moved all 787 production to North Charleston,
| so problem solved.
| hinkley wrote:
| > But then they moved all 787 production to North
| Charleston, so problem solved.
|
| That better be some top shelf sarcasm.
|
| It's shameful what's happened to Boeing. I worked there
| during the fall. After the bribery scandal, but before MD
| broke it. It was still okay-ish until they butchered their
| R&D dept. That's not a healthy company.
| hsdnd65 wrote:
| Its not about one or two guys its financial engineering culture
| that Wall St rewards. You can make bank without being an
| engineer anymore. 2008 meltdown has not changed the culture.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Also, the 25% (over 4 years) they're bandying about as the
| offer includes (per [1]) a loss of a bonus with a 4% target,
| and that's an annual bonus. I don't understand how this person
| calculated, but one of the employees claims it's more like a
| 10% raise including the foregone bonus. Good deals don't need
| to be sold with lies.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/qVO5D
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Why is the CEO pay relevant? It is not even within an order of
| magnitude of the amounts needed to pay for even the contract
| Boeing proposed to the union, let alone the union's demands.
| People complain about CEO pay as if paying them less would get
| them what they want. Frankly companies need CEOs, and people
| who are qualified for the job are very few in number. Whereas
| the line workers represented by the machinist unions are in
| trades where there are massive quantities of workers available
| - which is why many took Boeing jobs even if they were not
| happy with the pay and benefits.
|
| I am also not sure why the stock buybacks are worth mentioning.
| There are many reasons why a buyback may be the right thing for
| a company to do. I am aware that sometimes it can be a
| manipulation of executive compensation by artificially raising
| the stock price (and may have been so here). And obviously I
| don't support that. But I feel like the practice of buying back
| is attacked by many without adequate understanding of what it
| is for and how it can be financially good for the company,
| helping support future investments.
| stevage wrote:
| High CEO pay is a symptom of poor board control, not a direct
| cause of poor performce.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| CEO pay generally has a relationship to company size, and
| Boeing is pretty big. It would be hard to argue their CEO
| is overpaid if they paid the CEO that much and the CEO _did
| a good job_. Implying the problem is not how much they were
| paid but rather the quality of the work.
| tempfile wrote:
| > Implying the problem is not how much they were paid but
| rather the quality of the work.
|
| Aren't those identical? If you do a bad job, we could
| have got the same bad job from someone else, who we could
| have paid less...
| ywvcbk wrote:
| They did a great job, though..
|
| From the perspective of other board members, upper
| management and the shareholders at the time.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is the real problem - we cannot evaluate how a CEO
| did today for another 10 years. Their job is to figure
| out where the company needs to be in 10 years and then
| get them there.
| sofixa wrote:
| CEO pay is relevant because Boeing haven't had a competent
| CEO in decades. Yet all of them were compensated handsomely
| for making pretty obviously bad choices (e.g. the 787
| development was done McDonnell Douglas style, pushing most of
| the costs and risk to suppliers, and was highly problematic)
| or downright killing people through negligence.
|
| > I am also not sure why the stock buybacks are worth
| mentioning
|
| Because Boeing is a very capital intensive business that is
| currently in mountains of expensive debt, with multiple
| projects delayed with years, and a recovery time of 5 years
| minimum. The idiots in charge wasted billions on the wrong
| things, and now the company is a very bad situation.
| triceratops wrote:
| It's relevant because the company's performance has been a
| dog turd. They clearly overpaid for a low-performer.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| It's kinda fun, right? The whole point of tying executive
| compensation to share price was to have them have some rough
| stake in the business, but even that didn't prove enough:
| there's always a longer term, and doing a visible, clear NPV
| boost is usually accretive to market cap even if it introduces
| long-term risk, because the long term risks are usually hidden
| from public eye and very mushy.
|
| Ironically, I think the poster child for how to properly
| structure compensation away from this is Hank Greenberg's AIG,
| where not only was his compensation basically all deferred
| stock options, they were deferred until retirement, so about as
| long-term a view as you can get. He was very risk-averse, and
| his biggest flaw wasn't under his operational ownership but
| under successor and personnel selection (looking at you,
| Welch).
|
| But at some level, it was just bad people making bad calls. I
| don't think McNerney thought that this would wreck Boeing, he
| was just wrong. Even if he was left predictably destitute at
| the end of such a failure, he probably wouldn't have changed
| his choices because he thought they were good. You could claim
| that this is a failure of boards and governance (and, truly, I
| think boards are by and large really bad and I wish there was a
| much more pervasive activist investor culture) but at some
| level I'm not sure how much of this is solvable.
|
| I don't know. There's probably a way to do boards well enough
| that this isn't a problem.
| sofixa wrote:
| > But at some level, it was just bad people making bad calls.
| I don't think McNerney thought that this would wreck Boeing,
| he was just wrong.
|
| Well, he was stupid not to - there's no way he didn't know
| thay focusing on the short term stock price won't have
| negative effects on the quality and future of an engineering
| organisation whose main business, building and selling
| airplanes, is extremely capital intensive. He came from
| McDonnell Douglas who nearly bankrupted themselves doing the
| same sort of crap (pushing suppliers to the edge, cost
| cutting at every opportunity).
| metaphor wrote:
| > _[McNerney] came from McDonnell Douglas..._
|
| Cite? Wiki[1] appears to suggest otherwise.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney#Career_path
| sofixa wrote:
| Oops, my bad, he was just a GE sociopath.
|
| That being said, McDonnell Douglas' history was visible
| to everyone - what they were doing hadn't been working
| for decades (first as Douglas, then as McDonnell
| Douglas).
| darby_nine wrote:
| We all know boeing won't be "wrecked"; they're too critical
| for state interests to be allowed to fail. If they're smart
| they'll either nationalize the company to remove the profit
| inefficiency or force the company to split to remove the
| profit inefficiency. Either way, the profit motive and lack
| of any competition is clearly a national security risk.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We all know boeing won 't be "wrecked"; they're too
| critical for state interests to be allowed to fail_
|
| People keep repeating this without context. The auto
| companies are strategically significant. That didn't
| prevent them from going bankrupt [1][2]. Wiping
| shareholders doesn't mean blowing up the factories.
|
| I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt. It
| can then shed unprofitable units--through spin-offs, sales
| or liquidations--and restructure its obligations. I'm not
| convinced the union comes out of that better off than it is
| now. But America sure does.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Chapter_11_reorg
| aniza...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11
| _reor...
| night862 wrote:
| Maybe so, but I would say cars are different than
| aerospace.
|
| It's clear that Boeing was able to squeeze costs centers
| at the expense of quality and business investment all
| while keeping the coin under shell in the form of regular
| old stock buybacks.
|
| But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all
| this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They're just gonna
| spin it off to another buyer--consisting of who exactly?
| McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk? Tencent?
|
| Seems like a nightmare for someone, not sure for whom.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _But if /when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all
| this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They're just gonna
| spin it off to another buyer--consisting of who exactly?
| McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk?_
|
| Idk, pick one that's American or closely allied [1].
| Ideally not one of the three larger than Boeing.
|
| Worst case: audit and re-assign the contracts. We'll be
| better for it in the long run. And I'm not convinced it
| wouldn't result in quicker, higher-quality deliverables
| in the short.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Who even needs a specific buyer? Boeing itself is a
| publicly traded company, the spin-offs can be too. Put
| the business unit into its own corporate entity and give
| all the shares of the new entity to the existing Boeing
| shareholders to do with as they please, or sell them into
| the market.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > The auto companies are strategically significant.
|
| Not really, they're more politically significant than
| economically critical. I've certainly never owned an
| american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing
| to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles.
| Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of
| maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is
| true for the plane market, or at least not until boeing
| acquired its current popular reputation of not being very
| good at making planes (deserved or not)
|
| The fact we bailed out the companies but refused to take
| ownership should be considered treason. Same for the
| banks, the car companies, the airline industry we bailed
| out for more than its entire value, etc etc. completely
| corrupt and incompetent governance
| bombcar wrote:
| The auto companies are strategically significant because
| war footing America will turn those F150 lines into tank
| lines in a matter of months instead of the years it would
| take to spin them up from scratch.
|
| IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.
| mulmen wrote:
| Exactly correct. Good time to skim
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run.
|
| Years of startup problems but when it finally started
| humming they were building a B-24 every 63 minutes! In
| the meantime existing factories were winning the war.
|
| As Americans we tend to glorify the industrial feats of
| WWII but the US government used a very heavy hand to pull
| that off. Public-private partnership is the preferred
| euphemism today but essentially we were a socialist
| economy.
| bombcar wrote:
| At its peak, the US had 40% of GDP going into the war.
| _Forty percent!_
|
| Today the US military budget is 3.4% of GDP. Can you
| imagine it being _ten times_ as much?
| newsclues wrote:
| If America goes to war it will need many f-150s for the
| war itself.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| No it won't, because only about 30% of F150 parts are
| made in the US. The rest are made elsewhere - mostly
| China.
|
| This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the
| strategic industrial base it used to.
|
| Off-shoring made some people a lot of money and lowered
| consumer costs (while simultaneously cutting consumer
| pay.)
|
| But it was economically and strategically unwise. The US
| is set up to run small-scale wars against technologically
| inferior opponents. It has no ability to sustain a
| prolonged multi-year slug-fest against an opponent with a
| superior manufacturing base.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Considering the US hasn't won a single war against
| technologically and numerically inferior opponents since
| the turn of the century, I think we have even more
| fundamental problems than just a rusty war machine
| dependent on Chinese blue jeans.
|
| Now granted I might be unfair to the US here; the Middle
| East is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason.
| bluGill wrote:
| The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The
| military was doing just fine, but the people back home
| got sick of the efforts.
| vundercind wrote:
| 1) That's still losing.
|
| 2) I'm not sure the military was doing _just fine_ in all
| of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan--
| reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have
| given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in
| favor of a system that let them continually cycle
| officers through and let them claim they succeeded at
| their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their
| mission, but facts on the ground remain exactly the same
| or worse!), for _years and years_. Fighting fitness may
| have been OK throughout, but military leadership _in the
| military itself_ was absolutely not committed to any kind
| of winnable mission, let alone to actually winning it.
| That may have been driven (I'm sure it was) largely by
| civilian leadership, but the entire upper echelon of
| military leadership betrayed their commands and the
| soldiers counting on them, to keep up a convenient (to
| their careers, and a bunch of junior and mid-tier
| officers who got a big boost to their careers...)
| political fiction at the cost of any hope of something
| resembling actual success, and all it took was shitting
| all over their soldiers and the trust of the American
| people.
|
| I bet Iraq (part 2) was similar. I have some grave
| concerns about the state of our more-politicized-and-
| static professional officer corps since roughly Vietnam.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I'm with you 100% on point #2.
|
| Disagree on point #1. We occupied Afghanistan for 20
| years. We operated with nearly absolute impunity in all
| population centers, through all trade routes, and all
| agricultural areas. Our casualties were a minuscule
| amount our total forces. Our culture completely
| transformed theirs (in a way that old school hardliners
| lament publicly). We killed a huge number of Taliban (and
| foreign fighters).
|
| Clausewitz says that "the political object is the goal,
| war is the means of reaching it." Can you tell articulate
| what the political goal of the war was?
|
| Thinking back to 2001 (I was in middle school), the goal
| was retribution. I believe the military achieved that in
| spades. Yes, in the end Afghanistan did not turn into a
| US vassal state or a US colony. But was that the goal?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the
| war was?
|
| The goal was to eradicate the Taliban, remove terroristic
| sentiments, rebuild Afghanistan, bring the country to
| 21st century democratic standards, and prevent future
| 9/11s.
|
| Did we achieve it? _Hell no._
|
| Verdict: We lost. Over 20 years of bloodshed and misery
| on both sides for fucking nothing. We failed on every
| single fucking count. Every. Single. Count.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The discussion was more about if the military fumbled
| Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.
|
| You haven't shown a military failure.
|
| I also disagree with that list of objectives and their
| current status. Let's go through 1 by 1:
|
| +Eradicate Taliban. Complete. This is a new gen of
| fighters and the movement shares very little outside the
| name. Nearly all the Taliban from 2001 are dead of
| violent causes.
|
| +Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal, but also has
| Afghanistan committed many terror acts in the last 15
| years? Current status is trending green.
|
| +Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal (ie in
| Oct-2001). Also not a DoD goal, this was a State Dept
| goal after the military victory was secured. Also I'd
| argue that Afghanistan today has better infra than it did
| in Aug-2001, so this is complete.
|
| +Democratic standards. Not an original goal. Also not a
| DoD goal, this was a State Dept goal after the military
| victory was secured. Not met.
|
| +Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.
|
| So we met all but 1 goal. That's not bad as wars go.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >The discussion was more about if the military fumbled
| Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.
|
| While I started off with the former, overall it is both.
|
| >You haven't shown a military failure.
|
| It has been demonstrated by Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam
| and others that the best way to defeat America is to
| engage in low tech guerilla warfare. We have lost every
| single one of them.
|
| Even more embarrasing is that the Houthi are
| demonstrating that the age old adage of "Don't touch
| America's ships!" also isn't true anymore. Our Navy
| hasn't adequately responded to some deranged goat herders
| lobbing missiles into one of the world's biggest sea
| lanes.
|
| >Eradicate Taliban. Complete.
|
| Are you drunk? The Taliban is literally back in power
| ruling over Afghanistan with an iron fist.
|
| >Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal,
|
| Lest we forget, we waged "The War On Terror".
|
| >Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal
|
| You can not remove hate until the people thereof can live
| comfortable lives, which is still not the case.
|
| >Democratic standards. Not an original goal.
|
| See above.
|
| >Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.
|
| I've lost count on the acts of terror we've seen across
| the west, America and otherwise.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| You've moved the goal posts of this discussion. We've
| been talking about military success or failure.
|
| Democracy (and "comfortable lives") was not a military
| objective. The military provided security for the State
| Dept and NGOs to pursue those goals.
|
| Since 9/11, Afghanistan has not prosecuted any terrorist
| acts on the West in my recent memory.
|
| The Taliban of 2001 was largely killed off. Yes, there
| are people in charge of Afghanistan today who call
| themselves Taliban, have some limited pre-9/11
| leadership, but are largely a completely different set of
| people than existed back then and this occurred because
| of military action, not old age.
| willcipriano wrote:
| When the participation trophy generation grows up and
| becomes generals you'll hear things like, we would've won
| that war if it wasn't for all that attrition!
| bluGill wrote:
| What attrition? While deaths were not zero they were very
| low.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Roughly 2.2 trillion on the credit card for Afghanistan
| alone. That's without the interest that will be paid on
| it. Your grandkids children will be paying for that war.
| bluGill wrote:
| The only time anyone cares about that debt is when
| democrats are in control of the government - then
| republicans care. (sometimes when republicans control
| congress and the democrats control the president they
| care, but it is not as much then)
| willcipriano wrote:
| The only president in my lifetime to not start any wars
| isn't really liked by either the democrats or the
| establishment republicans. Both parties are big fans of
| losing wars for some reason.
| mulmen wrote:
| Were you born in 2020?
| willcipriano wrote:
| > An armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led
| Palestinian militant groups[ad] has been taking place in
| the Gaza Strip and Israel since 7 October 2023.
|
| > The United States has given Israel extensive military
| aid and vetoed multiple UN Security Council ceasefire
| resolutions.
|
| > United States provided advice and intelligence to
| Israeli forces during the raid, through its "hostage
| cell" stationed in Israel. The attack resulted in the
| deaths of 274 Palestinians.
|
| How would that work in your mind? Call that one for
| Harris because Biden is mentally unfit?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| By that measure what the hell was bombing Suleimani? Or
| moving our recognised capital of Israel to Jerusalem? Or
| arms to Saudi Arabia during their war with Yemen?
|
| Neither Trump nor Biden started a war. They had wars
| happening around them that we were to various degrees
| involved.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Here's a (kind of?) objective take: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
|
| By my quick count, Obama (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize)
| started _seven_ wars, Trump started _zero_ wars, and
| Biden so far started _one_ war. All three Presidents were
| _involved_ in a war started by a predecessor.
|
| So, yeah. Trump started no wars, and he is the most
| rejected POTUS by the Powers That Be(tm) for that and
| other reasons.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| literally no one said that or even a rough approximation
| of that. Seriously I have no love for the generals but
| even they're not that dumb.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The comment I'm replying to said that and it was said
| frequently about Vietnam. What they didn't do is use the
| clear language I used and instead blamed the public for
| not wanting to spend every last penny on a pyrrhic
| victory as if that isn't attrition.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I agree that the dollar cost is real attrition too.
| Vietnam and Afghanistan were so wildly costly because we
| made the (political) choice to limit how we could engage
| the enemy, while our enemies were not limiting themselves
| Vietnam: limiting Cambodia ops, the DMZ, limiting bombing
| of N Vietnam Afghanistan: limiting Pakistan ops,
| focusing on creating a stable democracy rather than
| killing Taliban then leaving
|
| We made political choices on how to wage war, and then
| blamed the military for those poor choices.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Yeah, we could use biological weapons or drop hydrogen
| bombs as a few examples. We could send marines house to
| house executing anyone who even looks like a bad guy.
| Trouble is giving a few million civilians radiation
| poisoning or the bubonic plaque to "stop communism" or to
| "spread democracy" is evil and insane.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| You've made a rather wild leap here.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >then blamed the military for those poor choices.
|
| _Also_ the military.
|
| A war effort involves the entire country: The entire
| economy beyond just the military industrial complex, all
| branches of politics, and the military including both
| officers and rank-and-file soldiers.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Look I agree with your war effort comment. That simply
| isn't what the GP is saying though, so my comments are
| addressing something else entirely.
| rurp wrote:
| The US did not lose the war against Saddam. The war was
| started under false pretenses and they made a mess of the
| reconstruction after, but that's different from a
| military defeat. If one side of a war manages to destroy
| the other's military, execute its leader, and set up shop
| in his palaces; that's a win on the military front.
| bluGill wrote:
| > This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the
| strategic industrial base it used to.
|
| this is just wrong.
|
| The US didn't really have that industrial base in 1940
| either. We developed it fast over a couple years of war.
|
| To the extent the US had an industrial base, we still do.
| US manufactures more than we did in 1940 - we just do it
| with far fewer people in factories via automation.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is really the key - there's a ocean of difference
| between "we manufacture literally nothing" and "we don't
| manufacture/assemble as much as we could".
| darby_nine wrote:
| Seems like a terribly irrational and inefficient way to
| run an economy but I'm sure russia will invade any day
| now. Or is it china these days?
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I agree. We should also stop subsidizing agriculture,
| there is enough food grown around the world for everyone.
| All this waste is very inefficient!
|
| In fact, we dump our cheap overproduced food on third
| world countries and collapse their ag. sector. If we
| stopped producing and switched to importing we would
| boost their economies.
|
| Since food can be grown in almost any country on earth,
| we would have a diverse supply chain. I'm sure nothing
| would go wrong with this plan./s
| jampekka wrote:
| Major industries are economically critical for trade
| balance. Even if foreigners don't buy US cars, domestic
| buying means there's less import.
|
| There's a limit to how long USA can print petrodollars to
| make up for the trade deficit. And the limit doesn't seem
| that far off.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Good, let's learn to get along with people without trying
| to dominate them for the first time in living memory
| mulmen wrote:
| The auto bailouts saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and
| turned a profit for the US government.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Cool, i don't care about either of these things. Jobs are
| a poor index of economic health for americans and we
| should really be guaranteed one as a fundamental human
| right if we also refuse to implement modern welfare.
| mulmen wrote:
| You don't care about saving jobs but you think we should
| be guaranteed jobs? How do you imagine guaranteed jobs
| work?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of
| maybe tesla in the nordics,
|
| The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead
| (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with
| Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification
| of transport.
|
| But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in
| the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of
| course quite a few of those were built outside the US so
| perhaps they don't count as US cars.
| teytra wrote:
| Norway is special. 94.3% of new cars sold last month were
| electric cars.
|
| Actually, in the private marked it was 96.7% !
|
| Links to info (in Norwegian)
|
| - https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/
|
| - https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-
| august-h%C3%B8yest...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Norway is special
|
| I know, I live there. Been driving electric since 2017.
| janalsncm wrote:
| China is the biggest auto market in the world and also
| produces the Teslas they buy domestically.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Foreigners certainly don't want our cars
|
| FYI: Tesla sold 600,000 cars in China last year. It is a
| huge market for them. They also sold more than 200,000
| cars in Europe last year.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > Foreigners certainly don't want our cars
|
| Then why are they always bitching about their neighbors
| who buy large American vehicles that are too wide for
| their streets?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt.
|
| I agree and hope they do go bankrupt, but I hope so
| because the country needs a fucking wake up call:
| American Exceptionalism(tm) is simply no longer true.
|
| I sincerely think we need to see one (Boeing), maybe even
| a few (Intel? US Steel?) paragons of American
| Excellence(tm) go down in smoking ruins so we have to
| accept that we are not 1970s America taking mankind to
| the Moon and beyond anymore.
|
| Once we realize that, we can actually get started on
| Making America Great Again in a real, meaningful way
| instead of a dumb political catchphrase.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Once we realize that, we can actually get started on
| Making America Great Again in a real, meaningful way
|
| I see no reason to believe this will happen rather than a
| continued slow decline and eventual collapse.
| gartdavis wrote:
| The Canadian government drove its primary aerospace
| company, Avro Canada, not just into
| bankruptcy/reorganization, but to completely shutdown
| operations. The country lost 14,000 aerospace
| professionals, but more importantly, it lost its
| leadership position in cutting edge aerospace. Its best
| engineers left for the USA or the UK. Canada, more than a
| half century later, has never recovered anything like the
| leadership role it had built during the post-war period.
| Be careful what you ask for.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Look, we're going down one way or another. We might as
| well get down there faster so we can start crawling back
| up sooner.
| donatj wrote:
| > If they're smart they'll either nationalize the company
| to remove the profit inefficiency
|
| So... remove the need to actually produce planes, or
| anything at all for that matter, subsidize their continued
| failures?
| jajko wrote:
| Some car manufacturers are definitely not critical to
| national security, they just employ tons of folks in few
| places. Company making weapons like choppers, planes etc
| for whole US military is on completely different level of
| importance.
| danielheath wrote:
| > even that didn't prove enough
|
| It did the opposite.
|
| Humans respond - on some level - to incentives.
|
| Tying compensation to short-term performance creates perverse
| incentives which make it much harder to accept the idea that
| your plans might be ruining the company.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Bad people brought to fruit by a MBAd culture whos claim to
| success is mostly inherited inertia.. Longterm Losers with an
| Attitude and shortterm numbers to silence doubters.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Then blame the board imo. They define the objectives for the
| CEO, the incentives for achieving them, and the governance
| framework for governing their execution. If shareholders want
| this "short term thinking" that always gets brought up, then
| they have every right to it.
|
| Of course this "short term thinking" trope is just a meme
| that the armchair commentators like to pedal out. If the
| system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise short term
| profit seeking to this extent, then all a competitor would
| have to do to monopolise any market is do enough "long term
| thinking" to outlast all their failing competitors. Investors
| would notice this and reallocate their capital accordingly.
|
| But none of this is what happens in reality. If anything I
| would say the market is over-interested in long term
| strategies. The popularity of the growth over profit model
| that we observe amongst most prolific capital allocators
| takes "long term thinking" to absurd lengths.
| photonthug wrote:
| > If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise
| short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a
| competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do
| enough "long term thinking" to outlast all their failing
| competitors.
|
| This makes it sound like my broker, the finance community
| in general, or maybe the state is better able to handle
| long term thinking than our industry leaders, but why would
| anyone believe that? Aren't they all looking quarter to
| quarter and retiring next year no matter how bad they wreck
| the company/economy/country?
| M95D wrote:
| Stock is sold and bought all the time with no tax. It's
| in the investor's intrest to sink a company for short-
| term profits. When the s*it hits the fan, they can sell
| the falling stock, short-sell even, to some clueless
| pension funds and invest the money in a competitor
| instead. When only one company remains, profit +++. This
| is how stock markets work. Why are you surprised?
| immibis wrote:
| Long term thinking is often incompatible with short term
| thinking. It doesn't matter if your company is long term
| sustainable if it's short term unsustainable. See dumping.
| jajko wrote:
| Its not like you have 30 competitors who can produce AH-64
| Apache chopper equivalent out of blue with all support
| stuff required around it, its not perfect market and boeing
| c suite knows it very well.
|
| Sure in 30 years they may be eventually pushed out but they
| can coast 2 generations of successful careers till then.
| riffraff wrote:
| > If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise
| short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a
| competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do
| enough "long term thinking" to outlast all their failing
| competitors.
|
| isn't this exactly what's going on with Boeing?
|
| > Airbus last year topped Boeing for the fifth straight
| year in the orders race, with 2,094 net orders and 735
| delivered planes. Boeing had 1,314 net orders and delivered
| 528 aircraft.[0]
|
| I 100% agree the majority of investors don't seem to take
| the long view, and that's been the case for a while.
|
| [0] https://apnews.com/article/boeing-airbus-airline-
| safety-manu...
| hnthrow289570 wrote:
| >Then blame the board imo
|
| Half of them would look like job hoppers with such short
| tenures on their resume. Some of them have simultaneous
| executive positions at other companies.
|
| If you want some evidence of short-term thinking not being
| a meme, it's probably that.
| banannaise wrote:
| > _Then blame the board imo._
|
| The Board of Directors at most major corporations is made
| up largely of current or former executives, many of whom
| come from the same industry. It's in their personal
| interest to normalize lucrative and exploitable
| compensation plans.
|
| You would also be shocked to know what people control the
| lion's share of investment dollars.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Would love to see a shift towards something like deferred
| options for executives. Or, ya know, a fixed multiplier on
| median employee pay, like managers make 3x median, VPs 5x,
| CEOs 7x. I'm okay with people who have crazy responsibilities
| making good money, but it doesn't have to be obscene.
| timfsu wrote:
| This sounds like an incentive to fire/outsource all of your
| lower-paid employees
| selimnairb wrote:
| Good point. It would have to include contractor pay in
| the calculation.
| jandrese wrote:
| > The whole point of tying executive compensation to share
| price was to have them have some rough stake in the business
|
| This reasoning was always flawed. The Stock Market is not
| real life. It consists of the opinions of a bunch of guys who
| sit in towers in New York, London, Shanghai, etc... In theory
| there are fundamentals that should drive the price, but in
| practice the market is not rational. It's not a good metric
| for the long term health of a company. Even worse, Goodhart's
| law applies in spades:
|
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
|
| Time and time again we see CEOs playing games with the stock
| price in order to get a big payday. We see management
| sacrificing long term stability in order to maximize their
| year end bonus.
|
| Imagine if every time you remember a now dead company do a
| stock buyback they instead invested that money into R&D, or
| simply lowered their prices to be more competitive in the
| market? Maybe they paid their employees better and didn't
| have constant turnover problems and had higher quality
| output. How many of those now failed companies would still be
| around today?
| swarnie wrote:
| > Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019
| while paying their CEO ~$30M/year.
|
| Boeing share price was up almost 400% in that period. If the
| business goal was to maximise share price and therefore return
| for investors over that period it was a cracking success.
|
| Since the US government will always pick up the pieces in the
| event of a failure its a minimal risk stratagy.
| cced wrote:
| Can someone explain to me the theory of stock buybacks? How
| is this not just financial engineering? How are you meant to
| differentiate companies who's stock goes up because they've
| been productive and made great products from those that
| increase their stock prices using buybacks? Are there rules
| against taking out loans and using them to perform stock
| buybacks?
| bombcar wrote:
| Stock buybacks are mathematically identical to dividends if
| you work it out.
|
| And yes, people track that, and yes taking loans to pay
| dividends is a favorite trick of dying companies.
| darkfloo wrote:
| Do you have to pay taxes on dividend under American law ?
| If so I guess that makes stock buyback better from a
| point of view of shareholders
| bluGill wrote:
| You pay taxes in Dividends, which is one reason
| shareholders generally don't like them. A lot of
| shareholders are also in the savings phase of their life
| - they are working some other job and don't need the
| income from Dividends yet and so getting a dividend is a
| bad thing as it is more money they have to invest
| (particularly if you have to pay for each trade which is
| common). Shareholders who are retired like dividends
| because it is a simple paycheck without needing to sell
| their shares and they would be paying those taxes anyway.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Aren't they taxed differently, though? To my knowledge,
| dividends are taxed as ordinary income, whereas sales
| following a stock buyback may be taxed as capital gains
| (if they were held long enough before that point).
| refurb wrote:
| If you're talking about the US, then no, dividends are
| given special tax treatment at a reduced rate if they are
| "qualified dividends". If they aren't, then yes, they are
| taxed as regular income.
| teraflop wrote:
| "Qualified" dividends from long-term-held stocks are
| taxed in the same way as long-term capital gains.
| triceratops wrote:
| You only have to hold a stock for 60 days to get
| qualified dividends. For long term gains it's a year.
| triceratops wrote:
| Rich people borrow against appreciated assets. They don't
| sell and incur capital gains tax. That's why company
| leadership loves buybacks.
|
| Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of
| appreciation. So unless they can time sales to optimize
| taxes - really only an option for retirees - they might
| as well get regular dividends.
| lordfrito wrote:
| > Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage
| of appreciation
|
| Not entirely true.. Ordinary people can take advantage of
| appreciation of their home value via a standard home
| equity loan.
| bombcar wrote:
| The real problem with dividends is they're taxed at the
| corporate level (corporate income tax) and then taxed
| when distributed to the shareholders (the shareholders
| pay income tax on the dividend).
|
| Eliminating the double taxation of dividends would likely
| solve most of the buyback problems.
| MereInterest wrote:
| That sounds like a non sequitur. The same would be true
| of money spent on stock buybacks.
| positr0n wrote:
| As a shareholder, dividends are income. Cash going in to
| your account that is taxed immediately.
|
| A stock buyback of 1000 shares means that your one share
| now represents 1/999,000th of the company, not
| 1/1,000,000th. Thus the share is worth more. It isn't
| income until you sell the share and pay taxes on the
| gains. This flexibility is useful and can result in tax
| savings depending on the situation.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| This makes no sense. A dividend is more akin to an
| annuity, paying out periodically.
|
| Stock buybacks are cashing in your chips, a one-off
| payment.
| thrance wrote:
| Stock buybacks used to be illegal in the States up until
| 1982. You can thank Raegan for that too.
| refurb wrote:
| > Stock buybacks used to be illegal in the States up
| until 1982. You can thank Raegan for that too
|
| This is not true, but seems to come up a lot. I guess it
| makes for one of those fun "internet facts" that people
| like to repeat without any investigation. Bonus points
| for blaming Reagan.
|
| Stock buybacks were not illegal before 1982. If you sit
| down even think through it, it doesn't even make sense
| they were illegal. Just like issuing new shares (or doing
| a stock split), companies have legitimate business needs
| to buy back stock (reduce the quantity of outstanding
| shares).
|
| What happened in 1982 was that the government made Rule
| 10b-18, which outlined the "safe harbor" requirements for
| stock buybacks, where if followed, the company could not
| be found liable for stock manipulation.
|
| https://www.skadden.com/-/media/files/publications/2020/0
| 3/t...
|
| So stock buy backs _were legal before 1982_ , but
| companies faced a risk of stock manipulation if they were
| reckless in how they did it.
| naasking wrote:
| > So stock buy backs were legal before 1982, but
| companies faced a risk of stock manipulation if they were
| reckless in how they did it.
|
| Sounds like a much better state of affairs.
| refurb wrote:
| Really? You think it's bad that the government is
| explicit in its rules?
|
| I think that's a good thing. I'd rather have it be clear
| to all parties what is acceptable and what isn't, rather
| that a murky legal framework where you never know if
| you're breaking the law.
| SaintGhurka wrote:
| This subject brings up so much rancor that I think you
| might have missed the possibility that there was no
| sarcasm intended in the post you responded to.
| refurb wrote:
| That's why I asked
| thrance wrote:
| I mean, from what I can read online, it seemed the
| practice was generally regarded as market manipulation
| prior to 1982 and so was de facto illegal. So yeah,
| thanks Reagan indeed. There are good reasons to blame him
| for his part in the current state of affairs.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > Muilenberg and McNerney "had personal reasons to emphasize
| productivity and cost-cutting" because their compensation was
| tied to share performance. Together they took $209 million in
| total pay over seven years.
|
| Absolutely stunning - those guys will walk away from this mess
| with more money than God and American aviation will take a
| backwards step that may take decades to fix if at all... fuming
| here.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Incentives matter. The extremist solution would be to ban
| executive compensation tied to stock price and some mechanism
| where every penny more that goes into buybacks/dividends than
| R&D/CapEx is taxed at 105%.
|
| Oh, and make executive and BoDs personally and criminally
| liable for safety fiascos like the 737MAX. I bet you'll see
| culture change in a hurry under those circumstances
| gigachadbro wrote:
| Just make stock buy-backs illegal. It would streamline a
| lot of "focus" issues when it comes to financial
| "engineering" mindsets.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Stock buy-backs are a tax efficient way to send
| distribute to shareholders. If you make them illegal then
| the only way left to distribute money to shareholders is
| via dividends. Want to make that illegal as well???
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I have said this and I'll say this again: executives should
| never have a disproportionate pay comparing to their most
| senior trench workers (think a very senior, lead engineer).
| 3-5x should be the maximum.
|
| The saying of "oh if you don't give big bucks then you won't
| hire good talents" is only true to certain extends. Einstein
| doesn't figure out GR because he wants the cash from Nobel's
| prize, actually none of the winners probably achieve because of
| the money. Scientists won't stop inventing because they don't
| get the big bucks (most don't get big bucks anyway). Carmack
| would still pump out great code if he stays indie. As long as
| properly paid, pretty much every real talent would be happy and
| do whatever they love to do.
|
| Giving disproportional pay to executives ONLY attract bad
| players and TBH some 500 are probably better NOT have an
| executive. It also creates sort of toxic culture everywhere
| that people are forced to chase big bucks because average pay
| is screwed.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Also, the only reasonable response to the saying of _" oh if
| you don't give big bucks then you won't hire good talents"_
| is "you mean the same talent that got you into this mess in
| the first place?"
| triceratops wrote:
| Pretty much this. If a potential leadership hire is willing
| to walk away solely because of the pay then they are clearly
| not the right hire. Of course they should be well-paid. But
| the job is about the job, not about the money.
|
| If they aren't sufficiently excited by the mere idea of being
| in charge of the company's products, services, and future
| direction, doing a good job for customers, shareholders, and
| employees, then they should look for a different job.
| ericd wrote:
| My reply to this is that the potentially outsized rewards
| gives Carmack de facto leadership of his next project,
| because he's the one paying the bills, and it lets him work
| on whatever he wants, in perpetuity, without ever having to
| consider money again. In a system where that's not the case,
| then maybe his superior skills are enough to secure a
| leadership spot, or maybe not, because maybe he hasn't
| invested enough in developing his political skills. This is
| generally a failing of engineers versus business people. Many
| of the engineer-led companies you see these days are because
| they were founders.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks
|
| I am very sympathetic to this line of criticism but I also find
| that "stock buybacks" are misunderstood and, as a result,
| overly demonized. So I just want to explain a few things for
| anyone who reads this.
|
| The question with a corporation is what to do with surplus
| profits. The first iteration of this was to pay dividends.
| These legally are paid equally among shareholders. If you
| distribute $1B in profits and have 100M shares issued then each
| share gets a $10 dividend. Simple. Additionally, dividends had
| to be profits so corporate taxes were paid on those.
|
| So there are two problems here:
|
| 1. Not every shareholder may want a dividend; and
|
| 2. The US tax treatment of dividends is bad, specifically
| double-taxing. as an example, the company may pay 15% corporate
| tax, pay a dividend with the remaining 85% and then the
| individual may 50% federal and state taxes on that, leading
| marginal tax rates of upwards of 60%, possibly higher.
|
| (2) has led to some screwy legislation (eg passthrough
| corporation discounts) so solve what is otherwise a simple
| problem. Australia has completely solved this problem with so-
| called "franking credits". This means that $1B of profit is
| made, 30% taxes are paid and $700M is distributed but it comes
| with $300M in tax credits. So if you get a $700 dividend, you
| also get $300 credit with the ATO. If your marginal tax rate is
| higher than 30% is higher, you may have to pay a little more.
| If it's lower, you'll get a refund.
|
| Now you generally can't borrow to pay dividends until you
| historically pay dividends. There are a lot of rules around
| this.
|
| Enter share buybacks. This is where the company buys back its
| own stock on the open market. This reduces supply and hopefully
| raises the price for remaining shareholders.
|
| Some will argue this is market manipulation but it really
| isn't. It's just a different way of distributin gmoney to
| shareholders. Unlike dividends, you can choose to take it or
| not by selling or not.
|
| A share buyback has none of the dividend tax problems but it's
| even better. If you've held for 12+ months you're paying the
| long-term capital gains tax rate, which can be substantially
| lower than the marginal income tax rate.
|
| But here's the big problem: it's completely fine to borrow
| money for a share buyback. This loophole needs to be closed.
|
| Prior to the IRA and Trump tax cuts, it would work like this:
| you would leave profits overseas so you wouldn't have to pay
| corporate tax on them. You'd then borrow money used those
| overseas profits as collateral and do a share buyback. This
| should've been illegal. Or, in the very least, any borrowing
| against foreign profits should be treated by the IRS as
| repatriation of profits and thus tax is owed.
|
| The Trump tax cuts changed how foreign profits are treated. The
| IRA further changed this with the 15% minimum tax, which was a
| very good change and one that didn't get a lot of attention.
|
| Should a company pay out shareholders or pay its workers more?
| I absolutely favor the latter. But we shouldn't focus solely on
| share buybacks because that's a small part of the problem. I'd
| say what we need is:
|
| 1. A higher corporate tax rate;
|
| 2. An end to passthrough corporations;
|
| 3. End the double-taxing of dividends. Just do what Australia
| does;
|
| 4. All share buybacks have to come from profits only; and
|
| 5. An aggressive attack on profit-shifting / transfer pricing
| to offshore profits.
| Dennip wrote:
| My understanding of stating this figure was to highlight that
| the cash to pay employees reasonably exists, its just being
| spent elsewhere...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Correct.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder if a non-profit aerospace competitor would be
| viable, if this would force all profits to be invested back
| into the company. Or maybe a hybrid with some kind of profit
| cap.
| jandrese wrote:
| How about they tried using that money to be more competitive
| in the market? Lowering prices. Paying workers more. Spending
| more on R&D. That sort of thing. Why are shareholder
| considerations the only considerations?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019
|
| Stock buybacks should be illegal or at least very difficult to
| do. They provide short-term gain to shareholders (and the
| executives who authorize them to prop up the stock price on
| which their bonuses depend) but can be extremely damaging to
| the company long-term (by which time the CEO is out anyway, and
| shareholders may have reaped their profits and moved on), with
| workers, and the local economy, left paying the price. The
| worst kind of capitalist poison.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| It should be illegal* to post articles about strikes without
| including details on current deal, current offer, and union
| demands. All these pieces try to influence your opinion without
| providing any details! Maybe the union demands are reasonable, or
| maybe they're not. Give me specifics please!
|
| *obvious hyperbole
| calcifer wrote:
| > Maybe the union demands are reasonable, or maybe they're not.
| Give me specifics please!
|
| Would that really help, though? Do you have the industry know-
| how, expertise, and _internal knowledge_ to assess whether the
| offer is reasonable or not?
| ikawe wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I'd like to know more. To me it's
| interesting to know what the workers are concerned about
| specifically.
|
| Otherwise it just reads like "lots of people are mad". Well
| about what exactly?
|
| It's fine for a headline, but not very impressive reporting.
| calcifer wrote:
| That much I agree with. I'd like to know more too, but I
| won't pretend it would be because I'd like to judge it for
| reasonableness :)
| zo1 wrote:
| That's the whole point of journalism. Right now, they
| gave neither the facts that the GP wanted, nor the
| context and understanding that you may need to be
| comfortable enough to judge it's reasonableness within
| the context of the strike/industry/company.
|
| It's like a BS meeting by a BS manager that he holds for
| "stakeholders" where he just throws a bunch of facts on
| the table, and then proceeds to do nothing to guide the
| decision making process. And then during the whole
| meeting we all run around like headless chickens trying
| to find out more info and context, all half-arguing with
| one another because we all have different pieces of the
| puzzle.
|
| </rant> Sorry had one of these just yesterday, and no
| matter how delicately I phrased or insinuated-it the
| person with the most info/context just did not offer up
| guidance and direction (ironically it's the same person
| that organized the meeting). Then at the end they gave
| praise to all those that contributed and then said
| they'll schedule another meeting to discuss the outcomes
| because we "couldn't reach consensus" or "decide on the
| next course of action".
| anon7725 wrote:
| This union last initiated a strike in 2008 just as the
| financial crisis hit. They were in a weak position and
| didn't get a good deal.
|
| In 2009 Boeing decided to build the 787 in a non-union
| factory in SC instead of in Washington.
|
| A few years later (can't recall exactly - it was around 10
| years ago), Boeing cut the pensions for new workers. The
| union was not in a strike position at the time.
|
| In the last 5 years the company has pushed forward with the
| 737 Max program with all of its problems that you've likely
| heard of.
|
| There was a leadership crisis and a new CEO is starting.
| They've made a big show about recommitting to Washington.
|
| The contract that was voted on this week included a
| headline raise of 25% over 4 years, but buried in the
| details was the elimination of a 4% annual bonus.
|
| Sounds like there is a generation's worth of grievance to
| sort out, and this being a fraught moment for the company,
| the union has decided to press their advantage. More power
| to them. This could have been avoided if the company
| leadership had a long-term approach to management and
| employee relations.
| Incipient wrote:
| That's an interesting point to make. If you can't make a
| informed opinion, should you have an opinion at all? What
| defines informed? How much information and experience does
| one need?
|
| I don't think that entirely detracts from the general premise
| of wanting to be given more information however.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The recent past had clearly shown that the most vocal about
| their opinions are very often the least informed.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Does it matter? These puff pieces exist solely to influence
| public opinion. That's true whether I have internal knowledge
| or not!
|
| We live in an era where a lot of media types actively push
| pro-unionization ideas. It'd be helpful to present facts and
| details alongside union efforts! I personally assume that if
| details are withheld it's because they'd be damaging to their
| argument. YMMV.
| immibis wrote:
| This is true but the media is usually anti-union, because,
| you know, shareholders vote for who has editorial control.
| OKRainbowKid wrote:
| I hope you are this critical not only when an article goes
| against your own personal stance.
| ikawe wrote:
| I'm going to assume the "illegal" is hyperbole, but yes I
| agree.
|
| Another pet peeve of mine is omitting the time frame for wage
| increases. A 25% raise today is not the same thing as a 25%
| raise over the course of 4 years.
| anon7725 wrote:
| > A 25% raise today is not the same thing as a 25% raise over
| the course of 4 years.
|
| And is also different than 25% over 4 years while also
| removing a 4% per year annual bonus.
| bsder wrote:
| > It should be illegal to post articles about strikes without
| including details on current deal, current offer, and union
| demands.
|
| Getting 96% to vote to go on strike pretty much says that
| company offer is complete garbage. You probably can't get 96
| out of 100 people to agree that the sky is blue.
|
| And while I wish that things were a bit more fact heavy,
| sometimes the sticking point is something really arcane and
| non-obvious to outsiders (on-call requirements, for example).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Getting 96% to vote to go on strike pretty much says that
| company offer is complete garbage. You probably can't get 96
| out of 100 people to agree that the sky is blue.
|
| People can vote the same way without agreeing with each
| other. Some of them could think it's a bad offer, the others
| could think the company has bankruptcy immunity because the
| government will bail them out so they might as well hold out
| for more even when the company makes a reasonable offer.
|
| > And while I wish that things were a bit more fact heavy,
| sometimes the sticking point is something really arcane and
| non-obvious to outsiders (on-call requirements, for example).
|
| This isn't an excuse for not providing the explanation. What
| should happen in this case is that you get a longer article
| because there is more context to unpack.
| obscuretone wrote:
| The sky is in fact black at the moment.
|
| Bit of a green hue towards downtown, regional bank creating
| the Aurora Desjardins
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Black? I am pretty sure it is some shade of grey.
| jjulius wrote:
| The specifics are literally in the article.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Defeat for the company or defeat for shareholders? These things
| are not the same.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Depends on if you are a shareholder for the long terms (many
| years) or a short-term trader. I don't own stock in Boeing (or
| any of their main competitors), but when there is a strike like
| this in a company I hold stock in I generally get more bullish
| for the long term because it means that:
|
| 1. It signals employees still care about the company enough to
| not just quit and go elsewhere. And employees who care make a
| better product.
|
| 2. Negotiating better benefits generally helps retain the solid
| "middle class" who make the brunt of the work in a company. It
| might not entice the "rock-stars" or so, but they generally are
| not dis-incentivised by their colleagues getting better
| benefits either.
|
| 3. The C-suite gets to know they are not untouchable, this also
| helps keep them level when answering to the board of directors.
| mrdevlar wrote:
| It's a Washington Post article, owned by who? Who has what kind
| of relationship with labour?
| hungie wrote:
| Good. Jim McNerney absolutely shredded the culture, and eroded
| decades of good will. It's far past time workers for Boeing
| pressed for things to go back to being an engineering and
| manufacturing led company.
|
| Striking is one way to get closer to that, good on them.
| tempodox wrote:
| Reclaiming control from the beancounters and misers to rein in
| their destructive influence? I'm not optimistic.
| M95D wrote:
| Ever heard of a stock-price led company that "went back to
| being an engineering and manufacturing led company"?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| What happened with dell when they went back to being
| privately owned for a couple of years?
| fragmede wrote:
| Depends on how deeply you know the story of GE, which was an
| engineering company, became a financial services company, and
| now is back to engineering.
| triceratops wrote:
| I think GP meant went back successfully. Whether today's GE
| will ultimately be successful remains to be seen.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Do you have any more information on that? I worked for GE
| in the past and would like to do so again; however, I'd
| avoided them because it seemed like they'd been run into
| the ground.
| paxys wrote:
| > and now is back to engineering
|
| There is no company called GE anymore. Most of its
| engineering units were sold off to other companies which
| just license its brand. GE appliances, for example, are
| actually Haier. GE Lighting was sold to a home automation
| startup.
|
| GE's biggest value creator today is its brand name, not its
| engineering.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| This is not correct. There are three companies formed
| from the splitting up of GE that all do serious
| engineering. GE Aviation, GE Vernova (power), and GE
| Healthcare.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It may be Boeing's only chance of having a future.
|
| Good luck, Boeing. (And I mean that.)
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Maybe they should go private then, like Musk did with
| Twitter.
| michael1999 wrote:
| I don't see anything about the engineering culture in the union
| demands. It's all about pay, benefits, etc.
|
| I fear this will do the exact opposite: vindicate the union-
| busters who wanted to move out of Washington in the first
| place.
| michael1999 wrote:
| I should be clear, I see the linkage.
|
| The union-busters from MD are a cause of Boeing's woes, and
| it would be difficult to maintain a high-discipline, high-
| quality culture in a right-to-work plant without external
| oversight. The plausible deniability of production mandates
| with records falsification make zero-tenure employment toxic
| to a safety-critical program.
| hintymad wrote:
| And what's enraging is that he was boasting his so-called
| culture-building in his book and retried scar free
| csomar wrote:
| https://archive.is/2X1KV
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Any Boeing engineers who may be looking for alternate paths,
| please know that I've known many great aerospace engineers who
| have made a pivot to medical devices very successfully and many
| of the best medical devices to come out in recent years are due
| to such. It seems very different but really it's very similar.
| bibelo wrote:
| or they could come here to Toulouse to work for Airbus ^^
| echelon wrote:
| Boeing engineers should leave and start their own company.
|
| "American dynamism" is hot right now and there should be
| ample funding available. Lots of the old dinosaurs are being
| nipped at by nimble upstarts like Anduril.
| fragmede wrote:
| Have you _seen_ how much lambasting Boom Aerospace gets
| every time they come up? Starting a new aerospace company
| isn 't for the faint of heart!
| sealeck wrote:
| I agree but not because "boohoo people aren't nice enough
| to us" - because it's a tough market to break into with
| (justifiably) high regulatory scrutiny, high R&D costs
| and few investors who know what they are doing.
|
| It's very natural that any company be subject to scrutiny
| - this doesn't mean that you shouldn't set up a company
| or that the environment for setting up a company isn't
| favourable.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Well, Boom is not any aerospace company, they want to
| make supersonic planes.
|
| Supersonic travel is expensive and environmentally
| unfriendly, and it will probably always be, because it
| requires more energy, because physics. All that for the
| minor advantage of saving a couple of hours on select
| flights. What it means is that it is a privilege for the
| wealthy (because it is expensive for what you get), at
| the expense of everyone else (because of the
| environment). So of course it is going to be unpopular,
| except to the wealthy in question.
|
| It doesn't mean Boom can't be successful because the
| public opinion is negative, if the rich can pay. I am
| still not convinced though, after all, Concorde didn't
| fail technically (and it still flew after that one
| accident), it failed commercially. Boom is not taking the
| easy path here, since it is a technically hard problem
| with a dubious market.
| beaned wrote:
| I think that take is a little cynical.
|
| If it's only for the rich then the prices will be high.
| Meaning the capitalist mechanism of resource distribution
| will be even higher (more paid by the rich received as
| income by the non-rich). It will also take demand from
| existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else.
| It also employs people. It also drives technology
| forward. And ultimately it does let people travel in less
| time, and why wouldn't we want that? To some extent
| emissions are not as bad as you'd think since they are
| being emitted over less time in the course of a shorter
| journey. Success in this category will also drive
| competition in every metric and work to bring cleaner,
| shorter flights to everyone over time.
|
| There is a lot to love about the idea of supersonic
| flight.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It will also take demand from existing airlines making
| fares lighter for everyone else.
|
| That's not how airline economics work. The first class
| passengers (the ones who could afford to leave for
| supersonic) subsidize the economy seats[1]. If they left
| you would probably see worse prices, worse amenities or
| both.
|
| There are airlines that don't have business or first
| class seats (e.g. Spirit), and they're generally a
| terrible experience.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-class-vs-coach-a-
| game-of-...
| tmhrtly wrote:
| Not fully convinced by the "will make fares lighter for
| everyone else" argument. The economics of planes are
| heavily weighted towards the passengers up front -
| business & premium economy make more profit per sqft for
| the airline than seats at the back. So I'd imagine that a
| reduction in demand for premium seats could actually
| increase prices.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The flipside of this is that the passengers in the back,
| while not as profitable in the "$/sqft" equation, are
| what merit the airline buying a 777-300 or A350.
|
| If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then
| you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with
| things beginning to approach JSX's
| (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > To some extent emissions are not as bad as you'd think
| since they are being emitted over less time in the course
| of a shorter journey.
|
| Emissions are usually compared in amounts per passenger-
| kilometer.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Computers used to be very, very expensive. Residential
| telephone lines were acquired through mortgage a couple
| decades ago in my country so being expensive now doesn't
| mean expensive forever.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| unlike with computers, there's some pretty obvious
| barriers that limit the efficiency of supersonic
| airplanes. your volume has a strict lower bound from the
| size of passengers and luggage, your engines have a lower
| bound since there's only so much air you can push
| against, and your drag has a lower bound of a perfectly
| smooth aerofoil that produces lift and can fit the people
| and luggage. Even if you take the most optimistic
| assumptions that didn't violate physics, your fuel burn
| isn't going to be reasonable.
| thehappypm wrote:
| What if you leave the atmosphere?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| That's a thing called a rocket. Those have different
| constraints (e.g. energy proportional to mgh to get out
| of the atmosphere, dramatically less efficient engines
| since you now need to carry your oxidizer, etc. It seems
| vaguely plausible that for very long distances (e.g. New
| York to China), a rocket could be more efficient than an
| airplane, but it does seem pretty unlikely that a rocket
| can be as efficient as a normal airplane.
| krisoft wrote:
| Plus the added benefit of looking exactly like a
| ballistic missile attack on radar. :D Hope nobody with a
| twitchy trigger finger ever mistakes your flight for one!
| And also hope that no enemy will try to disguise their
| incapacitating strike as a scheduled flight.
| fragmede wrote:
| A ballistic missile flight to go from New York to Sydney
| would take 40 minutes. The Concorde, travelling at Mach
| 2, if it had the range to do that flight, would take 7.5
| hours, or 16 hours on a regular jet, if you can get a
| direct flight (except there currently aren't any).
| vundercind wrote:
| What's expensive, largely, is the fuel to shove something
| through the air faster than the speed of sound. Short of
| sci-fi frictionless materials cheap enough to cover an
| aircraft, I don't think you're going to see a big
| breakthrough there.
| bluGill wrote:
| No, but there are nothing I'm aware of changing the
| economics. Electronics were coming down in price for
| decades before computers reached the average house (of
| course when they reach the average house is debatable -
| on one extreme the Atari 2600 had a CPU, on the other
| there are still remote villages that are just adopting
| phones )
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| As I am currently sitting on a flight from Tokyo to SFO I
| would greatly appreciate the flight taking half the time.
| Boom _should_ be as efficient current aircraft. They will
| operate at 60K feet where the drag is much less and fly
| for less time. Their engines are being designed to run on
| 80% biofuels. But let 's see how it turns out in the end.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Are you travelling first class?
|
| If you are not, then you are probably not making the
| right comparison. Supersonic travel will absolutely not
| be for those who are flying economy right now and
| complaining about reclining, legroom, and crying babies.
| The kind of things that make flights feel very long, and
| yet, that's how most people fly despite much superior
| alternatives, because it is cheaper.
|
| Judging by how much it cost to fly on Concorde, it is
| reasonable to assume that a supersonic ticket will be
| equivalent in price to first class, or at least a very
| good business class.
|
| It means a seat that can recline 180deg, good enough to
| sleep on, an internet connection suitable for remote
| work, as I expect it to become standard in the near
| future, a decent meal and some privacy. In these
| conditions, saving a few hours may not be as desirable as
| it is in economy class. Knowing that in order to shorten
| your trip, you will be sacrificing some of that comfort,
| or pay even more, maybe getting close to private jet
| territory.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Boom should be as efficient [as] current aircraft.
|
| Don't know where this so-called efficiency should come
| from, but this is a statement that doesn't seem to be
| based in reality.
|
| Except for the techno-bro startup take that the
| incumbents are so imbued with themselves that they
| dropped the ball, which rational explanations are put
| forward to explain how the current manufacturers are
| doing a bad job?
|
| To fly at Mach 2 (or 1.8 as boom now seems to be
| targeting once they realised the difficulty of the task
| ahead) you still have immutable laws of physics you need
| to overcome, and that's going to cost an unreasonable
| amount of fuel.
| gs17 wrote:
| > and environmentally unfriendly
|
| That's international flight in general.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > much lambasting Boom Aerospace gets
|
| If Boom wants respect, they should merge with Sergey
| Brin's LTA Research.
|
| Supersonic airships are the future's future.
| orbisvicis wrote:
| Supersonic dirigibles? Isn't that an oxymoron?
| tjpnz wrote:
| They're an aerospace company? It seems I've been
| confusing them for a lobby group trying to remove urban
| noise regulations.
| fragmede wrote:
| See what I mean?
| Maken wrote:
| I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of
| engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane,
| from planning to the first prototype, if they started right
| now. Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320
| in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the
| hundreds?
| badpun wrote:
| I remember reading that one engineer spent 6 years
| designing ,,ventilation for seats 40-80" on one of the
| larger Airbuses. It seems like the amount of design and
| engineering work required for a prototype of a complete
| aircraft (assuming you buy the engines) is just immense.
| kevindamm wrote:
| How much of that time was actual engineering-tradeoff
| decision-making and how much of that was working in a
| large corporation with abundant communication overhead?
| badpun wrote:
| I'm betting a lot of that is reviews, approval,
| documentation, testing, re-testing etc - but it may be
| required for building a safe aircraft, and for getting it
| licenced to fly.
| seabird wrote:
| For a safety critical system, the work documenting,
| explaining, testing, validating, etc. a decision
| outstrips the work it took to make the decision. It is
| that way for a very good reason. The problem with it
| requiring so much work and time isn't that there's
| BigCorp bureaucracy that needs disrupting, it's that
| there isn't a problem with the amount of work and time
| required.
| kevindamm wrote:
| I'm aware of that, but the proportion of overhead varies
| per company. Six months seems like a long time for a
| ventilation system, and the point being made in this
| thread is that the runway available for some spun-off
| group of former Boeing engineers would need to
| accommodate the very long schedules of the design stage.
|
| I'm just curious how much inflation there is in those
| schedules because I'm sure it's not zero.
|
| But you make a good point that these long runways are
| because the overarching tradeoff is one that prefers
| taking as long as it takes.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Why? Have the government step in, nationalize Boeing,
| give the union a board seat, and keep shipping. The
| problem is Boeing management and their board enabling the
| train wreck; don't build from scratch, refactor.
| charlie0 wrote:
| SpaceX has done such a phenomenal job rebuilding from
| scratch. How is it not obvious to you rebuilding airlines
| from scratch is also the best route?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Lottery tickets are not policy. SpaceX took decades to
| get to the success they realize today, having been
| founded in 2002, and it took a lot of luck to build a
| rocket shop from scratch. We must realize that companies
| are not built out of Legos, but ecosystems that require
| care, feeding, and are fragile systems.
| jonhohle wrote:
| PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,... how many times does someone
| "win the lottery" before it's not actually chance? Not
| saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave
| and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption.
| (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less
| liability.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning
| wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work
| hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's
| just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital
| begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much
| harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward
| decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter).
| Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between
| $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not
| terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that
| even with resources and skill that success is potentially
| out of reach.
|
| So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for
| investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the
| equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to
| enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from
| those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be
| generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale
| to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense
| marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled
| engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled
| to do their best work, while keeping out of their way.
| Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k
| workers, and successfully deliver products to customers
| that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also
| have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating
| customer confidence in the product and the org.
|
| https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/
|
| https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-
| evolution...
|
| https://escholarship.org/content/qt6668s4pz/qt6668s4pz.pd
| f
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| Bezos doesn't know how to build good hardware. Plenty of
| examples from Amazon. Then add Blue Origin to that track
| record.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sure, but can you not hire people who are good at
| hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Or, is
| it culture and an intangible ability to procure and
| orchestrate great people doing great work that leads to
| success? Think in systems. If you have the resources, and
| the physics demonstrate it can be done, the system is not
| properly configured, no?
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| _can you not hire people who are good at hardware with
| billions of dollars of investment?_
|
| Clearly not in Bezos's case.
|
| There is no magic involved here, some people have the
| skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling
| of innovative hardware, others don't.
|
| For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major
| things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional
| aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on
| countless analyses and few actual tests, like the
| incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many
| prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating.
| Musk knows what innovative design truly requires.
|
| What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and
| Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades
| has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and
| those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old
| fashion way.
|
| When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no
| amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players
| that play competitive chess will never make master, but
| of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess
| master is just down to chance. What percent of startups
| are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-
| first schemes, or people entering into competitive
| domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO
| you're probably pushing 90% there!
|
| To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin
| demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some
| generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos
| has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital
| marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be
| amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this
| just seems like it should be obvious.
|
| The vision, talent, and other such things are just so
| radically different. For instance Musk picked up his
| first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was
| literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue
| Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it
| seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with
| another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and
| political cronyism to use as crutches.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller
| bonzini wrote:
| To some extent it is. The current world chess champion
| was going to go to a xiangqi (Chinese chess) class and
| ended up by mistake at a chess class.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Musk has had 3 huge successes - Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX.
| Having one such success might be luck. But when it's 3
| times, dismissing it as luck is not very credible.
|
| The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
|
| And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software
| 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4.
| pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big
| deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies
| survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32
| bits.
| bonzini wrote:
| Pivoting to internet didn't work great for Bill Gates.
| Nobody really used MSN other than for chat and possibly
| hotmail, the browser wars were lost, and the bulk of the
| revenue was done on Windows at the time Nardella took the
| helm. However Microsoft was big enough to afford a
| failure.
| gosub100 wrote:
| he pissed off the far-left so nothing he has done or will
| do will ever redeem him. Start a profitable EV company
| that makes a durable, sexy-looking product? Nah doesn't
| count...but we need _more regulation_ to save us from
| climate change!
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking
| about PayPal as a Musk success story:
|
| Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal.
| I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is
| the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
|
| Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not
| going well.
|
| Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a
| prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running.
| They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd
| created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
|
| So Musk and his company architected a merger with
| Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the
| largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
|
| He remained CEO for _only four MONTHS_ , most of which he
| spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the
| entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic
| ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand
| Solaris and Java.
|
| The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after
| his four month anniversary, _when he 'd just left for two
| weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him
| in his absence_.
|
| Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a
| company that you're the major shareholder in that they
| _fire_ you (no "concentrating on my family", no
| "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it _while you
| 're on your honeymoon_.
|
| Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was
| mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
|
| I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his
| contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though?
| That's just another rewriting of history to support the
| Musk idolatry.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com.
|
| This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap
| again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't
| worked all that well, because most within my circle still
| call it by the old name Twitter.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If you think engineering is like a lottery, you may want
| to stop buying lottery tickets.
| enriquec wrote:
| nationalize? with the government that loses $500B to
| fraud and $3T to interest a year? What a horrible idea.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There is not one union, there are multiple employee
| unions, all fighting for their piece. Not only are there
| multiple unions, but even within a union, the older
| members usually vote against younger members.
|
| It's not a terrible idea, but also not a simple panacea
| to aligning interests in a business where payoffs happen
| decades in the future.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| > Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320
| in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the
| hundreds?
|
| Bombardier thought so, and did so! They developed and
| introduced the C-series aircraft to compete with smaller
| 737s and A320/A319. After introduction, Boeing fucked
| them over so hard that they sold the aircraft program
| after introduction to Airbus for a token sum. Airbus now
| builds and sells the C-series as the A220.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by
| _Bo...
| lainga wrote:
| And it went right into the little shelf in many
| Canadians' heads of "Canadian companies destroyed by the
| USA". Mauldite en soit trestoute la lignye.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Trying to translate your last sentence to English gives
| "Mauldite in itself very all the ligny". Trying to
| autocorrect it gives "Maudit soit toute la ligne" which
| apparently means "Damn the whole line". So... am I close?
| :D
| lainga wrote:
| Very!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Roy_Engloys
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of
| engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane.
|
| About 20 years for a fully-certified new commercial
| airliner design. They could have experimental prototypes
| flying much sooner of course. Even in China, their state-
| owned effort to develop a new narrow-body airliner took
| about 15 years and that's very likely with the CCP
| greasing the skids for them as much as they could. They
| are still not certified in Europe or North America.
|
| And some of the problems we've seen with Boeing have
| nothing to do with engineering, but problems with
| subcontractors, materials, and assembly.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Designing an airplane and producing a prototype isn't
| terribly difficult and many thousands of companies have
| done this.
|
| The tricky part is designing the massive manufacturing
| apparatus around it that can produce them in volume (ask
| Elon how easy building cars is), satisfying the varying
| demands of hundreds of different airlines, many from
| developing nations, helping them set up financing,
| supporting the design in the field for 30-50 years, AND
| turning a profit. Each widget produced has an MSRP of
| hundreds of millions of dollars.
|
| Ask yourself why Lockheed permanently exited the
| commercial aircraft business 40 years ago, despite having
| what was regarded as the most technologically advanced
| design of the era, ahead of its time. Douglas went
| bankrupt and got bought out, Convair and everyone else
| failed and closed up shop.
|
| You can't throw some engineers - they could be the
| smartest on the planet - into rented office space and
| become the next airplane company. There's more to it than
| designing the next WiFi-enabled food processor and
| slapping it together in Shenzhen.
| Corrado wrote:
| Actually, thinking about Tesla is appropriate. No one
| really thought starting a new automotive manufacturer
| from scratch was possible, but Tesla did it. Yes, it's
| very hard and you'll probably fail, but if you do things
| different you might actually have a chance. The reasons
| all the old aircraft companies failed is probably the
| same reason Boeing is struggling. Don't copy what they've
| done in the past, make your own way. Yes, I know that
| building aircraft is a much higher hill to climb, but I
| think it might be worth it.
|
| They could also join some of the small aircraft startups
| that are trying to gain a foothold. Maybe a cadre of
| experienced aircraft engineers would help them raise
| money and get a product to market faster.
| misiek08 wrote:
| I see this one as the saddest - if you are making good
| products the company will finally die. VW (with Audi and
| Porsche) failing to deliver quality products is the top
| group. Apple crushing iOS release after release and
| becoming trillion dollar company.
|
| Maybe that's just the way to live and lead the company
| and market and I just should stop dreaming about quality.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Engineers always over value their ability to start
| companies on their own. There is a lot to building a
| successful company and needs irrationality and risk-taking
| (not exactly traits of a median engineer).
|
| Engineers like Musk, Zuck, Gates are outliers than the
| norm. If you are a Boeing Engineer and had above average
| risk-appetite, you wouldn't be stuck in Boeing for 10+
| years.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Do they do any applicable work down in Alabama, or is that
| just manufacturing?
| coderjames wrote:
| That's who went on strike. "Tens of thousands of machinists
| voted Thursday to reject a proposed deal between the
| company and the union." This was the IAW manufacturing
| folks rejecting a contract, not the SPEEA engineering
| folks.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| That's not a great plan if what they're looking for is a
| higher salary though. Engineering in western Europe doesn't
| pay nearly as well as in the US.
| mricordeau wrote:
| Yes but Toulouse is way cheaper than any Tier 1 city in the
| US and you have to include insurance/health, school cost in
| the US (I'm from Toulouse and living in the US for more
| than 10 years). If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the
| US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Don't Boeing engineers also get insurance and 401k from
| their employer?
|
| Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not
| very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners.
| Trying to get around in life with just English there
| outside of Paris is not easy.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| There are quite a few employees in Toulouse that don't
| speak French, the company is very international. That
| being said I agree that daily life is much easier if you
| speak at least a little bit.
| hobs wrote:
| That's funny you say that because my experience of France
| is that everyone outside of Paris seems to hate the
| Parisians more than me, an American.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| My experience, although 20ish years ago now, was that
| France was very accommodating to people who were trying
| to make an effort to speak French, however badly, and
| would help correct pronunciations and other little
| errors, whereas their patience for foreigners who thought
| that the locals English would get better if they just
| spoke more loudly and slowly was thin.
| kpw94 wrote:
| > France is not very accommodating to non French speaking
| foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just
| English there outside of Paris is not easy.
|
| I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually
| people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This
| restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only
| speaking Japanese!!".
|
| That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In
| the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking
| presence, you better interact in English.
|
| Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or
| Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like
| Portland, NYC, or Chicago.
| dataflow wrote:
| > That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?
|
| No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of
| countries where English is almost as good as native. But
| obviously that's not the common case across the world,
| and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting
| people to know the local language.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Not really, the world isn't either black or white but
| various shades of gray. Everything North of Benelux is a
| lot friendlier and open to speaking English and doing
| things in English outside of capitals, compared to places
| like France where not speaking it gives you a severe
| handicap in life and career.
| retzkek wrote:
| I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of
| fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but
| not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a
| decision to relocate to another country for a job.
| smallnamespace wrote:
| But if I save money in the US I can decide to spend it
| anywhere else in the world later, including places that
| are _much_ cheaper than Toulouse.
|
| If I make money in Toulouse then I had better really love
| Europe, since I will have limited resources to relocate
| elsewhere if I ever change my mind.
|
| Tl;dr one advantage of getting paid in money over
| services is that money is much more portable.
| holoduke wrote:
| You can buy houses outside of Toulouse for 300k with
| swimmingpool and 4000 square meter land. 20 min drive
| from Airbus. Winter time you can ski in the mountains,
| summers are nice and cities like Barcelona can be reached
| in 4,5 hours. 80k is more than enough to have a super
| comfortable life.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's
| probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.
|
| If you are making $250k/year, you are already getting
| health insurance, and even if you weren't, it doesn't
| cost $170k.
| kfajdsl wrote:
| - Engineering jobs in the US tend to come with health
| insurance benefits
|
| - There are several state programs in the US that make
| attending an in-state public university very affordable.
| For example, in GA I attended university for $0 in
| tuition (only paying for room and board + a couple
| hundred bucks a semester on bs "fees"). The requirement
| for that grant is getting a 3.0 or higher high school
| GPA.
|
| - Not sure how cheap Toulouse is, but at least in the US
| you're probably better off making 200k+ in HCOL than 100k
| in LCOL. At that level of income, you don't have to spend
| much of your income on essentials even in an extremely
| HCOL area like SF ($3000 a month gets you a nice
| apartment).
| diggan wrote:
| True, as long as you don't consider cost of living, quality
| of life, work/life balance and life expectancy.
|
| But judging by the current policies and laws (or lack of
| them) in the US, seemingly "high salary" goes above all of
| those things for most people.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| They have nothing Tolouse right now.
| Avshalom wrote:
| That feels like too lousy of a pun to be making when we're
| talking about peoples lives here.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Sorry for boeing so insensitive.
| atlantic wrote:
| Good puns. Just out of curiosity, is your name a synonym
| for sh*tpost?
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| Jokes on Boeing are ok, they are just people with some
| loose screws.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Conversely, I've seen a lot pivot from aero to auto and
| flounder. They are kind of opposite industries in terms of
| pacing and design compromises, as well as the fact that most of
| a car has to plasticize in crash events which is not a primary
| consideration in aero.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Counterexample: Mulally
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I was moreso referring to ICs, but fair point.
| Balgair wrote:
| I'll echo this and have done something of this path. It's a
| very similar field surprisingly. Quite rewarding too. The
| timelines for products are also about the same (years-decade).
|
| The one tip is to not bother applying to Medtronic. They don't
| actually hire anything outside of interns. All the job postings
| are for internal roles (but required by federal law to be ...
| blah blah blah). Suffice to say, don't bother.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I'm curious. So this company basically only hires newbies and
| trains them from zero to any role they might need? That's
| kinda cool.
| behringer wrote:
| Except for the worker that will see stagnant wages.
| mbrameld wrote:
| Couldn't they change employers after leveling up their
| skills?
| ghaff wrote:
| I suppose the theory is that people won't see significant
| pay increases if they stay with the same company (but
| also presumably that if everyone leaves after training,
| the company will just stop training workers).
| giantg2 wrote:
| Joke's on you - my wages are already stagnate.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's not true, I have many colleagues that have made
| lateral movements into Medtronic (and out... and back).
| ska wrote:
| This isn't really true in my experience. They may be leery of
| hiring from outside the industry.
| RSHEPP wrote:
| Consider valves or pressure regulators also! Lots of shared
| fundamentals with the flow of gases!
| jandrese wrote:
| On one hand I can't blame any engineer that wants to flee, but
| on the other Boeing really can't afford any more brain drain.
| We are already seeing the results of years of forcing
| experienced but well paid engineers out and outsourcing their
| jobs. Planes literally falling out of the sky, but some nice
| fat executive bonuses.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Why it should be the engineers problem?
| onepointsixC wrote:
| It isn't. But Boeing failing and turning the commercial
| airline market into an Airbus monopoly is bad.
| deepsun wrote:
| That is a feature of capitalism and effective market. If a
| company falls a little bit below competition -- market forces
| it do dive even deeper, die quicker.
|
| I'm not saying it's good or bad. I've seen communism, and
| it's much worse to help failing companies -- they tend to
| fail even more instead of improving.
|
| The problem now is that international market is not really
| fair, trade treaties help too little.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > If a company falls a little bit below competition --
| market forces it do dive even deeper, die quicker.
|
| Feature of nature too, the jungle forces the weak to die
| quicker.
|
| One more argument for companies != people: we will be a lot
| more ok for this to happen to companies vs it happening to
| people.
| salawat wrote:
| Solution: for e supremacy of compliance with regulations
| over fiscal performance. You have to be able to check all
| of the boxes reliably before we can talk about innovating
| or optimizing.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Companies = people + assets + organizing structure
| weaksauce wrote:
| boeing isn't a company the us government will let fail.
| it's too important to have as a domestic ability.
| UberFly wrote:
| This is true and I wonder if it's going to put them even
| more into a zombie state of existence. Their bad business
| practices will keep getting bailed out and they'll never
| really improve until a better company comes along.
| LargeWu wrote:
| The problem is that the "competition" aspect assumes low
| barriers to entry. We're not talking about the corner diner
| or a bank or even a large insurance company. There's very
| little substitute for what Boeing does, and the barriers to
| entry for new competition are (quite literally?)
| astronomical. Boeing can't just be replaced; even to allow
| it to fail would be a major problem for the western
| economy.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Pivoting to a remote-first culture would be a great start.
| Tons of talented engineers angry about RTO to draw from.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Why would a _manufacturing_ company - who is clearly having
| _manufacturing problems_ - pivot to a remote-first culture?
| What problem would that solve? It 's hard to build
| airplanes in your driveway, but I can't say that I've
| tried.
|
| That door-blowing-off thing wasn't a design issue. "It's
| hard to forget to install the bolts when you're working
| from home" is a bit of a logical fallacy.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| Anecdotal, but out of my graduating class in chemical
| engineering from a University in Seattle, the top 20 students
| went into tech and finance. The worst performing students (by
| academic metrics) went to Boeing. Over time, I expect
| decisions to be made by engineers which are not stand outs.
| Coupled with the MBA trainwreck prioritizing profits and cost
| cutting, I expect Boeing has a very rough patch ahead.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I always wonder who these folks who graduate with excellent
| STEM degrees are who can't land a job.
|
| I had a similar experience with my graduating class in
| undergrad computer science at a no-name state university.
| Of the graduating class (significantly smaller than when we
| started), I don't know of a single person who couldn't find
| some kind of gainful tech related employment - including
| the few folks who somehow _could not code!_ by the end of
| our program. My experience is circa 2014, so only shortly
| after the great recession.
|
| Where are these people who just can't get any kind of work
| with real CS degrees? Even the many hardcore cheaters I
| know of found ways into the FAANG (some have been promoted
| several times now too!)
| spratzt wrote:
| I suggest you come over to the UK.
|
| I know several guys with postgraduate STEM degrees and 10
| years of development experience who can't even get
| interviews.
|
| It's very bad here.
| ghaff wrote:
| Things are a bit sketchy at the moment. Had a recent get-
| together including a former co-worker who was an obvious
| hire-this-person. They got hit in a layoff and they're
| still essentially out of work after a year.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Job postings that don't respond to inquiries about the
| role are a waste of your time, and it's possible to spend
| all day every day applying to them. Job postings without
| a method of contact are probably some kind of scam.
|
| The easiest step, IMHO, is to start by ignoring employers
| who use a service to filter applicants.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Top 20 students in chemical engineering went into tech and
| finance.... two professions that at the first sight have
| nothing in common with chemical engineering... Tech and
| finance must really be looking for a lot of employees....
| boc wrote:
| Or they just pay a lot more.
|
| If Boeing was paying $500K+ TC for engineers in their
| early/mid career, you'd see a lot more expertise enter
| the field. Instead you basically have to go into tech or
| PE/IB to see that type of compensation fresh out of
| school. Especially when students are taking on hundreds
| of thousands in debt, the payback period becomes really
| important when considering career paths.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I completely understand graduates would choose higher TC
| from tech/finance vs TC from Boeing. What I do not
| understand is why tech/finance companies would want to
| hire chemical engineering graduates.....
|
| I know a few people who changed careers from biology to
| finance - but that was only after going back to school
| and getting some business degree....
| darod wrote:
| because they solve a lot of math problems very well.
| protastus wrote:
| No doubt, Big Tech prints money and absorbs all available
| talent. Boeing's troubles are surely compounded by having
| all the best new talent hired away from them, because Big
| Tech pays much better.
| infamouscow wrote:
| There is literally nothing actually preventing Boeing from:
|
| 1. Firing 100% of management between CEO and lowest level
| supervisors that make things happen. All of middle management
| should go.
|
| 2. Promote supervisors into middle management.
|
| 3. Promote ground level employees into supervisor roles.
|
| 4. When human problems happen (and they will), spare no
| expense with resources and training. Remember, the reason for
| firing management is because they had the interpersonal
| talent, but fundamentally lack aeronautical talent.
| Interpersonal talent is of minimal value at Boeing.
| misiek08 wrote:
| 3. Never do this! Good engineer should get paid better over
| time and do good engineering. Being for a long time in a
| role doesn't make you better at different ones like
| supervising from engineering. Few bigger companies in EU
| wasted a lot of tech talents this way and people most often
| leave job after being leaders for a moment.
| ajross wrote:
| > Any Boeing engineers who may be looking for alternate paths
|
| The strike in question is the machinists' union, engineers
| aren't involved.
| carabiner wrote:
| This is correct and I'm not sure why it's downvoted. The
| engineers at Boeing are still going into the office and not
| on strike.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| I can see how they'd be similar. They both have lots of Real-
| time, must work, critical type systems.
| ska wrote:
| In the other direction, I've hired engineers out of aerospace
| into medical devices and can confirm it's a pretty easy fit.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| Trying not to see it black and white because I do support unions
| to a point but it is hard not to think negative things about a
| union being pushy at a place like Boeing. I know one engineer
| there and she was incredibly bright. I'm hoping for the best
| outcome so they win and everyone in the USA wins because a
| company like Boeing nose diving is bad for everyone.
| sealeck wrote:
| > it is hard not to think negative things about a union being
| pushy at a place like Boeing
|
| Hard not to think negative things about a union being "pushy"
| at a place where there are serious cultural failings around
| safety, the company has engaged on a decades-long campaign of
| financial engineering where it has slashed investment into the
| company and instead paid out huge dividents to its
| shareholders, and the company regularly pursues and demonises
| whistleblowers (partly in what a cynical person might term
| collusion with the regulator, but also independently) who
| attempt to apply pressure to the company to improve and inform
| the public about the risk to life that the dangerous practices
| the finance types at Boeing have adopted.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Unlike the idea I've initially got from reading some of the
| comments here, the workers aren't striking for long overdue
| measures that will save the company and get engineers back in
| charge of Boeing.
|
| They are striking to get the biggest share possible of the pie
| before Boeing completely crumbles down. Reading the news, there
| isn't a single demand from the workers that's about trying to get
| the company back on its feet.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| And why would they demand that? That's management's
| responsibility. The workers want fair compensation for their
| labor.
| ericd wrote:
| Because they have a set of specialized skills with only a few
| potential buyers, and if they kill this one, they'll have
| very limited options that use their skills without massively
| uprooting their lives.
| coldpie wrote:
| The workers aren't the ones killing the company.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| This is obviously true but one of the biggest privileges
| of management is being able to deny this specific bit of
| reality
| ericd wrote:
| If you reread what I was replying to, I was saying they
| might want to demand changes to management because it's
| in their best interest to demand those changes, focusing
| only on short term benefit to themselves is harmful to
| their long term best interest. And organized labor does
| have the power to severely damage the companies they're
| part of it's not all one group or the other.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| This reads like someone just spouting off a preconceived
| notion. How much are they making now? What are they looking to
| make? What do you think is reasonable? The AP article says the
| union salaries haven't been visited in 16 years.
| jjulius wrote:
| ... you do know that unions historically support workers, not
| companies?
| underseacables wrote:
| Boeing has been on a deathwatch for years now. I predict before
| the year is out. We will see something about a bankruptcy filing.
| Havoc wrote:
| Just watched a documentary on Boeing an hour ago. It's incredible
| that they avoided criminal prosecution despite two planes
| crashing, door popping out and then paperwork somehow going AWOL.
| Also Boeing knew about wiring issues since 2022 and the FAA only
| issues an inspection order in '24.
|
| Gonna try and avoid Boeings of all types going forward
| diggan wrote:
| Once you start thinking of Boeing as a government agency with
| less oversight that poses as a for-profit corporation, a lot of
| things start to make more sense. Including what you wrote
| about.
| aners_xyz wrote:
| I'm not really sure this framing makes any sense if I'm being
| honest.
| diggan wrote:
| What private corporation could make mistakes where people
| lose their lives on the same scale while still operating as
| normal afterwards?
| jfarina wrote:
| Boeing. It's literally the post.
| echoangle wrote:
| The question obviously was meant as "except Boeing".
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| People dying due to profit-motivated corporate negligence
| and the corporations in question getting a slap on the
| wrist? Must be a day ending in "y."
| FredPret wrote:
| There must be a billion corporations out there. What %
| can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away
| with it?
|
| A tiny number.
|
| And for the ones that can, it's likely that there are
| strong ties to the same government that's supposed to
| prosecute them. For Boeing, there are significant
| financial and contractual ties to the US government.
|
| Having a steady stream of ultra-reliable government cash
| surely reminds you of a state department?
| troupo wrote:
| Boeing is one of those "billions" corporations.
|
| Some are even immortalized in Oscar-winning movies. See
| e.g. the disasters section here: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
| consteval wrote:
| > What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and
| get away with it?
|
| 100% of the ones that are at, or near, the top of their
| domain. As the US and other developed nations move more
| towards Oligarchy, this describes a vast majority of the
| economy.
|
| If you pick a domain, any domain, there's typically < 5
| companies that represent almost 100% of the value in that
| domain. There're some exceptions, like tech, but not
| many.
|
| Losing even just one of those companies therefore has
| catastrophic economic effects. So you can't lose them, or
| even really hurt their profit much, because what's good
| for them is good for you (you being the US economy).
|
| Bayer Pharmaceutical famously gave thousands of people
| HIV, knowingly, instead of clearing their inventory. Who
| knows how many of those people went on to unknowingly
| spread HIV to their future children or partners. We
| literally can't measure how many people died of AIDS
| because of them.
|
| But they're one of the most important pharmaceuticals out
| there. And we need drugs.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Debatable. For all the complaints about regulation,
| there's lead in your cinnamon and filth in your deli
| meats. Listeriosis kills.
|
| The regulators are under-resourced, if anything.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _People dying due to profit-motivated corporate
| negligence and the corporations in question getting a
| slap on the wrist?_
|
| As opposed to what, people dying because government
| workers were negligent or on a power trip and nobody
| getting even that much accountability?
| ryandrake wrote:
| You know, it's possible that both are bad.
|
| The root problem is that the rich and powerful[1] face no
| consequences for wrongdoing. It's endemic to every part
| of life, and nothing gets done about it because the rich
| and powerful make the rules. It really doesn't matter if
| they happen to be aligned with "Team Corporation" or
| "Team Government". They are equally unaccountable to
| justice.
|
| 1: Rich and Powerful are both the exact same thing since
| money is frictionlessly convertible to power and vice
| versa.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for
| wrongdoing._
|
| Bernie Madoff. Jeff Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell. Sam
| Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Harvey Weinstein.
|
| I get that sometimes you'll see things like Hunter
| Biden's tax issues being allowed to pass the statute of
| limitations, but a universal "the rich never face
| consequences" is just plain false.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You can always cherry pick a few counter examples to any
| argument without invalidating the typical case.
| slt2021 wrote:
| can you list how many financiers were jailed after 2008
| GFC ?
|
| can you find any?
|
| can you list how many people were jailed for engineering
| SARS-CoV?
|
| heck, government hasn't even acknowledge that it was
| engineered and still pushes fairy tale about bat
| infecting pangolin who infected a chain of few other
| animals and then ended up in wet market - but no signs of
| viruses in 1000 miles between caves and wet market were
| ever found
| hobs wrote:
| Well, disregarding the bankers - generally we require
| evidence to be presented in a court of law and then those
| findings to be found true for people to go to jail -
| repeating stuff you read on the internet doesn't really
| rise to that level.
| lucianbr wrote:
| If you approach it with mathemathical universality, yes,
| it is false.
|
| But what about "95% of the time 95% of the rich do not
| face consequences"? It's still a huge problem, and
| probably what the commenter meant.
| piva00 wrote:
| Probably all of the oil industry?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Monsanto, Nestle, J&J, the whole tobacco industry, the
| companies that made asbestos, talidomide, etc.
| frmersdog wrote:
| So, yes. All have deep ties with government through their
| regulatory apparatus (some would characterize this as
| "capture"). Also of note: people might be confused by
| tobacco's inclusion here if they don't realize that North
| America was essentially settled as a tobacco agribusiness
| (Spanish gold-hunting and death-trap religious colonies
| notwithstanding). Tobacco's role in shaping America's
| socioeconomic nature is massively underrated.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Maybe do a search for "most dangerous jobs"?
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| BP and Exxon have killed entire ecosystems including
| people. They lied for decades about the environmental
| effects of fossil fuels. Air pollution alone has
| conservatively killed hundreds of thousands of people.
| While you can't blame them for air pollution existing,
| you can blame them for intentionally suppressing the
| ability of people to mitigate it and improve air quality.
|
| EDIT: accidentally a word.
| zymhan wrote:
| Union Carbide:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
| dimal wrote:
| Are you joking? Once a corporation gets large enough, the
| worst they can get is a fine, which is usually a fraction
| of their income. This is how the system works.
|
| For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck
| killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and
| they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a
| fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one
| was individually prosecuted.
|
| If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars,
| you have a license to kill.
| jdright wrote:
| This is just malicious. Boing is the exemplar capitalist
| enterprise, traded, where the sole objective is profit above
| everything else, including safety and following regulations
| obligations, something that they can do because they bought
| politicians (lobby aka legal corruption).
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Their stock is down 55% in the last five years. How is that
| an exemplar of profit making capitalism?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > How is that an exemplar of profit making capitalism?
|
| They still exist and are regularly pumping out
| millionaires from their executive suites.
|
| It's helpful to think about corporate America as a
| gigantic factory, but instead of a factory that makes
| gadgets or appliances, it's a factory that makes
| millionaires. On one end of the factory, the raw
| materials come in: Able-bodied workers, money from
| customers, and capital from investors. On the other end
| of the factory, the finished product--millionaire
| executives--fly out on golden parachutes into retirement.
| In the back, the waste from the manufacturing process
| gets discarded: The broken lives and bodies of all the
| rank-and-file workers, and all the negative societal and
| environmental externalities that were also destroyed in
| the process.
|
| Profit for shareholders and [temporary, conditional]
| employment for workers are mere side effects of the
| process, and they'd do away with the second one if they
| had the technology to.
| mnau wrote:
| They hired the lead prosecutor that cut them a deal. To be
| precise a Boeing criminal defence firma hired her after she
| left the Justice department.
|
| It's the American way.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > Boeing's lead corporate criminal defense law firm is
| Kirkland & Ellis. Cox, the lead prosecutor in the Boeing
| case, left the Justice Department earlier this year. And last
| month she joined Kirkland & Ellis as a partner in its Dallas
| office.
|
| It looks like the firm bought the prosecutor, resulting in a
| win for its client. How could this be prevented, though?
| Politicians can't be trusted with oversight like this--they
| would use it to punish prosecutors and would inevitably
| further politicize the Justice Dept.
|
| https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-
| boeing-...
| evilos wrote:
| Can't a law be passed that states prosecutors legally
| cannot consult or assist in cases or for defendants they
| were involved with during their tenure as a prosecutor for
| X years after they leave their position?
| para_parolu wrote:
| Then some friend of Boeing CEO would invest in
| prosecutor's startup
| triceratops wrote:
| The allegation is the prosecutor got a cushy gig at the
| law firm, not that they subsequently worked on the case
| after switching sides.
| evilos wrote:
| Ah so the implication is not that the prosecutor gave
| them inside info on the government's case's weaknesses
| but the prosecutor intentionally played the case
| suboptimally in hopes of being paid after the fact? If
| this was done with prior assurance that sounds already
| illegal no? If it was done simply on the hopes of
| securing "payment" afterwards with no prior deal then
| that seems like a large risk for the prosecutor to take.
| dmix wrote:
| Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since
| plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the
| spending bills they voted on. Trying to target
| prosecutors would cast a eye on themselves.
|
| It's like trying to separate church and state in England
| back in 1600-1700s.
| lukan wrote:
| "Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since
| plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the
| spending bills they voted on."
|
| It is the same problem - bribery/corruption but hard to
| proof and not much interest to investigate.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Restricting them too much is a double edged sword because
| a lot of people use government work as a stepping stone
| even if they don't go to work for people they directly
| deal with. Making it too hard to find a job after can
| make good lawyers never go into public service because
| they couldn't get the cushy private gig afterwards.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| If the whole legal system protects and even encourages such
| actions, maybe...wait an UPS guy is knocking the door,
| strange I don't remember ordering anything...hold on.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Not defending Boeing here. They have lost engineering focus as
| everything has become financialized in the search for ever-
| higher profits.
|
| But there's also a recency bias here, as in fatal defects
| aren't new. Example: there were several fatal accidents with
| the 737 rudder in the 1990s [1].
|
| One valid area of criticism is how the FAA has essentially
| allowed Boeing to self-certify to safety since ~2009 [2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
|
| [2]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-
| editor/b...
| zooq_ai wrote:
| You can make a documentary about any person or any company on
| this planet and make them look evil with the benefit of
| hindsight.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You get a lot of leeway when you are a large defense contractor
| and one of the last American aviation companies.
| __xor_eax_eax wrote:
| Sadly, this will kill the US. We have no other aerospace
| manufacturer at that scale.
|
| Unless you're not in the US, you want Boeing to get better, not
| fail (or root for a competitor, but I see no such thing)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Didn't the door of the flight land on the lawn of one of the
| universe's lawyers suing them?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Executives nearly always avoid jail time despite egregious
| lawbreaking, because we have a culture of corporate
| permissiveness in the US (and arguably many other countries as
| well of course).
|
| Only the absolute worst of the worst of the worst will get jail
| time for doing something illegal in the course of doing their
| job at the company, if it's something that nominally benefits
| that company (as opposed to, say, stealing from the company
| themselves). And even then, probably only some.
|
| This creates a perverse incentive to commit crimes as an
| executive, because the upsides are huge -- big
| bonuses/promotions/pay raises as a part of cutting costs, even
| if you had to compromise on safety or otherwise do something
| illegal -- but the biggest downside is usually only having to
| resign or get fired.
|
| Imagine if the worst result of repeatedly putting someone in
| the hospital or robbing a bunch of banks with a gun was just
| losing your job. That's how executive crime works in the US.
| mlindner wrote:
| They're voting to strike right as the new CEO gets in? That's
| kind of the worst time possible to improve the situation at
| Boeing. All you're doing is creating an antagonistic environment
| with your boss. So dumb.
| diggan wrote:
| Imagine thinking that people should stop thinking of their own
| best because it might create "an antagonistic environment"...
|
| How about making the conditions good enough for employees so
| they don't have to strike to get some basic benefits and OK
| salary for performed work?
|
| If the executive team doesn't want to people to be comfortable
| at their work, it feels a bit unfair to put "creating an
| antagonistic environment" on the employees.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Some of us don't like the taste of dirt licked off a boot.
| They'll be fine.
| spacemadness wrote:
| There is an insane amount of "bootlicking" being posted here.
| I'd say it's astroturfing but really it's likely decades of
| brainwashing. Time to go watch some Amazon union busting
| videos in my right to work state.
| dh2022 wrote:
| So when Boeing was shopping this summer for a new boss I was
| thinking the new boss would negotiate with the board worker pay
| increases related to the upcoming union contract.
|
| It looks like the new boss was not smart enough to ask for a
| big worker pay increase (or maybe did not ask at all). Looks
| like not a good place for Boeing.
|
| BTW - there is another contract due in 2026. Hmm, another
| strike in a couple of years? Will Boeing be in a better place
| or worse place in 2 years? Interesting times ahead.
|
| https://investors.boeing.com/investors/news/press-release-de...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| In my mind, this is an unalloyed good
|
| The practice alone of organizing labor power against owners,
| irrespective of the demands, given the existing state of the
| world, is what is needed to show Class solidarity.
|
| Simply showing class solidarity in order to kick off other
| strikes is valuable in and of itself.
|
| Y'all really have to understand a general strike is coming.
|
| A general strike means the labor class (you most likely), which
| is the group of people who do not primarily gain their income
| from passive investments, and are reliant on contracts that they
| don't create or control which provide them very little control
| over their economic future, stop working in order to put extreme
| pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts
| and who do control capital.
|
| Such a system is foundationally unethical, and should be
| Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of
| all that capital to the rightful owners: the people actually
| producing the value, and done in a way that's not under duress,
| such that you do not have to take whatever dog shit contract is
| put in front of you
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| This is an ancient and universal idea, that has failed to
| deliver prosperity and growth, and often drives societies that
| were once flourishing into starvation.
|
| Capitalism is the new, cool, unique idea that has actually
| delivered prosperity for society. Not perfectly evenly, but
| certainly more evenly than other ideas like socialism, fascism
| and feudalism.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You're conflating political and economic systems here.
| Capitalism is fully compatible with fascism. And it emerged
| out of and is an evolution of manorialism, the economic
| system used under european feudalism.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Labor action isn't contrary to a free market. Labor action is
| precisely labor using its negotiating power _in_ a market to
| secure concessions, the same way that employers use their
| market power to secure concessions from employees, customers
| use their market power to secure concessions from businesses,
| or businesses use their market power to extract profit.
|
| I'm a business owner. I believe in business, and I like
| participating in a competitive market. I like that it keeps
| me honest and forces me to really try to do my job. But that
| doesn't imply that I have to be hostile to the interests of
| laborers in principle! They're sticking up for their
| interests, just as much as I stick up for mine. That's how a
| market works. And just as with my customers, we can have a
| mutually beneficial working relationship while still
| negotiating in the knowledge that we're all adults with some
| degree of self-interest.
|
| As long as we're working within a system where we don't
| expect businesses to show loyalty to employees beyond self-
| interest (and it seems that we are), why should we expect
| employees to behave any differently? You can't make
| employment an ethical question for one side and not the
| other: either we're all in this together (and thus that
| businesses have a responsibility that Boeing has clearly
| failed to uphold), or we believe in a ruthlessly competitive
| market (and labor has every right to play hardball).
| bdowling wrote:
| > A general strike means the labor class ... stop working in
| order to put _extreme pressure_ on the group of people who do
| control those contracts and _who do control capital_.
|
| > Such a system ... should be Deconstructed as rapidly as
| possible with the _expropriation of all that capital_
|
| (emphasis added)
|
| The result, predictably, is that unions lose all their leverage
| against the investor class (which no longer exists) and
| management (which is now the government). See, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
| ("[S]trikes were still more or less restricted... Unions
| remained partners of management in attempting to promote labor
| discipline, worker morale, and productivity.").
| asats wrote:
| In your profile it says you work for some company, do the
| founders know you want to expropriate their company? Those damn
| kulaks, feasting on the fruits of your labor.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yes they do.
|
| I'm employee #3 so...you know Probably not exactly what you
| expected
| asats wrote:
| >Probably not exactly what you expected
|
| No, because calling for a communist revolution from your
| position is a suicide wish then, any entrepreneurs or
| owners of pretty much anything were considered a class
| enemy and you being in a leadership positions of any kind
| is a guaranteed ticket to a gulag.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe in this contract they both can have provisions in for poor
| workmanship and poor engineering decisions. Both for the shop
| floor as well as the management.
|
| You ship defects, you get salary or bonus deductions and
| vestments pulled.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Typically quality improvement programs don't rely on punishing
| mistakes. Doing so results in people hiding mistakes,
| pressuring QA people to do a worse job etc.
|
| Now if the issue is malice and not mistakes - then you can
| apply discipline. And indeed most union contracts do still have
| a process for discipline.
| danielodievich wrote:
| During national neighbor night out few weeks ago I met a couple
| who just moved to the neighborhood, wife is a doctor and husband
| is a Boeing engineer in the material science something rather. Me
| being a huge Boeing fan we've immediately connected on the topic
| of Boeing's issues. His view from inside echoed mine - too many
| MBAs, too much focus on financial engineering and stock buybacks
| and shareholder returns (he was LIVID about Boeing having no cash
| now because they sent it back to shareholders), too little focus
| on engineering. I touched on the nextgen (79?7) program and he
| just shook his head. And the CEO based out of wherever but not
| Seattle is just a huge spit into everyone's face.
|
| I don't think Boeing is going down due to it being well, Boeing,
| but it will likely need to get bailed out if it goes on like
| that.
|
| So go machinists!
| squigz wrote:
| Why would bailing out Boeing be a good idea?
| cwmma wrote:
| because it's too big to fail.
| danielodievich wrote:
| Um, they are one half of duopoly of widebody aircraft makers,
| they are a huge portion of high technology export from USA,
| they are in every state (for better or worse), they are a
| defense provider of insane importance with planes, rockets
| and satellites. Yeah, they're strategically essential to this
| country's abilities in airspace. I have no doubt they'd get
| bailed out. With a huge stink but they will.
| squigz wrote:
| These might be why they likely will be bailed out, but I'm
| not sure those are _good_ reasons.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| That's just how the free market works wink wink nudge nudge
| cchance wrote:
| Good! Fuck boeing the company/executives, the merger with
| McDonnell Douglas totally fucked that company!
|
| Profits over safety and performance fucked boeing over
| benced wrote:
| A lot of people here seem justifiably angry at Boeing
| management's total destruction of an engineering corporate
| culture. It's unclear to me if fixing that is what the machinists
| are demanding or if they just want normal union things like being
| paid more and working less.
|
| No hate if they are optimizing for that, unions don't exist to
| serve corporate culture. Just want to be clear-eyed about what
| the union is seeking and (potentially separately), what it will
| take to make Boeing an American great again.
| kedean wrote:
| It's not totally clear to me, but it is telling that the union
| members specifically say boeing needs to "stop breaking the
| law" and that the rejected deal included an allegedly large pay
| increase. 96% turning that down doesn't feel like the increase
| just wasn't enough to me
| hosh wrote:
| It goes with the perception of corporate greed. Boeing stocks
| have shot up, profits are not being shared, and those profits
| came at a cost of safety, and it isn't as if market share had
| not still declined against Airbus.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a machinist used to be able to go
| home, proud of the work they have done, and now, it is not
| so.
| goda90 wrote:
| And if the culture destroys Boeing and its reputation in
| the end, the machinists are going to be struggling to find
| new jobs. "Sorry, we don't want someone who built bad
| airplanes to work on this other safety critical thing."
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| The larger economy just doesn't have enough similar
| positions to absorb all of the Boeing employees without
| them having to significantly reskill. Not to mention
| after you build airplanes going to build most anything
| else might feel like a downgrade.
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| Unless you are talking about a very specific period in the
| last ten years, Boeing's stock has not "shot up". It is
| barely up over the last decade in a period when the total
| US market has nearly tripled.
| TylerE wrote:
| Boeing stock is worth 4x what it was 15 years ago.
|
| It had gone up almost 10x from 2010 to 2020, then they
| got hammered by the obvious.
| gruez wrote:
| >Boeing stock is worth 4x what it was 15 years ago.
|
| The S&P 500 is worth 5.4x over the same time period.
| There might have been some enthusiasm back in 2018, but
| in the past 5 years they've definitely underperformed.
| carabiner wrote:
| It's the latter. They want normal union things (nothing wrong
| with that). Engineering is a whole different world, white
| collar vs. blue collar.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| > A lot of people here seem justifiably angry at Boeing
| management's total destruction of an engineering corporate
| culture. It's unclear to me if fixing that is what the
| machinists are demanding or if they just want normal union
| things like being paid more and working less.
|
| Let's not be naive here. People are going to strike on what
| they are incentivized to strike on. Not the goodness of their
| hearts.
| gs17 wrote:
| They should want to influence the company to ensure they can
| keep their jobs, at the higher pay they want, indefinitely.
| There's a clear incentive: without the corporate culture
| fixed, they'll go from on strike to laid off when Boeing goes
| bankrupt before they can get the full raise.
| asdf333 wrote:
| unions are bad for our economy. they are monopolies in
| themselves
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Whose economy are they bad for? They are bad for the rich
| people's economy, and good for poor/middle class folk.
| plasmatix wrote:
| I'm curious to know if you think unions are bad for the
| economy now, after everything they/labor have accomplished
| for worker rights in the last century, or if it's those very
| things you consider bad for the economy?
|
| Is child labor good for the economy? Maybe short term.
|
| Are 16 hour workdays and subsistence pay good for the
| economy? That doesn't make good consumers out of the
| employees.
|
| Unions exist because people were subjected to brutal
| conditions and it seems very unlikely to me such conditions
| were conducive to a healthy economy.
| zardo wrote:
| The negotiating team has to be pretty out of touch with the
| members to reach a deal that's rejected with 96% of the vote.
| cwmma wrote:
| Not really, the negotiation team gets the best deal that can
| get that doesn't involving going on strike and they present
| that to the union which is then better informed for their vote.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Correct rejecting the companies "best and final" contract is
| basically par for the course in union negotiations. The
| company is banking on being able to outlast the strike to get
| a better deal than the union would otherwise agree to or
| betting on the government coming in an kneecapping the union
| and forcing the workers to accept a deal like happened with
| the ATC and train operator unions when they struck (striked?
| struck doesn't sound right in the context of a union strike
| for some reason...).
| elwell wrote:
| > struck
|
| "went on strike"
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