Because, America

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Ivanhoe]

Google search results can be unintentionally ironic;

 

 

[lucklucky]

 

[sunday]

😶

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Rick]

The ugliness of true hate and why the the U.S. is where it is at today.

"What Pastor Voddie said about the people loving us when we serve our communities..... In the next small town over, they have a large festival and parade in July. Now, they love our food banks, our free soup suppers, and thrift shops, but at that parade this past July, as usual, the churches joined up, made their float, and threw candy to the children. But...this year they were also passing out Gospel tracts from Living Waters. A woman made a post on our local Facebook group about how offended she was, that one of the tracts ended up in the hands of her 10 year old daughter. There were over 500 comments that were so absolutely hate-filled. I cried reading them, because I realized how much Jesus and His church are hated in these days. I would add, that out of all of these comments, only 2 believers stood up. I started to write a reply, and they had shut down comments. What sadness. Jesus forewarned us."

[Ivanhoe]

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/city-in-crisis/baltimore-police-grapple-with-dangerous-staff-shortage-experts-warn-of-public-danger
 

Quote

 

The dwindling staff at Baltimore's Police Department is dangerously low, according to national police experts.

In Baltimore's Southern Police District on Tuesday, sources say at one point, there were as few as three police officers patrolling a district of more than 61,000 residents.

At several points, radio transmissions called for volunteers to work overtime.

 

 

[rmgill]

How long before Baltimore PD's radio chatter sounds like it's Main Force Patrol? 
 

 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Rick]

True reporting vs the main-stream media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.natesilver.net/p/americans-love-florida-even-if-you

Quote

However, progressive political types seem inclined to write Florida off, often even treating it with disdain. Take, for example, an NBC News story from Sunday, which was approvingly tweeted into my X feed by many Democratic types. The premise of the story is that, sure, lots of people might move to Florida, but many of them regret doing so, finding the state’s political climate and its actual climate equally disagreeable. 

The "story behind the story" is that there are progs so stupid, they moved to Florida during the lockdown without researching the weather. How on earth can an American not know about the head and humidity?
 

Quote

 

The NBC story leaves a false impression, however, partly by relying on anecdotal evidence — I would like to have seen some due diligence on the woman who said she had a tumor that doctors refused to operate on. But mostly because it implies that the rate of “movers’s remorse” in Florida is high. And statistically, it isn’t.

The numbers that I’m about to show you come from the same Census Bureau migration data that the NBC story cited. In principle, a state could still have a net positive migration flow is a lot of people leave it, provided that even more people arrive But Florida isn’t like that: it has a high rate of in-migration and a low rate of out-migration:

 

Expect tons more stories like this, as we approach the election.

[Rick]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsP4U09XClg

This traveler has many good videos of the U.S. 

[sunday]

Were you tempted to fly in a Boeing 787 or 737MAX, please read this first:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Quote

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. 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. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

Quote

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Quote

Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered. He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.

Quote

Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”

This could go here or in the Culture Wars thread, also.

Edited April 13 by sunday

[Tim Sielbeck]

Just a reminder:

 

 

[urbanoid]

On 4/13/2024 at 8:16 PM, sunday said:

Were you tempted to fly in a Boeing 787 or 737MAX, please read this first:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

This could go here or in the Culture Wars thread, also.

Wow, what a shitshow.

[sunday]

Just now, urbanoid said:

Wow, what a shitshow.

There is more

 

[Ssnake]

This looks less and less like the love child of incompetence and negligence; I am shifting my assessment closer to criminal greed now.

I already avoided flying 787 since composite parts are more delivate than traditional aluminum alloys (and defects are harder to detect too), but apparently my paranoia wasn't dialed up enough - yet. At this point, I suppose I'm willing to spend a premium on travel time and ticket fees to avoid flying Boeing. Ten, fifteen years ago I wouldn't have believed it would come to this.

[sunday]

Lots of composites on A350, too: https://aircraft.airbus.com/sites/g/files/jlcbta126/files/2023-02/Airbus-A350-XWB-Airframe-Composite-guide-for-firefighters.pdf

B777-200 and -300 should be quite safe, as they were developed before the onset of the rot.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Its worth looking at an air accident that occurred 50 years ago this year.

Basically, they knew 2 years before the accident the aircraft was vulnerable to floor collapse when the door opened in flight, which knocked out the flight controls, usually resulting in the loss of the aircraft. The FAA didnt want to mandate Douglas fixed it, so they took a promise they would. Which cost everyone at Eremonville their lives.

Fast forward 50 years, the same management structure is in place at Boeing (it is the same company now after all), and pretty much exactly the same failures repeat themselves. Even FAA reluctance to mandate fixes, because they dont want to get in the way of the market. We saw how well this worked with the Max.

I wont say history repeated itself, but its a damn good rhyme.

 

Not that Airbus is immune either. You only have to look at accidents involving the ATR series of aircraft, where the FAA claimed that the ATR wing was the most efficient design ever devised to attract ice, and the Frence blew them off because they said they were being pro American business. Result, lots more deaths.

[Ssnake]

Not saying that Airbus is fault free, but things seem much worse at Boeing these days, and I suspect for at least a few more years, and only if they really turn around the management attitude from the board of directors down. I'm not seeing that yet.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well, Airbus certainly seem to have far fewer planes falling out the sky due to corporate culture right now, there is no doubt about that. OTOH, there was quite a lot of concern in the late 1980's on about Airbus flight control systems, one of which did incirectly cause at least 2 bad air accidents. One can argue whether that was because Airbus rushed the technology out to be first, or airlines didnt appreciate quite how revolutionary FBW was in airliners. A mixture of both perhaps.

To me, the adoption of FBW in Boeing looks almost the same kind of mistake, or at least, the bug you expect moving to new technology. The only real difference was Airbus redoubled its efforts to make sure Airlines knew how different their airliners were and how to operate them safely, and Boeing, with the Max at least, really didnt give a toss after its aircraft was sold how they were operated.

Boeing will turn it around, they just need to remember to make their engineers the primary consultant on whether something is ready for the marketplace or not. The only question is how long that is going to take them to remember how to do.

Edited April 15 by Stuart Galbraith

[Ivanhoe]

4 hours ago, sunday said:

B777-200 and -300 should be quite safe, as they were developed before the onset of the rot.

Developed before, but manufactured after.

I was already avoiding airline flight like the plague, due to the inconveniences and discomfort involved. Boeing ain't helping.

[Ivanhoe]

4 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

 

Fast forward 50 years, the same management structure is in place at Boeing (it is the same company now after all), and pretty much exactly the same failures repeat themselves. Even FAA reluctance to mandate fixes, because they dont want to get in the way of the market. We saw how well this worked with the Max.

To be precise, the FAA doesn't want to get in the way of the airliner market. Their attitude towards general aviation is mostly obstructionist.

[Ssnake]

3 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Boeing will turn it around

I thought so too, but with the latest reports I think the penny still hasn't dropped with them. They may be too big to fail immediately. I'm not sure they can rebuild safety culture before running out of money, and they need to retain staff and keep their production lines open while doing the rebuilding thing.

That in turn will mean to continue building sub par planes for the foreseeable future while identifying all the top, mid, and low tier managers that need the boot, haemmorraging more money as airlines will demand bigger rebates, further eroding Boeing's profitability.