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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#381

Post by kpw94 »

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.

> 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.

I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!".

That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking presence, you better interact in English.

Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like Portland, NYC, or Chicago.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#382

Post by somenameforme »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #311
jonhohle wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players that play competitive chess will never make master, but of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess master is just down to chance. What percent of startups are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-first schemes, or people entering into competitive domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO you're probably pushing 90% there!

To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious.

The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#383

Post by FireBeyond »

bombcar wrote: post #99
cced wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me the theory of stock buybacks? How is this not just financial engineering? How are you meant to differentiate companies who’s stock goes up because they’ve been productive and made great products from those that increase their stock prices using buybacks? Are there rules against taking out loans and using them to perform stock buybacks?

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.

This makes no sense. A dividend is more akin to an annuity, paying out periodically.

Stock buybacks are cashing in your chips, a one-off payment.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#384

Post by zymhan »

diggan wrote: post #213
aners_xyz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not really sure this framing makes any sense if I’m being honest.

What private corporation could make mistakes where people lose their lives on the same scale while still operating as normal afterwards?

Union Carbide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#385

Post by [deleted] »

MPSFounder wrote: post #376
jandrese wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#386

Post by myrandomcomment »

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…

As I am currently sitting on a flight from Tokyo to SFO I would greatly appreciate the flight taking half the time. Boom should be as efficient current aircraft. They will operate at 60K feet where the drag is much less and fly for less time. Their engines are being designed to run on 80% biofuels. But let's see how it turns out in the end.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#387

Post by dmix »

evilos wrote: post #335
marcusverus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm is Kirkland & Ellis. Cox, the lead prosecutor in the Boeing case, left the Justice Department earlier this year. And last month she joined Kirkland & Ellis as a partner in its Dallas office. It looks like the firm bought the prosecutor, resulting in a win for its client. How could this be prevented, though? Politicians can't be trusted with oversight like this--they…

Can't a law be passed that states prosecutors legally cannot consult or assist in cases or for defendants they were involved with during their tenure as a prosecutor for X years after they leave their position?

Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the spending bills they voted on. Trying to target prosecutors would cast a eye on themselves.

It's like trying to separate church and state in England back in 1600-1700s.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#388

Post by badpun »

kevindamm wrote: post #241
badpun wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that one engineer spent 6 years designing „ventilation for seats 40-80” on one of the larger Airbuses. It seems like the amount of design and engineering work required for a prototype of a complete aircraft (assuming you buy the engines) is just immense.

How much of that time was actual engineering-tradeoff decision-making and how much of that was working in a large corporation with abundant communication overhead?

I'm betting a lot of that is reviews, approval, documentation, testing, re-testing etc - but it may be required for building a safe aircraft, and for getting it licenced to fly.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#389

Post by lotsofpulp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #242
Maken wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane, from planning to the first prototype, if they started right now. Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?

Why? Have the government step in, nationalize Boeing, give the union a board seat, and keep shipping. The problem is Boeing management and their board enabling the train wreck; don't build from scratch, refactor.

There is not one union, there are multiple employee unions, all fighting for their piece. Not only are there multiple unions, but even within a union, the older members usually vote against younger members.

It’s not a terrible idea, but also not a simple panacea to aligning interests in a business where payoffs happen decades in the future.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#390

Post by hinkley »

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.

Technically they also had offices in St Louis after the coup. The MD people moved to Chicago. And I hope every single one of them was a Cardinals fan.
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