re: How Boeing fell apart.

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military procurement and engineering created a corrupt design process, with unnecessary complexity, poor safety standards, “wishful thinking projections” on performance, and so forth.

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The Pentagon Wars

I stumbled upon this movie recently and was surprised I had never heard of it. It is surprisingly good and based on true events. It’s hilarious and sad all at once. It tells the story of the The Bradley Tank and what a clusterfrick it became. They spent an absurd amount of money producing something completely useless over 30 years. The military at it’s finest!

Seems like the same thing that happened in medicine, when the bean counters took over running hospitals instead of the doctors doing it.

Thanks, general nuisance.

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Ehh...

The exact same shite would have happened under a Republican. Private equity pukes own both sides of our government and they are the ones responsible for driving this country into the dirt more than anything else. They're the ones who offshore everything to the point we can't make our own shite anymore. They're the ones who demand never ending cuts in product quality and the work force while they continually give themselves bonuses and raises. shite, they're even the ones who fund all the media that is purposely driving wedge after wedge into American society so their looting of the country can go unnoticed.


It won't be popular here because most people so much enjoy rooting for their politicking team and blaming the other at all costs but it's 100% spot on.

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I deal with PE a LOT, have for the past 25 years, and I am ex-McDonnell-Douglas. There is a lot of truth in these two posts, but let me point out a few subtleties:

1. There are different flavors of PE. Much of it, including most of the mega-funds, might as well be completely synonymous with the big banks and the likes of Blackrock. This is the PE that you should rightly hate, for the reasons listed. The other half of PE though, which includes VC, is responsible for funding all of the tech advancements that keep money in your pocket with new jobs, technology, and soaring investments.

2. WRT to politics, the R's have decent relationships with a handful of the PE/VC world, including the branch JD Vance comes from. The relationships with the rest of PE is arms length more often than not. PE donations to D candidates are 10x or more what is given to R's. See FTX donations for a microcosm of what goes on - that is a classic example of PE/D incest. Back in 2008, a big name VC boasted to me that he talked with Obama weekly. Would the merger have happened under Bush I? Maybe, but it would not have been forced. R's want you to figure out how to best line their pockets on your own. D's want to tell you how to line their pockets down to the gender on your store bathrooms, and if you don't comply, there's always lawfare.

3. It is fashionable now to blame all of this on McD, but no one wants to remember the line of legendary McDonnell-Douglas products that came before. F-15 Eagle, dominant fighter of its day in the late 1970's, still in service. F-4 Phantom, the NATO air power icon of the 60's and 70's. F/A-18 Hornet, also still in service. A-4 Skyhawk, best attack aircraft of its time. Tomahawk. Harpoon. Skylab. Saturn S-IV stage. This list goes on and on.

4. When I was there in the 1980's, the way Boeing hired engineers was by simply looking at fresh grad resumes and making offers without ever interviewing. M-D OTOH had a rigorous in-person interview on-campus, followed up by a process on-site that took most of a day to hire an engineer. M-D was considered a prestige job in my corner of the aerospace world. Boeing was for warm bodies.

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won't be popular here because most people so much enjoy rooting for their politicking team and blaming the other at all costs

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And look at how wrong you are based votes.

You owe the board an apology sir.

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A merger forced by the government.

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lesson here is that if the government has to "force" it for it to happen its probably a catastrophically bad idea...

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You are about to see the same things happen in the chemical plants in this area. I've never seen such incompetence in this sector, but largly the top. The engineering is terrible, safety is no longer important, and the most competent people on the job are the ones that supervisian wants to get rid of the quickest, before they get exposed for being a dumbass. Production is the only thing thats important. They are more concerned about how well you can write a resume, than how well you actually do a job. (And lets not forget about DEI)

Boeing had plane doors flying off in flight. I suspect we will start seeing man hole covers flying over the city from plant pressure vessels.

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This is why I retired from a local chemical manufacturer’s engineering department after 30 years. Monthly DEI meetings thinly disguised as “Safety Meetings” , and outsourcing project engineering to overseas entities. Dealing with overseas project drawings annotated in, not meters (which is fine) but MILLIMETERS! Dimensional and survey annotations 50 characters long! (You would think they could at least use scientific notation) Plant engineering people calling me after retirement asking me for help GRATIS! I just told them that, unless the culture changed, don’t call me again for “help”. And even then, I don’t work for free.

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This sounds like as good as the Clinton/Barney bank loan debacle that came to a head in 2008.

it was now racist to take credit scores into consideration when determine loan amount, loan rate and mortgage term.

This was going to hep the little guy, the minority, the woman who previously could not get a loan (because they were a loan risk with terrible credit) by getting the money they needed. All this did was created UC Lendings type lenders all over the place where people with debt up to their eyeballs could now get a consolidation loan and not pay that back.

Couple that with the people/companies who had good credit were now being offered loans far outside of their realistic amounts and they were defaulting at a 30%-40% rate.

All of that was packaged into investment block like bonds and other bank paper with false ratings of BBB when they were DDD. it took about a decade before this garbage ran through the markets and then the government bought it up and it went belly up.

They then blamed the investors and banks who were just doing what they were told to do or allowed to do.

Then we bailed out the banks and Wall Street and Dems like Barney Frank and friends walked away with a decade of of cash off investment deals.

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During the height of the Clinton years, people in the mortgage banking world would have an absolute fit if you brought a red pen into their office. They were terrified of the SEC/DOJ DEI witch hunt over "redlining".

Great article. I hope Trump and Musk read this and restore the engineering/pilot culture at Boeing.

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Yup. Look what they've done to Cole Haan, Florsheim, and Johnston & Murphy. Took great shoe lines and made them all throwaway brands.

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A shitload of the brick and mortar stores that have died were b/c of them too. They'll hide behind bullshite like saying Amazon was too tough to compete against but almost always you can bet that the real killer is b/c it was a land grab. They take over and spin the land off into a different company, charge out the arse for rent that the stores never needed to budget for before, and then when store profits inevitably go down due to the new costs they cry out "Oh no! We have to break it all up b/c we're making less money and can't compete!!!" Then they sell the assets piece by piece, sell the land to developers, and move on to the next company to suck the life out of like vampire squids.