Boeing Has Become the Poster-child For Ruling Class Incompetence
All our rulers know how to do is lie and loot
Several months ago I reviewed ’s debut hard science-fiction novel Theft of Fire. Many of you purchased the book, and replied in the comments to the effect that you enjoyed it as much as I did. It seems that Theft of Fire is now a finalist for the fan-voted Dragon Awards, which just goes to show what great taste I have in books (see also). Apparently it’s the first self-published novel to go to the finals since 2017, already quite an achievement in itself.
So, here’s the thing. If you read Theft of Fire and enjoyed it, this is your chance to help push it over the top. The process is pretty straightforward:
All you have to do is click through to the signup page, give them your email, wait a bit for the ballot, and vote. I’ve been told as few as 3000 votes could be enough to push it over the top.
If you haven’t read Theft of Fire, then you should read it:
And then you should go vote.
Theft of Fire is a Heinleinian space yarn of the old school. Its hero is a competent man who must match his considerable wits and expert technical knowledge against the hazards of space, using the limited resources at hand to solve desperate problems that get between him and his goal.
Competence is something in seemingly short supply these days. Competence and competition share an etymological root. A feminized society that abhors competition, under the sway of an elite that rigs games in its favour so that it may select winners (them) and losers (you) based on whim, cannot help but end up this way.
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Take Boeing.
Right now, two astronauts are trapped aboard the International Space Station, their one-week eight-month mission, to wait for Boeing to unfuck its Starliner capsule so they can get home. Problems have plagued the Starliner since before it even launched, starting with helium leaks that NASA decided were nothing to worry about. Once in space the thrusters started malfunctioning. Following months of obfuscation in which NASA and Boeing insisted that everything was fine, Starliner definitely isn’t broken, the astronauts totally aren’t stranded, they’ve recently admitted that, well, yeah, everything isn’t fine, the astronauts kind of are stranded, giving the popular science media implicit permission to starting adding adjectives like ‘troubled’ to Starliner headlines. It’s now looking like they might have to wait for Space-X to rescue them with a Dragon capsule ... which apparently might not happen until 2025.
It isn’t only the gimpy thrusters. The Starliner is blocking one of the ISS’s two docking ports. The geniuses who designed the capsule’s flight software set things up so that it cannot be undocked remotely, meaning that the only way to free up the docking port for now is for at least one astronaut to strap in and ride the deathtrap down. What makes this especially baffling is that during its uncrewed test flight, the Starliner was perfectly capable of autonomous docking.
This isn’t the first time Boeing has had software problems.
I wonder why.
Boeing wants to push an update to the Starliner, to enable it to undock autonomously and return home. They want their expensive spacecraft back. The problem is, there’s a risk the update could brick one of the ISS’s two docking ports, which would endanger all current and future occupants. Given the quality of Boeing’s software engineering lately, NASA’s hesitation is understandable. I can only imagine the colourful profanity that must be coming from Roscom behind closed airlocks.
Amazingly, NASA has announced that they intend to continue using the Starliner. Policy is apparently to always have at least two contractors providing launch services, so as to avoid keeping all your eggs in one basket. That’s probably a good policy, except when one of the baskets is full of holes, in which case the eggs you put in it are guaranteed to break. I suspect they just don’t want to admit that the only person who seems to know what he’s doing in space right now is Elon Musk, who has become a demon prince to progressives.
And NASA, like every other legacy institution, is packed with progressives.
So far Boeing has extracted about $4B from NASA for its faulty Starlemon, which is well behind schedule. SpaceX, meanwhile, has charged half that for the Dragon, which has made 20 successful flights to the ISS since its first crewed launch in 2020.
The Starliner isn’t Boeing’s only contract with NASA. They’re also helping to develop the Space Launch System for the Artemis moonshot. Boeing’s part of the contract has more than doubled in cost since it started in 2014, from around $900M to over $2B, while falling behind schedule. A few days ago a report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General called out Boeing’s SLS program for the company’s poorly trained workforce and inadequate quality control, leading to an unacceptable number of defects, which it is concerned may place the SLS program in jeopardy. I suspect the SLS will end up getting cancelled before it ever sends humans the Moon. The fully reusable SpaceX Starship makes the expendable, expensive SLS completely obsolete.
The Starliner’s comedy of errors isn’t the only bad press Boeing has experienced over the last year or so. They also have the problem that their airplanes keep breaking down, catching on fire, and losing parts in midair. I won’t spent much time on that here. Back in January,
cast a cold and unsympathetic eye on Boeing’s aviation safety record in The Competency Crisis: Flying Blind With Boeing, which covers the debacle in Boeing’s core business incompetency in hilarious detail.Boeing used to be known as an extremely competent corporation. You have to be to play in the aerospace big leagues. Jet aircraft are stupendously complicated machines with millions of parts, requiring thousands of highly trained engineers and mechanics with extremely specialized, extraordinarily difficult skill-sets in order to design, test, and manufacture. A corporation capable of reliably and safely building and maintaining jet aircraft is, necessarily, an even more complex machine than its products. Much like their airplanes, and their disaster of a spacecraft, that intricate organizational infrastructure seems to be falling apart.
There are a couple of explanations that have been put forward for this. Both of them are probably true, and both of them are related.
One is that clueless diversity hires have no idea what they’re doing, which is leading to design flaws, manufacturing defects, sloppy assembly, poor software, and every other problem you can imagine.
The other, which you don’t hear quite as often, is that the sociopaths running Boeing, such as CEO Dave Calhoun, don’t care about anything but the stock price, as a result of which core functions have been outsourced to cut-rate third parties who have no idea what they’re doing while quality control has been deliberately undermined in order to save a few bucks on the assembly line.
Just for context, here’s Dave Calhoun.
He apparently has exactly zero engineering experience – shocking, I know – but quite a bit of experience in juicing the stock price via the popular stock buyback scam. He’s a money man, and he also looks like a bad man, to me. The sort of guy who won’t let little things like professional ethics or common morality get in the way of his executive compensation package. Now, I’m not saying that he put out a hit on John Barnett, the quality control inspector who turned whistleblower and then turned up with a bullet in his head while in the middle of a lawsuit against his erstwhile employer.
I mean, how would I know? Officially, Barnett’s death was a suicide, and who am I to doubt the official story? It’s not like there were billion-dollar contracts on the line.
Somewhat suspiciously, two months after the first whistleblower Epsteined, a second Boeing whistleblower turned up dead. Maybe it’s just an unfortunate coincidence. In this case it was a fast-acting infection, rather than a bullet, which is a weird – if deniable – way of offing someone.
Actually, I just realized that I spread misinformation. David Calhoun was the Boeing CEO, until about a week ago. He was replaced on August 7th by Kelly Ortberg. The bad press finally forced him out.
A white guy replacing a white guy? Shame on you, Boeing. That isn’t very inclusive of you. What will your ESG people say? In any case, if the bio on his Boeing page can be taken at face value (hah) Ortberg seems to actually have some engineering experience, unlike Calhoun, so perhaps he’ll turn Boeing around. We can hope. Certainly Boeing has every reason to get its act together, given the quarter-billion-dollar fine it just agreed to pay for the 346 people who died on their 737 MAX, which all but wipes out the tens of billions in paper profits it obtained by looting the company with stock buybacks. Oh wait, no it doesn’t – that fine is a rounding error in comparison to the value senior executives have extracted from the company over the last few decades.
So what’s the connection between the diversity hiring initiatives and an executive class that loots instead of builds? Simple, really. If your business model doesn’t require you to actually make things that work, you don’t need competent employees. Those are only necessary if you have any intention of your products actually functioning. If all you intend to do is outsource, cut corners on quality control, slash R&D to the bone, and shortchange your employees so that you can plow the savings into stock buybacks, competence becomes a lot less important. Almost beside the point, in fact. You don’t need the best people, you just need people who are just barely good enough to avoid embarrassing you beyond the ability of your PR team to correct the record.
Of course, people are liable to catch on to the scam eventually – for example, when your airplanes start falling out of the sky – and they’ll probably be a bit annoyed with you. There might be calls for regulatory changes to crack down on legalized theft and force you to actually fulfil whatever function your organization is there to provide (which, in general, is not ‘maximizing shareholder value’). So, you dazzle the rubes with the prismatic spray of the rainbow, blinding them to what you’re doing.
See, they’re not a class of petty criminals with the souls of starving weasels rampaging through the chicken farm. They’re not a parasitic infestation of engorged ticks sucking the host dry as they infect its bloodstream with crippling biowarfare pathogens. No, they are caring, empathetic, good people for whom social justice is their top priority. They aren’t robbing your country blind and leaving rust and ruin in their wake. That’s silly. No, they’re increasing representation, ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table, that every voice is heard1.
Diversity hiring plays another role, which is specifically to exclude as many competent men from the institutions as possible. The heads of the rat king infesting the institutions know what species they belong to.
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They know that they cannot build, innovate, or create. They know that the wealth in which they luxuriate was taken, not earned; that in a just world, they would be hustling marks with shell games on a street corner, not running multibillion-dollar corporations. Keeping their scam going requires that they maintain the fiction that they are Bold Innovators and Creative Entrepeneurs and Titans of Industry and Knowledgeable Experts. That’s easy enough to do in the absence of any actual innovation: just keep insisting that you’re an innovator, and everyone will pretend to believe you. But if you have competitors who can actually do things, real things that aren’t just elaborate scams, well, you start to look bad by comparison.
Thus, not only is competence irrelevant, it is actively a threat. The solution is obvious: crowd out the competent with the incompetent, justifying it however you can.
Of course, you can’t say that you’re deliberately hiring people who have no idea what they’re doing. That would give the entire game away. So you babble on about systemic racism, institutional misogyny, hidden bias, or whatever, then clamour for Inclusion, so that you can make Diversity the top priority in hiring, which then enables you to keep making off with everyone’s Equity.
Our entire economy is dominated by this faek and ghey Game of Loans, a bonFIRE of inflated vanity in which the only people making money are running some kind of scam, be it a financial scam, an insurance scam, or a real-estate scam. Our elites don’t know how to do things anymore. They don’t have any ideas. They don’t solve problems, they make problems. They don’t innovate, they stagnate. They simply collect rents on the assets they squat on, use their positions to pump asset valuations without doing anything to actually improve the assets they hold, and then dump the resulting mess in everyone’s laps.
This social rot in general competence is starting to show up everywhere. As another example, medical schools are dumbing down their curricula, graduating a new cohort of doctors for whom social justice is a much higher priority than a working knowledge of anatomy, organic chemistry, molecular biology, or drug interactions. Making their programs easier is necessary because the people being admitted in the name of social justice are dumb. Of course, you can’t just out and admit that, so the metrics have to be polluted. Sure enough, they’re now going to cripple the SAT with another one of their shell games, in order to make it impossible to tell the difference between a good student and an idiot. The result of this kind of thing is doctors who can’t articulate their thoughts in recognizable English.
The institutions filling up with superfluous idiots is a big problem but it isn’t the only problem. Every time someone unsuitable is admitted to a university program or hired for a skilled position, someone who is suitable is left out in the cold. Some of them will find other things to do, sure ... but in general, their work goes unrewarded, their intellects unchallenged, and their talents fail to be honed into demanding skills. Competence is not something one is born with, but something which must be cultivated. Underappreciated and underemployed, many of those who get passed over sink into apathetic mediocrity. The ripest fruits of society rot on the vine untasted.
Over generational timescales this becomes a self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop. Skills and knowledge that are not passed on are simply lost. All things require a certain baseline of potential to learn; if the people who are capable of learning those things are prevented from doing so, while those who are not capable are given their rightful places, those things will not be learned. Because they are not learned they will not be passed on. Because they are not passed on, they will be lost.
This is not how we get to the stars.
This is how we get to Zimbabwe.
This is how civilizations collapse.
Not right away. Not in some sort of Mad Max nuclear apocalypse. This is a slow, crumbling collapse, an entropic decay in which the gleaming tower of high civilization gradually settles into a stinking, mouldering pile of ignorance and entropy.
Right now we’re mainly seeing the breakdown of our most complex mechanical systems – airplanes, spaceships, the occasional bridge collapse. But it will spread. Supply chains are already starting to break down. It takes noticeably longer to get anything done: incompetence-induced slowdowns in one sector have knock-on effects in sectors that rely on them. Eventually, the electrical grid will start struggling. Blackouts will become more frequent, then the norm. You’ll have to boil tap water before drinking it, and you’ll have to wait for the few hours a day during which you have power to boil it; that, or start a fire. Later tap water itself, potable or not, will be remembered as a luxury. Flush toilets will be a privilege of wealth, and the lightless streets will be sticky with human excrement.
Or we could not settle for that, and start insisting on high standards again.
Of course, standards are exactly the thing the rat king ruling class is most desperate to prevent. They know that if they’re held to them, they will come up short.
The solution is simple.
As
put it: Our rulers have to go.Thank you for paying attention to my rambling, semi-coherent thoughts on the intersection between the parasitic rat king of our ruling class, our DIEing institutions, and the shambolic faildaughter that Boeing has become. I promise this whole thing wasn’t just an excuse to get you all to go vote for Theft of Fire in the Dragon Awards.
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There's another reason for the downfall.
I was working for a contracting company writing software for the Boeing 787 project in the mid-2000's. Boeing wanted to do things differently this time, deciding that instead of having most of their talent in one facility, they would take advantage of the global market and spread production throughout the globe. The idea was they would take advantage of skill sets regardless of time zones. They quickly found out how difficult logistics became without physical proximity.
My company was horrifically behind, and it was always a game of chicken hoping another company that was horribly behind would blink first so we wouldn't get blamed for delays. When parts came, they found you couldn't just connect them like legos, and there were subtle differences in dimensions that forced them to go back to the drawing board.
The only effective way to manage large, technologically sophisticated, safety critical, projects is to get a massive swath of people in the same area so you can walk to a guy's desk and hash things out. When you don't know the guy half a world away, and their team might as well be from mars, you will never be able to get the candor you need. There's no spreadsheet in the world that can smooth out human factors.
DEI is a lot of the story, but don't underestimate how much managerialism has deluded themselves that process and metrics can replace old-fashioned human relationships.
I would argue that this goes well beyond a profit motive. I don't think pumping stock prices is the goal when companies such as Disney actively destroy their stock prices in favour of progressive ideology. It's easy to blame everything on sleazy capitalism, but there is something more sinister at play here.