Boeing Sales and Profits Plummet as 737 Max Crisis Continues

I thought the other point (about the luck of selecting high skill employees early in a company lifetime) was also pretty interesting though.

I don't think that they forgot about the technology side of things - but I do think that in leaving behind so much of what inspired them to expand in the first place, they may have drowned their muse.

At very least, I think they have compromised their ability to dog-food what they're working on.

They've followed a similar trajectory. Starting out as a product-focused company in their industry (games), with innovative titles and game engine tech. Then moving on to focuses that have more to do with bottom-line finance than creative effort at pushing forward the industry with Steam. Delivering files [games] via an online internet store was anything but a revolutionary idea. Then moving in an admittedly interesting direction toward platform development with their VR products (Steambox notwithstanding). And I have to give them credit there for investing in real hardware development, but let's be honest, that happened at a time when VR was very buzzwordy and worthy of the corporate boardroom setting. They still haven't invented a piece of platform-changing innovation in the hardware/killer-app space, they're trundling along like everyone else who started a VR company in 2013, albeit with a bunch of previous revenue streams enabling large investment.

I don't think that helps your case. I would expect a state-owned enterprise to be over-budget, especially if managers knew they had "what amounts to an unlimited budget".

In both crashes, after repeated activations of MCAS has pushed the stabiliser almost fully down, we see the pilots do two quick presses of the trim up button. The graph shows the stabiliser barely moving (much less than a press of the same length earlier in the flight).

I suspect the pilots pressed the trim up button, heard a loud noise from the electric motor straining, or a fuse popping, or something? So they stopped pressing trim up.

Even worse, only trim up was failing, MCAS was still able to command more trim down.

Wasn't it software? Isn't that just as "real"?

> Toyota was not at fault

Uh...

A subsequent investigation[47] by Safety Research[48] of the NTHSA/NASA report along with information from Barrs report[49] and Koopmans report[50] revealed that bad software design, antiquated ECU hardware fueled by a poor company culture were the likely cause of the SUA in the Toyota Camry incidents.

In April 2013, Betsy Benjaminson, a freelance translator working for Toyota to translate internal documents, released a personal statement about Toyota covering up facts about the sudden unintended acceleration problem.

This leak of internal documents fueled a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department that had been ongoing since 2010,[52] and on March 19, 2014, the DOJ issued a deferred prosecution agreement with a $1.2 billion criminal penalty for issuing misleading and deceptive statements to its consumers and federal regulators, as well as hiding another cause of unintended acceleration, the sticky pedal, from the NHTSA.[41] This fine was separate from the $1.2 billion settlement of a class action suit paid to the drivers of Toyota cars who claimed that their cars had lost value as a result of the SUA problems gaining publicity in 2012, and was at the time the largest criminal fine against an automaker in US history.[53] Toyota was also forced to pay a total of $66.2 million in fines to the Department of Transportation for failing to handle recalls properly and $25.5 million to Toyota shareholders whose stock lost value due to recalls. Nearly 400 wrongful-death and personal injury cases were also privately settled by Toyota as a result of unintended acceleration.[53]

>> In a horse race, if the jockey is terrible you don't shoot the horse.

> What are you talking about? The shareholders, the board, and the upper management collectively are the company. The rest is just employees and assets.

You're splitting hairs. The employees, assets, and their organization are the only part of the company that performs a useful social function. The shareholders, the board, and to a lesser extent the upper management are parasites that can be dispensed with and literally no one else will care.

Prior to industrialization individual skill was the primary contribution of value to companies so, while a single person might own the premises, the value of the company was in those employees. In the modern economy employees have been commoditization to be interchangeable and the result is that employee power has been severely curtailed without compensation.

Compare a rando factory to a sports team, losing a star player on a sports team can drastically effect your valuation and thus those stand out employees are considered primary assets of the teams (and often times teams will have both injury and sudden contract termination insurance for their players). Your statement that companies generally aren't employees is correct, but it is newly correct and unhealthy for society. Those lower level employees are the only ones actually producing value for the company.

Out of curiosity, do you think they wouldn't let it even get that far to make sure they stay competitive vs Airbus?

"Too big to fail" describes a concept in which the government will intervene in situations where a business has become so deeply ingrained in the functionality of an economy that its failure would be disastrous to the economy at large. If such a company fails, it would likely have a catastrophic ripple effect throughout the economy.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/too-big-to-fail.asp

The "too big to (let) fail" theory asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the greater economic system, and that they therefore must be supported by government when they face potential failure.[1] The colloquial term "too big to fail" was popularized by U.S. Congressman Stewart McKinney in a 1984 Congressional hearing, discussing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's intervention with Continental Illinois.[2] The term had previously been used occasionally in the press.[3]

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

Yes, a balance among all three functions is necessary. However, the 737 Max case is definitely about letting bean counters dictate engineering choices: saving design costs by pulling the ancient 737 design off the shelf; the software fixes to the problem introduced by those engines on that frame; and then pretending that the plane was just like an old-school 737, hiding all the complexity and compromises from pilots to avoid recertification costs. And even the decision to charge extra for redundancy of the critical sensor driving the software.

Moreover, as SSC was planned as a 40 TeV machine, and LHC reaches 14 TeV now (at presumably much higher luminosity), SSC might have discovered something that still has not been observed.

I won't avoid the plane forever -- but I will certainly give it a few years before I fly in one. Better safe than sorry.

Oh yes, the joys of a cramped 737 with the added benefit of in-flight nose dives. The post-9/11 trend of every domestic flight being a 737 (or Airbus equivalent) is generally just as bad as TSA.

Boeing needs to come out with a redesigned medium-range narrow-body airliner that doesn't hug the ground, has ample leg room and overhead bin space, and sell it domestic carriers as the future of air-travel instead of releasing the airplane equivalent of Windows XP Service Pack 8.

In the US, you'll want to avoid Southwest, American, and United.

Now I only fly airlines that never had the Max in their fleet.