Textbook case of late stage capitalism. A resounding success for Boeing’s major shareholders.
Boeing: Last Week Tonight
Submitted 8 months ago by flango@lemmy.eco.br to technology@lemmy.world
https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?feature=shared
Comments
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The ceo of Boeing was the ceo of my bosses last company. He cut every corner possible, took his paycheck and ran right before the company nose dived into the ground.
Now that he’s CEO of Boeing he did the one thing he set out to do. Get the Max series in the air so he can get his fat paycheck. Hopefully nothing literally nose dives this time.
toiletobserver@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The term is “GE flunkie.” Literally a fucking accountant without a moral compass.
PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Is that the guy who called Trump personally after the 2nd 737 Max crash crying to not allow the FAA to ground the plane?
Meanwhile the rest of the world was like “fuck that shit” so basically for a few hours the Max could only fly in US airspace and finally Trump got the memo & told Boeing guy “sorry fam”.
weew@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Too late, 2 of them already did
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 8 months ago
But… Nose diving is exactly what happened not too many yeas ago.
GiddyGap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Boeing has made life a lot easier for Airbus over the past few years.
frezik@midwest.social 8 months ago
Which is good for Airbus, because they haven’t been doing themselves a lot of favors, either. The A380 is a pretty good plane that nobody seems to want.
GiddyGap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Yeah, the trend turned against large planes like the A380 and 747. At least until they can make them more environmentally friendly.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
This whole LWT segment is a perfect illustration of the transition to late-stage capitalism at the microeconomic level, featuring examples of shareholder primacy, regulatory capture, communication breakdown, and recursive subcontracting. If I was teaching junior college microeconomics (Economics 1B), I’d consider showing this in class or recommending it to my students for viewing.
It really is a good schoolbook example of how a large reputable company goes to shit from the common ailments of real-world capitalism.
DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Why is Boeing even still operating after 737 max, Alaskan airlines, tax avoidance?
weew@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Boeing’s #1 competency isn’t airplanes or engineering, it’s lobbying.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly, this is probably true for any company once it reaches a sufficient size.
exu@feditown.com 8 months ago
They’re the only other big plane manufacurer beside Airbus and being the only remaining US based one, probably important for national defense as well.
TheBat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Fucking nationalize them then. And prosecute their senior management.
falkerie71@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
They kind of have to, otherwise it would be an Airbus monopoly, and there are plenty of planes they still need to deliver to customers. Management needs a total reshuffle for sure though.
frezik@midwest.social 8 months ago
Their management doesn’t just need reshuffling, but also start throwing a bunch of them in jail. They made decisions that specifically led to people dying.
taanegl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“Too big to fail”, or: "congress is bought and paid for ".
skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.
That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think a lot of people would actively refuse to fly on a 737 MAX in the future.
The design of the MAX was flawed to begin with. Essentially, the Boeing 737, designed in the 1960s,could not compete with the newer A320Neo on fuel efficiency due to Airbus redesigning the A320 around the much larger, state of the art CFM LEAP engines (Neo stands for “New Engine Option”), Boeing choose to jerryrig the CFM LEAP engines on their existing 737 airframe instead of redesigning another plane around the engine.
Now, since the engine is oversized with respect to the airframe, the newly christened 737 MAX has a tendency to tip upward due to too much lift when flying. Boeing opted to correct this in software by having the plane automatically correct its flight by tipping downward if it senses the plane was tipping up, which they called the MCAS. And of course, since one of the selling point of the 737 MAX Boeing promised was that no additional training was needed for the 737 MAX, the pilots did not know about MCAS, much less have a way to have a manual override for it.
So what if the sensors made a mistake and tipped downward when it’s not supposed to, you ask? We found out in 2018.
It is not something that is fixable barring a grounds up redesign. But that’s not going to happen.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 8 months ago
At this point I’m not flying on any Boeing if I can help it. There’s no way to know how recently it was made or refurbished and anything that Boeing touched in the last few years is suspect.
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I work in the world of planes, my rule for the 737 family. Is anything in the older NG family is fine. They were designed and built long enough ago for Boeing’s current issues to not be a problem. Plus they have seen enough maintenance with the airlines that they would have found any just in case. So that would be any 737-900/800/700/600
As for the Max family nope, I wouldn’t fly it. For a number of reasons, but mostly the engines are in the wrong spot and nothing they do can change that. That will be any 737-7/8/9/10 with the 10 still delayed. You may or may not see the word MAX in the name.
The quick and easy way to tell them apart is to look at the engines. The Max ones are larger and have a sawtooth edge on rear cowling Image
As for other Boeing planes currently flying. Basically everything else is an older legacy model except the 787.
TLDR stay away from the 737 Max everything else is fine.
inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
So I lived in the Everett area and worked near the Boeing plant. My ex gf’s brother worked directly on the line. One family dinner someone mentioned the two MAX crashes mentioned in the video. He totally brushed them off and said
They were from “”“n-word”“” countries. They crashed it themselves.
He was the most blatant, but the other Boeing folk I knew spoke simmiliarly.
TheBat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Someone on Boeing subreddit said almost same thing under this video. They just used politically correct term, ‘backwards’.
stellargmite@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeh that was one of the most shocking aspects of Boeing behaviour post the first Max crash. But it was the attitude from the top. Blaming the victims, on effectively racial or cultural grounds. An incredibly cynical and disgusting tactic, to deflect from their own abject failure of a business model resulting in death. The whole corporation showed how it values its passengers in those moments for me, ( and as a non American). They have no interest in our safety and due to this I haven’t stepped on a Boeing plane since the Lion air incident. Not that they care. It also made me wonder to what extent Boeing are responsible for the poor air transport safety history of Indonesia and elsewhere. I would bet they haven’t put a cent into atleast helping to improve it, considering how much money they have probably made there - it being an archipelago and the 4th most populated country globally. Several hundred people were sacrificed in order to expose these criminals for what they are. Profit making is too often a conflict of interest when lives are at stake.
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I bet if we give them more tax money they’ll do better next time. Promise
Maggoty@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why aren’t these people in prison? They’re not going to change anything until there’s murder charges.
Badeendje@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Maybe this will be one of the drops in the bucket that show that the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is the issue.
TheBat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is a myth.
nullPointer@programming.dev 8 months ago
no one escapes enshitification
toiletobserver@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No one expects the Spanish inquisition!
TheBat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No one expects Spanish enshittification!
IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Number go up mean safe go down.
WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 8 months ago
“The uploader has not made this video available in your country”
(Australia)
Any other way to see this?
Akasazh@feddit.nl 8 months ago
High seas was my option after they moved their upload to Thursday. HBO claims that it would promote praying customers, I claim otherwise and they lost my YouTube subscription.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
HBO claims that it would promote praying customers, I claim
Why does HBO care if their customers are praying or not?
FollyDolly@lemmy.world 8 months ago
My uncle repaired airplanes for a living. I have never flown as an adult and I hopefully never will. Somethings I just can’t unlearn. When he first started things were great, but by the time he retired it was a shitshow of cutting corners on replacement parts and who knows what else.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I wish I knew who made the plane that scared me, I remember it was a Southwest flight, oh, almost 30 years ago now.
I had a seat on the wing and the engine STOPPED. No more pleasant engine noise, just silence.
And I’m like “We’re OK, there’s more than one engine…”
Then the silence was broken by the sound of them trying (and failing) to re-start the engine…
“Boy, they sure seem intent on re-starting that engine…”
OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
One of the defining characteristics of Southwest is that they ONLY fly 737s (Boeing). That and their focus on domestic flights helps them offer good rates and low/non-existent fees. I guess their maintenance only has to focus on one plane. However, it seems like they got caught up in Boeing’s “737 MAX is the same plane” scam because they fly some of those too and I believe it affected their stock.
crapwittyname@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Commercial flying remains the safest way to travel, and it continues to get safer. That’s not to minimise your reluctance to fly. I get it: if something goes wrong it’s 99.9% sure you’re going to die, and know about it long enough for your last moments to be horrifying. But the facts is the facts and the facts is that you’re way more likely to die on a bicycle journey.
meliante@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t buy that simply because of the metrics used to get to that “safest way to travel”. Isn’t it per distance traveled? That’s extremely pro aeroplane.
What if it’s per journey?
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 8 months ago
Yet flying has gotten safer and safer, statistically.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think it’s the (seeming) paradox of the information age. Visibility on issues increasing has made things seem more dangerous, even when in reality they’ve gotten safer.
To put it mathematically, if we see only half the failures with a 10% failure rate, we perceive a 5% fail rate. But if we see every failure for a 7% failure rate, we perceive a 7% fail rate, and it looks worse even though it’s actually better.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
Since this is lemmy and not tiktok, anyone has a short description? There are reasons i can’t play it.
BillMurray@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Boeing used to be a company that put safety and quality first, they revolutionized plane travel with the 737. But recently Boeing has put share price ahead of safety and decided to move their corporate office from Seattle, where the planes are built and engineering is done, to Boston. Why? Because executives heard that successful companies have corporate offices in a separate location. Then the merger with McDonnell Douglas, who has a horrible track record just made Boeing’s quality slide even further. Boeing now parcels out work to subcontractors who subcontract even further and there is no oversight or quality control on the components. This results in “door plugs” missing bolts or having bolts that were not tightened properly on the 737 max.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
According to the video it was Chicago, not Boston. Why anyone would move to The Windy City is beyond me.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why? Because executives heard that successful companies have corporate offices in a separate location.
You know, I feel like a corporation that fired management and executives for stupid decisions would end up with a massive advantage over competitors. Because apparently there’s a lot of inept executives out there who are moving offices because it’s the cool thing to do.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
Thanks!
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
YouTube == TikTok? What?
johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think they just mean a lot of people on lemmy would prefer content that doesn’t require audio since they viewing it at work or on a phone in public etc.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Let’s cut all the things that made us great!
RamSwamson@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
In case anyone wanted to buy one of those sweet shirts he inadvertently plugged in the clip, I checked the Boeing store and it appears they have pulled it already.
poopkins@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Was that the “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” shirt? I think it can be fairly easily fixed with a sharpie. If you’re feeling creative, you could also draw the wreck on the runway.
RamSwamson@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Oh damn how could I not find it??? Must not be available in the region I was searching because I scrolled through 13 pages of shirts and it didn’t show! I ironically want one
SuperSynthia@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I am so glad that all my flights on Boeing aircraft was in my childhood. Thankfully AirBus hasn’t fallen out of the fucking sky :\
Wahots@pawb.social 8 months ago
They need to become a private company again. And fire the Douglas team.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nah, since they’re in the “too big to fail” category, nationalize them. Achieves the same outcome of removing the shareholders and board, without pouring money into a rich douchebag’s pocket
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s a very natural way to identify which industries and companies should be nationalized. If it’s too big to fail, it’s too important to be privately (or publicly by investors) owned.
Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I don’t know that the second part would succeed. I feel like it’d end up with the same contractor structure, but now the contractors are whoever’s company bought the right senators.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why? So they can make the bad decisions in secret?
frezik@midwest.social 8 months ago
There’s a bit of meme that private companies make better decisions because they don’t have the silly pressures that the stock market puts on companies. Valve is usually the prime example.
It’s not completely wrong, but needs to be more carefully considered. Being private makes it possible to make better decisions due to lack of stock market pressures. Whether companies actually do or not needs to be considered on a case by case basis. There are plenty of private companies that are still run by shitbags.
taanegl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
TL;Dr Boeing got ate up internally from the failed company they had acquired, becoming a little bitch to a bunch of cocaine addled wall street ninkompoops, who had to be acquired because they made flying death traps, who eventually made Boeing make and sell flying death traps.
It’s the circle of capitalism.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Are we talking about the time McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money?
Album@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Lmao yep
CptEnder@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The irony is the whole “if it’s not Boeing I’m not going” phrase came from the era of airplanes like McDonald Douglas being so utterly shit - the company that bought Boeing. Basically a bunch of engineers got buttfucked by business school dropouts.
CuttingBoard@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
The only thing not covered by LWT (no shade for them at all) was the reaction time required to “correct” MCAS’ error. Imagine being strapped into a seat in the cockpit, and the plane suddenly nosedived and you have under twenty seconds to correct it after not being informed it had that much control in the first place. People who fly model airplanes and helicopters wouldn’t accept that. Pilots with planes full of travelers absolutely shouldn’t. Enshittification issues aside, (takes mental gymnastic skills that I don’t have) that is an unforgivable mistake that should have never made it to planes.