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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

This is sickening. I live in Canada, and this directly affects a friend's family of mine considerably.

Both my friend and his father are full time factory workers at a company called "Goodrich". They machine landing gear primarily for Boeing jets.

This means less available-overtime at the very least (which many of the workers rely on), and possibly lost wage increases in the future. Who knows.

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I sympathize with you, but Boeing never had a chance if one goes purely by cost: benefit comparisons.

The only way they could have won this is if they lobbied enough for the Brazilians to look past the significant shortcomings of the Boeing aircraft. And I think even then their lack of cooperation when it comes to transfer of technology and offsets would have sabotaged the deal.

Brazil already has a very reliable civilian aircraft maker in Embraer, and they are looking to bootstrap them into defense through transfer of technology. Boeing never would have done that.

Distrust is a very strong motivation to reject a bid. If Boeing had won the bid, the NSA would have armed themselves with a FISA court order, mandating Boeing to install malware in the fighter jets, along with a gag order forbidden Boeing to tell Brazil. Due to their massive internal audit problem, the one or the other rogue NSA contractor would end up selling off a copy of the specifications describing the backdoor to crime syndicates, who would then be able to blackmail the Brazilian government. To cut a long story short, it has now become impossible to buy any American technology product which contains proprietary software or hardware. It must now all be open source and open design and then reviewed by non-American experts at the expense of the American company trying to sell its gear.

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