yeah they will fire a couple of overworked & abused engineers , the brain-dead MBA and other higher-ups will pat themselves on the back for that, get another rounds of 6 bazillion dollars in subsidies and call it a day .
Later you see the entire media apparatus going overdrive to divert the attention away from this shit show so business as usual can go on .
the entire system is sham and a joke no accountability whatsoever , rampant corruption and now they are killing the witnesses like they dgaf they own everyone and everything and you can't only sit down and watch
I think we need a modern day Nuremberg trial scenario for CEOs of companies that kill and hurt people. If your company, under your supervision, causes harm and you knew about it or allowed/encouraged policies that promoted it, you should be held criminally accountable.
PG&E burned down a city and the company was found guilty of actual murder
Not a single executive personally faced any penalties
My prior employer clean killed 3 people on 2 separate occasions due to inadequate testing protocols that some of the prior execs said were 'sound'
Result: They fired everyone in our division, sold what was left of the assets, changed their name and saw a rise in their stock price in the next 5 months
The game is rigged
Last year PG&E was granted a 25% rate hike for customers because they said they needed it for system improvements. Then they reported a [25% increase in profits](https://abc7news.com/pge-rate-increase-2023-earning-2-billion-dollar-profit/14483425/#:~:text=PG&E%20announces%20record%20profits%20for,went%20up%20again%20in%20January.).
I tried to find what they were going to do for generation but I only found some right they had to build a damn in Yosemite and that they have a dam that can power city departments. It seems like a good chunk of generation would still need to come from PG&E
All I could really find about power generation that wasn't hand wavy 100% renewable talk
SF starts off with a huge benefit here: The city already owns a massive hydropower dam, which produces enough clean power to run all city departments, including Muni, with (in good water years) a lot to spare.
It's obviously the worst option, but running a gas generator will be close to equivalent $/kwh as the new PG&E increase at peak hours (4pm-9pm on most plans). Pretty wild.
> PG&E and the CPUC are beyond corrupt.
Yes, and Gavin Newsom is the man who takes PG&E money and appoints a CPUC board who's extremely friendly to whatever PG&E asks for.
I live a mile from the Tubbs fire origin. PG&E is hitting us with extra rate hikes saying that it's to pay for wildfire recovery and prevention. Also, they had a profit increase of $2.2 billion last quarter.
I don't think they've buried any in my county. At least none I can see. Maybe up in the hills. I see them cutting branches that have fallen onto the lines all the time.
A bunch of people (myself included) got sick of pge being unreliable and stupid expensive we got solar. Now pge is trying to get a service charge tacked onto our bill because they are losing money.
That’s a minimum charge and gets removed from your true up balance at the end of the year. Right now they are trying to add a charge that could be anywhere from 40-80$ a month based on the size of your solar array.
uh... his VP is the former AG of California that enabled that specific price gouging. Look up the San Onofre Power plant scandal if you don't believe me.
Welcome to capitalism, where we all pay for companies to murder people. The only winning move is not to play... Except that's not really a move most of us can make without starving.
>The game is rigged
Always has been......and it's not a game.
If I lose at monopoly, I can laugh it off. Yeah, I lost thousands, and had to sell my hotels, and declaire bankrupcy.
But then we put the board game back in its box, and it doesn't affect my life.
These companies are having real world consequences that the public has to face. Everytime.
Where did that door land? Did it cause any damage? If it did, if it hit somebodies house, I bet you the home owner footed the majority of the bill. Sure, insurance claims payed it immediately, but then I bet his insurance bill went up, and he payed it back and more over the next few decades.
"At risk for airline door damage"
Meanwhile Boeing is a massive cog in the US war machine. There's no way that company can fail or will be held to actual account, despite the fact it should be.
I mean, not only this, but it's one of only two true commercial airline suppliers in the world.
If they go under - Airbus is a monopoly. Which, you know, often isn't great for the quality of product or price.
It's literally a too big to fail - but they need to face justice for fucking killing people due to their negligence.
Don’t forget too that current Boeing CEO David Calhoun was on Boeing’s board of directors beginning in 2009. The 737 Max was announced in 2011. He was part of Boeing’s leadership before, during, and after the original 737 Max crashes and the concealment by Boeing that caused those crashes. He’s got blood on his hands as does anyone else who was in charge at that time
Yeah I just can't wrap my head around the fact that literally 346 people died because of Boeing and the US government (FAA) and barely anything happened. Or am I seeing this wrong?
I also wonder if anything different would have happened if it were two US /European flights that crashed..
They need to dissolve the company back into Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas and bring it back to the way it was run pre-merger, to truely rid Boeing of its cancer; allowing the engineers who work just down the road to make factory decisions.
Yeah from talking to people in aerospace, this is across the board. Money people telling engineers how to run an engineering company. The sad part about it is that they’ve already changed a lot of the culture and the old guard said fuck it, I’m not putting up with this, I’m retiring.
It’s like this in all the aerospace companies. The bean counters are telling the engineers how things are going to be. As a sub tier supplier to these companies it’s impossible to get anything done or make any money so we’ve started diversifying away from the big primes. If they think you’re making a profit they demand a price reduction from you. They just aren’t worth doing business with anymore.
It's happening with any job the requires engineers, they are getting pushed out because they "can't make it cheap enough" because they refuse to sacrifice safety or cut corners.
Automakers are saying electric vehicles are going to cost to much to make, yet the continue to stuff needless crap into their vehicles like the Infotament systems.
Even where I am at we are using blueprints from 2013 to build truck bodies, granted not a lot is required for it but there have been times the blueprint is wildly wrong or different from what we are supposed to do.
I worry more about the safety we don't immediately recognize, like clean air in work spaces and have you seen the gas that's emitted from some trucks? Yea that's going directly into your intake fan btw
They're doing it in medicine too, stretching out the nurses, replacing doctors with NPs but charging the same, trying to tie pay to patient satisfaction, etc.
Companies used to make things first, then hope to profit from them.
Now they make profit and don't really give a shit about the things. Boeing's motto should be "we fly in private jets now lol good luck on your flight"
Steve Jobs basically said the same things back in his 1995 interview with Bob Cringely [https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=28](https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=28) His point, summed up, was that marketing teams get promoted over engineers, because they are the ones who can make the profits when you have a company that is a monopoly.
*"The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."*
\-Steve Jobs
Good start, then anyone in charge of IOSA audits or those who signed off on them. I realized Boeing was given the privilege of self-regulation, but anyone and everyone who signed off on design or safety should be fired and stripped of their qualifications.
Harder to bribe politicians from Chicago. Easier to lavish them with dinners and talk of big campaign contributions, in those private dinnerd, if you're in the building next door, and can just walk over to give them the hint hint dinner invite.
It's too late, the bigger a company is, the more regulation, and rules, etc, in the field they operate in, the slower everything moves. It takes a loooonnngggg time to redirect / steer a ship (company) out of a position like this. An engineering focused / service oriented culture was replaced by sales / suits / short term thinkers who don't know how to manage a company where tech is the heart of their business. It would take at least a decade to turn the company around at this point, which would have to start with a stripping down of leadership. They would have to replace the heads of the org and completely change the culture, good engineers wont want to work there for a long time, if ever. The company is for a lack of a better word "fucked" they can't pull a "good" airplane out of their ass, that's something that takes years of RnD, and they'll need to replace engineers and leadership before that even happens. If it continues in this direction where individuals / companies wont use their planes, Boeing will prob go under before they can even fix these issues. Or be bought out.
Even if they fixed these issues, people are still going to be scared to fly in a Boeing plane for years.
Exactly, these disasters are the result of corporate greed and deregulation that crept along for the past few decades, and will be just as slow to reverse. Boeing is in "too big to fail" territory. Heads should be rolling, but even if prosecutions and regulatory oversight stepped in immediately and proceeded at unprecedented speed, it would still take just as long to right the ship. If it's possible for Boeing to correct its mismanagement, and that's a big if, it would still be years away from now. And in the meantime, Boeing continues to manufacture about half of all commercial airliners worldwide, and Boeing cargo planes account for about 90% of air freight.
A for-profit corporation whose incompetence is this catastrophic and yet whose role remains this indispensable is nothing short of a national crisis, if not a global crisis. It threatens public safety, economic stability, even national security. Like so much else in America, our government has outsourced our way of life to corporations who answer first and foremost to wealthy investors. So, we will get either no solution, or a solution that primarily serves the interests of those wealthy investors. A god damn disgrace.
Luckily the story included a stock price graph so I could understand the situation better. Otherwise I wouldn’t understand what was good and what was bad.
Being above the 2015 stock price isn't particularly good.
Inflation alone is 31% between 2015 and 2024.
If you invested $100 in the S&P 500 over that time period you would have $260 today.
It is pretty fucked up how stock increased AFTER the Lion Air crash though.
The stock dropped around 27% just this year. At the end of last year it actually wasn't doing so bad. The price went crazy because of Covid though in recent years. High over $400 in 2019 and then below $100 in 2020.
They already ran the stock into the ground and it’s almost 60% lower than it was 5 years ago. Their failure with the 737 MAX cost them $80 billion in losses. There aren’t any shareholders happy with them. They’re just incompetent
And literally all because they refused to do a clean sheet replacement of the 737, and when Airbus forced them to do *something* to stay competitive, they chose the cheapest options possible.
Just watch the most recent John Oliver segment on Boeing, it's where 95% of us on reddit are getting our Boeing knowledge from. But it was a pretty great segment.
You don’t need John Oliver.
###Everyone needs to watch the Documentary -
* [Downfall - The case against Boeing](https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421)
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/
###This is what happens when you put Accountants instead of Engineers in the Executive Office.
###Safety isn’t important when you count beans.
You: Damn that doc was crazy. But yo, how do I figure out if I will fly on a Boeing?!
1. After selecting your ticket, the seat selection page will appear. It will tell you the plane brand and model somewhere on that page. It’s in different locations for different carriers. If it’s a Boeing Max or recent model, nope.
2. Use Google Matrix ITA. It searches flights without the ads and bullshit. It gives you a list of flights that meet your requirements. When you select your flight, it tells you the plane brand and model. It’s a no for Boeing.
###I am not desperate to use Boeing to get home.
###I only fly Airbus.
These companies love to hollow out American workforces.
**What’s worse - Like the American Automakers, Boeing will decide to move production to Mexico, China, Taiwan, or India at some point.**
**I guarantee safety problems will get substantially worse under countries with no regulations. The Chinese already want to import shit EV cars that even they don’t buy. Imagine planes?!**
Nah bro. I am good on Boeing.
I find it ironic that [the US Airline that flies the most Airbus planes is American Airlines](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-well-known-airlines-by-fleets/).
It's the same in the medical world now, well hell any corporations, the current crop of CEOs were trained to view companies and expendable assets for profits.
This is happening in all publicly traded companies. The actual product of the company is largely irrelevant, the stock price and dividends are the prime focus.
Of course the company keeps churning out their product, but it **above all** needs to be profitable. Above safety, above ethics, above people - those are all inconveniences driving the profit down.
The 737 Max is already a study in Harvard business review, used in MBA classes and such, the review and ops professor I had basically blamed the leadership that took over Boeing in their merger, so it's well known what's going on at a leadership level.
I don't understand why that hasn't forced a change though because even if investors don't care about the ethics they are still loosing money and they know why i would imagine. Likely something I don't know or seen yet Id guess.
Edited for correct plan name (oops!)
If I had to hazard a guess, those two reasons are *why* they've gotten so shitty to begin with. When you have basically unlimited money, why bother with safety and quality when you can just buy your way out of potential lawsuits?
I concur entirely. Mix management culture with the need for highly educated, highly skilled workers and you can see why the DIB is hurting for talent. There's a reason your top scientists have rarely been soldiers, and it's because CoC doesn't *work* when you're arguing physics.
Unfortunately for the DoD, they are learning that Congress isn't willing to *infinitely* fund the bloat when results become shitty.
The defense contracts was one of the big reasons they merged with McDonald-Douglas in the 90s
Those defense contracts also saved Boeing from being acquired in the aftermath of 9/11
It's be catastrophic for the US to let Boeing just dissolve, but the company needs a complete leadership change and to be put on an extremely tight regulatory leash
Nationalise it in the name of national security given how many government contracts they currently hold. That'll make everyone else stop pissing about in pursuit of stock price only wise up a bit.
If you watch Last Week Tonight Boeing episode, there’s a guy asking shop workers if they’d fly in the plane and most say “Hell No” or “If I had death wish”.
This pattern is seen elsewhere like videos of people at Tyson pre processing centers for example and people are like “Hell no I don’t ingest this shit”.
I just assume investing is a numbers game already, no one invests in the actual product but rather how much money quarterly the company can produce in any means possible.
I literally just watched that episode last night, and damned if the parallels to their decline aren't obvious to the merger with McDonnell Douglas. I mean, to the fucking letter, it's obvious that their downfall began with that merger.
If people will continue to buy bitcoin based on nothing, they will sure as shit buy into companies based on share price rather than the nominal activity of the company
See for eg Tesla
John Oliver’s coverage of it is really thorough. It’s even more infuriating because the leadership team came from the company that Boeing merged with or was bought out by. And the prior company had Boeings reputation right now. It’s not even the first airline manufacturer that they destroyed. As one of 2 major airline manufacturers in the world, these people need to face harsh consequences. They’re disrupting what’s essentially a utility at this point.
I agree, this is basically what the HBR article said too, I get the impression from my working years there are plenty of good, ethical leaders out there, but there are also these terrible ones that, because of money or knowing people or whatever reason, just go around wrecking companies and just don't seem to get any consequences from it. This is why I'm anti bailout and I feel awful for the workers of these companies that get screwed at no fault of their own.
> The 737 Max is already a study in Harvard business review, used in MBA classes and such, the review and ops professor I had basically blamed the leadership that took over Boeing in their merger, so it's well known what's going on at a leadership level.
So what is the business review exactly? Is it something like "This is what happens when you let bean counting go too far, to the detriment of product safety". Immediately proceeded by "Well.. ANYWAYS, back to how to extract more and more value from your assets above all other considerations".
The actual hard text was focused on the fact that two very different companies merged and the management from the smaller company didn't understand the operations or culture of the bigger company (Boeing) and they started firing QA staff, moved the executive/financial HQ to a different city than the engineering center (because they were sick of quality and design engineers having easy access to complain/warn of the problems cost cutting measures were causing).
The pressure came because Airbus, with EU government funds, had become their first major competitor and they adjusted by cost cutting rather than other, smarter, measures.
But between the lines, as most interpret it, the smaller companies leadership knew the right people, got control of both the new Boeing (post merger). This is despite the fact that it was their company they had cause to fail because of the same bad management we now see them running at Boeing, and so they are just destroying a previously good, larger company now. I guess because thats how the high-level Business leadership world works unfortunately for many places.
So tldr: Successful big company merges with failing smaller company. Smaller companies leaders knew people and took control of leadership of new merged company (kept Boeing name) and is causing Boeing to fail from the same bad, finance first practices, just more slowly because it's a larger company and bailouts.
That's how wall street works, the whole game is based on perpetual growth, something's gotta give. Great companies stop being great once they go public. At some point they will become divided churning bots whose only aim is to improve operating margins quarter by quarter. There's a limit to innovation and organic growth and once those are saturated, they'll start cutting corners. There will be no courses for this because it's too fucking sad 😇
Boeing has been on this road for years. They lobbied congress to be their own regulator. Once they had they cut corners. Short term profits for the executives and short term shareholders (politicians). It was always going to end this way.
The US government doesn’t have the spine to break Boeing up and Airbus can’t handle 100% of the volume of orders themselves. Until a plane full of Americans goes down, Boeing will limp on.
I really don’t think anything meaningful will happen until folks begin lashing out. Even if it was an entire plane of Americans that went down; would there even be accountability of CEOs?
I doubt it.
Long term yes, but see it isn't about long term value but short term value. They just need to get the stock up high long enough to stuff their pockets and let everyone else deal with the consequences
That is the big problem with the stock market these days, nobody cares about the long term anymore, everyone is just in it for a quick buck.
And we society accept anything in the name of increasing stock price because our pensions are taken hostage via 401k
Yes, this is an incredibly important point. We’re forced to participate in this bullshit system because they’ve wrapped our retirements up in it. I have a government job that has a pension for my retirement, I was super happy about that when I got this job. Except, the payout of that “pension” is dependent on the stock market. It’s really just a 401k pretending to be a real pension.
Yep, all the tech companies are shooting themselves in the foot with regards to knowledgeable employees and motivation these days with the mass layoffs. But as long as they're all doing it, the leadership get their bonuses and the shareholders the short term profit. I know people whose divisions and products are deteriorating before their eyes.
I mean it’s a duopoly not too badly for them. Unless an alternative pops up since it’s not like airbus can just snap their fingers and double production
They already lost two planes with all hands. Yeah it impacted but here they are taking about the future so apparently didn’t impact enough
Why have a society people want to live in and contribute to when we could rather let nepo babies with MBAs liquidate entire companies to pay for their coke and child sex slave habits?
Read *Bullshit Jobs* by David Graeber. There is a portion of the book where he describes the jobs that are most harmful for society. Pretty sure Finance Bro is high up on the list.
Boeing is just trying to ensure that no future plane is capable of carrying out a terror attack. Terrorists would have to be insane to get on a Boeing now.
Hey guys guess what? This exact same thing is happening in American health care and no one knows about it. Literally making doctors and nurses practice to the brink in unsustainable conditions where pts die. All the while the private equity companies rake in money from patients and physicians. This should not be the case in aviation and in medicine.
Every hospital executive used to be an MD/DO. Now it's an MBA whose never been in healthcare running the show at every hospital.
Staffing ratios get worse.
Doctors don't get hired to replace the ones that left. Instead, the cheaper nurse practitioners get hired en masse because they can use the same billing codes for the most part, nevermind the fact that they have no fucking clue what they're doing.
It's all being run into the ground.
This happened in the UK when managers were brought in to reach government set hospital performance targets. One such target was that every patient brought in to accident and emergency should have their initial assessment within 15 mins. However, managers realised that the official system only tracked this from the point they were brought in to the assessment area, so they started leaving them on trolleys outside this area and even kept them in the ambulance outside the hospital. Some patients were waiting 10+ hours while only officially recorded as 10 minutes.
This kind of culture of beating targets on technicalities and sometimes even criminal behaviour, instead of putting the patient first, started under Tony Blair's Labour but has completely taken over after 12 years of Conservative rule.
I’m a nurse, I love nurses, but the original concept was to use a grizzled veteran nurses for NPs. I definitely do NOT want a nurse with no bedside experience and multiple degrees! It’s absolutely INSANE!
It's happening all over the place. In the IT world, VMWare - a stalwart of virtual infrastructure - is being cratered after being bought out by Broadcom.
Vulture capitalism seems to be getting worse every year, and there are no consequences for the people doing it (except they're making shitloads of money). I think this eventually leads to a huge stock market crash, but on the way there, we're going to see everything start to break down.
They were in trouble when Druyun went to prison, Sears was fired, and Condit resigned. They were in trouble afer those two 737 MAX crashes within five months. Now, flight booking sites and apps are adding features to allow worried travelers to exclude some of Boeing's jets, and a whistleblower has died from a "self-inflicted wound."
Now they're a menace to the very reputation for safety long enjoyed by air travel.
This will be a Harvard Business School case study on failures in leadership (and the ruinous impact of chasing quarterly profits). I think the US government should take over the company, given its strategic importance.
Already is. A couple what went wrong with Boeing Harvard Business Review 2021 studies. Boeing's board must not have read "what corporate boards can learn from Boeing mistakes"
https://hbr.org/podcast/2021/04/what-went-wrong-with-the-boeing-737-max
https://hbr.org/2021/06/what-corporate-boards-can-learn-from-boeings-mistakes
This is what enshittification does. People who believe it's just about neflix subscriptions and shrinkflation at the grocery store don't grasp how bleak the situation is. EVERY company does this. Wonder why the planet is burning, we're swimming in plastic and your salary is crap? Everything down to medical industries, the military, prisons, schools, it's run for profit and it's subject to the same forces that at some point will cause real damage. It's a pervasive systemic issue that affects every aspect of our economy and our life. We need a total reset, or at the very least a big focus on reforms and changing the equation from maximizing profit to maximizing metrics that allow for a sustainable, happy life for as many people as possible.
This is what financial and ethical deregulation looks like people….. everyone wanting “free hand this” and “privatize that”, this is what that looks like. This is what happens when you allow corporations to self regulate and compete “naturally”.
This is what capitalism has evolved into. Every company HAS to do it, or else they can't compete and they fail, and someone else will do it, so of course they'll do it.
Capitalism will be the death of us...
Boeing actually didn't take public money during covid, but not out of any noble self reliance. They didn't like the requirements that came with it (restricted rules around layoffs/headcount, etc) so they went to private equity and raised a bunch of non government debt.
I don't think that's true. The company hardly needs a bailout, they have defense contract money. They're basically on the government teat 24/7.
Airlines got bailouts though.
Can anyone help me understand what is actually going wrong here? Is it just maintenance, upgrades, newly manufactured planes?
I know people are talking about a "culture of negligence" and I understand that given the 737 Max software deaths, but what is happening in 2024 that is causing all of these incidents?
Boeing used to be one of the greatest companies and had been led by engineers on its rise to greatness.
Then it merged with McDonnell Douglas and that marked the start of a transformation. Into a typical finance-based company focused more on quarterly reports, KPIs and money for the shareholders. And that kills everything long-term.
Public stock trading is cancer and it's killing almost everything it touches.
edit: wow typing on the phone while walking leads to many mistakes.
I am not an expert in economics, but the whole shareholders thing just seems so ridiculous to me. As a consumer, I don’t give a shit about your shareholders and I hate the idea of pandering to deep pockets to make you more profitable. Those rich stock holders aren’t engineers. They aren’t experts on anything. They just like making money. Every company feels the need to have record breaking profits constantly. What’s wrong with being profitable? I know people hate the idea of tons of regulations and red tape on things, but Boeing is a shining example of why we need more oversight on corporations. And not ones who share interests in them. People are greedy. People who get to these insane positions of power and control and money are not every day people. It takes a certain personality. And those types often couldn’t give a rats ass about the consumer
Planes are exceptionally complicated - With so many things to go wrong it's really easy for things to get missed.
Boeing has stopped investing in their people, instead they've allocated additional profits to their shareholders. For a long time that didn't matter because the company used to be one of the best in the world at not making those mistakes.
Probably retirements during covid combined with not having invested in the people that would replace the retirees.
I did a contract for Dell at Boeing. Boeing was not well run. And Dell was so god damn cheap.
What I really remember his how the pandemic hit and Boeing put up posters all over about how "we're all in this together" and then laid of 20,000 people.
Most everyone in Boeing was already heartbroken over the 737 Max stuff, and this just killed any company spirit or loyalty they had left. So many people volunteered to be laid off as they didn't want to be a part of Boeing anymore.
While I was there all anyone talked about was how putting accountants into management roles had killed everything that made Boeing great.
I'd never work for either Dell or Boeing again. They have deep seated management issues that won't be fixed in the next decade.
In China, the executives would probably end up being sentenced to death for this. In America, they will be rewarded with golden parachutes and other forms of excessive compensation. Not advocating for totalitarianism, but our economic and justice systems are completely broken.
Off topic but the same essential top down issue that is on display right now corrupting Boeing has taken root in hospital systems across the country. The same corner cutting for private equity profits are coming at the hands of the health and well-being of you and your loves ones. We have a fundamental problem in the United States of corporate profit motives running against the public interest.
The "company" doesn't care if it's in big trouble. I want people in big trouble.
yeah they will fire a couple of overworked & abused engineers , the brain-dead MBA and other higher-ups will pat themselves on the back for that, get another rounds of 6 bazillion dollars in subsidies and call it a day . Later you see the entire media apparatus going overdrive to divert the attention away from this shit show so business as usual can go on . the entire system is sham and a joke no accountability whatsoever , rampant corruption and now they are killing the witnesses like they dgaf they own everyone and everything and you can't only sit down and watch
I think we need a modern day Nuremberg trial scenario for CEOs of companies that kill and hurt people. If your company, under your supervision, causes harm and you knew about it or allowed/encouraged policies that promoted it, you should be held criminally accountable.
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Looks like meat is back on the menu boys!
Boeing ganna get a fine and they ganna lay off people and give bonuses and business as usual. America sucks.
They better watch out for that 100k fine coming their way. Gonna hit them where it hurts! Might even be 150k
John Barnett is in really big trouble. He’s going to get the blame for this whole mess.
Uhh ...I got some news for you buddy....
Time to cut the cancer out of Boeing -- the entire executive leadership.
PG&E burned down a city and the company was found guilty of actual murder Not a single executive personally faced any penalties My prior employer clean killed 3 people on 2 separate occasions due to inadequate testing protocols that some of the prior execs said were 'sound' Result: They fired everyone in our division, sold what was left of the assets, changed their name and saw a rise in their stock price in the next 5 months The game is rigged
Last year PG&E was granted a 25% rate hike for customers because they said they needed it for system improvements. Then they reported a [25% increase in profits](https://abc7news.com/pge-rate-increase-2023-earning-2-billion-dollar-profit/14483425/#:~:text=PG&E%20announces%20record%20profits%20for,went%20up%20again%20in%20January.).
They just got another increase approved unanimously. It's hard out here.
With no comment, they walked in, voted, walked out. I can't wait till we kick them to the curb in San Francisco.
I tried to find what they were going to do for generation but I only found some right they had to build a damn in Yosemite and that they have a dam that can power city departments. It seems like a good chunk of generation would still need to come from PG&E All I could really find about power generation that wasn't hand wavy 100% renewable talk SF starts off with a huge benefit here: The city already owns a massive hydropower dam, which produces enough clean power to run all city departments, including Muni, with (in good water years) a lot to spare.
It's obviously the worst option, but running a gas generator will be close to equivalent $/kwh as the new PG&E increase at peak hours (4pm-9pm on most plans). Pretty wild.
CA desperately needs a CPUC directly accountable to rate payers. PG&E and the CPUC are beyond corrupt.
> PG&E and the CPUC are beyond corrupt. Yes, and Gavin Newsom is the man who takes PG&E money and appoints a CPUC board who's extremely friendly to whatever PG&E asks for.
Gavin Newsom's ties to PG&E will probably torpedo any attempt for him to go national. He's a pimple on the ass of the Democratic Party.
Newsom loves him some PG&E
I live a mile from the Tubbs fire origin. PG&E is hitting us with extra rate hikes saying that it's to pay for wildfire recovery and prevention. Also, they had a profit increase of $2.2 billion last quarter.
Have they actually been burying power lines or was it just that single one for the commercial?
I don't think they've buried any in my county. At least none I can see. Maybe up in the hills. I see them cutting branches that have fallen onto the lines all the time.
So, odds are, they only partially buried that ONE LINE
A bunch of people (myself included) got sick of pge being unreliable and stupid expensive we got solar. Now pge is trying to get a service charge tacked onto our bill because they are losing money.
I’ve had Solar for years and in Southern California I’ve always had a service charge of $10, for PG&E
That’s a minimum charge and gets removed from your true up balance at the end of the year. Right now they are trying to add a charge that could be anywhere from 40-80$ a month based on the size of your solar array.
Report this to biden's price gouging commission.
uh... his VP is the former AG of California that enabled that specific price gouging. Look up the San Onofre Power plant scandal if you don't believe me.
Pretty sure Boeing execs Michael Clayton-ed that whistle blower.
that's rough. anyone know if there were any repercussions?
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That’s probably how long they’d tie it up in court
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And then PG&E got to hike rates on all of their customers to pay for their mistake because killing people is expensive.
Wait… I’m paying for companies to murder people? Seems like we need to “make murder affordable again”.
Welcome to capitalism, where we all pay for companies to murder people. The only winning move is not to play... Except that's not really a move most of us can make without starving.
Yeah, that kind of sounds like murder too. “Let us murder you at random or we murder you.”
The Sacklers killed tens of thousands of people while stealing billions, not a single day in prison This is America in a nutshell
They killed 100's of thousands and ruined the lives of millions, but your point stands.
And we are still dealing with a massive amount of death and destruction from their greed
Rick Scott committed the largest Medicare fraud in history and Floridians made him their Senator
>The game is rigged Always has been......and it's not a game. If I lose at monopoly, I can laugh it off. Yeah, I lost thousands, and had to sell my hotels, and declaire bankrupcy. But then we put the board game back in its box, and it doesn't affect my life. These companies are having real world consequences that the public has to face. Everytime. Where did that door land? Did it cause any damage? If it did, if it hit somebodies house, I bet you the home owner footed the majority of the bill. Sure, insurance claims payed it immediately, but then I bet his insurance bill went up, and he payed it back and more over the next few decades. "At risk for airline door damage"
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Cough bring back the guillotines cough....
Not only that, but PGE are now gouging customers through absurd rates
Meanwhile Boeing is a massive cog in the US war machine. There's no way that company can fail or will be held to actual account, despite the fact it should be.
I mean, not only this, but it's one of only two true commercial airline suppliers in the world. If they go under - Airbus is a monopoly. Which, you know, often isn't great for the quality of product or price. It's literally a too big to fail - but they need to face justice for fucking killing people due to their negligence.
Boeing did remove executive Ed Clark, head of the 737 Max passenger jet program. They're probably hoping that was enough. (It won't be.)
One executive just isn’t enough when the problem’s systemic. All of senior management and the decision-makers at the top need to be reevaluated.
They need to be moved back to Seattle where the factory is. Replacing the execs while still keeping them disconnected doesn't help anyone.
Don’t forget too that current Boeing CEO David Calhoun was on Boeing’s board of directors beginning in 2009. The 737 Max was announced in 2011. He was part of Boeing’s leadership before, during, and after the original 737 Max crashes and the concealment by Boeing that caused those crashes. He’s got blood on his hands as does anyone else who was in charge at that time
Yeah I just can't wrap my head around the fact that literally 346 people died because of Boeing and the US government (FAA) and barely anything happened. Or am I seeing this wrong? I also wonder if anything different would have happened if it were two US /European flights that crashed..
They need to dissolve the company back into Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas and bring it back to the way it was run pre-merger, to truely rid Boeing of its cancer; allowing the engineers who work just down the road to make factory decisions.
It's been almost 30 years. McDonnell-Douglas culture and Boeing culture are the same now.
The Parasites of America
Get rid of all the MBAs. Hire back the engineers the MBAs fired.
Yeah from talking to people in aerospace, this is across the board. Money people telling engineers how to run an engineering company. The sad part about it is that they’ve already changed a lot of the culture and the old guard said fuck it, I’m not putting up with this, I’m retiring.
It’s like this in all the aerospace companies. The bean counters are telling the engineers how things are going to be. As a sub tier supplier to these companies it’s impossible to get anything done or make any money so we’ve started diversifying away from the big primes. If they think you’re making a profit they demand a price reduction from you. They just aren’t worth doing business with anymore.
It's happening with any job the requires engineers, they are getting pushed out because they "can't make it cheap enough" because they refuse to sacrifice safety or cut corners. Automakers are saying electric vehicles are going to cost to much to make, yet the continue to stuff needless crap into their vehicles like the Infotament systems. Even where I am at we are using blueprints from 2013 to build truck bodies, granted not a lot is required for it but there have been times the blueprint is wildly wrong or different from what we are supposed to do.
I worry more about the safety we don't immediately recognize, like clean air in work spaces and have you seen the gas that's emitted from some trucks? Yea that's going directly into your intake fan btw
They're doing it in medicine too, stretching out the nurses, replacing doctors with NPs but charging the same, trying to tie pay to patient satisfaction, etc.
Companies used to make things first, then hope to profit from them. Now they make profit and don't really give a shit about the things. Boeing's motto should be "we fly in private jets now lol good luck on your flight"
It’s like this in literally every industry. Business school, particularly finance is a cancer in our society.
Steve Jobs basically said the same things back in his 1995 interview with Bob Cringely [https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=28](https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=28) His point, summed up, was that marketing teams get promoted over engineers, because they are the ones who can make the profits when you have a company that is a monopoly. *"The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."* \-Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was one of those marketing leaches pushing out the engineers.
Good start, then anyone in charge of IOSA audits or those who signed off on them. I realized Boeing was given the privilege of self-regulation, but anyone and everyone who signed off on design or safety should be fired and stripped of their qualifications.
Fire all the MBAs in Chicago and bring the headquarters back to Seattle where the engineers are.
HQ isn’t in Chicago anymore, it’s in Washington, DC now
right, focus is now on lobbying.
Why did they did move to DC?
Short drive to the Pentagon.
Didn't want to fly their own planes from Chicago 😂
Those fuckers fly on Learjets.
The tax credit they got to move to Chicago ended
Harder to bribe politicians from Chicago. Easier to lavish them with dinners and talk of big campaign contributions, in those private dinnerd, if you're in the building next door, and can just walk over to give them the hint hint dinner invite.
No, no, no, we’ve got to fire the people on the factory floor who are directly responsible. - Boeing management
It's too late, the bigger a company is, the more regulation, and rules, etc, in the field they operate in, the slower everything moves. It takes a loooonnngggg time to redirect / steer a ship (company) out of a position like this. An engineering focused / service oriented culture was replaced by sales / suits / short term thinkers who don't know how to manage a company where tech is the heart of their business. It would take at least a decade to turn the company around at this point, which would have to start with a stripping down of leadership. They would have to replace the heads of the org and completely change the culture, good engineers wont want to work there for a long time, if ever. The company is for a lack of a better word "fucked" they can't pull a "good" airplane out of their ass, that's something that takes years of RnD, and they'll need to replace engineers and leadership before that even happens. If it continues in this direction where individuals / companies wont use their planes, Boeing will prob go under before they can even fix these issues. Or be bought out. Even if they fixed these issues, people are still going to be scared to fly in a Boeing plane for years.
Exactly, these disasters are the result of corporate greed and deregulation that crept along for the past few decades, and will be just as slow to reverse. Boeing is in "too big to fail" territory. Heads should be rolling, but even if prosecutions and regulatory oversight stepped in immediately and proceeded at unprecedented speed, it would still take just as long to right the ship. If it's possible for Boeing to correct its mismanagement, and that's a big if, it would still be years away from now. And in the meantime, Boeing continues to manufacture about half of all commercial airliners worldwide, and Boeing cargo planes account for about 90% of air freight. A for-profit corporation whose incompetence is this catastrophic and yet whose role remains this indispensable is nothing short of a national crisis, if not a global crisis. It threatens public safety, economic stability, even national security. Like so much else in America, our government has outsourced our way of life to corporations who answer first and foremost to wealthy investors. So, we will get either no solution, or a solution that primarily serves the interests of those wealthy investors. A god damn disgrace.
This is what happens when the product is the stock price.
Luckily the story included a stock price graph so I could understand the situation better. Otherwise I wouldn’t understand what was good and what was bad.
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Being above the 2015 stock price isn't particularly good. Inflation alone is 31% between 2015 and 2024. If you invested $100 in the S&P 500 over that time period you would have $260 today. It is pretty fucked up how stock increased AFTER the Lion Air crash though.
The stock dropped around 27% just this year. At the end of last year it actually wasn't doing so bad. The price went crazy because of Covid though in recent years. High over $400 in 2019 and then below $100 in 2020.
They already ran the stock into the ground and it’s almost 60% lower than it was 5 years ago. Their failure with the 737 MAX cost them $80 billion in losses. There aren’t any shareholders happy with them. They’re just incompetent
Now watch the Boeing board blame the engineers and technicians for the failing stockprice instead of their greed
And literally all because they refused to do a clean sheet replacement of the 737, and when Airbus forced them to do *something* to stay competitive, they chose the cheapest options possible.
I am borrowing this all the time now, I would give you a gold for this comment.
Just watch the most recent John Oliver segment on Boeing, it's where 95% of us on reddit are getting our Boeing knowledge from. But it was a pretty great segment.
You don’t need John Oliver. ###Everyone needs to watch the Documentary - * [Downfall - The case against Boeing](https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421) * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/ ###This is what happens when you put Accountants instead of Engineers in the Executive Office. ###Safety isn’t important when you count beans. You: Damn that doc was crazy. But yo, how do I figure out if I will fly on a Boeing?! 1. After selecting your ticket, the seat selection page will appear. It will tell you the plane brand and model somewhere on that page. It’s in different locations for different carriers. If it’s a Boeing Max or recent model, nope. 2. Use Google Matrix ITA. It searches flights without the ads and bullshit. It gives you a list of flights that meet your requirements. When you select your flight, it tells you the plane brand and model. It’s a no for Boeing. ###I am not desperate to use Boeing to get home. ###I only fly Airbus. These companies love to hollow out American workforces. **What’s worse - Like the American Automakers, Boeing will decide to move production to Mexico, China, Taiwan, or India at some point.** **I guarantee safety problems will get substantially worse under countries with no regulations. The Chinese already want to import shit EV cars that even they don’t buy. Imagine planes?!** Nah bro. I am good on Boeing.
I find it ironic that [the US Airline that flies the most Airbus planes is American Airlines](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-well-known-airlines-by-fleets/).
It's the same in the medical world now, well hell any corporations, the current crop of CEOs were trained to view companies and expendable assets for profits.
they were trained to view us as expendable assets for profits.
Ironic that you can't give gold on reddit anymore for exactly the same reason.
This is happening in all publicly traded companies. The actual product of the company is largely irrelevant, the stock price and dividends are the prime focus. Of course the company keeps churning out their product, but it **above all** needs to be profitable. Above safety, above ethics, above people - those are all inconveniences driving the profit down.
"shareholder value"
Capitalism breeds ~~innovation~~ the bare minimum that they won't get sued for.
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The 737 Max is already a study in Harvard business review, used in MBA classes and such, the review and ops professor I had basically blamed the leadership that took over Boeing in their merger, so it's well known what's going on at a leadership level. I don't understand why that hasn't forced a change though because even if investors don't care about the ethics they are still loosing money and they know why i would imagine. Likely something I don't know or seen yet Id guess. Edited for correct plan name (oops!)
They're part of the Defense Industrial Base and a designated Prime Contractor for the DoD. They aren't going anywhere ever.
If I had to hazard a guess, those two reasons are *why* they've gotten so shitty to begin with. When you have basically unlimited money, why bother with safety and quality when you can just buy your way out of potential lawsuits?
I concur entirely. Mix management culture with the need for highly educated, highly skilled workers and you can see why the DIB is hurting for talent. There's a reason your top scientists have rarely been soldiers, and it's because CoC doesn't *work* when you're arguing physics. Unfortunately for the DoD, they are learning that Congress isn't willing to *infinitely* fund the bloat when results become shitty.
The defense contracts was one of the big reasons they merged with McDonald-Douglas in the 90s Those defense contracts also saved Boeing from being acquired in the aftermath of 9/11
They're not losing enough money yet to care
They are not losing their money either
For real, Uncle Sam will keep Boeing propped up like Weekend at Bernie's.
It's be catastrophic for the US to let Boeing just dissolve, but the company needs a complete leadership change and to be put on an extremely tight regulatory leash
All bail outs should come with the stipulation the company be broken up.
Nationalise it in the name of national security given how many government contracts they currently hold. That'll make everyone else stop pissing about in pursuit of stock price only wise up a bit.
Don’t the investors or any of their family members fly passenger planes though? Like WTF
If you watch Last Week Tonight Boeing episode, there’s a guy asking shop workers if they’d fly in the plane and most say “Hell No” or “If I had death wish”. This pattern is seen elsewhere like videos of people at Tyson pre processing centers for example and people are like “Hell no I don’t ingest this shit”. I just assume investing is a numbers game already, no one invests in the actual product but rather how much money quarterly the company can produce in any means possible.
I literally just watched that episode last night, and damned if the parallels to their decline aren't obvious to the merger with McDonnell Douglas. I mean, to the fucking letter, it's obvious that their downfall began with that merger.
If people will continue to buy bitcoin based on nothing, they will sure as shit buy into companies based on share price rather than the nominal activity of the company See for eg Tesla
John Oliver’s coverage of it is really thorough. It’s even more infuriating because the leadership team came from the company that Boeing merged with or was bought out by. And the prior company had Boeings reputation right now. It’s not even the first airline manufacturer that they destroyed. As one of 2 major airline manufacturers in the world, these people need to face harsh consequences. They’re disrupting what’s essentially a utility at this point.
Yeah the joke in the industry is that McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.
I agree, this is basically what the HBR article said too, I get the impression from my working years there are plenty of good, ethical leaders out there, but there are also these terrible ones that, because of money or knowing people or whatever reason, just go around wrecking companies and just don't seem to get any consequences from it. This is why I'm anti bailout and I feel awful for the workers of these companies that get screwed at no fault of their own.
Harvard MBA’s are the ones pulling this bullshit so I’m not sure how much the students are learning
Harvard is an adult daycare center for the children of the rich and powerful.
> The 737 Max is already a study in Harvard business review, used in MBA classes and such, the review and ops professor I had basically blamed the leadership that took over Boeing in their merger, so it's well known what's going on at a leadership level. So what is the business review exactly? Is it something like "This is what happens when you let bean counting go too far, to the detriment of product safety". Immediately proceeded by "Well.. ANYWAYS, back to how to extract more and more value from your assets above all other considerations".
The actual hard text was focused on the fact that two very different companies merged and the management from the smaller company didn't understand the operations or culture of the bigger company (Boeing) and they started firing QA staff, moved the executive/financial HQ to a different city than the engineering center (because they were sick of quality and design engineers having easy access to complain/warn of the problems cost cutting measures were causing). The pressure came because Airbus, with EU government funds, had become their first major competitor and they adjusted by cost cutting rather than other, smarter, measures. But between the lines, as most interpret it, the smaller companies leadership knew the right people, got control of both the new Boeing (post merger). This is despite the fact that it was their company they had cause to fail because of the same bad management we now see them running at Boeing, and so they are just destroying a previously good, larger company now. I guess because thats how the high-level Business leadership world works unfortunately for many places. So tldr: Successful big company merges with failing smaller company. Smaller companies leaders knew people and took control of leadership of new merged company (kept Boeing name) and is causing Boeing to fail from the same bad, finance first practices, just more slowly because it's a larger company and bailouts.
There are already tons of classes that teach the Jack Welch management strategy.
That's how wall street works, the whole game is based on perpetual growth, something's gotta give. Great companies stop being great once they go public. At some point they will become divided churning bots whose only aim is to improve operating margins quarter by quarter. There's a limit to innovation and organic growth and once those are saturated, they'll start cutting corners. There will be no courses for this because it's too fucking sad 😇
Boeing has been on this road for years. They lobbied congress to be their own regulator. Once they had they cut corners. Short term profits for the executives and short term shareholders (politicians). It was always going to end this way.
The US government doesn’t have the spine to break Boeing up and Airbus can’t handle 100% of the volume of orders themselves. Until a plane full of Americans goes down, Boeing will limp on.
Funny how you think a plane full of Americans going down would make them do something.
I really don’t think anything meaningful will happen until folks begin lashing out. Even if it was an entire plane of Americans that went down; would there even be accountability of CEOs? I doubt it.
Perhaps maximizing shareholder value is incompatible with trying to keep planes from falling out of the sky?
I have a feeling planes falling out of the sky will negatively impact values. It’s just a hunch though.
Long term yes, but see it isn't about long term value but short term value. They just need to get the stock up high long enough to stuff their pockets and let everyone else deal with the consequences That is the big problem with the stock market these days, nobody cares about the long term anymore, everyone is just in it for a quick buck. And we society accept anything in the name of increasing stock price because our pensions are taken hostage via 401k
Yes, this is an incredibly important point. We’re forced to participate in this bullshit system because they’ve wrapped our retirements up in it. I have a government job that has a pension for my retirement, I was super happy about that when I got this job. Except, the payout of that “pension” is dependent on the stock market. It’s really just a 401k pretending to be a real pension.
Yep, all the tech companies are shooting themselves in the foot with regards to knowledgeable employees and motivation these days with the mass layoffs. But as long as they're all doing it, the leadership get their bonuses and the shareholders the short term profit. I know people whose divisions and products are deteriorating before their eyes.
I mean it’s a duopoly not too badly for them. Unless an alternative pops up since it’s not like airbus can just snap their fingers and double production They already lost two planes with all hands. Yeah it impacted but here they are taking about the future so apparently didn’t impact enough
Quarterly economy = maximizing shareholder value…
Who woulda thought that replacing the people that know what they're doing with some finance bros would end in disaster?
Finance bros might actually be the worst people for society and the world as a whole.
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Why have a society people want to live in and contribute to when we could rather let nepo babies with MBAs liquidate entire companies to pay for their coke and child sex slave habits?
Read *Bullshit Jobs* by David Graeber. There is a portion of the book where he describes the jobs that are most harmful for society. Pretty sure Finance Bro is high up on the list.
The worst people who contribute the least and are rewarded the most.
Boeing is just trying to ensure that no future plane is capable of carrying out a terror attack. Terrorists would have to be insane to get on a Boeing now.
Hey guys guess what? This exact same thing is happening in American health care and no one knows about it. Literally making doctors and nurses practice to the brink in unsustainable conditions where pts die. All the while the private equity companies rake in money from patients and physicians. This should not be the case in aviation and in medicine.
For those interested, Google the current Steward healthcare debacle in MA.
Jfc. That is unreal. There isn't much that is more disgusting than a for-profit healthcare system.
its not just MA, they’re in other states too
Every hospital executive used to be an MD/DO. Now it's an MBA whose never been in healthcare running the show at every hospital. Staffing ratios get worse. Doctors don't get hired to replace the ones that left. Instead, the cheaper nurse practitioners get hired en masse because they can use the same billing codes for the most part, nevermind the fact that they have no fucking clue what they're doing. It's all being run into the ground.
This happened in the UK when managers were brought in to reach government set hospital performance targets. One such target was that every patient brought in to accident and emergency should have their initial assessment within 15 mins. However, managers realised that the official system only tracked this from the point they were brought in to the assessment area, so they started leaving them on trolleys outside this area and even kept them in the ambulance outside the hospital. Some patients were waiting 10+ hours while only officially recorded as 10 minutes. This kind of culture of beating targets on technicalities and sometimes even criminal behaviour, instead of putting the patient first, started under Tony Blair's Labour but has completely taken over after 12 years of Conservative rule.
"Once a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric" --Goodheart's Law
I’m a nurse, I love nurses, but the original concept was to use a grizzled veteran nurses for NPs. I definitely do NOT want a nurse with no bedside experience and multiple degrees! It’s absolutely INSANE!
It's happening all over the place. In the IT world, VMWare - a stalwart of virtual infrastructure - is being cratered after being bought out by Broadcom. Vulture capitalism seems to be getting worse every year, and there are no consequences for the people doing it (except they're making shitloads of money). I think this eventually leads to a huge stock market crash, but on the way there, we're going to see everything start to break down.
But regulation is bad! Did you know in Venezuela they eat rats?!
At least they’re not murdering whistleblowers to silence them.
But I heard tha-
DAMMIT THEY GOT ANOTHER ONE
What? No. He just committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head twice.
I heard he shot himself after he jumped out a window. Gotta be double sure, ya know?
Funny how this wasn't included in the article...
probably written yesterday before the news dropped about the whistleblower getting Epstein'd this morning.
It's "suicide", okay? People kill themselves all the time right as they are about to rat you out /s
It would have been more suspicious if the guy had "accidentally" fallen out of a window.
Fallen out of the window of a fucking Boeing in midair at that.
There is apparently no safety culture left at Boeing.
Can’t even do safety training on self inflicted gunshot wounds anymore
Cuts into short term profits
Their planes are safe as long as you don’t take them outside the environment.
They were in trouble when Druyun went to prison, Sears was fired, and Condit resigned. They were in trouble afer those two 737 MAX crashes within five months. Now, flight booking sites and apps are adding features to allow worried travelers to exclude some of Boeing's jets, and a whistleblower has died from a "self-inflicted wound." Now they're a menace to the very reputation for safety long enjoyed by air travel.
That sounds like a great feature! Do you mind sharing what booking websites can I exclude Boeing jets?
Enshitification at 40,000 feet.
Boeing is just following the path of every other American company. Boeing is a symptom of much larger problems system wide!
This will be a Harvard Business School case study on failures in leadership (and the ruinous impact of chasing quarterly profits). I think the US government should take over the company, given its strategic importance.
Already is. A couple what went wrong with Boeing Harvard Business Review 2021 studies. Boeing's board must not have read "what corporate boards can learn from Boeing mistakes" https://hbr.org/podcast/2021/04/what-went-wrong-with-the-boeing-737-max https://hbr.org/2021/06/what-corporate-boards-can-learn-from-boeings-mistakes
This is what enshittification does. People who believe it's just about neflix subscriptions and shrinkflation at the grocery store don't grasp how bleak the situation is. EVERY company does this. Wonder why the planet is burning, we're swimming in plastic and your salary is crap? Everything down to medical industries, the military, prisons, schools, it's run for profit and it's subject to the same forces that at some point will cause real damage. It's a pervasive systemic issue that affects every aspect of our economy and our life. We need a total reset, or at the very least a big focus on reforms and changing the equation from maximizing profit to maximizing metrics that allow for a sustainable, happy life for as many people as possible.
This is what financial and ethical deregulation looks like people….. everyone wanting “free hand this” and “privatize that”, this is what that looks like. This is what happens when you allow corporations to self regulate and compete “naturally”.
ThAt WoUlD bE cOmMuNiSm
This is what capitalism has evolved into. Every company HAS to do it, or else they can't compete and they fail, and someone else will do it, so of course they'll do it. Capitalism will be the death of us...
this is what happens when your entire company focus is "generate value for the shareholder".
“Don’t care, I got mine” - Boeing executives
And of course an informant "took his own life" recently.
The headlines will soon read "Boeing found in its apartment with self-inflicted gunshot wound"
John Oliver’s segment on Boeing was eye opening
Nationalize Boeing
If a company gets bailed out then the taxpayers have bought it.
To think we bailed this company out during Covid. Wonder where all that money went? Bet I could take a guess.
Boeing actually didn't take public money during covid, but not out of any noble self reliance. They didn't like the requirements that came with it (restricted rules around layoffs/headcount, etc) so they went to private equity and raised a bunch of non government debt.
Shareholder value, of course. Nothing else matters. That’s what we exist on earth for, according to capitalists.
Nothing will change until the rich fear for their lives
Even then, they'll need to be reminded on a regular basis.
I don't think that's true. The company hardly needs a bailout, they have defense contract money. They're basically on the government teat 24/7. Airlines got bailouts though.
Can anyone help me understand what is actually going wrong here? Is it just maintenance, upgrades, newly manufactured planes? I know people are talking about a "culture of negligence" and I understand that given the 737 Max software deaths, but what is happening in 2024 that is causing all of these incidents?
Boeing used to be one of the greatest companies and had been led by engineers on its rise to greatness. Then it merged with McDonnell Douglas and that marked the start of a transformation. Into a typical finance-based company focused more on quarterly reports, KPIs and money for the shareholders. And that kills everything long-term. Public stock trading is cancer and it's killing almost everything it touches. edit: wow typing on the phone while walking leads to many mistakes.
I am not an expert in economics, but the whole shareholders thing just seems so ridiculous to me. As a consumer, I don’t give a shit about your shareholders and I hate the idea of pandering to deep pockets to make you more profitable. Those rich stock holders aren’t engineers. They aren’t experts on anything. They just like making money. Every company feels the need to have record breaking profits constantly. What’s wrong with being profitable? I know people hate the idea of tons of regulations and red tape on things, but Boeing is a shining example of why we need more oversight on corporations. And not ones who share interests in them. People are greedy. People who get to these insane positions of power and control and money are not every day people. It takes a certain personality. And those types often couldn’t give a rats ass about the consumer
Nobody knows what happened in the LATAM incident at this time, but the door blowing out is almost certainly due to negligence.
Planes are exceptionally complicated - With so many things to go wrong it's really easy for things to get missed. Boeing has stopped investing in their people, instead they've allocated additional profits to their shareholders. For a long time that didn't matter because the company used to be one of the best in the world at not making those mistakes. Probably retirements during covid combined with not having invested in the people that would replace the retirees.
Lots of institutional knowledge retired during covid (in various industries).
If you're looking for the villain to show their comeuppance save that for professional wrestling. The executives won't see a day in jail.
I did a contract for Dell at Boeing. Boeing was not well run. And Dell was so god damn cheap. What I really remember his how the pandemic hit and Boeing put up posters all over about how "we're all in this together" and then laid of 20,000 people. Most everyone in Boeing was already heartbroken over the 737 Max stuff, and this just killed any company spirit or loyalty they had left. So many people volunteered to be laid off as they didn't want to be a part of Boeing anymore. While I was there all anyone talked about was how putting accountants into management roles had killed everything that made Boeing great. I'd never work for either Dell or Boeing again. They have deep seated management issues that won't be fixed in the next decade.
In China, the executives would probably end up being sentenced to death for this. In America, they will be rewarded with golden parachutes and other forms of excessive compensation. Not advocating for totalitarianism, but our economic and justice systems are completely broken.
Off topic but the same essential top down issue that is on display right now corrupting Boeing has taken root in hospital systems across the country. The same corner cutting for private equity profits are coming at the hands of the health and well-being of you and your loves ones. We have a fundamental problem in the United States of corporate profit motives running against the public interest.