7 ms·
It should. And I hope it continues to hurt them. We keep hearing how bad corporate behavior happens because the cost/benefit analysis simply views bad outcomes
by geophile 7y ago
It should. And I hope it continues to hurt them.
We keep hearing how bad corporate behavior happens because the cost/benefit analysis simply views bad outcomes as costing a certain number of dollars, and then you throw in the probabilities, and you can justify pretty much any appalling decision.
The best possible outcome of the 737 Max disaster would be a legendary business school case study showing management of technical endeavours by bean counters is a terrible idea.
- grecy 7y agoI'm calling it now - the US Government will pass a law so Boeing can't be sued out of existence, or they will bail them out. Because "too big to fail".
- ortusdux 7y agoSteve jobs understood this back in 1995. https://youtu.be/ZBma82g3Uag https://youtu.be/ZBma82g3Uag
- ISL 7y agoThat case study should come along with case studies like the Superconducting Super Collider [1], where insufficient counting of beans may have led to the demise of an important scientific instrument. The Higgs could have been discovered in ~2000 had the instrument simply turned on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- tropo 7y agoThat one suffered from insufficient members of congress. It needed to be more like the Space Shuttle or F-35. Better locations: 1. It could have been in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. 2. It could have been in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virgina. 3. With a slight size increase: Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and either Illinois or Arkansas 4. With a big size increase: all 5 of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Arkansas 5. With a big size increase: Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma 6. With a big size increase: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma
- i_am_nomad 7y agoI came here to say something along these lines. Letting accountants drive engineering is a fatal mistake, but so is engineering without any thought to costs and profits. I’ve walked away from more than one startup whose business plan was, “Let’s design the thing, and only after that will we think about COGS and competitive pricing.” That way lies madness, and Juicero.
- geophile 7y agoJuicero adds another function to the discussion: marketing. Juicero was an example -- a very comical example -- of marketing over everything else: technology and bean counting. Yes, a balance among all three functions is necessary. However, the 737 Max case is definitely about letting bean counters dictate engineering choices: saving design costs by pulling the ancient 737 design off the shelf; the software fixes to the problem introduced by those engines on that frame; and then pretending that the plane was just like an old-school 737, hiding all the complexity and compromises from pilots to avoid recertification costs. And even the decision to charge extra for redundancy of the critical sensor driving the software.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoJuicero may also have had the opposite problem: the dangers of letting engineers play unsupervised. It appeared to be, and maybe should have been, a cheapjack gizmo swaddled in marketing glitz to justify its ridiculous price. But someone did a teardown and discovered that it actually did contain a very expensive, precision-engineered, completely unnecessary two-ton press. To squeeze fruit pulp out of a tube.
- mikepurvis 7y agoThe legendary Juicero teardown: https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/ https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoThis one is a lot more fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
- dwoozle 7y agoWhat are the implications of the Higgs being discovered in 2000?
- ISL 7y agoHigh-energy particle physics would be more than a decade ahead of where it is now. Moreover, as SSC was planned as a 40 TeV machine, and LHC reaches 14 TeV now (at presumably much higher luminosity), SSC might have discovered something that still has not been observed.
- jchallis 7y agoThere is also an excellent chance that the standard model is the story up to 100TeV and these expensive programs take away attention from better science endeavors.
- papreclip 7y agoThis super-high energy stuff is generally a boondoggle. You could scale up the energies involved by another 2 orders of magnitude and get precise experimental data describing a new, even more ephemeral state of matter. Any practical benefit to the human race will be collateral damage ("we got better at building magnets and detectors because our toy demanded them")
- dredmorbius 7y agoBad accounting is bad.
- jgon 7y agoRight, but in one case hundreds are dead and in the other case we made a physics discovery 15 years later. Not sure if this is the bullet-proof equivalency you think it is.
- scarejunba 7y agoWe don't know the counterfactual world. Maybe we spend $12 b building it, then we don't run the DARPA AV challenges and the world is behind on CV instead. Maybe that's better, maybe that's worse.
- empath75 7y agoMost likely outcome is a government bailout.
- rad_gruchalski 7y agoHow is that going to fly with wto? Asking because of the recent case against airbus.
- asdfman123 7y agoCool, the opposite of a fine!
- elif 7y agoI think direct restrictions by the government, stricter regulations/inspections, loss of contracts, etc. would be more powerful and direct impactors than a handful of quarters in red ink with an asterisk. Capitalism is not the only or best tool to guarantee safety.
- Merrill 7y agoIt appears that the critical decisions on the Max design were made during Raymond Conner's tenure as head of Commercial Airplanes. He was a sales executive. His successor, Kevin McAllister was also a sales executive, and worse, was ex-GE. No doubt he was hired during James McNerney's stint as Boeing CEO. McNerney was also from GE under Jack Welch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_G._McAllister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_G._McAllister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
- PhantomGremlin 7y agoMcAllister was just replaced. The bad news is he was replaced with Stan Deal, a sales executive. The good news is he's not just a sales guy, he's held a number of jobs. He also has a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering. So there's some hope. https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2019/10/22/5-things-boeing-bca-airplanes-max-ceo-stan-dea.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2019/10/22/5-things...