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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#371

Post by gosub100 »

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.)

[flagged]

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#372

Post by FireBeyond »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #248
mricordeau wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't Boeing engineers also get insurance and 401k from their employer? Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.

My experience, although 20ish years ago now, was that France was very accommodating to people who were trying to make an effort to speak French, however badly, and would help correct pronunciations and other little errors, whereas their patience for foreigners who thought that the locals English would get better if they just spoke more loudly and slowly was thin.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#373

Post by slt2021 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #302
ryandrake wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it's possible that both are bad. The root problem is that the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing. It's endemic to every part of life, and nothing gets done about it because the rich and powerful make the rules. It really doesn't matter if they happen to be aligned with "Team Corporation" or "Team Government". They are equally unaccountable to justice. 1: Rich and Powerful are both the…

> the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing. Bernie Madoff. Jeff Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell. Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Harvey Weinstein. I get that sometimes you'll see things like Hunter Biden's tax issues being allowed to pass the statute of limitations, but a universal "the rich never face consequences" is just plain false.

can you list how many financiers were jailed after 2008 GFC ?

can you find any?

can you list how many people were jailed for engineering SARS-CoV?

heck, government hasn't even acknowledge that it was engineered and still pushes fairy tale about bat infecting pangolin who infected a chain of few other animals and then ended up in wet market - but no signs of viruses in 1000 miles between caves and wet market were ever found

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#374

Post by janalsncm »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #116
darby_nine wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The auto companies are strategically significant. Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles. Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is true for the plane market, or at least not…

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification of transport. But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of course quite a few of those were built outs…

China is the biggest auto market in the world and also produces the Teslas they buy domestically.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#375

Post by FireBeyond »

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.)

Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story:

Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:

Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.

Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.

So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.

He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.

The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.

Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.

Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.

I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#376

Post by MPSFounder »

jandrese wrote: post #303
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.

On one hand I can't blame any engineer that wants to flee, but on the other Boeing really can't afford any more brain drain. We are already seeing the results of years of forcing experienced but well paid engineers out and outsourcing their jobs. Planes literally falling out of the sky, but some nice fat executive bonuses.

Anecdotal, but out of my graduating class in chemical engineering from a University in Seattle, the top 20 students went into tech and finance. The worst performing students (by academic metrics) went to Boeing. Over time, I expect decisions to be made by engineers which are not stand outs. Coupled with the MBA trainwreck prioritizing profits and cost cutting, I expect Boeing has a very rough patch ahead.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#377

Post by krisoft »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #264
thehappypm wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you leave the atmosphere?

That's a thing called a rocket. Those have different constraints (e.g. energy proportional to mgh to get out of the atmosphere, dramatically less efficient engines since you now need to carry your oxidizer, etc. It seems vaguely plausible that for very long distances (e.g. New York to China), a rocket could be more efficient than an airplane, but it does seem pretty unlikely that a rocket can be as efficient as a nor…

Plus the added benefit of looking exactly like a ballistic missile attack on radar. :D Hope nobody with a twitchy trigger finger ever mistakes your flight for one! And also hope that no enemy will try to disguise their incapacitating strike as a scheduled flight.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#378

Post by FireBeyond »

tmhrtly wrote: post #178
beaned wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not fully convinced by the "will make fares lighter for everyone else" argument. The economics of planes are heavily weighted towards the passengers up front - business & premium economy make more profit per sqft for the airline than seats at the back. So I'd imagine that a reduction in demand for premium seats could actually increase prices.

The flipside of this is that the passengers in the back, while not as profitable in the "$/sqft" equation, are what merit the airline buying a 777-300 or A350.

If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with things beginning to approach JSX's (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#379

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

darby_nine wrote: post #75
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We all know boeing won't be "wrecked"; they're too critical for state interests to be allowed to fail People keep repeating this without context. The auto companies are strategically significant. That didn't prevent them from going bankrupt [1][2]. Wiping shareholders doesn't mean blowing up the factories. I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt. It can then shed unprofitable units--through spin-offs…

> The auto companies are strategically significant. Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles. Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is true for the plane market, or at least not…

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars

Then why are they always bitching about their neighbors who buy large American vehicles that are too wide for their streets?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#380

Post by bdowling »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #330

In my mind, this is an unalloyed good The practice alone of organizing labor power against owners, irrespective of the demands, given the existing state of the world, is what is needed to show Class solidarity. Simply showing class solidarity in order to kick off other strikes is valuable in and of itself. Y’all really have to understand a general strike is coming. A general strike means the labor class (you most lik…

> A general strike means the labor class ... stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.

> Such a system ... should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital

(emphasis added)

The result, predictably, is that unions lose all their leverage against the investor class (which no longer exists) and management (which is now the government). See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Uni... ("[S]trikes were still more or less restricted... Unions remained partners of management in attempting to promote labor discipline, worker morale, and productivity.").

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