Boeing again 47

[3DDave]

Not a surprise. Union leadership is to negotiate on behalf of the members. Refusing to take an offer to them indicates, bluff or not, that it's not worth taking a vote.

 

[Oops409]

SEATTLE (AP) — Boeing is giving the union representing striking factory workers more time to consider a revised contract offer with bigger pay increases and more bonus money, but it was unclear Tuesday whether the union would schedule a ratification vote on the proposal.

On picket lines in the Pacific Northwest, strikers said the company’s latest offer wasn’t good enough. Both the union and many of its members complained about the way Boeing bypassed the union in publicizing the offer, with some workers saying it was an unfair attempt to make them look greedy.

Boeing’s new “best and final” offer includes pay raises of 30% over four years, up from 25% in a deal that 33,000 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers overwhelmingly rejected when they voted to strike. The union originally demanded 40% over three years.

In the face of opposition from the union, Boeing backed down Tuesday from a demand that workers vote on the new offer by Friday night, but the company still wants a vote.

https://apnews.com/article/boeing-strike-offer-faa-safety-cb3de0dc02082efcb0d5f7d6287ea7a7

To put things in perspective, this weeks auto repair kinda drives home the point that the cost of living has far outpaced employee pay for a long time. In 1994 I bought a voltage regulator for my 86 farm truck at $12.99. Now today, that same regulator is $52 or 4 times the price, even though it is made in China today, vs Japan back in 1994.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

737 rudder issues again.

Faulty part this time unlike previous poor design issue with it.

https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...safety-alert-after-boeing-737-rudder-failure/

 

[Oops409]

"The NTSB says the rudders on "more than" 353 Boeing 737NG and MAX aircraft can freeze stuck and it's suggested the manufacturer come up with a solution besides stomping on the pedals to free them up. The board issued an urgent safety recommendation Thursday resulting from its investigation of an incident in Newark last February in which the rudder pedals jammed on a United MAX after landing. The pilots couldn't budge the rudder, so the captain kept the plane on the runway using the tiller.

The investigation determined that moisture can get inside the rollout guidance actuator, which is only used during CAT IIIB approaches but remains mechanically attached to the rudder controls all the time. In cold weather, the water seeping in through a faulty bearing freezes inside the actuator and hampers the pilots' ability to control the rudder. Collins makes the actuator and has told Boeing about the problem.

The board is suggesting the faulty actuators be removed (presumably limiting low-visibility operations) until freeze-proof units can be installed. The board says the flight manual tells pilots with a stuck rudder to “overpower the jammed or restricted system [using] maximum force, including a combined effort of both pilots,” which could make matters worse by resulting in a sudden full deflection of the rudder. It's urging Boeing to come up with another plan for pilots facing a stuck rudder."

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/737-rudders-can-freeze/

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20240926.aspx

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AIR2406.pdf

Collins Aerospace is under RTX, as well as Raytheon and Pratt Whitney.

 

[Oops409]

Day 15 - Strike Update
September 27, 2024

Even the pups are Holding the Line!

https://x.com/IAM751/status/1839840569977381234

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Seems the head of the defence side of Boeing is departing rather quickly now.

 

[dik]

This is a really good description of how Boeing is where it is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieghkqcUjmk

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Oops409]

dik,

I actually watched the whole video you posted above, on how Boeing is where it is, and how it applies to the US as a whole. He mentions Intel as an another example of a National Treasure becoming irrelevant by managing to short term stock results, and not focusing on engineering and building the best products.

My first desktop computer at work was a Wyse PC with an 8086 processor..... That was such a long time ago, and Intel has milked that architecture way beyond it's useful life, and the time has come to pay for their MBA mentality........

Great Article, thank you!

 

[3DDave]

The current Intel architectures have nearly nothing to do with the 8086 except by being a CPU.

Unlike most other CPU makers, Intel has retained the ability to run previous code that was designed for previous architectures. Motorola made a superior architecture in the 68xxx series, but could not help themselves in repeatedly ensuring old code would fail on the new chips, extinguishing most of the possible back-log of day-one applications, including OSs.

Intel's current problems are with a manufacturing step that is on their leading edge processors not part of "milked" and a poor response to the marketplace for those who bought them.
---
In any case, the reason this is all a big problem is that the Republicans, noticeably starting with Reagan, removed the incentives for businesses to do anything else. By lowering the upper tax rates they lowered the incentive to avoid them by re-investing, paying employees more, spending money on in-house training, spending money on R&D. Instead much of the money that was previously a target of taxation and those tax avoidance strategies, went into off-shoring and stock buybacks, because there was no other reason to do any other thing. This resulted in a great increase in market value - due to inflation from too much money entering that market.

Add in other influences, like the rise of Venture, aka Vulture, Capital companies that exist to create leveraged buyouts and then gut profitable companies and the parallel use of companies to use their cash to extinguish competitors and develop near total monopoly control over markets and here we are.

Blaming CEOs for this is ignoring what created and fuels it.

At the time of the move to Chicago, Boeing was not solely manufacturing airplanes. What happened to the Lockheed commercial airliner company? What happened to the Douglas Aircraft commercial airliner company? What happened to the Ford Motor airliner company? Boeing had been branching out to avoid the fate of these other commercial airliner companies. They also saw what happened to Fairchild and their military aircraft business, to General Dynamics and their military aircraft business. James McDonnell and his board failed to find a successor CEO for the company he founded - turned it over to a son who didn't want to run it - and the rest follows.

Remember Bell Laboratories? They invented the transistor and was where Unix, the idea basis for Linux which is what essentially runs most cell phones, came from. Now the operation is owned by Nokia. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_developments

and realize how little corporations do of this anymore.

On top of which Reagan over-fertilized the defense industry with far too much cash in order to get Russia to give up, ignoring that Russia was already rotted inside, awaiting one Polish shipyard worker to push the whole thing over. This cash dump caused a huge amount of hiring and, soon after, a huge amount of firing when the Russian threat evaporated, leaving a huge amount of people fleeing the defense industry, followed by massive consolidation of all the damaged participants.

The economic ecology changed to favor what has happened to most large American companies. The rules define the type of game that results and the rules now favor what has happened to Boeing, among many others.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Back in the late 90's, Intel developed a totally new chip based on what was called a the time, a RISC architecture (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) and we even ported our software to it, but there was just too much momentum with the old architecture, and in all honesty, the main competitors at the time, like the Sun SPARC, HP's PA-RISC and Silicon Graphics MIPS (which was really the fist true RISC chip) they were so much faster and cheaper than the Intel RISC processor that they never really made any headway there, but as they say, there's more to the story, while these other RISC architectures were superior, you had to rewrite your code to get maximum advantage, so there was some issues getting the software you wanted to use on the latest and greatest. Now our company was lucky since as far back as the days of 'mainframes' we had developed our source code as 100% machine independent and them used pre-processors to convert our machine independent code into executables for each target machine with a minimum of machine specific tweaking. This allowed us to move to whatever the next most popular hardware platform was out there. Unlike some of our competitors, we were never in the hardware business in the sense the we always ran on commercially available systems, or as we said, whatever was the customer's choice. This allowed us to move from mainframes, to workstations, to desktops systems to laptops as they matured and became powerful enough for our software. So we didn't really care who was winning the chip or hardware wars, we just waited to see which systems were the most popular and ported the software to that platform. As for why is the world still on what some say is an 'old' Intel architecture, it's just that they survived while most of their competitors just fell by the wayside or was gobbled up by someone else. Granted, we still have AMD and Apple with their ARM chips, but that Intel chip just keeps delivering the goods, like it or not.

Anyway, that's how it all looked from where I was sitting for some 35+ years after I had moved from 'hard engineering' to the world of software.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[dik]

Oops... so did I, I thought it was great, and really informative.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Oops409]

BUSINESS NEWS
Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry. Now it's struggling to stay relevant.
Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now a fraction of the size of Nvidia by market cap, and smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD.

Intel made efforts to break into smartphones. It released an x86-based mobile chip called Atom that was used in the 2012 Asus Zenphone. But it never sold well and the product line was dead by 2015.

“Job number one was to accelerate our efforts to close the technology gap that was created by over a decade of underinvestment,” Gelsinger told investors on Thursday.

Nearly every modern smartphone uses an Arm-based chip instead of Intel’s x86 technology which was created for PCs in 1981 and is still in use.

Interesting article linked below:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/bu...ustry-now-struggling-stay-relevant-rcna149601

 

[Oops409]

 

[3DDave]

That expert on Boeing:

Before his academic career he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.

McKinsey is a root source of the MBA problem. And pharma is a root source of problems in the US medical industry.

Small wonder there is no mention of the affect of tax policy on corporate incentives.

"Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation."

If your expertise is leadership every problem is a leadership problem.

Seems like he believes what he says from the tiny straw through which he presents the world, but it doesn't explain how this toxic management spread so far and so fast. That can only be driven by the Boards of Directors and those are cash oriented people; always have been.

 

[IRstuff]

re: RISC; hindsight is 20/20, it's taken a long time for innate advantages of technological advancements to overtake the advantages of dedicated hardware.

It's easy, now, to see RISC as the obvious winner, but Intel has stumbled MANY, MANY, times; they lost about a decade because they couldn't get their factories to the next technology node, and they eventually missed about 4 technology node advances, getting stuck on a double digit nanometer node while others got into the low single digits of nanometers.

Let's not forget that MANY innovations were amazing at the onset, but quickly faded because of other technological advances or market forces. Some examples, GaAs was going to be the silicon "killer" because of its innate electron mobility speed advantages, and yet, silicon is the last semiconductor standing, as it were, and x-ray lithograghy was going to supplant UV lithography, and UV lithography, although shifted drastically downward in wavelength from the 300-ish nanometers of the 1990s, "killed" x-ray lithography.

There are also technologies that were way ahead of their time. Amdahl, of Amdahl Computers fame, started WSI, Wafer Scale Integration, in the 1980s, but it's only in the recent years where chips that were larger than the wafers Amdahl was using have come out.

What's fun is that the rise and fall of technologies is so fast that we're able to appreciation the ebb and flow of these things in one's own lifetime, as compared to even something like electric cars that were a thing 100 years ago and are now possibly ascendant.

The myriad of "killer apps" that have come and gone in my lifetime is truly amazing. I worked on integrated circuits that had 6 micron design rules, and the state of the art is 1000x smaller, albeit at 10x the overall process complexity, and 1000x more expensive factories. Rockwell, bought by Boeing in 1997, had its own integrated circuit facilities, which is something unimaginable now, albeit for good reason; the notion of owning a dedicated silicon foundry has turned out to be massive economically impractical.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Seems they are in full MBA mode pulling the health benefits off the strikers.

Getting a feeling everything might implode.

Wonder what they would do to keep the OEM design house operation to maintain the type approval safety oversite.

 

[AZPete]

The MBAs didn't "pull" the health care. That was woven into the fabric before this all started.

 

[dik]

They facilitated it and in some cases initiated it.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Well who ever has it in the stick part of the carrot and stick of the strike needs to have a re-assessment of who losses out the most with the skilled labour departing the building permanently.

Currently there is much keeping the skill work force in the building.

 

[AZPete]

CEO put his word on the line. Union leadership/negotiating team 100% recommended accept offer. Blowing off leadership doesn't assuredly result in a better corporate outcome.