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NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

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Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#381

Post by Perceval »

imtringued wrote: post #365
boppo1 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My undergrad is in finance. IMO the problem is that we don't really teach what wealth is as Adam Smith defined it. A wealthy nation is not the one with the greatest stockpile of gold, but the one with the most quality goods and services easily available to its average citizens (I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you understand). Smith really stresses that profit is a measurement of the good provided to society by an activit…

War is profitable in capitalism, because the dogma is that capital is productive and must net a positive return. In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintai…

Ahistorical Marxist "analysis" on HN?

War has existed since the dawn of humanity, thousands of years prior to the advent of capitalism, and has been fought by societies with every kind of socioeconomic and political configuration. War is a human institution and not contingent upon a particular economic arrangement.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#382

Post by whatshisface »

mrguyorama wrote: post #377
whatshisface wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Soviet Union would actually send managers to GULAG for "wrecking," or other labor crimes, and it didn't really help. In fact, "accountability" was the only thing the USSR did not have a short supply of. Extraordinary punishments don't help if the system for figuring out who's doing a good job, and who isn't, is not working in the first place.

Sending management to the gulag because they didn't meet a stupid an unrealistic quota is NOT "accountability". The USSR did NOT have accountability. If Stalin liked you, you rarely went to the gulag. If Stalin didn't like you, you went to the gulag. That's not accountability and no citizen ever parsed it as such. You can't just shoot random people and pretend that's accountability.

Yes, that is my point. If the bureaucracy is corrupt to begin with and rewards and penalties are distributed on a internal political basis, imposing harsh penalties will make the few good managers desperate, and corrupt what's left of the system.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#383

Post by boppo1 »

imtringued wrote: post #370
boppo1 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one did anything wrong No, LIRP and ZIRP are totally responsible for fundamentally causing 'growth' businesses to be valued ridiculously higher than 'dividend' businesses. Basically any business that was "profitably make stuff now" had to compete with "no profit now, but we'll for sure change the world in 20 years" for capital and making the DCFV denominator's risk-free-rate term 0 tilted the table 90 degrees tow…

I don't know why so many people on HN get ZIRP wrong. The problem with ZIRP isn't the absolute level of interest. The problem is that the central bank thinks it can simulate negative interest through QE. The zero lower bound is ultimately a price guarantee by the government that it will offer an infinite quantity of bonds to the general public to prevent the interest rate from dipping negative. Any form of lower pric…

>get ZIRP wrong.

Buddy I'm not going off an economic theory about ZIRP like you posted, I'm going off having run valuations on companies and seen that interfering with the risk free rate made bad companies (and their wasteful activities) valuable.

I agree the problem isn't the absolute level of interest. My point is the yield curve should reflect the market appetite for risk, and we broke that relationship.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#384

Post by boppo1 »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #358
boppo1 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My undergrad is in finance. IMO the problem is that we don't really teach what wealth is as Adam Smith defined it. A wealthy nation is not the one with the greatest stockpile of gold, but the one with the most quality goods and services easily available to its average citizens (I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you understand). Smith really stresses that profit is a measurement of the good provided to society by an activit…

You had finance professors who were unfamiliar with Bastiat’s parable of the broken window? Or unable to apply it to the military-industrial complex? Our universities may be in worse shape than I thought.

>Bastiat’s parable of the broken window

Never heard of it. Admittedly it wasn't a highly ranked university.

Edit: Having familiarized myself, thank you for the introduction. This is not the first time my education has disappointed me.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#385

Post by HideousKojima »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #379
HideousKojima wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why are we fighting Houthi rebels? Because they're attacking commercial shipping heading to and from the Suez Canal? I mean it wlso pleases our Saudi allies but the shipping attacks are the main concern.

Why are they doing that?

Complex geopolitics involving Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, the US, China, and several other players

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#386

Post by seoulmetro »

elzbardico wrote: post #264

What MBAs and Financists destroyed so far: - Western Industry. - The blue-collar middle class - The Middle Class - Our health care system - Our education - Western Economic Leadership. - Social Mobility Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest. They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary…

- Social cohesion and homogeneity and all the draw backs of destroying it.

The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.

If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#387

Post by mangamadaiyan »

mc32 wrote: post #284
mangamadaiyan wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither approach works. Engineers (management are also employees, right?) ranking management erodes management authority, and management will never stand for it. Outside consultants are usually hired with a fixed agenda - the rotten eggs almost always get to stay. Stack ranking is evil, period.

It is, but it may be periodically necessary to get rid of dead weight and extirpate those who’ve risen to their level of incompetence. I'm not advocating stack ranking for yearly review but rather a quintennial or decennial event to clean-house. In other words, a mechanism to avoid what happened to Boeing, Intel, Yahoo, and what is happening to Google and others. 360 reviews obviously allows orgs to get fat and carry…

I agree with you on the importance and necessity of getting rid of dead weight.

All I'm saying is that stack ranking might not successfully get rid of dead weight. As with any system of metrics, the people who game the system are the ones who reap benefits from the system - thereby subverting the system, and preventing it from achieving its stated goals. As systems of its kind go, stack ranking is particularly insidious and gameable.

I have no idea what _would_ work, though. I have some half-baked thoughts, but will reserve them until such time as they are better than half-baked.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#388

Post by AnthonyMouse »

underlipton wrote: post #315
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR had just beat the US to put the first man into space. The same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy set out the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then he was assassinated. People wanted to make that happen. So they did. There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the gov…

No, it just aligned with elite interests ("If they can put nuke platforms above our heads and we can't put some above theirs, it doesn't matter how much better our economy runs, in theory.") There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen…

> There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen, so it didn't.

The problem with "climate change moonshot" is that the answer isn't really a single target or anything suitable to a government spending program. You get the result you want by doing a carbon tax and then refunding fully 100% of the money to the population as a dividend so the tax doesn't trash the economy.

Then people reduce carbon to avoid the tax. Hybrid and electric vehicles become more attractive than gas (especially to people who drive more), diesel rail lines get electrified, coal power plants get shut down as uneconomical and replaced with solar/wind/nuclear/hydro, people replace furnaces with heat pumps, etc. You don't have to order anybody to do anything in particular or figure out how it should be done for them because everybody wants to avoid the tax so they do it themselves.

The reason that doesn't happen is the reason you say -- the oil and coal industries have captured too many legislators. But even if you had the votes, the way to fix it still isn't "NASA for climate change", it's just pricing carbon.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#389

Post by BirAdam »

jameslk wrote: post #378
BirAdam wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is why I pointed out McKinley and also stated the process did start shortly after the founding. True financialization only after Morgan and his friends met and formed the Fed tho, which was 1913. Once the Fed was in place, they could vastly expand the amount of available credit, bribe and purchase without restraint, and start the type of economy to which we are all now accustomed. Importantly, this pattern…

Where have you learned about this? I’ve been casually spelunking into the US economic past, mostly via Wikipedia, but I’d love to know if there are other better sources to check out. Especially around where you drew that conclusion of “capitalism” vs “financialism”

Regarding capitalism vs financialism, that’s my own observation of the present vs reading about the past, and having studied economics. Today, there is no saving, and most of the wealthiest people are also the most indebted. This transition occurred as a byproduct of constant inflation. Even “low” inflation rates will push people from saving into investment (even if passive). If you sit on money you lose year over year. You’ll be forced to invest. Price inflation is therefore seen first in stocks, bonds, some derivatives markets, then in property and every other asset. As interest rates go down, they eventually fall below the inflation rate. This essentially makes money free if a person knows that he/she will make a return that exceeds the inflation rate. Eventually, with the collection and accumulation of debt obligations, those debt obligations themselves become a goods to be traded. Liabilities become assets. Future funds are used not only to fund the present, but they are then leveraged to create more credit and expand the pool of debt obligations and increase the inflation rate. This is financialism as a distinct economic system; the entire economy is built upon financial products and not upon physical wealth. Further, it is built upon future claims on production instead of on sacrifices made in the present. Financialism is then the temporal opposite of capitalism.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#390

Post by underlipton »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #388
underlipton wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it just aligned with elite interests ("If they can put nuke platforms above our heads and we can't put some above theirs, it doesn't matter how much better our economy runs, in theory.") There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen…

> There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen, so it didn't. The problem with "climate change moonshot" is that the answer isn't really a single target or anything suitable to a government spending program. You get the result you want…

No, trying to financially engineer incentives to make all of those things magically happen would not have worked. They tried that with broadband rollout and healthcare and got middling results, at best. Public/private partnerships are a fool's gold standard and it's time to stop getting burned by that scam.

We wanted the government to get directly involved. To fund and empower a federal agency to hire workers, plan projects, requisition resources, and execute at a massive scale, as had NASA worked in the 60s, or the WPA in the 30s. I know that this terrifies certain people, and I revel in their terror. Things that are bad for their craven interests are good for the rest of us.

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