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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#161

Post by GuB-42 »

fragmede wrote: post #146
echelon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#162

Post by Dalewyn »

gartdavis wrote: post #159
Dalewyn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 manki…

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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#163

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

beaglesss wrote: post #83
nullindividual wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The golden age of flight splattered the blood of professionals and innocents alike to write those regulations. Flight is not for cowboys.

You can't count all the dead from flight being held back FAA. It's similar with housing regulations -- the code inspector sees dead in a house but not the 10 homeless people he killed by making housing less accessible.

How would insufficient ability to make more dangerous planes kill anyone? By what mechanism? Who, for example? What are you even talking about?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#164

Post by extraduder_ire »

bibelo wrote: post #106
iancmceachern wrote: post #86

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.

or they could come here to Toulouse to work for Airbus ^^

Do they do any applicable work down in Alabama, or is that just manufacturing?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#165

Post by Dalewyn »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #131
bombcar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#166

Post by extraduder_ire »

M95D wrote: post #160
hungie wrote: post #21

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.

Ever heard of a stock-price led company that "went back to being an engineering and manufacturing led company"?

What happened with dell when they went back to being privately owned for a couple of years?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#167

Post by beaned »

GuB-42 wrote: post #161
fragmede wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#168

Post by fragmede »

M95D wrote: post #160
hungie wrote: post #21

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.

Ever heard of a stock-price led company that "went back to being an engineering and manufacturing led company"?

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#169

Post by extraduder_ire »

sofixa wrote: post #35
IntelMiner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing fleeing Seattle while trying to cheerfully pretend they're a "Washington company" was absolutely disgraceful

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.

I mean, any company based in DC can call itself a Washington company.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#170

Post by idiotsecant »

csomar wrote: post #84
Y-bar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

[dead]

Lol literally every point in this post completely dismisses the interest of the majority of people in our system, the workers. I'm very sorry if the capital class ends up with a temporary haircut so that workers can have safe, sane, and respectful conditions.
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