601–610 of 637 posts
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I think they're going to become more dependent on defense business, which is unlikely to go anywhere.
That's even less reassuring to me. I don't want North America's defence to rest on some American version of the Reichsfeuerzeug [], designed by an incompetent but politically connected firm. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_177
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The Starliner mission was a test. You wouldn't have 100% confidence that a test would be executed flawlessly. The purpose of the test is to find flaws in the system, and that's exactly what they did.
Doing the tests is fine, but Boeing is acting as though the tests were successful when they were not. Between this and the parachute issues from the pad abort test, I think actually approving Starliner for crewed use would constitute normalization of deviance. This is historically how astronauts die.
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If you pay me tens of millions of dollars to leave, you’re welcome to frown and talk crap about me all you like as you do it.
Are you an IC? It’s different for us... we are measured by our ability to get a job done. Management doesn’t get anything “done”. Their job is to faithfully represent the interests of the managers above them. Maintaining good terms with their superiors is their only actual job. Everything else can be going to shit and as long as their superior feels they are faithfully representing their will, then that lower level m…
When its top-down only, something's unhealthy.
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What about the risk that the government slashes your benefits?
Even if you expect to take a haircut on your pension, it's still a good idea to diversify your retirement investments, for the same reason that you should invest into both bonds, and stocks. If you retire during a recession, your planned 20 years of 401K runway may not last you more than 12. Or you might end up living longer than 20 years. Or both. With a guaranteed payments pension, you will continue receiving benef…
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Or, in other words, getting to space is hard because it requires millions of opportunities for silly mistakes. Most complex engineering projects are hard not because of one thing, but because of the mind-bogglingly large number of things that must all be done correctly. (1 - x) ^ y, where x is the chance of each small mistake and y is the total number of opportunities, doesn't need a very large x, if y is large enoug…
Yeah, this is a key insight, and something I didn't learn as a software developer with many years of experience until I studied probability formally. Maybe these days this is better known. This is also known as the inclusion-exclusion principal and can be used to model failure probability.
There are a lot of things I'd love to know the accepted name for, as I came into understanding through the backdoor. I regret that my college CS track didn't include more borrow-courses from physical engineering on reliability (and control theory). So many valuable, applicable lessons.
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I don’t think we disagree on any of the above. But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with I don’t necessarily disagree with this either, but it does come across as if we’re being distracted by proximate causes rather than focusing on the root cause. To someone on the outside, it sure seems like there are deeper engineering and cultural problems that deserve a greater priority at…
It wasn't a "procedural" AD, it was an "EMERGENCY" AD. It says so right at the top: https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA... Put another way, would you want to board an airplane where the pilot did not take EMERGENCY instructions seriously? I wouldn't. > distracted Pretty much 100% of the popular media (and its repeated appearances on HN) has been on the MCAS design shortcomings. Which distract…
Procedural is meant as an administrative action as opposed to a designed engineering action.
Think of a hazardous system that has software involved with controlling a pressure hazard. A procedural mitigation may be to have an operator monitor system pressure and push a non-software shut-off emergency button if the system overpressurizes. Even though it's an emergency, it's still a procedural mitigation. An engineering mitigation, on the other hand, may have mechanical pressure relief devices in place to mitigate the hazard. Whether or not it's an "emergency" just relates to the severity and time criticality of the hazard, not the mechanism of mitigation.
In safety design the hierarchy of hazard control preference is generally engineering controls, followed by procedural controls, followed by PPE as the least desirable control scheme.
Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
One of the common flaws in mishap investigation is jumping to “solving” proximate causes at the expense of finding the root cause. This is applicable to MCAS as well if that isn’t the root cause (although my hunch is MCAS will be closer to the root issue than pilot actions). As long as people aren’t pointing to the AD as the “fix” I think there’s not a problem with it being an interim measure
So, realistically, what will happen? Not what _should_ happen, but what will actually happen? 1) the current board will continue 2) European (and other) regulators will not be impressed 3) Boeing sales vs. Airbus will not return to their previous levels for years, if ever; a goodly percentage of international travel will be locked up for Airbus 4) Boeing will also face more competition from SpaceX (and perhaps others…
The real question is, why is BA stock still trading above 330? Why are big money guys so confident about the company's future?
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> All doing just fine. I think it may be too early to claim this. I think we can only judge these companies' well-being (especially with respect to their recent controversies) on a medium- to long-term scale. I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon. If I could remove my information from Equifax or another credit bureau, I would. By all standards…
> "I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon." you're just moving from one crappy, uncaring bank to another (i've banked at both in the past). a credit union or local/regional bank will treat you like a real human rather than a necessary inconvenience: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/reviews/
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What about the risk that the government slashes your benefits?
Even if they do you can also vote in someone next time to restore your benefits. I'd rather have an option on an indefinite benefit vs a fixed one.
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The Tylenol crisis is basically the case study for how to handle a corporate crisis. If you get an MBA without having come across it, you should ask for your money back. > Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost? I'm not sure it's so simple. At the head of the Boeing bureaucracy, Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horri…
>Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs. Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS. It's frustrating because Muilenberg was a engineer and started there as an intern in the 80s, so he at least should have some d…
I get where you are coming from, but I would reframe it as "Your job as a CEO is to create a culture with integrity and transparency"
It is also pretty clear that a time of crisis is the time that your true corporate culture manifests, it seems that the culture at Boeing is not long on integrity or transparency.