> Going forward, we will be focused on fundamentally changing the culture, stabilizing the business, and improving program execution,
This is corporate speak for “I don’t have a real plan and probably won’t gut leadership and start over like I should.” I wish the board would force some bigger changes already.
Boeing culture has been going down for quite some time.
The pivotal point to me was, when Airbus launched the A380, Boeing thought they would have an easy home run with the Dreamliner, Airbus would be doomed as competition as no one wants the A380, Boeing slacked off, and then Airbus came back, listened to the customers, changed the A350 to a new plane and had a runaway success (on top of the bread and butter neos).
As a side note, I am still fascinated that Airbus is relatively well run and successful company, even though it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that.
> I am still fascinated that Airbus is relatively well run and successful company, even though it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that.
If it doesn't add up, maybe it's the other side of the equation that's the problem: Maybe the flaw or surprise in the equation is not Airbus but the other side - the beliefs about "EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles" - maybe those aren't what you thought and don't have the impact you thought.
If the evidence doesn't match the theory, it's time to re-examine the theory.
I say that because those beliefs about the EU are a dogma of American big business and its fellow travelers, which prefers the US where they have so much power (and so little regulation or tax) rather than the more democratic power in EU.
>it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that
That is because one of those things is not true. It's not very cross-border. The vast majority of Airbus R&D and manufacturing happens in Toulouse and Hamburg with each city focusing on specific plane models.
Airbus is incredibly centralized and has been able to take advantage of that to deeply integrate R&D and manufacturing.
All airplane manufacturers have giant supply chains spanning countries… Airbus just considers some of them maybe a bit more "integrated". I.e. the Spanish wing-skin manufacturing unit could just be a separate company.
I feel the main difference is that Boeing's management post McDonnell merge decided to consider their suppliers as simple vendors, spinning off Spirit, and taking away their direct oversight using supply contracts as a backstop. Airbus does more hands-on oversight of their suppliers, they have staff to check their work, is all part of an integrated QA system instead of the hands-off outsourcing approach Boeing took.
At least that's what I understand from a very layman view of their processes, would love to be corrected if I'm wrong.
You have several misunderstandings packed in there.
First off, one of the things the UE does accomplish is reduce the obstacles that come with cross-border work, and European bureaucracy is massively overblown as a problem. Insofar as it is a problem, US-style lobbying amounts to as much of an obstacle. E.g. with no Intuit lobbying involved, I have literally not filed taxes once in the last ten years, it's just completely automated and a non-issue for me.
"Overregulation" is a sweeping generalisation, and pretty much irrelevant in this particular space: this is the aerospace industry we're talking about, it's one of the most tightly regulated industries worldwide. Airbus is not bogged down by any meaningful amount of red tape that Boeing is free from.
I used to believe that was true but I actually have a lot of concerns of the whatever the EU organization overseeing technology.
I see that they could do great good but instead work up very specific regulations that few companies fit. Those types of regulations instead of broad thinking about integration. They are narrowly focussed on implementation details. What I have seen in the past 2 years fits the exact fears my crazy uncle warns about.
I disagree. The only difference between the EU regulatory landscape and the US is the EU cares much more about end-consumer protections. They work the same but in backwards directions: the EU starts with the end-consumer and works out how to implement that in the private sector. The US starts with the impact to the private sector and works out how that can help end-consumers.
This means sometimes the EU will pass regulations that are difficult or abstract to implement. And this means the US will miss obvious regulations because they can't gauge the business impact.
The current FTC is attempting to actually enforce some of these more obvious regulations now, and they're facing a lot of push back from the American private sector. Blocking huge mergers that monopolize the free market, disallowing one-sided contract clauses, banning outright lying to consumers... these are obvious, to me. It's been shocking just how much resistance they face.
I consider myself very pro-consumer but I also tend towards pro-creator. I think the EU is starting to veer towards stagnation by limiting technology to what already exists.
I do think the EU has a common vision. I'm sure if a common vision drives the USA. I think it's more chaotic until an incumbent establishes a critical mass. I believe the influence only lasts as long as the mass holds.
I think using competition regulation to create equity is misguided. I believe incumbents become dominant and focused on narrower goals. This narrowing of thinking is more likely in my eyes to cause a USA company to fall from dominance.
Microsoft and ATT the monopolists I was raised on were definitely dominant. I having being using computers since the 1970s and the only Microsoft OS based computer I have ever owned wasn an OrangePC 486DX2 card that lived inside a PowerMac G3. I used for probably close to a decade to compile software for windows distribution of Mac developed software. I of course stayed as far away from corporate America which was Windows crazy.
My point is that any creator that feels they are being held back by a platform vendor just needs to re-arrange their thinking until they are free of that thought. There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned.
I also agree the EU is veering towards stagnation, but rather because their competition is US tech companies which have, truly, no rules. Like... no rules at all.
This means you can provide cheaper services by, say, stealing data. And you can protect yourself from lawsuits by making someone "sign" something. And, worse comes to worse and you're down on your luck, you can always aggregate the data and sell it to law enforcement for a pretty penny. While we're here, go ahead and implement the addictive tactics casino's use into your app.
> There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned
Yeah, to a scary degree. I mean you can just make a company to collude on prices. That's what RealPage does, and they're getting away with it. Not just them though - every industry has one of those. Or you can just decide to give people music without a license. That's what Spotify did. Or maybe you can just sell ad space for political campaigns. Wait, aren't there laws on that? Apparently not - if you're a tech company, you can do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want!
We haven't really decided if this is a good thing. The EU pre-emptively is saying "yeah not good". We're still mulling it over. So we're ahead now, but who knows if it will stay this way.
What most people do not understand, most of the regulation in the EU is to make trade easier. That is the main focus of the EU commission (not the parliament though, which brings in pro-people regulation like food regulations or GDPR).
There is often the joke about the EU regulating bananas. People don't ask why this is regulated, they think it's "the idiots in the EU". The reason is easier trade. Because this way some dealer in Poland can buy a quality level of banana from someone in Spain and knows what they can expect to get. It's for easier trade.
It's like having a standard API and language (e.g. SQL) instead of everyone doing their own. It's like lanugages generating LLVM IR (the IR is "regulated") so they don't have to write their own backend. Think of EU regulation more like OAuth.
Airbus is laying off a couple thousand employees. This might be a good thing for the company if those employees are truly bloat against what Airbus is currently producing but if they're quality resources that are being cut because some balance sheet needs to look better, it's a bad sign of what's to come.
The culture decline was largely from the merger with McDonnell Douglas[0]. Before that Boeing had a high engineering culture all the way up to leadership. When management of a tech company is decoupled from engineering, there are short-term wins and long-term losses.
The pivotal point was when they physically moved the leaders away from the people that engineer and build the planes, ensuring the creation of a management class of employees who only cared about squeezing the working class of employees.
Early in my career as a brand new baby mechanical design engineer, I would have absolutely made some huge mistakes were I not able to pick up my drawings and ask a machinist with 30 years of experience if I was being an idiot or not. I learned just as much from the welders and machinists as I did from my boss.
The abstraction that is created to isolate against empathy, also isolates against functionality and longterm reality. Who knew.. certainly not the process designers..
I haven't seen evidence, or heard people say, that engineers have more empathy. Usually the stereotype, fair or not, is the reverse. Many of the more reviled SV CEOs are engineers; many engineers openly reject humanism like it's the latest 'smart' ideological movement.
Which is part of what is so troubling about tech today, that it's ranks are filled with managers who don't build anything.
His podcast role is Chief Cynic but man I love listening to Ed Zitron's Better Offline. What I'm about to link is an extremely hard & direct a polemic, especially the second about the specific people at the largest companies, but damn. It was so enervating to hear.
The Shareholder Supremacy episode ties it all to Jack Welsh making everything awful forever everywhere, managing by number-goes-up. And then How Shareholders Are Destroying the Tech Industry is such a real shared anger against specific leaders, that undercuts how bad & ineffective & midling this age is, being lead by people with so little inspiration & touch with their products.
This podcast series is definitely on my world treasures list, as a how-it-really-is "histories of today" account. Also, the Daily Show keeps having some real bangers... (Covering the media coverage of McDonalds vs Enemy Within was a deep cut.) It's cathartic as hell and often remarkably informative (but also sometimes less so too).
> when Airbus launched the A380, Boeing thought they would have an easy home run with the Dreamliner,
This is ahistorical.
When Airbus announced the A380, Boeing tried to respond with their own version, the 747X [1]. The 747 is arguably the most successful aviation platform in history and was hugely profitable for Boeing for 40+ years. But the industry changed to wide-body 2 engine planes (eg 777, 787, A350) because they're more economical to run and engines have become so reliable that they'll generally last the entire service life of the plane.
The A380 needs 4 engines. The 747X would've too. Even with higher passenger count, running 4 engines instead of 2 is a huge economy issue. Basically you needed to fill ~550 seats to make a profit and not many routes could support that. It works great for the ME3 airlines and arguably a couple of Asian carriers (eg Sinapore Airlines) but not really anybody else and certainly not US airlines.
A way more pivotal moment was the A319neo. This was a complete surprise to Boeing and represented an existential threat to Boeing.
As you may already know, commercial pilots are generally certified for a single type rating at a time. They can train and certify for another type rating but generally speaking commercial pilots won't switch all the time between, say, a 787 and an A350 or even a 787 and a 737.
So airlines like Southwest keep costs low by maintaining a single type rating fleet, being the 737, an airline originally designed 50+ years. So that's both a blessing and a curse for Boeing. The curse being they lose that lock-in if they design a new cockpit. Airbus didn't have that problem.
But the A319neo was so efficient and coule potentially suit US airlines that Boeing ahd to respond and make the 737 more efficient, which of course led to the whole MCAS debacle.
That wasn't the first time Boeing had issues either. Back in the 90s the 737NG had an issue (that caused crashes) with the 737 rudder getting stuck in flight. That took years to resolve.
There were issues for Boeing as a company with the 787. That's when Boeing tried to savagely cut costs with layers of subcontractors and it was a disaster that delayed delivery by years. That's continued with the 737MAX issues like the door panels not being bolted in.
Better aerodynamic design, better (aka lighter) materials available, better manufacturing methods, etc. It's less one specific thing and more just aero as an industry pushing forward on all fronts.
Have been following Boeing, watching docs etc. Does anyone have any examples of a company this financialized and hollowed out making a comeback? I'm kind of skeptical it's even possible
A move which was partly financed by Microsoft. I don't know that Airbus would finance such a move by Boeing (but perhaps the US Gov will?) or who will "come back" to save the company.
I think a bankruptcy restructuring would do a world of good for Boeing, the sooner the better. The longer it keeps in this state, the further behind it gets.
Worth noting that Jobs made Apple come around due to the success of pivoting into a completely new and relatively untapped market at the time, the iPod-iTunes combo, which revolutionized the music industry enabling consumers to easily buy and own singles digitally and record studios to sell digitally for the first time, that's where the real genius was that nobody else on the market saw when Napster got shut down.
Had Jobs kept Apple only in the computer business trying to sell colorful expensive iMacs as alternative to cheap gray PCs, they would have long been bankrupt and their carcass devoured by Dell or Lenovo by now.
Boeing doesn't have any other new untapped markets they can enter and dominate. Come to think of it, neither does Apple now. They tried with the Vision Pro VR helmet thingy but that was a massive flop compared to the iPod and iPhone, coupled with the the shut down of their rumored secretive EV program, so they're left keep trying to milk that 30% AppStore fee as long as they can get away with.
The company was six months to running out of cash when Steve Jobs came back in 1998. The iPod came out in late 2001.
What Steve Jobs did that saved the company was put the hatchet to everything that didn't have an inkling of making cold hard cash. He killed the Newton, destroyed the convoluted product line, and most importantly put the whole company under one P&L statement. That's what saved Apple.
That he then was able to quickly herald a return to portable devices with the iPod is what allowed Apple to become the behemoth it is today. It's useless to pretend to know exactly what would have happened had Apple not made iPod.
That 150 millions was essential, but not for what you think. The money was useful, but Apple cut enough jobs and projets that it did not need it. But Microsoft also committed to continuing to release Office for Mac at the same time.
The iPod accelerated Apple’s growth but it did not save the company. Apple was already turned around and profitable again before they introduced the iPod.
People want what Boeing sells: airplanes. They just need to make better products, like Apple did.
Boeing has a lot of untapped markets. It's one of the few companies which can do things which require scale and regulatory changes in aviation.
Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example, are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Less ambitious would be things like sleeper planes for long haul red-eyes.
General aviation is a smaller industry, but also ripe for distribution by someone with capital and regulatory connections. It's stuck in 1970-era technology.
I can name dozen of other things Boeing could pull off, if lead by someone like Jobs -- someone with both vision and the ability to execute.
>Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example
This just sounds like fantasy wishful thinking like Elon's Hyperloop or FSD Model 3 Robotaxis that have been constantly around the corner in the next 6 months for the past 6 years.
>are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Ah yeah, those pesky regulations about *checks notes*… not killing people. Just like that millionaire "innovator" that got himself and others killed with his carbon fiber submarine who thought he could innovate his way around regulations and engineering process build around decades of accidents and deaths at sea.
Maybe stuff like this shouldn't be left to the move-fast-and-break-things crowd.
Apple isn't left trying to "milk" the app store fee. That's a small fraction of their business. They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history (Aramco's oil business and Google Search are the only things that match up). The app store is a moat for the iPhone, not their primary financial success. They could make that app store fee 0% and they'd still generate over $100 billion in op income per year. Then they'd get sued by regulators for anti-trust for not charging a fee, claiming they undercut the competition using the iPhone business profits.
Services are roughly a third of the revenue at Apple. Most of the services revenue are taxes on third-party developers, and the payola Google pays Apple for the privilege of Google Search being the default, and to prevent Apple from getting in the search market.
It's where all the revenue growth is at Apple right now. All their hardware businesses are enormous and safe, but basically stagnant. That the majority of revenue is from hardware doesn't mean the future of the company doesn't lie in its ability to extract ever more blood from a stone.
>They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history
Yeah, but that slice of the market is in decline for them.
"According to Stocklytics.com, iPhone revenue dropped $2.7 billion year-over-year, totaling $85.2 billion in H1 2024."
Makes sense since everyone and their dog already has an iPhone and keeps them for longer than ever meaning selling more iPhones now is more challenging compared to monetizing all the stuff people buy and do on them.
A lot of the "important names" in industrial manufacturing that wound up getting bought by the various industrial conglomerates of the mid 20th century wound up getting sold off when the conglomerates fell apart.
For example IH's agricultural equipment (now a part of CaseIH), construction equipment (now owned by Komatsu) and truck lines (owned by VAG) all more or less continued development and production despite being through a couple owners at this point.
I personally hope it gets split up and Ford winds up buying the passenger airline stuff so we can get a revival of the trimotor nameplate because I like it when reality is funny that way.
Electric Boat (US navy submarine maker) is trying. They were down to under 5k employees in the 90s (IIRC) after the end of the cold war and significant cuts to defense spending. Now they are probably over 20k and trying to increase production of one type of submarine, add a modified type to the same line, and build a new line for a new type. Not going perfectly but having billions shoved in your pockets sure helps recovery.
You can grow "external" daughter companies that have working "old" practices and get subsizdized by the dying parent, while keeping the MBA infection out as long as possible.
Just one piece of GE (GE Aerospace) is worth $200 billion now. The stock has tripled in eight months, with the company tracking to $5-6 billion in operating income and looking very healthy. GE Vernova (energy) is worth another $75 billion and is back in the black after years of losses. It's all probably going to be a lot healthier split up. That might be the case for Boeing as well. It's often the best way to restart failed old conglomerates (no Steve Jobs scenario is going to save Boeing).
Are we sure the rot hasn't trickled down to the engineering level yet? We know that once upon a time Boeing had great engineers and had an engineering culture but decades of MBA next-quarter management stands between that old company and the current Boeing. While I'm sure many good engineers still go to work for Boeing, what percentage of all the engineers and engineering managers at the company are top quality? Seems like over the decades that attrition, a failing reputation, and a focus on the wrong things would impact the quality of talent the company hired.
One option is for government to step in, cut away the military support branch into a separate company and manage that. Leave the remaining stuff out in the open and either support financially to turn around (like banks in 2008 who then paid back with interest), or let it die due to market forces.
Wondering what consequences all that mean for FAA and its international recognition.
That would be a very, very bad outcome for the free world.
We lost commercial ship yards, and or navy is on a long, slow march to obsolescence. That's messy decades it -- we have a huge lead -- but it's the path we're on.
Hard to see them turning this around, it’s a good 10 year program (optimistically) to develop a new aerospace platform like a 737 replacement. I don’t really see it happening.
Does Embraer have a program in the works? I like what they build.
If the problem was "Boeing have a big hole and need to fill it with money" you can indeed "fix" that by dumping US taxes into the hole until it's full. When US mortgages blew up, that's the exact fix. Money hole, fill with tax money, solved.
But that's not the problem here. Boeing is no longer able to make high quality aeroplanes. And if you dump US taxes into that hole the hole just yawns wider. Which doesn't mean the US government won't try that, but it's expensive and won't work.
Depending on how much money you have, the US experience varies from utopian socialism for the top brackets all the way to ruthless savage capitalism for the disenfranchised.
Admitting to it is the first step towards fixing it.
Then why is there such a gigantic welfare state for the poor in the US?
Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)? The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes. Why does the US have an aggressively progressive taxation system if it's so utopian for the rich? That's quite obviously not how the rich would choose to arrange things at all. The top 1% take in 26% of income and pay 44% of all income taxes. The top 1% pay the highest average tax rate of any group (26%), over double the median figure.
Medicaid + SS disability + all state and local healthcare programs cost over a trillion dollars per year and are free for the poorest 1/4.
The US Govt alone (not including local or state) spent $200 billion on all of its food assistance programs in 2022.
These programs go toward people who contribute almost nothing in taxes.
> Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)?
That's a flat out lie - that's not "all taxes", that's only one tax - Federal income. That's only about half what the IRS takes in (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-...), and then there's stuff like state, local, and non-IRS taxes like gasoline.
> The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes.
Guess what percentage of the wealth they hoover up.
A solid indication the level of taxation for that bracket is too low. Maybe it needs to add brackets up to the trillions, because there is a world of difference between 1M, 100M, 1B and, soon, 1T of net worth.
Remember - if you can't control money's political power, you need to control money itself, or the wealthy will have political power without the backing of votes.
> USPS is very good, better and cheaper than UPS or FedEx.
Indeed, it's a lesson on how all universal services should be managed by democratically elected governments according to clear charters that ensure universality and affordability.
> That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
Because war is the continuation of politics by other means, the objectives of a war, and thus the criteria by which we can determine if it was won, are set by politicians.
Unless your country's politicians are the military this means that your military has no way to win wars unless politicians have chosen winnable criteria.
Corporate - the British operation to take back the Falklands is an example of a clear political objective, set by a politician (Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister) and achievable by military force. If the British kill millions of Argentinians, but must fall back and cede the island, Corporate fails. If the Argentinians shit themselves and run off once the carrier fleet sets sail, Corporate has succeeded with little loss of life. As it happens the British invaded the Falklands on foot, at considerable cost in men, but they won the day, the Falklands remains very much British.
When American politicians set vague objectives, or none at all, it is not the fault of the military when the war does not succeed.
> That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
Iraq in 2003. Trivially stomped what was left of the Iraqi military and Saddam's entire government. There's a difference between a war and attempted nation building. And worth noting that nation building Iraq has not failed as of yet 20 years later. Iraq's GDP per capita is higher than Vietnam, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Philippines, India, etc - which isn't horrible given what they have been through.
What was the last war it lost? It didn't lose in Vietnam; it won every major engagement and along with South Vietnam held ~85% of territory when the US and South + North Vietnam signed a peace treaty and the US left. North Vietnam promptly ignored the treaty and resumed its conquest. Funny to pretend the US lost a war years after it left. It didn't lose in Afghanistan, the primary mission was to destroy bin Laden's Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (which was fully accomplished and bin Laden was killed). Nation building failed in Afghanistan, although the US was able to easily hold the core of the country with sub 30,000 soldiers and could have technically stayed forever (but it was pointless).
Endlessly debatable what counts as a win, and over what timeframe.
Did the North win the Civil War? In 1865, that answer was fairly clear. In 2024, perhaps less so. I suspect 1870s Americans would be a little surprised that Confederate flags and monuments pop up all over in the 20th and 21st centuries.
May I remind you that an entire US Navy Carrier Strike Group can't handle[1][2][3][4] a bunch of deranged desert goat herders lobbing explosive tin cans at them and the shipping lane they're supposed to protect?
The US hasn't won a war ever since WW2, and our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas armed with nothing more complicated than an AK-47 and a Toyota pickup. Our best jet fighter's sole kill is a fucking balloon.
No, the US's track record is French levels of trash and I fear more for ourselves than the enemy in an actual peer war where they will be armed with something better than AK-47s and balloons.
[2]: >“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.
[4]: >There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. ... There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.
The 1990-1991 Gulf War, and the US-backed campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan were major armed conflicts that the US unequivocally won.
The conflict against ISIL ("AK-47s and Toyota pickups") was essentially won (the Daesh still exist, but the ISIL no longer exists as a territorial state). There've been several smaller lesser-known conflicts post-WW2 that Wikipedia considers to be US victories ("operational successes"), as well.
> our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas
Maybe that's a good thing. Can you name any military that won a guerrilla war without resorting to concentration camps and total war against the entire populace?
I guess the point is to prevent a guerrilla war from starting without committing crimes against humanity. This implies other action complementing brute-force military incursions has been taken and that the people don't see you as an enemy.
Currently, the "we'll liberate you, you're welcome" approach is not working.
What good is a top-world military if we can't win wars without resorting to ancient barbarism?
I'm serious, our absolute best loses to some AK-47 manufactured over half a century ago that's seen shit and a beater Toyota pickup that's seen more sand than sense, operated by someone shouting something about chocolate bars. We have 11 nuclear aircraft carriers and we can't protect a single shipping lane.
>Maybe that's a good thing.
Be very careful what you wish for. When Pax Americana ends, whatever succeeds it won't be kind to us.
I meant that every military that has successfully defeated a guerrilla resistance has done so by resorting to cruelty and mass human rights violations. The US military's relative lack of success in these conflicts could mean they haven't done that. Pax Americana is great but so is good conduct in war.
> The only thing it gets from the government is a monopoly on putting things in people's mailboxes.
In exchange for that they have to attain some service levels others would consider unprofitable. Remember they need to be absolutely universal, however inconvenient for them.
US military spends $20 billion a year on air conditioning. Just because we outspend everyone and have for decades doesn't mean we're the best, it just means we're the rich kids who can fail upwards in life
Undoubtedly, whenever they move on the execs will be proud to talk about their time there as part of their journey. And the world will be happy to pull up a stool and listen.
Sort a bunch of spreadsheets by the "Cost" column, descending, get rid of the top rows. That ought to make the shareholders happy and buy the C-suite some reprieve.
It has been said before but I still find it insane how separate Boeing R&D is from Boeing manufacturing.
Boeing manufacturing has been butchered into several independent organisms and scattered across the US states that gives most tax benefits.
Meanwhile Airbus R&D engineers in Toulouse and Hamburg just have to walk a few minutes and they are in the factory hall that is manufacturing the parts they have designed.
Boeing is a perfect cross section of what is an epidemic in western business/government
where it is litteraly impossible to say where one ends and the other begins
same with communications technology
the people, institutions and companys that are missmanaging and hurting our civilzation need to start facing catestrophic personal and collective
repercussions for there moronic grasping greed and
the license to act against populations as a whole
by small self serving groups must end now
the rest of the world is,as we speak, running the
fuck away
I wonder if that fundamental change involves sacking their entire executive team for their incompetence and mismanagement, or whether they'll just shove it down the throats of regular employees?
You wonder what their entire executive team will prefer, sacking the entire executive team for their incompetence and mismanagement or shoving it down the throats of their employees.
Realistically if they all have golden parachutes, it might work out well enough for them. They can probably walk into other jobs anyways. I don't know if this is true however, just speculation on my part
They need to hire a firm with experience in operationalizing the existing market synergies that Boeing already possesses to maximize profit opportunities.
Normally I'd suggest firing all of the experienced, well-paid staff and offshoring as much of the work as possible. It appears that may have already happened however.
This is really a systemic problem and I'd honestly be shocked if it's even possible for Boeing to dig themselves out of the hole they've dug for themselves.
The core problem is the market demands ever-increasing profits and at a certain point the only way to achieve that is to cut costs. Executive compensation won't ever be cut. The management consultants will never be fired because they provide plausible deniability for the executives should anything go wrong.
The inevitable result here is that the financial people end up running the company, not the engineers. The old Steve Jobs Xerox quote [1] applies. No, Boeing wasn't technically a monopoly, but in a duopoly where it's supported by the captured US government, it really operates like one.
So you have a series of short-term decisions to increase profits that hurt the long-term viability of the company. Layers of subcontracting that add friction but marginally increase profits and lose quality control and institutional knowledge.
So, SpaceX is disrupting Boeing on the space front. Who is disrupting Boeing on the aviation front? Airbus and Embraer are great, but they're not based in the US. Where's the homegrown challenger? Or is this going to turn into another TSMC situation where the US has to look outside for competence?
Lockheed Martin has absolutely murdered Boeing in the jet fighter market. USAF sourced the F-15EX Eagle II because Lockheed can't make F-35 Lightning IIs fast enough, but even that was a flop because guess what: Boeing forgot how to install the F-15EX's fuel tank. The same fuel tank the F-15E and all its derivatives have used. As for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, it lost to the F-35 Lightning II in every single foreign market bid. Boeing literally lost multiple times to the worst-run jet fighter programme in US history. Fuck Boeing.
Airbus is poised to win without contest if and when USAF goes for bids on a new tanker again. The KC-46A Pegasus still isn't in active service due to ongoing refueling problems; yes, a tanker that can't tank. Fuck Boeing and fuck the Government Accountability Office who threw out Airbus's winning bid. As a NATO resident, there is no national security concern with going Airbus.
Northrop Grumman has murdered Boeing in the new bomber programme, the B-21 Raider, after USAF finally got around to a successor for the B-52, B-2, and B-1. This was next to the Joint Strike Fighter programme in terms of how coveted it was.
SpaceX as you mentioned is putting everyone in space out to pasture, not just Boeing.
So really, the only replacement we don't have for Boeing is commercial airliners and military heavy cargo which Airbus could be but can't because their production lines are already full. Northrop Grumman could be interested, I guess.
> Going forward, we will be focused on fundamentally changing the culture, stabilizing the business, and improving program execution,
This is corporate speak for “I don’t have a real plan and probably won’t gut leadership and start over like I should.” I wish the board would force some bigger changes already.
"We'll try stock buybacks, that always works."
A stock buyback only makes sense if they think the stock is undervalued, which I'm not sure is the case...
If your only goal is to be fiscally responsible, sure.
If you want a short-term boost to share values and don't care about the long-term damage (as is demonstrably the case in Boeing), no.
Doesn't it also make sense if they have a ton of cash and not a good place to spend it? It's basically like a dividend right?
The comment above this one relies on the unproven assumption that facts and calculations matter.
Boeing culture has been going down for quite some time.
The pivotal point to me was, when Airbus launched the A380, Boeing thought they would have an easy home run with the Dreamliner, Airbus would be doomed as competition as no one wants the A380, Boeing slacked off, and then Airbus came back, listened to the customers, changed the A350 to a new plane and had a runaway success (on top of the bread and butter neos).
As a side note, I am still fascinated that Airbus is relatively well run and successful company, even though it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that.
> I am still fascinated that Airbus is relatively well run and successful company, even though it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that.
If it doesn't add up, maybe it's the other side of the equation that's the problem: Maybe the flaw or surprise in the equation is not Airbus but the other side - the beliefs about "EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles" - maybe those aren't what you thought and don't have the impact you thought.
If the evidence doesn't match the theory, it's time to re-examine the theory.
I say that because those beliefs about the EU are a dogma of American big business and its fellow travelers, which prefers the US where they have so much power (and so little regulation or tax) rather than the more democratic power in EU.
But it seems like Airbus is the exception to the rule, by and large. For example, the Typhoon Eurofighter has had disappointing exports.
>it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that
That is because one of those things is not true. It's not very cross-border. The vast majority of Airbus R&D and manufacturing happens in Toulouse and Hamburg with each city focusing on specific plane models.
Airbus is incredibly centralized and has been able to take advantage of that to deeply integrate R&D and manufacturing.
What a great technical dynamic duo DACHA with French style.
My guess is this could only work in the airline industry where an efficient bureaucracy would be a competitive advantage.
"That is because one of those things is not true."
I will keep that in mind when seeing an Airbus Beluga again when in Hamburg.
All airplane manufacturers have giant supply chains spanning countries… Airbus just considers some of them maybe a bit more "integrated". I.e. the Spanish wing-skin manufacturing unit could just be a separate company.
btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Dreamlifter [ed. wrong link]
I feel the main difference is that Boeing's management post McDonnell merge decided to consider their suppliers as simple vendors, spinning off Spirit, and taking away their direct oversight using supply contracts as a backstop. Airbus does more hands-on oversight of their suppliers, they have staff to check their work, is all part of an integrated QA system instead of the hands-off outsourcing approach Boeing took.
At least that's what I understand from a very layman view of their processes, would love to be corrected if I'm wrong.
You have several misunderstandings packed in there.
First off, one of the things the UE does accomplish is reduce the obstacles that come with cross-border work, and European bureaucracy is massively overblown as a problem. Insofar as it is a problem, US-style lobbying amounts to as much of an obstacle. E.g. with no Intuit lobbying involved, I have literally not filed taxes once in the last ten years, it's just completely automated and a non-issue for me.
"Overregulation" is a sweeping generalisation, and pretty much irrelevant in this particular space: this is the aerospace industry we're talking about, it's one of the most tightly regulated industries worldwide. Airbus is not bogged down by any meaningful amount of red tape that Boeing is free from.
I used to believe that was true but I actually have a lot of concerns of the whatever the EU organization overseeing technology.
I see that they could do great good but instead work up very specific regulations that few companies fit. Those types of regulations instead of broad thinking about integration. They are narrowly focussed on implementation details. What I have seen in the past 2 years fits the exact fears my crazy uncle warns about.
I disagree. The only difference between the EU regulatory landscape and the US is the EU cares much more about end-consumer protections. They work the same but in backwards directions: the EU starts with the end-consumer and works out how to implement that in the private sector. The US starts with the impact to the private sector and works out how that can help end-consumers.
This means sometimes the EU will pass regulations that are difficult or abstract to implement. And this means the US will miss obvious regulations because they can't gauge the business impact.
The current FTC is attempting to actually enforce some of these more obvious regulations now, and they're facing a lot of push back from the American private sector. Blocking huge mergers that monopolize the free market, disallowing one-sided contract clauses, banning outright lying to consumers... these are obvious, to me. It's been shocking just how much resistance they face.
I consider myself very pro-consumer but I also tend towards pro-creator. I think the EU is starting to veer towards stagnation by limiting technology to what already exists.
I do think the EU has a common vision. I'm sure if a common vision drives the USA. I think it's more chaotic until an incumbent establishes a critical mass. I believe the influence only lasts as long as the mass holds.
I think using competition regulation to create equity is misguided. I believe incumbents become dominant and focused on narrower goals. This narrowing of thinking is more likely in my eyes to cause a USA company to fall from dominance.
Microsoft and ATT the monopolists I was raised on were definitely dominant. I having being using computers since the 1970s and the only Microsoft OS based computer I have ever owned wasn an OrangePC 486DX2 card that lived inside a PowerMac G3. I used for probably close to a decade to compile software for windows distribution of Mac developed software. I of course stayed as far away from corporate America which was Windows crazy.
My point is that any creator that feels they are being held back by a platform vendor just needs to re-arrange their thinking until they are free of that thought. There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned.
I also agree the EU is veering towards stagnation, but rather because their competition is US tech companies which have, truly, no rules. Like... no rules at all.
This means you can provide cheaper services by, say, stealing data. And you can protect yourself from lawsuits by making someone "sign" something. And, worse comes to worse and you're down on your luck, you can always aggregate the data and sell it to law enforcement for a pretty penny. While we're here, go ahead and implement the addictive tactics casino's use into your app.
> There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned
Yeah, to a scary degree. I mean you can just make a company to collude on prices. That's what RealPage does, and they're getting away with it. Not just them though - every industry has one of those. Or you can just decide to give people music without a license. That's what Spotify did. Or maybe you can just sell ad space for political campaigns. Wait, aren't there laws on that? Apparently not - if you're a tech company, you can do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want!
We haven't really decided if this is a good thing. The EU pre-emptively is saying "yeah not good". We're still mulling it over. So we're ahead now, but who knows if it will stay this way.
"with all the overregulation, bureaucracy"
What most people do not understand, most of the regulation in the EU is to make trade easier. That is the main focus of the EU commission (not the parliament though, which brings in pro-people regulation like food regulations or GDPR).
There is often the joke about the EU regulating bananas. People don't ask why this is regulated, they think it's "the idiots in the EU". The reason is easier trade. Because this way some dealer in Poland can buy a quality level of banana from someone in Spain and knows what they can expect to get. It's for easier trade.
It's like having a standard API and language (e.g. SQL) instead of everyone doing their own. It's like lanugages generating LLVM IR (the IR is "regulated") so they don't have to write their own backend. Think of EU regulation more like OAuth.
Airbus is laying off a couple thousand employees. This might be a good thing for the company if those employees are truly bloat against what Airbus is currently producing but if they're quality resources that are being cut because some balance sheet needs to look better, it's a bad sign of what's to come.
The culture decline was largely from the merger with McDonnell Douglas[0]. Before that Boeing had a high engineering culture all the way up to leadership. When management of a tech company is decoupled from engineering, there are short-term wins and long-term losses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing#Merger_with_McDonnell_D...
The pivotal point was when they physically moved the leaders away from the people that engineer and build the planes, ensuring the creation of a management class of employees who only cared about squeezing the working class of employees.
I remember when that happened, many people publicly predicted it would lead to the situation seen today.
When was that? If you remember, I'd love to see who predicted what.
I just did some Googling, and apparently they've moved their headquarters several times:
2001: Seattle to Chicago: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/on-this-day-boeing-moves-co...
2022: Chicago to Washington, DC area: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
2024: Back to Seattle (maybe just the CEO and not the whole office): https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/new-boein...
I think this antipattern kills many engineering businesses.
Early in my career as a brand new baby mechanical design engineer, I would have absolutely made some huge mistakes were I not able to pick up my drawings and ask a machinist with 30 years of experience if I was being an idiot or not. I learned just as much from the welders and machinists as I did from my boss.
The abstraction that is created to isolate against empathy, also isolates against functionality and longterm reality. Who knew.. certainly not the process designers..
I haven't seen evidence, or heard people say, that engineers have more empathy. Usually the stereotype, fair or not, is the reverse. Many of the more reviled SV CEOs are engineers; many engineers openly reject humanism like it's the latest 'smart' ideological movement.
Which is part of what is so troubling about tech today, that it's ranks are filled with managers who don't build anything.
His podcast role is Chief Cynic but man I love listening to Ed Zitron's Better Offline. What I'm about to link is an extremely hard & direct a polemic, especially the second about the specific people at the largest companies, but damn. It was so enervating to hear.
The Shareholder Supremacy episode ties it all to Jack Welsh making everything awful forever everywhere, managing by number-goes-up. And then How Shareholders Are Destroying the Tech Industry is such a real shared anger against specific leaders, that undercuts how bad & ineffective & midling this age is, being lead by people with so little inspiration & touch with their products.
https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-shareholder-suprema... https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/how-shareholders-are-de...
This podcast series is definitely on my world treasures list, as a how-it-really-is "histories of today" account. Also, the Daily Show keeps having some real bangers... (Covering the media coverage of McDonalds vs Enemy Within was a deep cut.) It's cathartic as hell and often remarkably informative (but also sometimes less so too).
> when Airbus launched the A380, Boeing thought they would have an easy home run with the Dreamliner,
This is ahistorical.
When Airbus announced the A380, Boeing tried to respond with their own version, the 747X [1]. The 747 is arguably the most successful aviation platform in history and was hugely profitable for Boeing for 40+ years. But the industry changed to wide-body 2 engine planes (eg 777, 787, A350) because they're more economical to run and engines have become so reliable that they'll generally last the entire service life of the plane.
The A380 needs 4 engines. The 747X would've too. Even with higher passenger count, running 4 engines instead of 2 is a huge economy issue. Basically you needed to fill ~550 seats to make a profit and not many routes could support that. It works great for the ME3 airlines and arguably a couple of Asian carriers (eg Sinapore Airlines) but not really anybody else and certainly not US airlines.
A way more pivotal moment was the A319neo. This was a complete surprise to Boeing and represented an existential threat to Boeing.
As you may already know, commercial pilots are generally certified for a single type rating at a time. They can train and certify for another type rating but generally speaking commercial pilots won't switch all the time between, say, a 787 and an A350 or even a 787 and a 737.
So airlines like Southwest keep costs low by maintaining a single type rating fleet, being the 737, an airline originally designed 50+ years. So that's both a blessing and a curse for Boeing. The curse being they lose that lock-in if they design a new cockpit. Airbus didn't have that problem.
But the A319neo was so efficient and coule potentially suit US airlines that Boeing ahd to respond and make the 737 more efficient, which of course led to the whole MCAS debacle.
That wasn't the first time Boeing had issues either. Back in the 90s the 737NG had an issue (that caused crashes) with the 737 rudder getting stuck in flight. That took years to resolve.
There were issues for Boeing as a company with the 787. That's when Boeing tried to savagely cut costs with layers of subcontractors and it was a disaster that delayed delivery by years. That's continued with the 737MAX issues like the door panels not being bolted in.
[1]: https://simpleflying.com/boeing-747x/
Perhaps a dumb question in this context, but what made the A319neo so efficient? What was the technological innovation?
Better aerodynamic design, better (aka lighter) materials available, better manufacturing methods, etc. It's less one specific thing and more just aero as an industry pushing forward on all fronts.
Have been following Boeing, watching docs etc. Does anyone have any examples of a company this financialized and hollowed out making a comeback? I'm kind of skeptical it's even possible
Apple was at junk bond status and very close to bankruptcy in 1996 before Steve Jobs came back and turned the whole company around.
Most other success stories involve first going bankrupt (ex. GM, Delta).
A move which was partly financed by Microsoft. I don't know that Airbus would finance such a move by Boeing (but perhaps the US Gov will?) or who will "come back" to save the company.
Didn't think of that.
I think a bankruptcy restructuring would do a world of good for Boeing, the sooner the better. The longer it keeps in this state, the further behind it gets.
Worth noting that Jobs made Apple come around due to the success of pivoting into a completely new and relatively untapped market at the time, the iPod-iTunes combo, which revolutionized the music industry enabling consumers to easily buy and own singles digitally and record studios to sell digitally for the first time, that's where the real genius was that nobody else on the market saw when Napster got shut down.
Had Jobs kept Apple only in the computer business trying to sell colorful expensive iMacs as alternative to cheap gray PCs, they would have long been bankrupt and their carcass devoured by Dell or Lenovo by now.
Boeing doesn't have any other new untapped markets they can enter and dominate. Come to think of it, neither does Apple now. They tried with the Vision Pro VR helmet thingy but that was a massive flop compared to the iPod and iPhone, coupled with the the shut down of their rumored secretive EV program, so they're left keep trying to milk that 30% AppStore fee as long as they can get away with.
The company was six months to running out of cash when Steve Jobs came back in 1998. The iPod came out in late 2001.
What Steve Jobs did that saved the company was put the hatchet to everything that didn't have an inkling of making cold hard cash. He killed the Newton, destroyed the convoluted product line, and most importantly put the whole company under one P&L statement. That's what saved Apple.
That he then was able to quickly herald a return to portable devices with the iPod is what allowed Apple to become the behemoth it is today. It's useless to pretend to know exactly what would have happened had Apple not made iPod.
>That's what saved Apple.
You're forgetting a 150 mil from Microsoft.
That 150 millions was essential, but not for what you think. The money was useful, but Apple cut enough jobs and projets that it did not need it. But Microsoft also committed to continuing to release Office for Mac at the same time.
The iPod accelerated Apple’s growth but it did not save the company. Apple was already turned around and profitable again before they introduced the iPod.
People want what Boeing sells: airplanes. They just need to make better products, like Apple did.
Boeing has a lot of untapped markets. It's one of the few companies which can do things which require scale and regulatory changes in aviation.
Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example, are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Less ambitious would be things like sleeper planes for long haul red-eyes.
General aviation is a smaller industry, but also ripe for distribution by someone with capital and regulatory connections. It's stuck in 1970-era technology.
I can name dozen of other things Boeing could pull off, if lead by someone like Jobs -- someone with both vision and the ability to execute.
If you want flying cars, please invent a silent, energy-efficient and safe levitation technology first, then we can talk...
>Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example
This just sounds like fantasy wishful thinking like Elon's Hyperloop or FSD Model 3 Robotaxis that have been constantly around the corner in the next 6 months for the past 6 years.
>are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Ah yeah, those pesky regulations about *checks notes*… not killing people. Just like that millionaire "innovator" that got himself and others killed with his carbon fiber submarine who thought he could innovate his way around regulations and engineering process build around decades of accidents and deaths at sea.
Maybe stuff like this shouldn't be left to the move-fast-and-break-things crowd.
Apple isn't left trying to "milk" the app store fee. That's a small fraction of their business. They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history (Aramco's oil business and Google Search are the only things that match up). The app store is a moat for the iPhone, not their primary financial success. They could make that app store fee 0% and they'd still generate over $100 billion in op income per year. Then they'd get sued by regulators for anti-trust for not charging a fee, claiming they undercut the competition using the iPhone business profits.
Services are roughly a third of the revenue at Apple. Most of the services revenue are taxes on third-party developers, and the payola Google pays Apple for the privilege of Google Search being the default, and to prevent Apple from getting in the search market.
It's where all the revenue growth is at Apple right now. All their hardware businesses are enormous and safe, but basically stagnant. That the majority of revenue is from hardware doesn't mean the future of the company doesn't lie in its ability to extract ever more blood from a stone.
>They're doing $300 billion in sales (and $100 billion in profit) in just iPhones, it's the most lucrative single product for a private company in world history
Yeah, but that slice of the market is in decline for them.
"According to Stocklytics.com, iPhone revenue dropped $2.7 billion year-over-year, totaling $85.2 billion in H1 2024."
Makes sense since everyone and their dog already has an iPhone and keeps them for longer than ever meaning selling more iPhones now is more challenging compared to monetizing all the stuff people buy and do on them.
It moved less than 1%, is that what it says?
It'll be a jobs program and a "compliance as a service" government contract middle man as other late stage big almost-state companies turn out.
Does it need to be under the same name?
A lot of the "important names" in industrial manufacturing that wound up getting bought by the various industrial conglomerates of the mid 20th century wound up getting sold off when the conglomerates fell apart.
For example IH's agricultural equipment (now a part of CaseIH), construction equipment (now owned by Komatsu) and truck lines (owned by VAG) all more or less continued development and production despite being through a couple owners at this point.
I personally hope it gets split up and Ford winds up buying the passenger airline stuff so we can get a revival of the trimotor nameplate because I like it when reality is funny that way.
Electric Boat (US navy submarine maker) is trying. They were down to under 5k employees in the 90s (IIRC) after the end of the cold war and significant cuts to defense spending. Now they are probably over 20k and trying to increase production of one type of submarine, add a modified type to the same line, and build a new line for a new type. Not going perfectly but having billions shoved in your pockets sure helps recovery.
You can grow "external" daughter companies that have working "old" practices and get subsizdized by the dying parent, while keeping the MBA infection out as long as possible.
Let's talk when GE becomes GE again?
Just one piece of GE (GE Aerospace) is worth $200 billion now. The stock has tripled in eight months, with the company tracking to $5-6 billion in operating income and looking very healthy. GE Vernova (energy) is worth another $75 billion and is back in the black after years of losses. It's all probably going to be a lot healthier split up. That might be the case for Boeing as well. It's often the best way to restart failed old conglomerates (no Steve Jobs scenario is going to save Boeing).
I actually didn't know that. It's been a zombie stock for years, so I just stopped checking.
Funny enough maybe GE Aerospace should buy the commercial plane division of Boeing. Take the business, engineers, IP and plants, ditch the management.
Are we sure the rot hasn't trickled down to the engineering level yet? We know that once upon a time Boeing had great engineers and had an engineering culture but decades of MBA next-quarter management stands between that old company and the current Boeing. While I'm sure many good engineers still go to work for Boeing, what percentage of all the engineers and engineering managers at the company are top quality? Seems like over the decades that attrition, a failing reputation, and a focus on the wrong things would impact the quality of talent the company hired.
One option is for government to step in, cut away the military support branch into a separate company and manage that. Leave the remaining stuff out in the open and either support financially to turn around (like banks in 2008 who then paid back with interest), or let it die due to market forces.
Wondering what consequences all that mean for FAA and its international recognition.
That would be a very, very bad outcome for the free world.
We lost commercial ship yards, and or navy is on a long, slow march to obsolescence. That's messy decades it -- we have a huge lead -- but it's the path we're on.
I don't know the solution here.
I don't see a problem with the military rotting away.
Maybe add "this large" and "this specializing in long-lead-time, cutting-edge technology" to your conditions.
Wont it just get bought out by the gov/taxpayer because it's a strategic asset etc. ?
Hard to see them turning this around, it’s a good 10 year program (optimistically) to develop a new aerospace platform like a 737 replacement. I don’t really see it happening.
Does Embraer have a program in the works? I like what they build.
Nothing from Embraer that I've seen. Comac (Chinese, state-owned) has a 737-equivalent, but I'm not sure it would be sold outside of China.
Yeah, at this ratey they will build the 737 for another 50 years.
Hold onto your wallet, bailout is a sure thing
Boeing falls in the category of "too strategic to fail". Wither a bailout or an acquisition (which would create an even bigger TSTF hazard).
If the problem was "Boeing have a big hole and need to fill it with money" you can indeed "fix" that by dumping US taxes into the hole until it's full. When US mortgages blew up, that's the exact fix. Money hole, fill with tax money, solved.
But that's not the problem here. Boeing is no longer able to make high quality aeroplanes. And if you dump US taxes into that hole the hole just yawns wider. Which doesn't mean the US government won't try that, but it's expensive and won't work.
> Which doesn't mean the US government won't try that
I bet they will, and yes, it won't work.
Alternatively: nationalize it under the Defense Production Act.
Even the far right would call that communism.
Yes, we should instead offer Boeing 50+ billion tax-payer dollars like true capitalists.
Depending on how much money you have, the US experience varies from utopian socialism for the top brackets all the way to ruthless savage capitalism for the disenfranchised.
Admitting to it is the first step towards fixing it.
Then why is there such a gigantic welfare state for the poor in the US?
Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)? The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes. Why does the US have an aggressively progressive taxation system if it's so utopian for the rich? That's quite obviously not how the rich would choose to arrange things at all. The top 1% take in 26% of income and pay 44% of all income taxes. The top 1% pay the highest average tax rate of any group (26%), over double the median figure.
Medicaid + SS disability + all state and local healthcare programs cost over a trillion dollars per year and are free for the poorest 1/4.
The US Govt alone (not including local or state) spent $200 billion on all of its food assistance programs in 2022.
These programs go toward people who contribute almost nothing in taxes.
> The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes
As one of the top 25%, that doesn't automatically make it unfair. What is their total share of earned income? How much of the wealth do they hold?
> These programs go toward people who contribute almost nothing in taxes.
Because they make almost no money. If you want people to pay more income tax, you need to start paying them more.
> Then why is there such a gigantic welfare state for the poor in the US?
And, yet, you can't even ensure decent free healthcare to everyone (even if limited to those who can't pay).
> These programs go toward people who contribute almost nothing in taxes.
Like Jeff Bezos?
> Why do the top 50% fund nearly all of the government (97% of all taxes)?
That's a flat out lie - that's not "all taxes", that's only one tax - Federal income. That's only about half what the IRS takes in (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/18/who-pays-...), and then there's stuff like state, local, and non-IRS taxes like gasoline.
> The top 25% pay around 90% of all income taxes.
Guess what percentage of the wealth they hoover up.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
The top 0.1% holds 1.76T in wealth; the bottom 50% holds 0.71T. The top 10% hold more wealth than the remaining 90%.
Notice the rich keep getting richer though. Level of taxation doesn't mean much, look at the actual outcome.
> Notice the rich keep getting richer though.
A solid indication the level of taxation for that bracket is too low. Maybe it needs to add brackets up to the trillions, because there is a world of difference between 1M, 100M, 1B and, soon, 1T of net worth.
Remember - if you can't control money's political power, you need to control money itself, or the wealthy will have political power without the backing of votes.
The far rights calls everything they don't like communism.
Everything the government touches turns to shit.
US military has no peer.
USPS is very good, better and cheaper than UPS or FedEx.
Wish antigovernment types didn’t lie and had actual complaints.
> US military has no peer.
That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
> USPS is very good, better and cheaper than UPS or FedEx.
Indeed, it's a lesson on how all universal services should be managed by democratically elected governments according to clear charters that ensure universality and affordability.
> That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
Because war is the continuation of politics by other means, the objectives of a war, and thus the criteria by which we can determine if it was won, are set by politicians.
Unless your country's politicians are the military this means that your military has no way to win wars unless politicians have chosen winnable criteria.
Corporate - the British operation to take back the Falklands is an example of a clear political objective, set by a politician (Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister) and achievable by military force. If the British kill millions of Argentinians, but must fall back and cede the island, Corporate fails. If the Argentinians shit themselves and run off once the carrier fleet sets sail, Corporate has succeeded with little loss of life. As it happens the British invaded the Falklands on foot, at considerable cost in men, but they won the day, the Falklands remains very much British.
When American politicians set vague objectives, or none at all, it is not the fault of the military when the war does not succeed.
> That is debatable. What was the last war it won?
Iraq in 2003. Trivially stomped what was left of the Iraqi military and Saddam's entire government. There's a difference between a war and attempted nation building. And worth noting that nation building Iraq has not failed as of yet 20 years later. Iraq's GDP per capita is higher than Vietnam, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Philippines, India, etc - which isn't horrible given what they have been through.
What was the last war it lost? It didn't lose in Vietnam; it won every major engagement and along with South Vietnam held ~85% of territory when the US and South + North Vietnam signed a peace treaty and the US left. North Vietnam promptly ignored the treaty and resumed its conquest. Funny to pretend the US lost a war years after it left. It didn't lose in Afghanistan, the primary mission was to destroy bin Laden's Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (which was fully accomplished and bin Laden was killed). Nation building failed in Afghanistan, although the US was able to easily hold the core of the country with sub 30,000 soldiers and could have technically stayed forever (but it was pointless).
10 trillion dollars to "win" against Iraq and Vietnam. I guess it is still debatable.
Endlessly debatable what counts as a win, and over what timeframe.
Did the North win the Civil War? In 1865, that answer was fairly clear. In 2024, perhaps less so. I suspect 1870s Americans would be a little surprised that Confederate flags and monuments pop up all over in the 20th and 21st centuries.
May I remind you that an entire US Navy Carrier Strike Group can't handle[1][2][3][4] a bunch of deranged desert goat herders lobbing explosive tin cans at them and the shipping lane they're supposed to protect?
The US hasn't won a war ever since WW2, and our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas armed with nothing more complicated than an AK-47 and a Toyota pickup. Our best jet fighter's sole kill is a fucking balloon.
No, the US's track record is French levels of trash and I fear more for ourselves than the enemy in an actual peer war where they will be armed with something better than AK-47s and balloons.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/us-navy-yemen-houthis-israel-war-...
[2]: >“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/24/red-sea-houthis-...
[4]: >There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. ... There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.
The US hasn't won a war ever since WW2,
The 1990-1991 Gulf War, and the US-backed campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan were major armed conflicts that the US unequivocally won.
The conflict against ISIL ("AK-47s and Toyota pickups") was essentially won (the Daesh still exist, but the ISIL no longer exists as a territorial state). There've been several smaller lesser-known conflicts post-WW2 that Wikipedia considers to be US victories ("operational successes"), as well.
> our top-of-the-world military has always lost to guerillas
Maybe that's a good thing. Can you name any military that won a guerrilla war without resorting to concentration camps and total war against the entire populace?
I guess the point is to prevent a guerrilla war from starting without committing crimes against humanity. This implies other action complementing brute-force military incursions has been taken and that the people don't see you as an enemy.
Currently, the "we'll liberate you, you're welcome" approach is not working.
What good is a top-world military if we can't win wars without resorting to ancient barbarism?
I'm serious, our absolute best loses to some AK-47 manufactured over half a century ago that's seen shit and a beater Toyota pickup that's seen more sand than sense, operated by someone shouting something about chocolate bars. We have 11 nuclear aircraft carriers and we can't protect a single shipping lane.
>Maybe that's a good thing.
Be very careful what you wish for. When Pax Americana ends, whatever succeeds it won't be kind to us.
> > Maybe that's a good thing.
> Be very careful what you wish for.
I meant that every military that has successfully defeated a guerrilla resistance has done so by resorting to cruelty and mass human rights violations. The US military's relative lack of success in these conflicts could mean they haven't done that. Pax Americana is great but so is good conduct in war.
Remind us, who's running Afghanistan today?
It's not affordable its subsidized.
Nope. The USPS pays its own way. The only thing it gets from the government is a monopoly on putting things in people's mailboxes.
> The only thing it gets from the government is a monopoly on putting things in people's mailboxes.
In exchange for that they have to attain some service levels others would consider unprofitable. Remember they need to be absolutely universal, however inconvenient for them.
US military spends $20 billion a year on air conditioning. Just because we outspend everyone and have for decades doesn't mean we're the best, it just means we're the rich kids who can fail upwards in life
Boeing already went to shit. We're in shit cleanup phase.
Are we? We should be. But are we?
Just find an employee within the company who is exceptional at both management and engineering and promote him or her to CEO.
You won’t. It’s essentially an arm of the federal government. No efficiency.
They could close shop and start a really cool aviation museum. Plenty of relics to come by.
Fascinating that things only need to change when profits are at risk.
It's crazy that whatever happens to Boeing their leadership team will bounce onto something else and won't be avoided like the plague.
Undoubtedly, whenever they move on the execs will be proud to talk about their time there as part of their journey. And the world will be happy to pull up a stool and listen.
Sort a bunch of spreadsheets by the "Cost" column, descending, get rid of the top rows. That ought to make the shareholders happy and buy the C-suite some reprieve.
It has been said before but I still find it insane how separate Boeing R&D is from Boeing manufacturing.
Boeing manufacturing has been butchered into several independent organisms and scattered across the US states that gives most tax benefits.
Meanwhile Airbus R&D engineers in Toulouse and Hamburg just have to walk a few minutes and they are in the factory hall that is manufacturing the parts they have designed.
Airbus has ships going back and forth between the EU and their plant in Alabama, and ships fuselages between Germany and France. They're plenty distributed. https://simpleflying.com/airbus-ships-aircraft-parts/
Whatever the words are, I read that as "More cost saving measures e.g. outsourcing and labor cut".
That's the only thing they know.
Even the headline about Boeing includes the stock price reference.
Speaking of Boeing, Hunterbrook just dropped a piece on Universal Stainless.
'Universal Stainless, Set To Be Acquired, Behind Fatal Bell Boeing Osprey Crash' https://hntrbrk.com/usap/
Boeing has been killing US Soldiers with V-22 Osprey since 2007, 50 and counting.
Boeing is a perfect cross section of what is an epidemic in western business/government where it is litteraly impossible to say where one ends and the other begins same with communications technology the people, institutions and companys that are missmanaging and hurting our civilzation need to start facing catestrophic personal and collective repercussions for there moronic grasping greed and the license to act against populations as a whole by small self serving groups must end now the rest of the world is,as we speak, running the fuck away
They will likely purchase a bigger rug to sweep the problems under. The current one looks more like a mound, and this is the problem.
I wonder if that fundamental change involves sacking their entire executive team for their incompetence and mismanagement, or whether they'll just shove it down the throats of regular employees?
I'm more interested in a criminal investigation into the deaths of two whistleblowers [0,1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40230790
You wonder what their entire executive team will prefer, sacking the entire executive team for their incompetence and mismanagement or shoving it down the throats of their employees.
I guess I can predict how that comes out.
Realistically if they all have golden parachutes, it might work out well enough for them. They can probably walk into other jobs anyways. I don't know if this is true however, just speculation on my part
> They can probably walk into other jobs anyways
None of them will need to.
It's infuriating that high compensation comes with zero responsibility. Broken system.
This is what we get when we allow the people with high compensation design the checks and the balances.
The obvious answer is to hire more consultants. It's the only way.
They need to hire a firm with experience in operationalizing the existing market synergies that Boeing already possesses to maximize profit opportunities.
Normally I'd suggest firing all of the experienced, well-paid staff and offshoring as much of the work as possible. It appears that may have already happened however.
Was my first idea too
Guess!
We all know the answer to that. NOPE. We take the short end of the stick as always.
Hahahaha, wait you're serious? Let me laugh even harder HAHAHAHAAHAH.
In all seriousness - Boeing should be called McDonnell Douglas - the merger was encouraged by the Pentagon after the cold war.
Don't let bad management team infect your company - there's a reason why this company you want to buy is on a fire sale.
While you laugh, he collects big bucks. I mean really BIG bucks. He probably laughs too.
Don't CEOs care about their legacy when they play the "big boy" game with all the other oligarchs?
In the era of 6-hour news cycles, the term "legacy" is kind of meaningless.
fall on your sword, resign, and appoint a c suite with engineering chops?
unlikely.
The downside of being a minor shareholder in a criminal enterprise is the loss of value when the negative consequences arrive.
The last dividend in 2020 should be the least of the losses
This is really a systemic problem and I'd honestly be shocked if it's even possible for Boeing to dig themselves out of the hole they've dug for themselves.
The core problem is the market demands ever-increasing profits and at a certain point the only way to achieve that is to cut costs. Executive compensation won't ever be cut. The management consultants will never be fired because they provide plausible deniability for the executives should anything go wrong.
The inevitable result here is that the financial people end up running the company, not the engineers. The old Steve Jobs Xerox quote [1] applies. No, Boeing wasn't technically a monopoly, but in a duopoly where it's supported by the captured US government, it really operates like one.
So you have a series of short-term decisions to increase profits that hurt the long-term viability of the company. Layers of subcontracting that add friction but marginally increase profits and lose quality control and institutional knowledge.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3NASGb5m8s
So, SpaceX is disrupting Boeing on the space front. Who is disrupting Boeing on the aviation front? Airbus and Embraer are great, but they're not based in the US. Where's the homegrown challenger? Or is this going to turn into another TSMC situation where the US has to look outside for competence?
Lockheed Martin has absolutely murdered Boeing in the jet fighter market. USAF sourced the F-15EX Eagle II because Lockheed can't make F-35 Lightning IIs fast enough, but even that was a flop because guess what: Boeing forgot how to install the F-15EX's fuel tank. The same fuel tank the F-15E and all its derivatives have used. As for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, it lost to the F-35 Lightning II in every single foreign market bid. Boeing literally lost multiple times to the worst-run jet fighter programme in US history. Fuck Boeing.
Airbus is poised to win without contest if and when USAF goes for bids on a new tanker again. The KC-46A Pegasus still isn't in active service due to ongoing refueling problems; yes, a tanker that can't tank. Fuck Boeing and fuck the Government Accountability Office who threw out Airbus's winning bid. As a NATO resident, there is no national security concern with going Airbus.
Northrop Grumman has murdered Boeing in the new bomber programme, the B-21 Raider, after USAF finally got around to a successor for the B-52, B-2, and B-1. This was next to the Joint Strike Fighter programme in terms of how coveted it was.
SpaceX as you mentioned is putting everyone in space out to pasture, not just Boeing.
So really, the only replacement we don't have for Boeing is commercial airliners and military heavy cargo which Airbus could be but can't because their production lines are already full. Northrop Grumman could be interested, I guess.
Let it burn. No bailouts please. Free market will sort it out one way or another without interventions.
Even as someone who indirectly holds Boeing stock, I am pleased at this $6.2 billion dollar bleeding, more please. I hope the strikers vote to reject.
The only language Boeing understands at this point is bankruptcy.
Come to think of it, there's got to be a financial product like: a passive index, minus a few stocks that you hand pick :)
optimism for a bright long-term future for late capitalist endeavors seems possibly ill-advised.