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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#311

Post by toomuchtodo »

jonhohle wrote: post #298
toomuchtodo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

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.pdf

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#312

Post by consteval »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #71
ncallaway wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m sure that was the union’s fault, and not pressure from management to work quickly, cut corners, and akip on quality. Honestly, anyone blaming unions for Boeings quality problems are not someone that anyone should listen to or take seriously when it comes to quality.

>Yeah I’m sure that was the union’s fault, and not pressure from management to work quickly, cut corners, and akip on quality. The union's job is to fight back against those poor choices from management that negatively impact the workforce and the product delivery. Otherwise what's the point of the union? What value are they adding to the workers if they end up with the same issues as non union labor?

> The union's job

Simultaneously the union is at fault, but when they try to fix it via bargaining power (like this strike), those same people lose their minds.

Which is it? Unions cannot simultaneously be super powerful tyrants and weak little losers. This is anti-union propaganda.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#313

Post by smallnamespace »

mricordeau wrote: post #206
benhurmarcel wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#314

Post by zooq_ai »

Havoc wrote: post #200

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

You can make a documentary about any person or any company on this planet and make them look evil with the benefit of hindsight.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#315

Post by bombcar »

MereInterest wrote: post #113
bombcar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#316

Post by diggan »

consteval wrote: post #277
Larrikin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're getting downvoted but you're 100% right. The Reagan-era conservative propaganda is so unbelievably strong that even when a private corporation kills hundreds of people, people will STILL use the opportunity to point at the public sector. No, they don't operate like the public sector because they're actually in the private sector. But the propaganda is so strong that it's literally unthinkable for a private act…

> Therefore, in this reasoning, Boeing must be like a public actor. It's really remarkable the mental effort people will go through to avoid any type of narrative that MIGHT imply the private sector needs more accountability.

Maybe it wasn't very clear but I'm making (trying to make) the opposite point. Boeing pays out bonuses to executives like they're a for-profit company, but considering Boeing is too big to fail and NASA using them as a partner to push their other partners and won't drop them no matter what happens (one of the press conferences about Starliner made this very clear) makes it seem like Boeing is a government agency.

Seems weird to immediately jump to "Reagan-era conservative propaganda" when I'm probably as far away from anything like that as humanly possibly.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#317

Post by jandrese »

JackYoustra wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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 exis…

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…

> 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?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#318

Post by consteval »

sofixa wrote: post #43
beaglesss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's failed from the floor workers because they forgot the plug door needs bolted. It's failed other ways due to the other (SPEEA) union botching the MCAS. Sometimes it's easy to lose track of how basically all the Washington unions are so broken in their homicidal negligence while begging for more money to fail miserably.

The MCAS failure was a multilayered one. The engineers who designed it, software engineers who developed it, QA, testing, pilots, managers who approved, managers who instilled that work culture, etc etc are all responsible and should all have been fired and sentenced to prison for their negligence and dereliction of duty.

The 737 MAX was a poor, cheap design from the start. It was a cost-cutting plane and compromises, like MCAS, had to be implemented to make it work.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#319

Post by bombcar »

bluGill wrote: post #199
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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".

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#320

Post by jandrese »

jmyeet wrote: post #133
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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 exis…

> 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…

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?
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