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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#401

Post by hobs »

slt2021 wrote: post #373
tbrownaw wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, disregarding the bankers - generally we require evidence to be presented in a court of law and then those findings to be found true for people to go to jail - repeating stuff you read on the internet doesn't really rise to that level.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#402

Post by wannacboatmovie »

Maken wrote: post #212
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.

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?

Designing an airplane and producing a prototype isn't terribly difficult and many thousands of companies have done this.

The tricky part is designing the massive manufacturing apparatus around it that can produce them in volume (ask Elon how easy building cars is), satisfying the varying demands of hundreds of different airlines, many from developing nations, helping them set up financing, supporting the design in the field for 30-50 years, AND turning a profit. Each widget produced has an MSRP of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ask yourself why Lockheed permanently exited the commercial aircraft business 40 years ago, despite having what was regarded as the most technologically advanced design of the era, ahead of its time. Douglas went bankrupt and got bought out, Convair and everyone else failed and closed up shop.

You can't throw some engineers - they could be the smartest on the planet - into rented office space and become the next airplane company. There's more to it than designing the next WiFi-enabled food processor and slapping it together in Shenzhen.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#403

Post by thrance »

refurb wrote: post #185
thrance wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock buybacks used to be illegal in the States up until 1982. You can thank Raegan for that too.

> Stock buybacks used to be illegal in the States up until 1982. You can thank Raegan for that too This is not true, but seems to come up a lot. I guess it makes for one of those fun "internet facts" that people like to repeat without any investigation. Bonus points for blaming Reagan. Stock buybacks were not illegal before 1982. If you sit down even think through it, it doesn't even make sense they were illegal. Jus…

I mean, from what I can read online, it seemed the practice was generally regarded as market manipulation prior to 1982 and so was de facto illegal. So yeah, thanks Reagan indeed. There are good reasons to blame him for his part in the current state of affairs.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#404

Post by dataflow »

kpw94 wrote: post #381
Rinzler89 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?

No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of countries where English is almost as good as native. But obviously that's not the common case across the world, and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting people to know the local language.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#405

Post by WalterBright »

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…

Musk has had 3 huge successes - Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. Having one such success might be luck. But when it's 3 times, dismissing it as luck is not very credible.

The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.

And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#406

Post by carabiner »

ajross wrote: post #350
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.

> Any Boeing engineers who may be looking for alternate paths The strike in question is the machinists' union, engineers aren't involved.

This is correct and I'm not sure why it's downvoted. The engineers at Boeing are still going into the office and not on strike.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#407

Post by salawat »

noisy_boy wrote: post #398
deepsun wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a feature of capitalism and effective market. If a company falls a little bit below competition -- market forces it do dive even deeper, die quicker. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I've seen communism, and it's much worse to help failing companies -- they tend to fail even more instead of improving. The problem now is that international market is not really fair, trade treaties help too little.

> If a company falls a little bit below competition -- market forces it do dive even deeper, die quicker. Feature of nature too, the jungle forces the weak to die quicker. One more argument for companies != people: we will be a lot more ok for this to happen to companies vs it happening to people.

Solution: for e supremacy of compliance with regulations over fiscal performance. You have to be able to check all of the boxes reliably before we can talk about innovating or optimizing.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#408

Post by jdminhbg »

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.

> If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.

If you are making $250k/year, you are already getting health insurance, and even if you weren't, it doesn't cost $170k.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#409

Post by advisedwang »

mc32 wrote: post #333

Maybe in this contract they both can have provisions in for poor workmanship and poor engineering decisions. Both for the shop floor as well as the management. You ship defects, you get salary or bonus deductions and vestments pulled.

Typically quality improvement programs don't rely on punishing mistakes. Doing so results in people hiding mistakes, pressuring QA people to do a worse job etc.

Now if the issue is malice and not mistakes - then you can apply discipline. And indeed most union contracts do still have a process for discipline.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#410

Post by patmorgan23 »

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.

I can see how they'd be similar. They both have lots of Real-time, must work, critical type systems.
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