• mlg@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I still hate that NAA ended up in Boeing’s hands after only two buyouts.

    Totally nothing wrong with an aerospace company buying out its competitors and then promptly liquidating its assets.

  • peanutyam@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Well that’s nothing new - I worked for them “briefly” (as in weeks - ended up with a better job offer!!) and as an actual aircraft mechanic I was disgusted by what I saw - they had supervising roles filled with non-aircraft trades people, training was done by a former boat mechanic, there were butchers and carpenters - who, if you asked them thought they were far more capable than an aircraft mechanic as, actual aircraft trades are considered “problematic” by Boeing management (who are all ex Toyota staff for the most part…) because - aircraft mechanics are too slow for a production line environment as we tend to take our time too much for their liking (oh because we want to get it right first time?!) 🤦🏼‍♀️

    I left and a week later the Max was grounded - the garbage that was spewing from senior management right before the grounding was eye roll inducing - about how they stand by the product bla bla bla and have no idea how shiny new aircraft could just fall out the sky……of course we know how that turned out for them….

    But yeah, Boeing, like Rolls Royce are not the brand a lot of people should think of as “high quality” until they sort their QA shit out and start employing actual aircraft tradespeople and engineeers who know what they are doing 🤷🏼‍♀️

  • Steak@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    That’s most industries. Society is falling apart lol. Look how the secret service responded to an assassination attempt on trump. It was absolutely pathetic. These people are supposed to be the best of the best of the best. It doesn’t surprise me that other industries are also experiencing this.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      Look how the secret service responded to an assassination attempt on trump. It was absolutely pathetic

      it was perfectly fine??? They shot and killed the guy within like 3 seconds of the event happening???

      Sure it’s weird that he was up there, but i’m not sure that’s a failing of SS specifically, but they certainly did their job in regards to neutralizing the threat.

      Also trump isn’t even the current president, so it’s not like he’s going to get all the coverage in the world.

      • Steak@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        The fact he even got shots off while laying on literally one of the only spots a sniper could get a shot off is absolutely bad enough. They should have had minimum one sniper looking at that roof constantly. That’s like step one.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          i believe they did, though it’s worth noting, you’re constantly scanning rooftops as a sniper, so there’s always going to be a small amount of time before targeting and shooting.

          I’ve heard, havent verified but apparently local police were working the grounds and apparently maybe that roof? So it might have been their responsibility entirely. I’m guessing the kid only peaked the roof shortly before shooting though, that’s the only way he would’ve gotten a shot off.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Apon rereading, your comment isn’t any more coherent. It’s like a vague “what is this world coming to?!”, drawing disparate concepts together as if they form some grand pattern, but there’s nothing there.

    • exanime@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’m still thinking they send the “barely qualified” secret servicemen to protect Trump

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      There’s no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated

      NOFX wrote about the rise of ignorance in America and the song “The Idiots Are Taking Over” is more appropriate now than ever before.

      full lyrics below. link to song for anyone not familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sNWDfryyMk


      It's not the right time to be sober
      Now the idiots have taken over
      Spreading like a social cancer, is there an answer?
      Mensa membership conceding
      Tell me why and how are all the stupid people breeding
      Watson, it's really elementary
      The industrial revolution
      Has flipped the *removed* on evolution
      The benevolent and wise are being thwarted, ostracized, what a bummer
      The world keeps getting dumber
      Insensitivity is standard and faith is being fancied over reason
      Darwin's rolling over in his coffin
      The fittest are surviving much less often
      Now everything seems to be reversing, and it's worsening
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool
      Now angry mob mentality's no longer the exception, it's the rule
      And I'm starting to feel a lot like Charlton Heston
      Stranded on a primate planet
      Apes and orangutans that ran it to the ground
      With generals and the armies that obeyed them
      Followers following fables
      Philosophies that enable them to rule without regard
      There's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated
      Political scientists get the same one vote as some Arkansas inbred
      Majority rule, don't work in mental institutions
      Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions
      What are we left with?
      A nation of god-fearing pregnant nationalists
      Who feel it's their duty to populate the homeland
      Pass on traditions
      How to get ahead religions
      And prosperity via simpleton culture
      The idiots are taking over
      
  • tacosplease@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Boeing was one of my accounts back before the pandemic. I had to respond to RFPs where my employer sold services to Boeing. They sucked to work with and just didn’t understand really basic things about the services they were requesting in their own RFPs.

    Disney and Walmart on the other hand were great. They were not pushovers, but they were consistently friendly, and they always knew their shit.

    • WldFyre@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Didn’t two Chinese rockets just blow up a couple months ago? I don’t think a couple specific aerospace examples on the cutting edge are indicative of broader issues lol

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Boeing is just a symptom of the rampant corporate greed and irresponsibility that modern MBAs teach as part of normal daily operations.

        It affects everyone, makes everyone less safe and less secure. Enshittification on a world scale brought to you by Next Quarter Only bottom line capitalism.

        But the powers that be are fine with it for now, mainly because of class war.

        • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I taught business ethnics for MBAs when i was in graduate school.

          The only ‘ethics’ they learned was ‘maximize shareholder value at any price’. They spent an entire semester learning to to argue why murdering people and abusing people was morally justified as long as the share price goes up. That was the curriculum. Nothing else mattered.

          • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            If humanity survives this with our records intact, future historians will put a huge chunk of the blame on that mentality.

            It really started with Dodge vs Ford, that codified the mentality as mainstream and we have paid the price for it every year since.

    • nifty@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, everything people have built up to now relies on a significantly greater amount of complexity. There is a lot which works well and is held together by hardworking, unsung normal everyday folks, but you don’t make the national news for getting shit done or keeping stuff functional.

      That said, yeah the bean counters have fucking ruined engineering firms, and it’s a story which repeats itself over and over. There’s also the issue of nepo babies or “I know this person” incest in a lot of places where qualified people are passed over for someone “you know”. The nepotism and cronyism phenomenon is a huge problem for many institutions, not just engineering firms. Nepotism and cronyism is not just an American issue, it’s something you see everywhere.

      Regarding unqualified people, I do think maybe standards should be raised for entry into some college programs. But the only way raising standards would make sense if we significantly invest in public education. In short, a lot of “breaking” of America is the direct result of short sighted Republican policies.

      • EnderLaw@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Boeing shifted production to break the Seattle unions. That’s been a sound financial decision so far…except for all of the failures and dead people.

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Every form of capitalism becomes unbridled as concentration of wealth allow exploiters to engage in regulatory capture and bribery.

      It’s only a matter of time.

      There is no ‘good’ capitalism, it is ALL the exploitation of the less powerful.

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Every company is trying for the most unqualified workforce these days… but at least most of them don’t involve flight.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.

    Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I’d rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we’ll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Who do you think built the shuttle…?

      Also, not defending the Musk shitstain, but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.

        That wasn’t the focus of my post, but are you suggesting that there is a nonzero number of rocket explosions that would be considered acceptable?

        I don’t need to be Elon Musk, or even know much about the space industry or development to know that the target number should always be zero.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          but are you suggesting that there is a nonzero number of rocket explosions that would be considered acceptable?

          …yes? During development specifically. Of course there is.

          • Furbag@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Let me know how that interview goes, because if the rocket you developed and spent billions of dollars building explodes at launch, you’re going to be looking for a new line of work.

            I’m sure the next aeronautics company will totally understand. Mondays, am I right?

            • ripcord@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              See, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you keep showing more and more that you’re not following what’s happening in the launch business at all.

              So for coming up on 10 years now, SpaceX has been absolutely kicking everyone’s ass. China is now coming up on being second.

              They’re following processes of rapid iteration. During design, they build quickly (and relatively cheaply). They launch frequently. Those launches may not go perfectly. Sometimes they explode. But they get a LOT of data. This helps them iterate quickly.

              This is different from what Boeing, Blue Origin, etc have been doing (and at different points, at NASA’s direction) - the “try to build it slow but steady, and perfect the first time” method. Guess what? That has been working horribly. It takes way way longer, costs way way more, etc. And they’ve left the door open for SpaceX to take over. They’re quickly becoming the ONLY game in town. And neither they nor, say, Blue Origin have really been focused that much on profit.

              Rapid Iteration is also what we did early on in the space program. A lot of stuff failed (blew up) but we were making REALLY rapid progress.

              Now - once the rockets go into production, they absolutely CAN’T blow up. ESPECIALLY with people inside. That’s a totally different thing.

              SpaceX just lost had their first operation failure in like a decade. After hundreds of successful launches. It’s the best record I believe any rocket series has ever had.

              You also picked tbe Shuttle as an example of things working well. It’s ironic - that’s specifically when everything started turning to shit - massive cost overruns, massive, years-long project delays. The delays for manned spaceflight, for launch systems, were a brand new thing starting with STS.

              Blowing shit up is absolutely a valid part of the learning/development phase of rocket design.

              • Furbag@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Okay, you’ve made some pretty salient points. I’m not too proud to admit that my understanding of the topic is limited. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me more on the subject.

                • ripcord@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Man, this has been a nice day full of niceness. It’s just…nice.

                  Have a good weekend, furbag. You’re a classy dude/ette.

      • piccolo@ani.social
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        6 months ago

        Not Boeing. Rockwell design and built the orbiter. Boeing later bought Rockwell im the mid 90’s.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I probably should have been more specific, though you’re right.

          They seem to think though that NASA themselves did most of the design and manufacturing or something, instead of farming a ton of it out to various contractors (Thiokol, etc). That absolutely happened with STS.

          In fact, the Space Shuttle is where costs and time frames and project management and etc started to go off the rails - and led to where we are with Boeing and others today. It’s a bad one to choose to make his point - even if we were actually still getting SOME shit done back then and the situation hadn’t deteriorated so badly.

    • Homescool@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      There is a reason we moved this to the private sector. Govt bureaucrats can’t get out of their own way and every project triples in cost, with no single person calling the shots to get the job done. Govt cannot keep up with the pace we need.

      Boeing is hot garbage.

      SpaceX has a shit face, but they are incredibly competent and effective at iterating their way to space.

      • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

        Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

        • Homescool@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I agree with everything you say and I am all about the way that you captured the dysfunction of the political apparatus and its inability to deliver for a price and on a date. I think my argument is that that’s exactly why the government should not be in charge of this stuff. It should not be political. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid billboards in space, but at least we’ll be able to finally get out there.

          • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

            Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      NASA blew up a fair few rockets, and lost two shuttles, so that’s not necessarily the better option.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Fair point, I don’t want to fixate on that one aspect of the colossal technical challenge that is getting spacecraft into orbit, but I’m still of the opinion that a nationalized and fully government-funded space program will always yield better results than a privatized one because there is no profit-taking incentive.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector.

      While I like the sentiment, you should know that you are absolutely, completely, 100% wrong.

      The space shuttle was the deadliest spacecraft in human history, not just in the US, but in the entire world. And mind you, NASA spacecrafts are all also quite literally built from parts delivered by the lowest bidder.

      For the record Boeing sucks and is doing a pretty crappy job right now, but regardless, it would be safer to launch on the Starliner 20 times in a row than to ride in the space shuttle once. At least the Starliner has a launch escape system.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I followed the Space Shuttle program pretty heavily as a kid and got to see a few launches from the Cape.

        Truly loved the innovative look and the futuristic (lol, at the time) feel.

        In retrospect, it was a good try with bad funding, and an exceptionally expensive satellite positioner that never lived up to its promised turn around time.

        I loved it, but it kind of was an objective flop.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money?

      I mean, spaceX has a fantastic track record. In their entire history, they only once failed to deliver a payload to orbit, and that was like just a month ago that they had their first failure after well over 300 successful launches. That’s record setting reliability in orbital rockets.

      They blow up a lot of rockets in testing and development, but that’s kind of just how rocket development goes. It’s the same for NASA, Russia, and everyone else who designs rockets. You blow some up during development.

      I’m just saying, I’m not sure you can lump SpaceX and Boeing together, they’re very different companies with very different track records.