- Western Industry.

- The blue-collar middle class

- The Middle Class

- Our health care system

- Our education

- Western Economic Leadership.

- Social Mobility

Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest.

They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?

They convinced us to exchange our pensions for the privilege of being the mark on a market where the sharks like them do whatever the fuck they want, from blatant insider trading, to pump and dump schemes, to outright fraud, having for all practical purposes bought the SEC a long time ago.

What they will kill next?

How long are we going to transfer wealth to those slimmy sweet talking ignorant greedy bean counters?

Our daily work is like being in a mad house because almost everything is subordinated to the the most sacred goal of cooking the next quarter numbers to ensure we maximize executive bonuses, and fuck the long run! crazy projects started, spin offs, merges, projects cancelled, company killing layoffs, fuck long term value generation! they want more and more, and more, and they fucking want it right now! the fucking bonus gollums.

Everything is fucked in our society but executive compensation. Xerox, HP, IBM, Boeing... How many other proud symbols of our economy and civilization are we going to let them destroy?

So we end up gradually converting our productivity to the measurable outputs because we can more safely trade them. But then unmeasurable values get shafted.

The non-fungible values get shafted even harder. For example, it's inherently impossible to trade for true human relationships because the bidirectional flow is where the value comes from and that flow must be built. But that means two people must simultaneously choose to take a mostly unknown level of risk on building a relationship that could fail or even be a net negative. Our relationship drive is pretty strong. The people making AI chatbot friends and SOs, not even to mention dating apps and relationship-commodifiers like Meetup or old Facebook, are doing their best to commodify relationships, though. The sheer level of social toxicity caused by online mass social media has been correspondingly enormous.

I had professors explain that war is profitable because people are employed building tanks etc. and they use their wages to stimulate the economy. When I asked 'what if instead of sending a few million dollars of steel and circuitry to the desert to get exploded, those workers used the same resources on a hospital?' I recieved the answer that if the NPV of the tank is higher than the hospital, it must be the better use of the resources.

Our universities may be in worse shape than I thought.

Never heard of it. Admittedly it wasn't a highly ranked university.

Edit: Having familiarized myself, thank you for the introduction. This is not the first time my education has disappointed me.

In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintains the profitability of domestic capital.

War is really that simple. If you had a war for any other reason, everyone involved would see the stupidity after the first few skirmishes.

War has existed since the dawn of humanity, thousands of years prior to the advent of capitalism, and has been fought by societies with every kind of socioeconomic and political configuration. War is a human institution and not contingent upon a particular economic arrangement.

What better alternatives are you thinking of? An intelligent, compassionate, eco-friendly and forward-thinking dictator would be great I guess, but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.

the only one that has so far been "good" has been the singaporean authoritarian regime (yes, they are "authoritarean").

But even if they're good and benevolent so far, there's zero guarantee that the next leader, or the next generation of them, will remain true.

That's why even though majoritarian gov't are bad, they're the least worst. Not to mention that if the elected gov't is bad, it's becaue the people doing the electing didn't put in enough civic responsibility as a collective.

Politicians would have more shit to throw around, yes, but hopefully the worst of them will look elsewhere for the easy money if it can't be had that easily in public office.

We are mostly ignorant, and we vote, consume, act and live that way. We choose to be that way, and so good things won't last long in our collective hands.

no, it would benefit the shareholders. The regulations imposed by the gov't (which is meant to be representitive) would reign in the excess externalization. Everyone would benefit from competition, when it does happen.

How is that not an oxymoron?

Surely those that do not win in a competition are losers. How is that a benefit to them?

If there's more than one grocery store, I probably get better prices. (Or, negatively, if there's only one then I probably get worse prices.) And so with every other aspect of the economy.

There are several hospitals around me. Endless amount of doctor offices. There are several health insurance companies I can choose from. There is competition. Yet, prices are not affordable for most.

it's because the number you're comparing to is from other countries, where they subsidize their own citizen's healthcare.

The US's healthcare system has become a convoluted mess, and the competition you mention is not sufficient.

Not even kidding. There are villages around where I grew up, a good number of adults have one kidney only.

Now if they manage to kidnap and kill a person, now they got two kidneys, a heart, a liver and other stuff.

Yep, they started with our eye balls. In exchange, we are getting "relevant ads".

Also our frontal lobe. In exchange, we get depressive dopamine releases.

You can add governance for as long as lobbyists have been writing law.

You can add accountability for whenever MBAs and investors come in contact with news orgs.

I’m almost certain I’ve seen a study that tried to prove opening up the organ trade would help the economy and hinder the black market.

The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.

If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.

It doesn't mean there aren't people in (a) who aren't anti-Semites and who have legitimate grievances. But they're virtually indistinguishable from the people shitposting (or worse let, legitimately posting) on /pol/.

The problem is that the Venn diagram of a) people who collect vintage teaspoons and b) competitive yodelers looks like a blurry circle unless you're right up against it. It doesn't mean there aren't spoon enthusiasts who can't carry a tune, but they're virtually indistinguishable from the alpine warblers at international yodeling championships.

I didn't see any reference to judaism in the original post, how you both end up there is just... weird.

The rise of private equity is what immediately came to my mind here, religion never crossed it. I am not in favor of what private equity is doing to the country. The reply seems to assert that I am thus a self-hating jew, which was hurtful of them to say about me.

If anything, connecting the private equity efforts described in GP, to semitism, is what is anti-semetic. Our private equity overlords hail from many religions and backgrounds, and their creed is greed.

> “According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. [...]

Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been hit particularly hard by management that doesn’t value tenured, expensive employees.

"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."

The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)

Sure, but we aren't talking about hiring astronauts (who ironically do tend to spend their entire career in government because it's the only place to get the thrills they want from fighter pilot to space).

We're talking about quality professional welders. Stereotyping them into one bucket would be silly, but I think it's fair to assume there are a large number of welders who wouldn't mind a guaranteed, high paying job with a guaranteed retirement package.

Extend that to like 90% of the jobs required to make a spaceship...

If so it might be the only government job in the country that beats the private sector in terms of pay.

What was it for the Apollo programme?(The entire programme was 11 years [1].)

> Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades?

I’m not arguing against having more people at NASA. Simply against the claim that this is the evidenced issue. Unless the entire American space programme is a failure, private operators are not the root problem.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Correct. OP suggested the root of the problem is we haven't made "these workers government employees." The Apollo programme had lots of government employees. Commercial interests clearly aren't at the root of the problem.

Edit: Median tenure is 2.8 yrs according to LinkedIn.

People wanted to make that happen. So they did.

There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.

I think there are lots of parallels between the Moon landings in the 60s and the idea of colonizing Mars today. In particular, most people don't think it's possible, and so they think it's a waste of money. The Apollo program only received majority approval once we landed on the Moon. People also tend to dramatically overestimate the cost of achieving great things in space. Polling suggested people thought the Moon missions were taking up about 22% of the budget. In modern times it's down to less than 0.5%, and that's with NASA blowing tens of billions of dollars of pork projects like the SLS.

Overall support for the Moon program only began to steadily rise in the years after human spaceflight was defacto completely cancelled by Nixon, and people were able to coolly reflect on what a ridiculous and important achievement that was.

[1] - https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...

> "When you divorce it from the numbers and you ask people if they like NASA and spaceflight, people say yes," Launius told SPACE.com. "75 to 80 percent are in favor."

Because obviously; people don't like paying for anything.

If you ask someone without a lot of surplus in their life whether they'd rather have the money themselves in tax cuts or benefits or they want to spend it on astronauts, they want food on their table. Especially when they're overestimating how much the space program costs.

But the question was, did people want to work for NASA? And then you get to select your idealists from the >75% in favor of the space program.

One more factor: decolonisation created new countries. That created a unique competition for ideological supremacy.

Also, you remove that second S and first R from that second sentence, and it would still be true. Our entry into the space race wasn't a matter of unmatched moral nobility.

The problem with "climate change moonshot" is that the answer isn't really a single target or anything suitable to a government spending program. You get the result you want by doing a carbon tax and then refunding fully 100% of the money to the population as a dividend so the tax doesn't trash the economy.

Then people reduce carbon to avoid the tax. Hybrid and electric vehicles become more attractive than gas (especially to people who drive more), diesel rail lines get electrified, coal power plants get shut down as uneconomical and replaced with solar/wind/nuclear/hydro, people replace furnaces with heat pumps, etc. You don't have to order anybody to do anything in particular or figure out how it should be done for them because everybody wants to avoid the tax so they do it themselves.

The reason that doesn't happen is the reason you say -- the oil and coal industries have captured too many legislators. But even if you had the votes, the way to fix it still isn't "NASA for climate change", it's just pricing carbon.

We wanted the government to get directly involved. To fund and empower a federal agency to hire workers, plan projects, requisition resources, and execute at a massive scale, as had NASA worked in the 60s, or the WPA in the 30s. I know that this terrifies certain people, and I revel in their terror. Things that are bad for their craven interests are good for the rest of us.

Public/private partnerships are an entirely different thing. There you still have the government dictating what should happen, even if the thing they require is inefficient or miserable, and then you invite a corrupt government contractor that satisfies none of the prerequisites for a competitive market to back their armored car up to the government's vault and suck out all the money.

A carbon tax does not involve any government contractors. You burn carbon, you pay tax. People avoid burning carbon to avoid paying the tax. All of the tax money goes back to the citizens; everybody gets a check cut in the same amount. The imperative is to eliminate space for corruption by leaving no exceptions to the tax and no discretion in where the money goes.

> We wanted the government to get directly involved.

You are implicitly asking for the thing you say you don't like.

In order to install solar panels, the government would have to buy land to put them on, and then buy solar panels. These things come from private sellers. But the government's purchasing process is thoroughly corrupt, so now you're buying solar panels and concrete and transformers from whoever's cronies have the in with the administration. You can't avoid this by trying to say "we'll make our own solar panels then" because for that you'd have to buy semiconductor wafers and fabrication equipment etc. The inputs ultimately have to come from somewhere and the somewhere is going to capture the government.

This is exactly what happened with the WPA and NASA. The term "boondoggle" was coined for the WPA's corruption and inefficiency. Around 90% of NASA's funding goes to government contractors. This is Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, etc. And it's not a new thing:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/hr-93-11.pdf

At the height of the New Deal in 1936, total federal spending, even adjusted for both population growth and inflation to 2024 dollars, was less than $500B. (In unadjusted 1936 dollars it was $8.2B). The current federal budget is over $6T -- right now it's more than twelve times as much in real dollars per capita than it was at the height of the New Deal. The "massive scale" you wanted is more than already happening, but it's not working, because the government doesn't spend money efficiently. It siphons it into the coffers of the connected.

That's a funny perspective. USSR just before that time mostly killed communist apparatus members¥ and with them innocent people. In such an environment, there naturally won't be too many dissidents, so I don't think they registered.

They did kill a lot of supposed sympathiers of pre-Soviet Russia, though.

¥ As they say, internal competition is the most fierce one.

We were spending more money. There was competition among contractors. And there were skilled low-level labourers from WWII.

Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.

Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.

What the government should have done is reduce their pay for missing deadlines by having milestones in the contract. At that point paying more makes economic sense and wages would rise.

A union fixes this in the long term, but that will take time. Government can employ rapidly. Something, quickly, needs to change before we forget how to build because MBAs, accountants, and lawyers burned the place down for shareholder value. There are two astronauts stuck in space very publicly demonstrating this.

Remember we are talking about experienced aircraft welders. They are not available for 20 an hour when industry is paying so much more.

You’re building rockets and complaining about the cost of skilled labor?

Besides when you're an aerospace company producing rockets for NASA you are not building a product that the local market pays for, so why should your workers be affected by what the local market is willing to pay for their skills? How can the local labor market accurately value their skills if the product of their labor isn't sold in the same market?

It's also a plain idiotic move because you'll end up with workers who cost 70% as much and are half as productive, at best, or at worst workers who cost 10,000% more because they screw up a critical component and cause massive delays.

Might want to remember that experienced welders demand stronger compensation. Can't have that compensation going to the wrong people, though. Boeing can't survive as a business if it had to compensate fairly!

The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.

Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.

The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.

Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”

America is an advanced economy and the advanced work is where the money and comfy life is. No one did anything wrong, really the problem is that too many are doing everything right.

The only real answers to this is either immigrants (who undercut local workers) or some kind of wage incentive rebalancing/redistribution (which pisses off service workers above the median income).

No, LIRP and ZIRP are totally responsible for fundamentally causing 'growth' businesses to be valued ridiculously higher than 'dividend' businesses. Basically any business that was "profitably make stuff now" had to compete with "no profit now, but we'll for sure change the world in 20 years" for capital and making the DCFV denominator's risk-free-rate term 0 tilted the table 90 degrees toward the latter.

The reason comfy "knowledge" WFH jobs are so much more financially desireable than anything else is absolutely the fault of the FOMC. They killed price discovery.

The problem with ZIRP isn't the absolute level of interest. The problem is that the central bank thinks it can simulate negative interest through QE. The zero lower bound is ultimately a price guarantee by the government that it will offer an infinite quantity of bonds to the general public to prevent the interest rate from dipping negative.

Any form of lower price control will cause an oversupply. In this case (mostly rich) people are oversupplying capital to the government instead of simply spending it.

Since the money is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, their investment decisions are going to either be a random crap shot, since information is distributed in the economy and the people who have information to make informed purchasing decisions have no money, while the people with money have no idea what to do with it, or it will endlessly get cycled through more QE and government debt.

In a hypothetical scenario with negative interest, wealth deconcentrates so that money goes to where it needs to be.

Buddy I'm not going off an economic theory about ZIRP like you posted, I'm going off having run valuations on companies and seen that interfering with the risk free rate made bad companies (and their wasteful activities) valuable.

I agree the problem isn't the absolute level of interest. My point is the yield curve should reflect the market appetite for risk, and we broke that relationship.

The only advance is the downward spiral of the American economy. The money is in the financial industry and third sector only, which only profits from the dollar control.

Like, from every angle, it's ill-conceived.

Igitur quī desīderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").[1] While I think there's immense scope for debate over what constitutes appropriate preparation in this or any other context, I believe the core idea, that effective preparation for war can prevent it, has merit. (Though it should not be the only way a country works to prevent war!) And there are ancillary uses for militaries, such as the prevention of piracy mentioned elsewhere.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum

Because they're attacking commercial shipping heading to and from the Suez Canal? I mean it wlso pleases our Saudi allies but the shipping attacks are the main concern.

Welding joints that look good as-welded, instead of passing over it with a grinder and a coat of paint to cover up any imperfections? That needs decent skills.

Welding thin material, and not having the heat of the welding process just melt a hole right through? That's needs skill.

Welding thin material to thick material, where it's easy to blow a hole in the thin part before the thick part gets up to temperature? That needs skill.

Welding complex shapes where some of the work has to be done upside-down and you have to control what's going to happen to that molten metal under gravity? That's a special skill.

Doing continuous welds around complex shapes, where you have to keep the weld puddle in the right place and moving at a constant rate while completely repositioning your body and moving your feet? That's a special skill.

Because of thermal expansion/contraction, to get precision results you don't just put the parts in the desired location and weld them - you need special 'fixturing' that anticipates the inevitable change of shape due to the heat of welding. That's a special skill.

Welding joints where, to prevent contamination, you need to get shielding gas not only at the front of the joint but also at the back? That's a special skill.

Welding unusual metals, like special high temperature rocket nozzles might involve? That's a special skill.

And most importantly, if you're welding a part that takes 40 hours of welding and 39 hours in you slip on the pedal and ruin the part, you've lost loads of work. So a part that needs 40 hours of welding requires exceptional consistency too.

Of course none of this stuff is impossible. But for sure it's skilled work, and not easy to hire for.

(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)

Meaning many failures would be spotted. Maybe not 100% automatically corrected but much better situation than current regulatory capture one and stuff we see in news every second week.

Edit. And by committee I mean various levels of review, feedback, non-executive decisions, etc. What should be a simple: "Bob, this guy Steve over here that we hired to do welds is beyond useless, I don't know who hired him. Fire him immediately and get someone we know can do the job."

Instead turns into endless debates about "The post-weld review board has found our welds to be hovering at a 7.6/10 score, we need to get these numbers up people! Ping HR and let them know we want to trigger an audit review of all our welding processes, we may need to increase our spend on weld-trainee onboarding."

We all know it, we've all seen it, we've all thought about it. I exaggerate the words to prove a point, but that stuff has been infecting every institution and we need to fight back against it. I've personally seen it in our field, and it's beyond infuriating. The machine itself will fight you if you try rectify it in your own little way. And at the end of the day, I have a family to feed and house. But so does everyone else.

We're not saying you have to personally know 500k people. We're saying that to some people, it's very clear and obvious that someone working for them is incompetent and/or simply doing a bad job (and this is not gut feel). This shouldn't be up for debate or controversy. If you hired that person to manage another person, you expect them to know what they're doing and at the very least see the Red Flags of incompetence (whatever they may be). We've been trying the "systemic" way of ridding ourselves of bias, but here it is, alive and well. What we got instead is a broken system that's full of conflicting priorities and people trying their best to navigate them and doing so badly - all whilst the actual goals and priorities get sidelined as secondary.

The commander essentially says that he constantly receives conflicting reports about his leaders' performance, and if he relieved one for unproven reports, his command would disintegrate. Because the good leaders have equal numbers of bad reports about them, from those who don't like them.

Summed up the proper exercise of authority nicely, imho.

The alternative is developing an intuition for bullshit. It's rarer, but I've had a few non-technical PMs / managers who were excellent at their job because they could suss out whether someone wasn't being honest.

And it's great if a handful of people can smell out bs in a field they're not familiar with, but you can't write policy on the back of a few unicorns like that. (Yes, managing ego is hard too, but I believe it's more common to start with and more trainable.)

Once it's common for someone in authority to tiebreak on technical arguments, it becomes very important they can set their ego aside.

And sure, does that mean Bob might get it wrong? Of course, he might even be a petty little tyrant with an ego or he just might not like Steve because he made a funny comment about Bob's tie on his first day. I don't think some things can scale and be optimized away like we're all a bunch of cogs in a machine with our own individual little tasks and performance metrics that get aggregated into the larger whole.

We can either choose excellence and competence, or we get this weird mediocrity that is killing us slowly but somehow we can say "but it's running our large department based on science and scalable metrics".

Maybe we're not supposed to make these departments scale, maybe we need to keep them small and autonomous and "unfair" to some degree in order to function. Have we considered that? Not everything has to be optimized to the N-th degree and made to grow large like an instagram or google.

Reading about the history of socialism is eye-opening, specifically the period where it turned into a giant bureaucratic corporation that nobody was allowed to leave. That period started even before the mass murder toned down into "repression," so strong was the desire of individual managers to make it impossible to blame them for shortfalls relative to unrealizable plans.

For all that's been said about how different the east and west are, their fatal economic problems were nothing more alien than politics plus monopoly.

I'll believe that capitalists believe in competition when they start passing policy that promotes it. Policy that tax disadvantages large corporations to encourage them to break up. Policy that winds down the "cheat codes" that business students and boardrooms salivate over. Policy that prevents political influence from becoming just another route to investment return. Policy that makes it easier to do incorporation/payroll/taxes/benefits for small businesses. Until these things happen, I see capitalism as just one more flavor of the same old empire-building dynamics that stretch back through time.

And not necessarily the winning one. Selling the industrial base of the United States economy to the Communist Party of China in order to pump the assets of wealthy Americans was a real six dimensional chess move. I suppose we'll see how it turns out.

Also, for what it is worth, individual players in the market obviously want to become literal kings. They're "capitalists" but not "capitalist ideologists." Capitalist ideologists are people like Milton Friedman, who was not a fan of monopoly and who was himself not much of a businessman.

My contention with the likes of Milton Friedman isn't that he enjoyed monopolies, it's that his policies (and those of capitalists by any definition I have heard put on the field) tend to support and encourage the formation of monopolies. Markets are full of natural anti-competitive forces (again, just ask any investor about moats) and if you don't have a plan to stomp them out, markets just devolve back into the world's 500th mechanism for the people on top to extract rents from the people on the bottom. As a side effect, the monopolies grow into the same bureaucratic monstrosities they claim to be the cure for.

Exhibit A: Boeing, per TFA.

Also, it was true both times you heard it. Brezhnev had no intention of "building communism." :-)

Progress depends on creative destruction, not internal reform. The only way we maintain or advance quality as a society is to enable the continual creation of new institutions to compete with sclerotic and terminally politician-infested ones.

When you artificially prop up the latter, you curtail progress overall.

Welding is an art and at a certain required level of performance it's not something you teach, but find the folks who have the drive to be that good and want to weld for high precision requirements.

What you've linked is a run of the mill welder. My Dad machined classified parts for USG and NASA. When they'd get those jobs they would go to the guys who had a reputation to be able to produce the die to the spec required. Messing up a multi-ton die of a specific quality could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost material and time. You don't make $48k on those tolerances, even back in the 80s.

Your dad had a a trade skill, and obtained a clearance. Congrats, he is an outlier. Nothing I said was false or misleading.

Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.

> Can anyone pull Boeing out of its nosedive?

Apparently the answer is a sound no.

They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.

The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!

It looks like they are having a go at correcting some of their more noted flaws - he's an engineer and is going to run things from Seattle. Good luck to him!

"CEO changes will continue until morale improves"?

Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.

They would have to be stupid to deliver in time.

They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.

(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)

This is part of the reason why the new era of firm, fixed price contracts at NASA is so important. And why it's so troubling that NASA is having difficulty transitioning SLS contractors to such contracts for later (Artemis V+) rockets.

It sounds like you agree that Boeing is failing to adopt to fixed cost?

Just from pop culture, isn't starliner that thing that leaves people stranded for a year after making them shed "excess" baggage for a supposedly weeklong(?) trip?

Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner

> Boeing has lost more than $1.5 billion in budget overruns on the Starliner project which has been marred by delays, management issues and engineering challenges. The price paid per flight has also drawn criticism from NASA's inspector general and from observers who point to significantly lower costs on the competing Crew Dragon.

Northrup Grumman seems to be doing a pretty good job with Cygnus. And ULA seems to be doing alright with NSSLv2 (although it sounds like they may have had to give up a launch or two due to Vulcan delays).

[1]: https://everydayastronaut.com/stoke-space/

Ever since Bezos installed David Limp as CEO, it seems like they've been able to ship stuff. It's hard to know if he was set up for success by his predecessor, but their older no press policy prevented anyone from knowing it, or if he changed the company culture for the better.

Regardless, it appears like Blue Origin is likely to launch New Glenn this year. Or, at least the DoD thinks it's likely enough that they agreed to onramp Blue Origin to NSSLv3 (pending a successful launch).

> it'll be a long time before these younger companies produce anything capable of rivaling Falcon 9

I don't think it'll be that long.

* Blue Origin's New Glenn should launch in 2024-2025.

* RocketLab's Neutron should launch in 2025-2027.

* Relativity's Terran R should launch in 2026-2028.

That's remarkably soon.

Of course, as you point out, Starship should be operational quite soon. It'll be exciting to see how things shake out.

My personal opinion is that SpaceX will move to payload based pricing, somewhat akin to their current rideshare pricing. I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, but something like $10m + $3m/tonne. That way they can compete for smaller payloads while also being paid appropriately for launching really heavy stuff. However it ends up, I'm sure pricing will be heavily influenced by the competition when it comes out.

That should die. This is what happens when you allow monopolies, you can’t even let them die because you’ll be left with nothing.

They face no competition , and have no reason to improve

I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.

Engineers (management are also employees, right?) ranking management erodes management authority, and management will never stand for it.

Outside consultants are usually hired with a fixed agenda - the rotten eggs almost always get to stay.

Stack ranking is evil, period.

I'm not advocating stack ranking for yearly review but rather a quintennial or decennial event to clean-house. In other words, a mechanism to avoid what happened to Boeing, Intel, Yahoo, and what is happening to Google and others.

360 reviews obviously allows orgs to get fat and carry bloat.

All I'm saying is that stack ranking might not successfully get rid of dead weight. As with any system of metrics, the people who game the system are the ones who reap benefits from the system - thereby subverting the system, and preventing it from achieving its stated goals. As systems of its kind go, stack ranking is particularly insidious and gameable.

I have no idea what _would_ work, though. I have some half-baked thoughts, but will reserve them until such time as they are better than half-baked.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

RIP Jerry. A Step Farther Out is one of my all time favorites.

SLS is the thing that launches Orion, which is the capsule with humans inside. SLS isn't capable enough to get that capsule into lunar orbit. Orion also isn't landing by itself though, it just transfers the astronauts to a landing vehicle (SpaceX Starship, currently...), which lands and then starts again.

The thing brought up in that video is that the rendezvous point should probably be in lunar orbit, but isn't.

No, Starship may carry people to the moon, but getting them off the moon isn't possible. The lunar Starship won't return to LEO.

The closest thing you could do is send another Starship and do the same NRHO docking that SLS+Orion is already doing and then instead of aerobraking, do a deceleration burn to get an LEO capture. That is the only way without Orion. For better or worse, Orion in NRHO is indispensable.

Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.

To be fair, Boeing, Lockheed etc won't be the decisive players putting humans back on the moon from the US. It'll be smaller and scrappier players more akin to startups.

The US was not a bastion of technical capability or well educated people in the 1950s. To say that the "skill doesn't exist anymore" suggests a misunderstanding of "where it comes from" in the first place.

You can do the same thing for Apollo as you can for the Shuttle. The process of reading through these histories, from front to back, is incredibly enlightening, and shows just how with determination alone you can build something like this from scratch.

That being said.. it really also helps if there's a dual purpose use for the military.

The effect that war had on the technological progress, including learning the skills of how to manage a not-so-simple idea like going to the moon into reality was incredible, and a direct spinoff from the bureaucracy created during the war.

Nowadays, that specific motivator is squarely with the Chinese.

While it is true that it is globally not very active in military terms I am pretty sure that this is going to change when more and more economic partners are realizing that there is no more money coming from China and it is cheaper to just default on their debt and nationalize Chinese interests.

FWiW :

    The Republic of China (ROC), or simply China, was a sovereign state based in mainland China from 1912 until its government's retreat in 1949 to Taiwan, where it is now based.

    The nine-dash line, also referred to as the eleven-dash line by Taiwan, is a set of line segments on various maps that accompanied the claims of the People's Republic of China (PRC, "mainland China") and the Republic of China (ROC, "Taiwan") in the South China Sea.

    A 1946 map showing a U-shaped eleven-dash line was first published by the Republic of China government on 1 December 1947.

The issue is that "Western" sea faring nations self selected themselves as arbitrators of global borders, including those of regions with governance dating back 4,000 years.

    On 12 July 2016, an arbitral tribunal organized under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) concluded that China had not exercised exclusive and continuous control over the [ dashed zones ]

    Over 20 governments have called for the ruling to be respected.
    It was rejected by eight governments, including China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%...

China and Taiwan have always claimed the regions within the nine dashed line.

Similar to the Chinese claims that the British never brought democracy to HongKong while China threatened invasion if any such thing had happened.

Populist words are cheap. I'll start blaming China for warmongering when they actually put boots on the ground. Meanwhile how many dorne strikes has the US made in the middle east without any consequences?

No, China is waging a war against the entire world in the smartest way imaginable, and most of us don't even realize it: They have their financial tendrils in all of our economies, down to the core elements and throughout the peripheries. Nearly everything has at least some degree of Chinese monies and thus influence now.

It's really only a matter of time until Pax Americana comes crashing down because we are all far too busy complaining about our navels. Be prepared, because Pax Sino isn't going to be kind to most of us.

IDK man, being drone striked from above by the USAF seems far worse to me than whatever China could be doing to me, but I'll bite.

>They have their financial tendrils in all of our economies, down to the core elements and throughout the peripheries. Nearly everything has at least some degree of Chinese monies and thus influence now.

More influence that the world reserve currency which last time I cheeked is the USD and only the US has the printer for it?

Just like all the other undemocratic dictatorships the west is "friends" with and turn a blind eye to their anti human rights actions?

They admit their own failings by showing us who they are "allergic" to. So yes, China may be a "bad guy", but they're painted as a boogeyman for a reason.

I'm a drop on the ocean only, but my case is the one I have: PhD in Computer Science, highly specialized and have lived and worked around the world , but there's not enough that attracts me to living in the US.

Its health system issues, the animosity against minorities and immigrants and the lack of reasonable immigration paths for professionals make it unsexy.

And as I said I'm literally nobody. How would the US attract real post Ww2 talent?

> lack of reasonable immigration paths for professionals

getting a visa is the hardest part, but doable if you’re a bit lucky. Once you have the visa, getting permanent residency after a few years and ultimately citizenship is relatively straightforward, IF you’re not from one of a few countries with large numbers of immigrants to the U.S.: mainly Mexico, the Philippines, China and India.

It seems from your profile that you’re Mexican so yeah, getting permanent status in the U.S. would take a really long time even if you got a visa.

This is one of the biggest competitive disadvantages of the U.S. currently: making it unreasonably hard for skilled people to immigrate, compared to places like Canada or Europe. But I think it’s an exaggeration to say there’s no reasonable path.

At least until SpaceX starts to feel a bit too comfortable... o_O

IMO, the opposite is true.

1. SpaceX needs money to fund their Mars dreams. And the HLS contract is a couple billion dollars that they can grab.

2. Getting to the moon with NASA will dramatically help SpaceX because NASA will be working with them to crew rate the lander for everything except taking off from and landing on Earth.

3. Developing HLS Starship will let SpaceX begin to offer private Lunar missions.

4. Mars is really tough. It's far away, it's only feasible to travel there once every 2 years, it's very difficult to land, and it'll be super hard to get in-situ resource utilization - basically harvesting resources from Mars to generate enough propellant that a return trip to Earth is possible.

I'm sure SpaceX will probably send some rockets to Mars. But the first few sets will be figuring out hwo to land and maybe set up ISRU. And in the meantime, the Moon is a great venue for SpaceX to train systems and earn a bit of money.

The Chinese are currently in their Apollo phase in which every engineer dedicates their life to the mission.

But I like to think we will.

I think those two things combined means your logic is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

Starship has fewer engines than Super Heavy, it likely won't be landing at full throttle either, and lunar lander Starship could have landing legs as well. The lower gravity on the Moon means that you can carry more hardware with you. Maneuvering in 0.16 g is nowhere near as fuel intensive as in 1 g.