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Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by shagie on Saturday August 24, 2024 @05:05PM (#41341501)
While Boeing - the union of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas - needs some fundamental changes, Boeing the company represents a significant trained workforce for aerospace construction.

Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."

Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by jessriedel on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:09PM (#41342117)
It is an incredible but true fact there’s often no known way to repair large organizations once they have gotten sufficiently sick. They have to be dissolved and new companies have to be built from the ground up. As you suggest, this is incredibly destructive. The employees and expertise aren’t destroyed — they start and join the new companies — but the relationships and institutional knowledge is largely lost. But it is recoverable, and the alternative is often worse.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by shagie on Saturday August 24, 2024 @07:32PM (#41342815)
> It is an incredible but true fact there’s often no known way to repair large organizations once they have gotten sufficiently sick.

I believe that this is a form of the Anna Karenina principle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle )

> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

There is no scripted formula to repair a large organization. Each one needs to be addressed in a way that is particular to that organization, its culture, and its ultimate desired end state.

One could look at the Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs Apple - that was a turn around of a not small organization. However, what worked for Apple certainly won't work for Boeing.

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by genewitch on Saturday August 24, 2024 @05:34PM (#41341736)
okay, so what's the solution if boeing can't make fit for purpose vehicles (air or space)?

Just let them keep eating crackers in bed, or what?

aka "too big to fail"

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @05:33PM (#41341728)
A true scientist would come to the conclusion that at this point in time it's time to give up on the great liberal democracy project. A true scientist has the scale needed to recognize that capitalism, as practiced under liberal aims, does not have the desire nor the ability to satisfy modern industrialism's education prerequisite. A societal culture that has prioritized the reverse of education is what has led to the United States's incompetence at technology and industry. The United States was never going to succeed in this arena.

The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's serious about doing real work.

Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is better at heralding space travel and mass production?

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by cdchn on Saturday August 24, 2024 @07:11PM (#41342625)
>A societal culture that has prioritized the reverse of education is what has led to the United States's incompetence at technology and industry.

If the US takes their ball and goes home from space exploration, who's does it? China?

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @07:18PM (#41342702)
China does appear to be a good replacement and contender for a sustainable modern empire (according to whatever objective analysis would support that claim). But, if they flirt with liberty and the pursuit of happiness even one bit, then it's game over and futile for this strain of politics too.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by doublepg23 on Saturday August 24, 2024 @05:56PM (#41341977)
Doesn't this ignore SpaceX being American?
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:03PM (#41342047)
Excellent question. And the answer is, of course, very simple: Being American (or, more generally, a liberal-democracy subordinated entity), you should expect even Elon Musk's SpaceX to be a bad bet. SpaceX will display its inherent inability too, eventually.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by zorak8me on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:16PM (#41342170)
That's a convenient wave of the hand, isn't it? "Oh it will eventually break" is just entropy, and can be applied to anything.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:26PM (#41342239)
I'm only minimizing the value of the Enlightenment's liberty proposition (liberalism) as a result of the scientific observation that entropy most definitely accelerates through liberal-democratic ideas and enterprises. Don't propose liberalism and then I won't appear aloof when I'm actually watching the situation very closely.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by gkuhl21 on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:42PM (#41342383)
Where does a true Scottsman stand on this issue? ;-)
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @07:14PM (#41342662)
That's the problem of the generic establishment's dominant principle: there's a pedagogic influence where a trend towards aggressive responses to criticisms of popular science is valuable and, really, should be expected. Capital rewards and incentives go to the distributed liberal justice warriors when they implement regurgitations of trite and irrelevant talking points. Like an objective optimizing GPT-4 model that focuses on “no true X” meme tokens. Civilization's trained citizens miss details that matter, as they're limited to the compliant programming script they must follow and never deviate from.

Besides violating some sacred cow and norms, how does the "no true Scotsman" fallacy proposal relate to the fact that no true scientist would ever consider the Boeing aerospace company or Elon Musk anything close to engineering geniuses? Because, otherwise, you're just avoiding the objective commentary's point and discussion it leads to. Whether this evasion is intentional or not.

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by vinceguidry on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:28PM (#41342254)
Lol. Who else is in this class? Little Piotr Communism dropped out of school 30 years ago. China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by makerdiety on Saturday August 24, 2024 @06:33PM (#41342296)
"Who else is in the pool of promising candidates for intelligent economics?" is the question we're trying to answer.

> China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.

edit: Getting to the frustration of realizing all reasonable options have been exhausted is an obstacle to climb over.

Re:NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth ... by vinceguidry on Sunday August 25, 2024 @06:39AM (#41346250)
Oh please. The answer was globalization. People couldn't get along well enough to make that work so here we are.

There is no magic sauce that will make economies work for everyone. Specialization is how we built civilization tens of thousands of years ago. It's how we get off the struggle bus today. But if nations can't rely on a global trade order then they all have to build everything.