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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#561

Post by night862 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They’re just gonna spin it off to another buyer—consisting of who exactly? McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk? Idk, pick one that's American or closely allied [1]. Ideally not one of the three larger than Boeing. Worst case: audit and re-assign the contracts. We'll be better for it in the long run. And I'm not convinced it wouldn't…

Who even needs a specific buyer? Boeing itself is a publicly traded company, the spin-offs can be too. Put the business unit into its own corporate entity and give all the shares of the new entity to the existing Boeing shareholders to do with as they please, or sell them into the market.

The top secret stealth formula they could possibly be privy to is not publicly traded. I was making the point that you're going to have a board filled with people who in some instances could be hand-selected to say the quiet part loud, and the list of companies who makes some of this stuff has one item in it.

Its military stuff.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#562

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tempfile wrote: post #107
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEO pay generally has a relationship to company size, and Boeing is pretty big. It would be hard to argue their CEO is overpaid if they paid the CEO that much and the CEO did a good job . Implying the problem is not how much they were paid but rather the quality of the work.

> Implying the problem is not how much they were paid but rather the quality of the work. Aren't those identical? If you do a bad job, we could have got the same bad job from someone else, who we could have paid less...

No, because the CEO who is paid $300/year and then likewise bankrupts the multi-billion dollar company is to a first order approximation the same amount of bad and what you actually need is the CEO who does a good job even if you have to pay them millions of dollars.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#563

Post by AnthonyMouse »

night862 wrote: post #561
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who even needs a specific buyer? Boeing itself is a publicly traded company, the spin-offs can be too. Put the business unit into its own corporate entity and give all the shares of the new entity to the existing Boeing shareholders to do with as they please, or sell them into the market.

The top secret stealth formula they could possibly be privy to is not publicly traded. I was making the point that you're going to have a board filled with people who in some instances could be hand-selected to say the quiet part loud, and the list of companies who makes some of this stuff has one item in it. Its military stuff.

There are more than a million people with a US security clearance. Finding enough to fill the board of a new company shouldn't be prohibitively difficult.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#564

Post by AndrewKemendo »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #349
Nifty3929 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an ancient and universal idea, that has failed to deliver prosperity and growth, and often drives societies that were once flourishing into starvation. Capitalism is the new, cool, unique idea that has actually delivered prosperity for society. Not perfectly evenly, but certainly more evenly than other ideas like socialism, fascism and feudalism.

Labor action isn't contrary to a free market. Labor action is precisely labor using its negotiating power in a market to secure concessions, the same way that employers use their market power to secure concessions from employees, customers use their market power to secure concessions from businesses, or businesses use their market power to extract profit. I'm a business owner. I believe in business, and I like partic…

Well said!

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#565

Post by triceratops »

lordfrito wrote: post #552
triceratops wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's talking about houses here. I thought that was obvious. Also rich people get way, way lower interest rates borrowing against their assets than us poors do on HELOCs.

> Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of appreciation > No one's talking about houses here. I thought that was obvious. For most ordinary Americans, the largest asset they will ever own is their house. Owning that asset is the essence of the old American Dream. So it seems like your original comment was primarily about housing assets. Anyone can get a home equity loan to access the appreciation the…

My original comment was about stock buybacks and how they boost stock prices. I repeat, no one was talking about houses. I thought it was obvious "assets" meant "stock" for the purposes of this comment thread. But since this is HN there's always at least one pedant.

Finally primary homes don't have any capital gains tax on sale (or at least not up to a pretty high limit). So this whole discussion is irrelevant. Ordinary people can always sell their "biggest asset" without paying much in tax.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#566

Post by asats »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #530
asats wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Probably not exactly what you expected No, because calling for a communist revolution from your position is a suicide wish then, any entrepreneurs or owners of pretty much anything were considered a class enemy and you being in a leadership positions of any kind is a guaranteed ticket to a gulag.

Why is it so hard to imagine worlds other than the ones that you currently live in? as though there’s no possible way to resolve this concept, ergo something like syndicalist anarchism *gasp* who would’ve ever thought something so well understood long described could be implemented someplace imagine that. *faints* As they say, it’s easier for most people to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism Mayb…

I grew up in russia mate, I've seen the alternative to capitalism, and I can tell you that capitalism is a damn paradise compared to what that alternative was.

Instead of doing drugs just read some history on how those things go. Once you start expropriating anything you'll get a violent pushback, that's either a coup or a civil war, during those you will get violent people take charge, then if your side looses you get Pinochet and a helicopter ride, if your side wins, you get Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc that will exterminate anyone remotely like you as class enemies.

>The anarchist movement lived on during the time of the Soviet Union in small pockets, largely within the Gulag where anarchist political prisoners were sent, but by the late 1930s its old guard had either fled into exile, died or disappeared during the Great Purge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#567

Post by coldpie »

ericd wrote: post #275
coldpie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workers aren't the ones killing the company.

If you reread what I was replying to, I was saying they might want to demand changes to management because it’s in their best interest to demand those changes, focusing only on short term benefit to themselves is harmful to their long term best interest. And organized labor does have the power to severely damage the companies they’re part of it’s not all one group or the other.

That's up to the bosses to figure out. If your business can't find employees to do the work at the compensation rate you're offering, then your business has failed. It may even be that your line of business is unviable in the current economy. That's not the employees' fault, that's just business.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#568

Post by consteval »

zahlman wrote: post #548
consteval wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same thing when people talk about the "risk" of owning a business. At the same time, those same people will advocate dodging accountability for business owners. If there's no threat of liquidation, fines, bankruptcy... what's the risk? If the fed can't come into your home and take your furniture... what's the risk? Because those workers end up homeless in the case of failure. And the owners just go back to t…

> At the same time, those same people will advocate dodging accountability for business owners. I don't think this is true at all.

I disagree, it's 100% true. Often conversations about business owners and executives will be derailed to address the "risk" they face, that being the reasoning we should cut them some slack.

In those cases, it quite literally happens in the same breath. Arguing business owners take on risk, and then immediately countering saying we should not hold them accountable.

It's a similar thing you see to the police. When a LEO shoots someone without due cause, people will decry to cut them some slack because their jobs are very risky. I mean, they could die. But there's not very much risk if you shoot someone the first chance you get - before any danger even prevents itself, right? And there's not very much risk if you cannot face jail time for such an action, right?

In order to use this "risk" argument you need to be harsher on the perpetrators. People usually do the opposite when they make such an argument, thereby deconstructing their own argument without realizing it.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#569

Post by JackYoustra »

jandrese wrote: post #317
JackYoustra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, that's my point. A stock buyback is a visible boost to NPV, whereas the drawback (opportunity cost of not investing in core businesses) is much harder to measure. Sometimes, they don't need any additional investment. Other times, it's Boeing.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#570

Post by zahlman »

consteval wrote: post #568
zahlman wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, those same people will advocate dodging accountability for business owners. I don't think this is true at all.

I disagree, it's 100% true. Often conversations about business owners and executives will be derailed to address the "risk" they face, that being the reasoning we should cut them some slack. In those cases, it quite literally happens in the same breath. Arguing business owners take on risk, and then immediately countering saying we should not hold them accountable. It's a similar thing you see to the police. When a L…

>In those cases, it quite literally happens in the same breath.

Perhaps you could show some examples, then. What you describe is completely foreign to my own experience.

>When a LEO shoots someone without due cause

No, that is not when the argument is brought out. Often, however, it's brought out to highlight that there was, in fact, due cause that was not obvious to critics.

>But there's not very much risk if you shoot someone the first chance you get

They don't actually do this, in any remotely ordinary circumstance.

They do shoot people who threaten them - because someone with a knife standing several meters away, who doesn't care about the risk of getting shot, can seriously injure you before you can get off a clear shot with a gun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill).

>And there's not very much risk if you cannot face jail time for such an action, right?

If you ignore the risk of physical injury or death (also noting that some criminals also carry firearms), then yes, there is not very much risk.

>People usually do the opposite when they make such an argument

You are still not providing anything that resembles evidence.

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