Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
Damn that’s the most relatable thing I’ve heard in a while.
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This is how the US and all its hangers on have been fumbling the ball against China for decades. Love to see an imperial power kill itself with brain poisoned petty kings following whatever new age nonsense their advisors tell them about instead of empirically proven methods. Sucks shit to live here, though.
Knowledge inside your employees’ heads is impossible to quantify on a spreadsheet. This, combined with the obvious truth that tacit knowledge exists which cannot be codified, transmitted, & instantaneously rehydrated inside of new employees’ brains, will forever irritate the shit out of beancounters.
This is the real reason they want neuralink.
Until they have full-on androids they just need a meat bag they can slot a chip into.mayos are very bad at even considering the existence of unknown knowns. For example it should be obvious that your employees do a ton of background work and expertise that you don’t explicitly quantify or pay them for, and that you DEFINITELY know nothing about–an unknown known (in that it’s known by your company). It should also be obvious that you can’t actually interface a digital silicon chip with an analog meat-brain seamlessly, because cells are alive and they way they move/react is incredibly fluid and intelligent–an unknown known (in that it’s known by your body’s cells, but not by you).
But mayos are really good at falsely convincing themselves that reality is an assortment of discrete mechanistic things and processes instead of a dynamic web of flexible and reactive phenomena
It should also be obvious that you can’t actually interface a digital silicon chip with an analog meat-brain seamlessly, because cells are alive and they way they move/react is incredibly fluid and intelligent–an unknown known (in that it’s known by your body’s cells, but not by you).
be cautious here. Input works pretty well because the brain is plastic. They’ve done (limited resolution) artificial vision through basically an electrode grid. Hundreds of people, google Argus II. Hit the brain with some arbitrary electrical inputs and eventually it will stop interpreting them as pain and start decoding the patterns.
You can quantify it on a spreadsheet by comparing your other metrics vs. turnover rate, esp. by department. The bean counters do this all the time in the big corps. Smaller ones might just make things up but the big ones have teams of people building out strategies all centered around certain profitability / marketshare / stock price goals. Such as those at Boeing.
They’re making intentional decisions to hollow the place out to maximize short-term profit and to break the unions at their workplaces. They have an estimate of what this will cost them and then they hit the “yes” button.
What they fucked up at is that they got too close to the “horrific safety and PR disaster” line mostly by doing blatantly negligent things, nothing requiring deep knowledge. Make are the bolts are tightened. Make sure QA does inspections. Make sure that when QA finds something wrong, it gets fixed. This was all replaced by “do it fast and don’t complain” incentives. This does tie into the union busting though, as it was part of opening up new non-union shops in various red states.
“Make big line go up more this quarter” is literally all they learn in business school
That and with this quote:
Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
Now the contradictory burger business ethos makes some sort of sense: it’s pure short-sighted parsimony. They’d simply rather order an inferior but free service from the workforce than cough up the extra cash even if it pays for itself and more. They may lament not having really nice things, but bringing ANYTHING to the table is completely alien to them, so they’d rather just wait around and hope they get things for free. Hence the gung ho approach to AI even if its inferior. Hence when they offshored jobs to China, they explicitly asked for things to be made as quickly and cheaply as possible.
There are two words that describe this mindset…hmmm…what are they? Oh yeah, laziness and entitlement. My wish for hospitals to be publicly funded just like any other emergency service pales in comparison to the entitlement my so-called “social betters” have.
Trash future said in their boeing episode that if some Chinese spy could make this happen to boeing, they would be the best saboteur ever. And yet they do it to themselves.
Come to think of it, all the Russiagate stuff is essentially people imagining that Putin is a super genius election hacker when the reality is that we’re doing it to ourselves. There’s a theme here.
: “Please workers, stop asking for wages. What ever happened to TAKING PRIDE in your work? Please, just work for free. The satisfaction of a job well done is its own reward!”
: “Who CARES if my company embarrasses itself and people trust me less? I WANT MUH SHAREHOLDER VALUE NOW!”Another data point to consider is that Boeing isn’t really a manufacturer any more. It’s an assembler. The actual work of manufacturing is done by contractors, I think mostly in Japan? Boeing owns the patents and assembles the finished pieces into a cohesive airplane, but they haven’t constructed anything in decades now.
I read Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing recently, really great book on the subject
