There are only two companies in the world capable of building and exporting the largest type of civilian aircraft, the "jumbo jet": Boeing and Europe's Airbus.
Since 1992, Boeing has gone from enjoying 70% market share to falling behind Airbus in orders and manufacturing.
2/n
Manufacturing aircraft is very expensive and technically challenging.
Only about a thousand large civilian aircraft are sold every year, so margins are small despite government subsidies, unlike say cars or microchips.
Any advantage or efficiency is crucial.
3/n
It was thus disastrous when, in 2018-19, two new Boeing airplanes crashed, killing 345 people in total.
And, since January 2024, Boeing planes have seen a series of incidents, some nearly catastrophic, including a mid-air nosedive that injured over fifty people.
4/n
These two series of incidents are unrelated.
But both stem from succession failure: when the power and skills to succeed in a position within an organization are not passed down from one person to their successor, especially including tacit and informal knowledge.
5/n
Succession failure in the engineering offices caused the two fatal crashes, as Boeing ended up designing and then delivering planes that, essentially, were programmed to crash themselves during a particular set of circumstances.
Which they then did, twice.
6/n
To date, nobody has been held responsible for the series of fatal errors.
But that is because no error on its own was fatal, just the combination of them, which no engineer at Boeing recognized in time or had the authority to act on, if they did recognize it.
7/n
Boeing is not the same company it once was.
Its non-technical managers and executives favored new factories in South Carolina rather than its core Seattle factories, where experienced workers were unionized and more expensive.
It is headquartered in DC now, not Seattle.
8/n
The political ascendance of consultants and “MBAs” over engineers, both at Boeing and in the U.S. generally, means that engineers are unable to overrule the decisions of consultants or MBAs and are themselves rewarded for making decisions like an MBA rather than engineer.
9/n
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What whistleblowers and regulatory audits describe at Boeing is a decline in industrial discipline, with basic norms and standards of competence, decorum, and work ethic falling.
10/n
From various Boeing factories over the years, there are reports of defective components being installed on purpose, debris being left in dangerous areas, workers abusing drugs during work, and so on.
Some Boeing employees said they would not fly on the planes they built.
11/n
This decline in discipline occurs when workers, technicians, and managers do not transfer their knowledge and skills.
It is happening both because of circumventing old factories and workforces with brand new ones, but also because Boeing's workforce is aging.
12/n
It has been a long time since manufacturing was seen as an attractive career path to American youth.
In 2018, over a third of employees represented by Boeing's machinists' union were over the age of 55 years old.
Now, Boeing is rapidly diversifying its workforce.
13/n
Minority hires are now 47.5% of new hires, up sharply from 37.2% in 2020.
Only 29.9% of Boeing interns were white males in 2022.
14/n
According to Boeing, they have fired 65 employees since 2020 for "behavior deemed to be racist or hateful." These are most likely older white male workers.
This rapid politically motivated change in Boeing's workforce implies that still more succession failure is happening right now.
15/n
Outsourcing, subcontracting, diversity policies, MBA-led decision-making, a focus on financial profits in low-margin heavy industry—these are all ultimately just different ways to accidentally cause succession failure, which in airplane manufacturing causes deaths!
16/n
With some 40% of U.S. military aircraft, a third of ICBMs, and U.S. passenger aircraft on its back, the U.S. government has a deep vested interest in returning Boeing to functionality.
But there is no reason to think it is capable of installing a live player in charge.
17/n
Which is perhaps why the U.S. military seems to be circumventing Boeing in favor of Lockheed Martin now.
Boeing's decay rather opens up the potential for a live player to start a new company that outdoes Boeing in civilian aircraft manufacturing.
18/n
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In April 2022, both the IMF and S&P Global forecasted an 8.5% annual decline in Russia's GDP.
Biden administration officials predicted that, due to the sanctions, Russia would go back to "Soviet style living standards from the 1980s."
This has obviously not happened.
2/n
Instead, Russia has become a rare live experiment in whether a major country can replace its reliance on the industrial bases of the U.S.-aligned world of North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea with the industrial base of China.
In-Q-Tel is both an intelligence outpost in Silicon Valley and a software outpost in Northern Virginia.
Its most high-profile investment is probably Palantir. But it also invested in what would become Google Earth, as well as GitLab, MongoDB, Wickr, and Databricks.
2/n
In-Q-Tel was not founded to be like DARPA, which has a budget an order of magnitude larger and which focuses on blue-sky research over decades.
Instead, it just acts like a normal venture capital firm, mainly for software, seeking tools the CIA or government would like.
This isn't the case because Romans employed Hellenistic Greek experts they employed made use of exact mathematical models to describe the natural world.
Heron isn't the contemporary of Plato or Aristotle, rather he stands on the shoulders of Archimedes and Eratosthenes.
Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the force-pump that makes use of pistons in the 3rd century BC. Classical scholars also attribute to him the discovery of the elasticity of air.
Formally, the Japanese constitution forbids a Japanese military, the states's "right of belligerency," and "other war potential."
Yet Japan has nearly 250,000 uniformed "self-defense force" service members with jet planes, warships, missiles, and a defense industrial base.
2/n
This large military is maintained through a consensus between Japan's conservative political elite, often-absurd language games regarding military terminology, and U.S. foreign policy that desires Japan to be a military counterweight to China (and previously, the USSR).
Japan has no oil or gas reserves, so it needs nuclear power for its industry.
The elite coalition behind Japan’s nuclear industry consists of the economy ministry, the industrial conglomerates, and the Liberal Democratic Party, through which Japan is a near one-party state
2/n
It is easy to mistake Japan’s nuclear pause in the wake of Fukushima for a degrowth environmentalist nuclear phaseout like Germany’s.
But Japan is now building new reactors and planning for 20% of electricity to come from nuclear by 2030.