Hacker Remix
Crises at Boeing and Intel Are a National Emergency
18 points by bookofjoe 3 hours ago | 14 comments
newprint 3 hours ago
bookofjoe 3 hours ago
nine_zeros 1 hour ago
But NO MORE BAILOUTS. Next time the US government needs to save something, they should take over the assets as an eminent domain, wipe out equity holders, and put a 10 year ban on all executives/board of directors who authorized share buybacks.
class3shock 21 minutes ago
I just wish things could be different. Boeing was in a place of being one part of a duopoly with Airbus, in a era of increasing commercial air travel. At the same time as slowly renewing focus on military aero that has been recovering after large cuts at the end of the cold war. In an era where space went from a tiny field to having a bunch of commercial applications and interest. All places they could have been leaders! But it's just eroded.
I know much of this is just the past repeating itself but I just wish it were different. It's hard not to think being an engineer back in the day working on the 747 was a better gig then it'll be working on whatever Boeing does next.
caseyy 1 hour ago
And people should be angry at them for failing and causing economic disruption (assuming it would even be as bad as prophets of doom say). Their suffering should be publicly attached to its harbingers — greedy and incompetent executives.
People responsible and accountable for the current situation would face natural consequences of their actions.
But of course, I don’t think it will happen. We bought into the delusion that executives and big business can do no wrong, and that they somehow shouldn’t face the results of their actions. Their employees, stakeholders, and the broader economy just keep being “affected by difficult times”.
But neither these companies would be “difficult times” nor subprime mortgage lenders and CRA’s were “difficult times”. They are and were just groups of greedy executive sociopaths getting a free ride off society, knowing full well the negative externalities of their actions.
We keep letting weeds grow in our proverbial garden unchecked and then say “if we take out the weeds then there will be no more garden”. Well guess how that happened, and guess what’s the only way to get a sustainable garden back. Except with weeds, dealing with them requires action, effort. With large corrupt businesses, we don’t need to do anything — just allow natural consequences.
alephnerd 49 minutes ago
In most cases I agree, but for extremely CapEx heavy industries, this is a death sentence.
For example, the entire semiconductor industry in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan would not exist without industrial strategy and capital provided by local and central government.
In fact, unlike in the US and Europe, anti-trust never had significant mindshare in Asian economies, and much of the economy in these countries are largely split among a couple dozen conglomerates or holding companies.
This is the model that China is using, as it was Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea that played the largest role in making China a multi-trillion economy by investing in China decades before the US and the rest of the West began investing in the early 2000s.
A purely profit driven incentive structure is diametrically opposed to commodification (which is the ultimate form of production at scale) because the margins pressures would be too severe.
This is exactly what caused the entire semiconductor fabrication industry to collapse in the US in the 2000s-2010s, while Asian countries continued to spend tens of billions subsidizing a handful of conglomerates that represented these industries.