371–380 of 568 posts
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Think of all the money GE saved: no need for expensive employees or manufacturing costs in the appliances division. Just sit back and collect royalties on the use of the trademark. Thanks, McKinsey!
Honestly, Chinese manufacturing with Western quality control strapped on top is probably the best bang for buck a consumer can get.
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I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level. If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole syst…
You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn. When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they wer…
I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
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Stock price gains. Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses. Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
>Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out. Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that…
Additionally, not all investors are savvy on what's going on with companies, so they decide to invest in ETFs (which mind you, is now the lion's share of investment activity). Now not all ETFs are the same basket of stocks. Some may have 15 stocks, whereas others may consist of 50. This is done so people can "choose their risk tolerance", which is calculated based on various things such as how diversified the fund is (50 stocks is more diversified than 15), what the market caps of the companies are, etc. Anyhow, the point is, choosing to invest in said investment vehicles, has little to do with investing based upon fundamentals, or rewarding productive companies, and more to do with managing a person's personal investment risk. The result? Companies are detached from fundamentals because, quite literally, the majority of investors are not investing based on fundamentals, but based on risk.
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I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level. If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole syst…
There is no comforting answer. Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down. In every industry it's the same. The guard rails have been systematically dismantled for decades by opportunists just like this, hoping to make some quick cash and jump ship before it falls down. Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their…
Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
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The system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works t…
Humans are corrupt.
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
I've been involved (at the worker bee level) in multiple mergers and in every case where they attempted to merge systems it easily took 5-10X the estimated time, cost and resources.
The most successful mergers were the ones where they either left the companies separate (minimizing the ability to reduce costs) or the ones where they just threw away one of the company's systems, got rid of most of their employees, most of their products, and just acquired their customers.
This situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It's not only about innovation or asymmetric motivation but also due to the internal decay of incumbents like Boeing and General Electric. This presents an opportunity for an aeronautics startup to emerge - mission focused on building the best airplanes.
Boeing is not going to be disrupted any more than TSMC or ASML will be disrupted. Planes are too complex and too expensive to manufacture correctly.
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
I stopped reading here. I thought it was an article not a political flame presenting opinions as facts