Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest.
They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?
They convinced us to exchange our pensions for the privilege of being the mark on a market where the sharks like them do whatever the fuck they want, from blatant insider trading, to pump and dump schemes, to outright fraud, having for all practical purposes bought the SEC a long time ago.
What they will kill next?
How long are we going to transfer wealth to those slimmy sweet talking ignorant greedy bean counters?
Our daily work is like being in a mad house because almost everything is subordinated to the the most sacred goal of cooking the next quarter numbers to ensure we maximize executive bonuses, and fuck the long run! crazy projects started, spin offs, merges, projects cancelled, company killing layoffs, fuck long term value generation! they want more and more, and more, and they fucking want it right now! the fucking bonus gollums.
Everything is fucked in our society but executive compensation. Xerox, HP, IBM, Boeing... How many other proud symbols of our economy and civilization are we going to let them destroy?
You should know that in business school and after everything you just described would be called "optimized". There is some short discussion about ethics, usually involving not stealing from investors, but otherwise the world is seen as one giant place where people are the same as nuts and bolts or ingredients in a chocolate bar to be optimized. This goes for customers and employees.
Optimization is one of the more useful terms for it, but I think a big part of the problem is foundational. It's easier to trade in measurable values than unmeasurable ones, so the trades with something measurable on both sides get prioritized, which subtly increases the demand and market value of measurable values over unmeasurable.
So we end up gradually converting our productivity to the measurable outputs because we can more safely trade them. But then unmeasurable values get shafted.
The non-fungible values get shafted even harder. For example, it's inherently impossible to trade for true human relationships because the bidirectional flow is where the value comes from and that flow must be built. But that means two people must simultaneously choose to take a mostly unknown level of risk on building a relationship that could fail or even be a net negative. Our relationship drive is pretty strong. The people making AI chatbot friends and SOs, not even to mention dating apps and relationship-commodifiers like Meetup or old Facebook, are doing their best to commodify relationships, though. The sheer level of social toxicity caused by online mass social media has been correspondingly enormous.
My undergrad is in finance. IMO the problem is that we don't really teach what wealth is as Adam Smith defined it. A wealthy nation is not the one with the greatest stockpile of gold, but the one with the most quality goods and services easily available to its average citizens (I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you understand). Smith really stresses that profit is a measurement of the good provided to society by an activity. But in my studies, there was no concern for this quality of profit. The attitude was that any way net income (profit) could be increased was strictly to be understood as a net positive for society.
I had professors explain that war is profitable because people are employed building tanks etc. and they use their wages to stimulate the economy. When I asked 'what if instead of sending a few million dollars of steel and circuitry to the desert to get exploded, those workers used the same resources on a hospital?' I recieved the answer that if the NPV of the tank is higher than the hospital, it must be the better use of the resources.
War is profitable in capitalism, because the dogma is that capital is productive and must net a positive return.
In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintains the profitability of domestic capital.
War is really that simple. If you had a war for any other reason, everyone involved would see the stupidity after the first few skirmishes.
No one really “let them” destroy things. This is one of the key dangers of majoritarian government. The moment that people can vote for representatives the representatives will be purchased, and later, the votes will purchased. Once this happens, money will be destroyed to allow the purchasing class to rob the wealth of the civilization, and this leads to financialization of economics. This pattern has been repeated over and over again. In the USA, this process started almost immediately after the formation of the country, but it didn’t become truly corrupt until the McKinley campaign. The financialization process started in 1913, saw its first bust boom/bust less than a decade later, and then purposeful inflation began in 1971. The entire economy was financialized by the late 1990s which culminated in 2008. The banks are now so bankrupt that the Fed has begun providing overnight repossessions to member banks…
> This is one of the key dangers of majoritarian government. The moment that people can vote for representatives the representatives will be purchased
What better alternatives are you thinking of? An intelligent, compassionate, eco-friendly and forward-thinking dictator would be great I guess, but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.
It goes beyond voting, people actually empower their abusers by buying the cheapest option regardless of its context. People dislike monopolies, but will happily grow one if it costs less than local or more responsible alternatives. That monopoly eventually gains the power to change the game rules.
We are mostly ignorant, and we vote, consume, act and live that way. We choose to be that way, and so good things won't last long in our collective hands.
It wasn't always this way. Milton Friedman introduced the idea in the 1970s that businesses could ignore their workers and communities because if they focused on profit, that would benefit everyone. Shareholder Theory elevates the stockholders above all others and leads to stock buybacks and optimizing for wealth extraction.
no, it would benefit the shareholders. The regulations imposed by the gov't (which is meant to be representitive) would reign in the excess externalization. Everyone would benefit from competition, when it does happen.
I see your organ trade study and raise you a billion dollar VC to turn kidneys into penis enlargement powder, buying at a rate that prices out the majority of dialysis patients.
- Social cohesion and homogeneity and all the draw backs of destroying it.
The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.
If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.
> They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?
It's an extortionist scheme. Every additional industry or vertical is not only proof that capitalism continues to provide "value" and move society forward, but it makes more millionaires and inflates our GDP. Currency wants everything to be traded with currency. Healthcare, water, land, sex, breathable air.
Also, this ultimately benefits the Fed and other massive financial institutions. If they get together and decide policy, they can do almost whatever they want. Then that small cabal of people can scheme with the government or military to exert control. This is mostly extra-democratic.
We'd have to switch out our entire government with un-bribable ethically driven heroes in order to even put a dent in this system.
In truth we are playing pretend with democracy. Like a little game for the peasants to play pretend. While economic and military policy is decided outside of that system.
Every inch financiers can gain, is another system under the control of economic fascists.
And to claim that it is dictated in some way by profit or merit is laughable. It is only dictated by those things when they want it to be. Another game.
> During a visit to Michoud in 2023, for example, inspectors discovered that welding on a component of the SLS Core Stage 3 did not meet NASA standards. Per the report, unsatisfactory welding performed on a set of fuel tanks led directly to a seven-month delay in EUS completion.
> “According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. [...]
Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been hit particularly hard by management that doesn’t value tenured, expensive employees.
"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."
> it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce […] in part due to […] lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors
You’re building rockets and complaining about the cost of skilled labor?
The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
There was an ad for Navy shipbuilding recently that did the rounds online, targeting gig workers [1]. The snake grows hungry, and slithers toward its tail. :)
I think it is a great development, the US decided to export jobs to other countries to pay less its own workers, so it fits well that now it has no expertise to build its war machines.
Everything about this reeks to me. Why do we need to build so many warships? (To fight China? We're going to war with another nuclear power?) Why are we fighting Houthi rebels? But also, why isn't the government sponsoring this training? Why is it only thousands, and not hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers being trained? And when did the call go out that they were going to be offering training? (I never hear about these initiatives, or when I do, it's for a couple thousand people to get into a position that pays $18/hr starting. Might as well walk onto a warehouse job.) If this is so important, why did they close so many shipyards during realignment?
I guess they felt, correctly, that they were not just making a weld, not just making an engine or a rocket, but helping to put people on the moon. "Building a cathedral", indeed.
A welding book I had mentioned that stick welding aluminum is no longer done because it is too hard and used the F-1 stick welds as an example of such welds. I think they we not so much welds as strategic strengthening.
The obvious patch for this is to have monetary penalties for failing inspection written into the contract, so that submitting shoddy work has a price measured in dollars. Money is the unit of caring, at least at a corporate scale, so there needs to be money involved if you want them to care systematically.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
> Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen.
They’re not. You must be one of those people that hears something once and quotes it as gospel. My BIL did that yesterday: “nfl viewership has been down because of all the different platforms, and it’s been trending down for years.” As it so happens, last year was their second-best year of ratings since ratings were tracked. But, it fit his narrative, facts be damned.
“We all see the welding school advertisements: Make Over $100,000 As a Welder! And while it’s true that skilled welders are among the most sought-after workers in the job market, the average welder is bringing in $48,000 per year, a far cry from six figures.” [0]
This is 1000% false and misleading. My Dad was a journeyman machinist and many of his friends were highly sought after welders in the area we lived. These guys could weld anything anywhere and exceed quality criteria.
Welding is an art and at a certain required level of performance it's not something you teach, but find the folks who have the drive to be that good and want to weld for high precision requirements.
What you've linked is a run of the mill welder. My Dad machined classified parts for USG and NASA. When they'd get those jobs they would go to the guys who had a reputation to be able to produce the die to the spec required. Messing up a multi-ton die of a specific quality could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost material and time. You don't make $48k on those tolerances, even back in the 80s.
I can assure you that skilled welders like the ones you need for aerospace applications are rare and valuable. The welding techniques and standards are much higher than your average welding application
Headline makes it sound like it's intentional, like Boeing knows the moon's haunted and wants to prevent people from going.
Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.
They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.
The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!
To paraphrase the investigators of the average Boeing airliner crash: "A trained pilot would not have been able to regain control in the required time"
> Originally, the EUS was allocated a budget of $962 million and intended to fly on Artemis II, which in January was pushed to no earlier than September 2025. But by the OIG’s estimate, EUS costs are expected to balloon to $2 billion through 2025 and reach $2.8 billion by the time Artemis IV lifts off in 2028.
Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.
Exactly - all the anti-Boeing sentiment in the comments here (while deserved) should also be directing some ire at the funding and contract structures being used for these projects (I.e. “cost-plus” contracts).
They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.
(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)
The "left with nothing" fear is unfounded. All of their assets would be bought up by investors seeking to do the same thing but the right way; a factory has value and somebody will want it.
I do not know the details of their contracts, but assuming these are cost-plus contracts then it may be fair to equate structural dysfunction to intent.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Defense contractors extract money from the government, they are not here to enable space travel, they are here to move money from other people's pockets to their own. Any other actions are purely ancillary. And if they can get the money without delivering any result at all, why, they're fine with that.
It only reads that way if you're being very very generous and have lived under a rock for the past few years so that you've not seen any other information about Boeing.
I usually despise stack rank, but it looks like there are times when it's needed. Maybe companies should mostly eschew it for other methods, but run it once per decade and flush out all the dead weight, of course, including management.
The problem is that stack ranking rewards the political actors and not people who heads down focus on their work. This is especially true when the organization has already been taken over by the parasites.
I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy claims another victim.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
RIP Jerry. A Step Farther Out is one of my all time favorites.
Does anyone actually seriously believe the U.S. will land a person on the moon in 2025? This is the country that takes decades to open a new subway station.
There is a very interesting video from Smarter Every Day that suggests everyone knows that the SLS is physically incapable of landing on the moon as designed but nobody seems to be mentioning it.
SLS is the thing that launches Orion, which is the capsule with humans inside. SLS isn't capable enough to get that capsule into lunar orbit. Orion also isn't landing by itself though, it just transfers the astronauts to a landing vehicle (SpaceX Starship, currently...), which lands and then starts again.
The thing brought up in that video is that the rendezvous point should probably be in lunar orbit, but isn't.
We're the only nation that has ever done it. It seems like unchecked graft is our current main problem. In the scope of all problems of returning people to the Moon this is both expected and the easiest to deal with.
When that was happening, the US was spending ungodly amount of money to show Soviets that they can take ~a nuke~ sorry people to the Moon and back.
Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
That doesn't really seem like something SpaceX will do any time soon though. After all, they want Mars. The moon is just wasting time to SpaceX. So until SpaceX achieves Mars, they have too much to do to become too comfortable. Of course, I just sit on a couch offering opinions.
I honestly hope so or soon after although I think it unlikely.
The psychological shock to the nation & to the world of seeing China do it before us will be immense. It will have indicated a changing of the guard and the decline of America.
That was always a bullshit date. No different than elder Bush's Mars in 2030. 2028, maybe if everything goes well with Starship, and the suits. Their lunar variant is still a disaster waiting to happen without a better design. We've seen how Starship destroys a launch pad with ill-conceived flame diversion. How is it going to land on unprepared regolith without toppling in its own crater or destroying the engines with rebounding shrapnel? SLS is also supposed to somehow fit into the picture which is still not tested in any way resembling the baby steps Apollo took.
"We've seen how Starship destroys a launch pad with ill-conceived flame diversion. How is it going to land on unprepared regolith without toppling in its own crater or destroying the engines with rebounding shrapnel?"
Starship has fewer engines than Super Heavy, it likely won't be landing at full throttle either, and lunar lander Starship could have landing legs as well. The lower gravity on the Moon means that you can carry more hardware with you. Maneuvering in 0.16 g is nowhere near as fuel intensive as in 1 g.
The damage to Boeing is already done I am afraid. But moving forwards there needs to be accountability for management types that destroy companies in such a way. This is a massive destruction of capability for the USA and will continue to be extremely expensive in the future.
The Soviet Union would actually send managers to GULAG for "wrecking," or other labor crimes, and it didn't really help. In fact, "accountability" was the only thing the USSR did not have a short supply of. Extraordinary punishments don't help if the system for figuring out who's doing a good job, and who isn't, is not working in the first place.
The challenge with this is how far back you have to go. A lot of the damages that ultimately led to the 737 MAX and now this space boondoggle started under James McNerney, who was CEO from 2005 to 2016 and is now 74 years old.
> For example, Boeing Defense’s Earned Value Management System (EVMS)—which NASA uses to measure contract cost and schedule progress ... has been disapproved by the Department of Defense since 2020. Officials claim this precludes Boeing from reliably predicting an EUS delivery date.
Interesting that instead of commenting on engineering or technology issues, this is basically NASA bureaucrats complaining about Boeing bureaucrats' procedures. The whole SLS program is so bureaucratized it's amazing they can get anything of the ground, and not surprising that Space X is beating them in performance and cost by 3X.
Just read a little farther, here are some comments on technical issues:
>“According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. “The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that Boeing will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards.”
Fair enough and thanks for pointing that out. Even that focuses on "adhere to NASA requirements" rather than "will it work". In between there's stuff like:
> DCMA also found that Boeing personnel made numerous administrative errors through changes to certified work order data without proper documentation
and
> Some technicians reported they had to hunt through layers of documentation to identify required instructions and documentation of work history and key decisions related to the hardware
It sounds like the focus is more on making documents and reading documents and complying with documents than "will this thing fly?"
I feel that in this situation the balme is valid. Engineering was spot on until management threw it out the window as something in the way for making money.
They wanted to make things for sales, not for use. Usability is the side effect for sellable for them apparently: sometimes happen, sometimes not. While they were pushing on with sell sell sell sell sell, sell nooow! Instead of making something that is needed and is usable, so people would want to buy.
Readit News
- Western Industry.
- The blue-collar middle class
- The Middle Class
- Our health care system
- Our education
- Western Economic Leadership.
- Social Mobility
Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest.
They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?
They convinced us to exchange our pensions for the privilege of being the mark on a market where the sharks like them do whatever the fuck they want, from blatant insider trading, to pump and dump schemes, to outright fraud, having for all practical purposes bought the SEC a long time ago.
What they will kill next?
How long are we going to transfer wealth to those slimmy sweet talking ignorant greedy bean counters?
Our daily work is like being in a mad house because almost everything is subordinated to the the most sacred goal of cooking the next quarter numbers to ensure we maximize executive bonuses, and fuck the long run! crazy projects started, spin offs, merges, projects cancelled, company killing layoffs, fuck long term value generation! they want more and more, and more, and they fucking want it right now! the fucking bonus gollums.
Everything is fucked in our society but executive compensation. Xerox, HP, IBM, Boeing... How many other proud symbols of our economy and civilization are we going to let them destroy?
So we end up gradually converting our productivity to the measurable outputs because we can more safely trade them. But then unmeasurable values get shafted.
The non-fungible values get shafted even harder. For example, it's inherently impossible to trade for true human relationships because the bidirectional flow is where the value comes from and that flow must be built. But that means two people must simultaneously choose to take a mostly unknown level of risk on building a relationship that could fail or even be a net negative. Our relationship drive is pretty strong. The people making AI chatbot friends and SOs, not even to mention dating apps and relationship-commodifiers like Meetup or old Facebook, are doing their best to commodify relationships, though. The sheer level of social toxicity caused by online mass social media has been correspondingly enormous.
I had professors explain that war is profitable because people are employed building tanks etc. and they use their wages to stimulate the economy. When I asked 'what if instead of sending a few million dollars of steel and circuitry to the desert to get exploded, those workers used the same resources on a hospital?' I recieved the answer that if the NPV of the tank is higher than the hospital, it must be the better use of the resources.
Our universities may be in worse shape than I thought.
In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintains the profitability of domestic capital.
War is really that simple. If you had a war for any other reason, everyone involved would see the stupidity after the first few skirmishes.
What better alternatives are you thinking of? An intelligent, compassionate, eco-friendly and forward-thinking dictator would be great I guess, but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.
We are mostly ignorant, and we vote, consume, act and live that way. We choose to be that way, and so good things won't last long in our collective hands.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Dead Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
no, it would benefit the shareholders. The regulations imposed by the gov't (which is meant to be representitive) would reign in the excess externalization. Everyone would benefit from competition, when it does happen.
Not even kidding. There are villages around where I grew up, a good number of adults have one kidney only.
Now if they manage to kidnap and kill a person, now they got two kidneys, a heart, a liver and other stuff.
Moldova?
You can add governance for as long as lobbyists have been writing law.
You can add accountability for whenever MBAs and investors come in contact with news orgs.
Yep, they started with our eye balls. In exchange, we are getting "relevant ads".
Also our frontal lobe. In exchange, we get depressive dopamine releases.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen a study that tried to prove opening up the organ trade would help the economy and hinder the black market.
The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.
If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.
already happening, look at the american food industry
* https://www.npr.org/2015/01/25/379787274/howd-a-cartoonist-s...
Deleted Comment
It's an extortionist scheme. Every additional industry or vertical is not only proof that capitalism continues to provide "value" and move society forward, but it makes more millionaires and inflates our GDP. Currency wants everything to be traded with currency. Healthcare, water, land, sex, breathable air.
Also, this ultimately benefits the Fed and other massive financial institutions. If they get together and decide policy, they can do almost whatever they want. Then that small cabal of people can scheme with the government or military to exert control. This is mostly extra-democratic.
We'd have to switch out our entire government with un-bribable ethically driven heroes in order to even put a dent in this system.
In truth we are playing pretend with democracy. Like a little game for the peasants to play pretend. While economic and military policy is decided outside of that system.
Every inch financiers can gain, is another system under the control of economic fascists.
And to claim that it is dictated in some way by profit or merit is laughable. It is only dictated by those things when they want it to be. Another game.
Dead Comment
> “According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. [...]
Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been hit particularly hard by management that doesn’t value tenured, expensive employees.
"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."
They pay a solid 30% below market. ( 100k for a senior eng position )
You’re building rockets and complaining about the cost of skilled labor?
The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1IZC3t8NRc
Like, from every angle, it's ill-conceived.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
We've let everything go to rot for the sake of a giant financial ponzi scheme that we call the U.S. economy.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
They’re not. You must be one of those people that hears something once and quotes it as gospel. My BIL did that yesterday: “nfl viewership has been down because of all the different platforms, and it’s been trending down for years.” As it so happens, last year was their second-best year of ratings since ratings were tracked. But, it fit his narrative, facts be damned.
“We all see the welding school advertisements: Make Over $100,000 As a Welder! And while it’s true that skilled welders are among the most sought-after workers in the job market, the average welder is bringing in $48,000 per year, a far cry from six figures.” [0]
[0] https://primeweld.com/blogs/news/how-much-do-welders-make-in....
Welding is an art and at a certain required level of performance it's not something you teach, but find the folks who have the drive to be that good and want to weld for high precision requirements.
What you've linked is a run of the mill welder. My Dad machined classified parts for USG and NASA. When they'd get those jobs they would go to the guys who had a reputation to be able to produce the die to the spec required. Messing up a multi-ton die of a specific quality could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost material and time. You don't make $48k on those tolerances, even back in the 80s.
He got shipped around the country.
Not exactly a trade-school C-student.
Had a better house than mine, but I’m a cheapskate.
Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.
> Can anyone pull Boeing out of its nosedive?
Apparently the answer is a sound no.
They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.
The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!
Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.
They would have to be stupid to deliver in time.
They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.
(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)
That should die. This is what happens when you allow monopolies, you can’t even let them die because you’ll be left with nothing.
They face no competition , and have no reason to improve
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-ma...
I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
RIP Jerry. A Step Farther Out is one of my all time favorites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
SLS is the thing that launches Orion, which is the capsule with humans inside. SLS isn't capable enough to get that capsule into lunar orbit. Orion also isn't landing by itself though, it just transfers the astronauts to a landing vehicle (SpaceX Starship, currently...), which lands and then starts again.
The thing brought up in that video is that the rendezvous point should probably be in lunar orbit, but isn't.
Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
The USA of the 1960s was very different from the one that exists today.
At least until SpaceX starts to feel a bit too comfortable... o_O
Deleted Comment
The Chinese are currently in their Apollo phase in which every engineer dedicates their life to the mission.
But I like to think we will.
Starship has fewer engines than Super Heavy, it likely won't be landing at full throttle either, and lunar lander Starship could have landing legs as well. The lower gravity on the Moon means that you can carry more hardware with you. Maneuvering in 0.16 g is nowhere near as fuel intensive as in 1 g.
I think those two things combined means your logic is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
He argues that there should be clawbacks to managers that harm a company to the degree Boeing’s current management has.
He invokes The Code of Hammurabi to illustrate how ancient civilization used to deal with such class of professionals.
Interesting that instead of commenting on engineering or technology issues, this is basically NASA bureaucrats complaining about Boeing bureaucrats' procedures. The whole SLS program is so bureaucratized it's amazing they can get anything of the ground, and not surprising that Space X is beating them in performance and cost by 3X.
>“According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. “The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that Boeing will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards.”
> DCMA also found that Boeing personnel made numerous administrative errors through changes to certified work order data without proper documentation
and
> Some technicians reported they had to hunt through layers of documentation to identify required instructions and documentation of work history and key decisions related to the hardware
It sounds like the focus is more on making documents and reading documents and complying with documents than "will this thing fly?"
They wanted to make things for sales, not for use. Usability is the side effect for sellable for them apparently: sometimes happen, sometimes not. While they were pushing on with sell sell sell sell sell, sell nooow! Instead of making something that is needed and is usable, so people would want to buy.