Boeing is a cautionary tale about current American manufacturing

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9 pointstoomuchtodo3 comments

As a “builder” it’s quite frustrating to watch MBA chads and PE firms kill engineering cultures for short term profits. But they’re also like cancer for a business - an inevitable outcome of senescence that should create the conditions for a healthy young successor to emerge and consume its resources. The problem is that the tumour has learned to pay off the politicians and remain “alive” much longer than it could in nature.

So now we’re left with a bunch of rotting metastasised zombies building airplanes that automatically nose dive and space craft that leak.

Well what kind of builder are you?

Boeing caught the disease early, from acolytes of Jack Welch. There have been decades of antagonism to the engineering culture and labor. Boeing's management, even with a new CEO, remains tone deaf: They ask the machinist's union to keep in mind Boeing's debt. Most of that debt would not exist but for share buybacks.

If there is a government bailout, there should be a debt for equity swap in the terms of such a deal.

More generally, there should be something like a "stress test" for allowing share buybacks.

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