Early 80's, when I was 6 or 7, my best friend had a pinball machine in his basement. The front door "hatch" to it was unlocked and we spend countless hours poking the insides with a long screwdriver to trigger various component. Probably wasn't safe but it sure was fun!
Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion that the safety culture started to break down after 1997 after the merger with McDonnell Douglas?
>Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion
Yes-- this represents formal acknowledgement by a regulatory agency. The hope is that agency can now use this formalization to enforce change within Boeing.
Does anyone else share my wish that the result of this investigation was “poof no more Boeing”? I don’t understand why corporations can be fundamentally flawed and keep going, where a person in that situation would be prosecuted as a criminal. If Boeing has a bad safety culture because they keep investing unbelievable sums of money into stock buybacks and dividends, so much so that they don’t even have reporting culture… I don’t think they deserve a second chance, and frankly I think the shareholders deserve jail time so I really don’t care if they lose some money.
Yes, I know some pension fund somewhere is invested in Boeing. No, I don’t care. Will we ever solve corruption and climate change if we refuse to actually change our ways?
I think that people are far more culturally and historically specific than they appreciate, so I take claims like this (i.e. non-specific ones about human nature and virtue therein) with a massive grain of salt. I agree in the general sense of the word, of course!
Whatever you will decide to do with Boeing, you will have to make employees, shareholders and numerous clients (incl. Us military) content.
I totally agree with many of your points re:climate change and hierarchies, but I don't see how that responds to my initial charge: that specific companies that are found systematically guilty of some sort of crime should be forcibly disbanded.
What if many of the smart, motivated Boeing engineers would be more productive in a dynamic marketplace of smaller firms? What if there's a warp drive concept lurking in the mind of an underutilized systems analyst deep in the basements of their valley? Investing all these resources, especially public fiscal ones, into a company that has proven again and again to prioritize suicidally negligent, short term, excessively selfish thinking... well, it seems criminally unjust.
TL;DR_1: I don't need him, he needs me!
I own a share of a fund which has shares of boeing. Should I go to jail?
I would separate laborers who have shares as some form of retirement from capitalists who deploy unimaginable sums of money. I know the 1% discourse is tired but the general sentiment is extremely valid: a relatively small group of powerful people pressured the Boeing board to make these decisions. In the paraphrased words of AOC: "..and it's, like, twelve people."
Yes, I think the people who lobbied for cost cutting and dividend/buyback programs within the company deserve to be criminally investigated. I am so far from a lawyer and doubt our exact current laws and policies (esp. SEC) would be enough, so the most specific I can get is "charges related to negligence and greed" TBH.
But no, I was being unclear when I said "owners" -- not all owners of any amount of the stock are complicit, other than in a broad ethical-consumerism sense. You're on Hacker News, so I have no doubt at all that you're living your life in good faith.
Most people are only mildly greedy, but that accumulates as a silt in a river, and eventually gives opportunity for more serious greed to manifest in full glory. Corporations, while are not democratic in nature, still get nudged in various direction by all the people around it, not only execs, but (even if differently weighted) also employees, customers, voters. As it is the environment where corporation operates in. Btw. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but I would call turning a blind eye to minor infractions done by others as manifestation of minor greed. (acting would cost my time/energy without benefit to me)
> that specific companies that are found systematically guilty of some sort of crime should be forcibly disbanded.
There are limitations what can be actually done to boeing, even if a lot of people agree that boeing is faulty.
It is not feasible to just nuke it from the orbit. (As in, “there was boeing a minute ago, and now there is vacuum”)
For example, somehow supply/services to Us military MUST be kept.
Maybe restructuring, maybe some execs investigated, maybe penalty, but military must be supplied.
(Not disagreeing with the sentiment regarding accountability per se, but implementation must be compatible with current reality)
> You're on Hacker News, so I have no doubt at all that you're living your life in good faith.
Thanks for that, but I would caution you to adjust this heuristic. As I see it, HN is a good filter for tech curiuosity, but it is orthogonal to a lots of things. I’ve read that suicide bombers frequently were engineers.
As soon as you quote AOC "Eat The Rich" you lost all credibility in your comment section.
She is the least knowledgeable person to be anywhere close to a Boeing strategy of change.
And, just like "Eat The Rich" is rhetoric, so is "..and it's, like, twelve people." It's not 12, it's anyone making more than $X00,000, wherever X makes her more popular with her base.
I lost all credibility by quoting a politician I like in a relevant way? Seems like an awfully fragile conception of credibility.
Re:it’s not literally 12 people, thanks, I know. It’s not 1% either. I don’t hate the rich, I hate capitalists; I’ve never had any capital and maintain no empathy for the monsters who do. They do things like defund safety programs so much that planes literally disintegrate in mid air.
And, what, undo capitalism? The motivating forces here are profit, plain and simple. I've come to think that it's not only probable, but _inevitable_ that any growth-oriented, profit-motivated company (read: any company) will reach a point that their only remaining growth path is to undermine quality.
Capitalism in practice is an artificial environment. People speak of it as if it is a force of nature, but anywhere it is put into practice it is put into practice in the context of norms and regulations. Undo capitalism is a conversation terminating tactic.
If the Jack Welch style of capitalism is failing, it can be changed. For example, there is a national Labor relations board because we don't do this anarchically.
No, they just have to make following a safety culture less expensive than not. For example, by conducting proper audits. If not following safety requirements means that new planes are not certified and the others get grounded before it is fixed, then it is going to get more costly for Boeing than doing it right to begin with.
That's what regulations are for.
And undermining quality is often not profitable. That's because their customers also want to maximize their profits, and a bad plane, one that doesn't last, requires frequent repairs, is unreliable, has a bad reputation with passengers, etc... isn't going to be very valuable. Customers will pay more for a good plane that offers better returns on investment. This is the same for any B2B company. Consumers are a bit easier to fool, especially with good advertising (which is also expensive), but at some point, they too will realize that a brand is worthless.
Short term profits. Literally nobody gives a shit anymore what happens to a company ten years in the future.
Outsourcing and building the Max fast led to good numbers at the annual shareholder meeting. Arguably it still does because what is anyone going to do? Buy Airbus? They have waiting lists too.
It can be channeled, directed and mitigated. That is what regulations and regulatory agencies do. Although of course you need to watch the watchers so they don't get captured.
* and even if it were, we channel, direct, and mitigate forces of nature all the time, if not always to great success, or without consequences
I don't cut Boeing much slack, but some of this also falls on the FAA for delegating certain oversight activities to the manufacturer. I assume they do it for manpower reasons (ie there just aren't enough FAA employees to do the job sufficiently).
I don't think there's any need to cut Boeing any flack to point out that the regulators did fail to do due diligence.
It is understandable that regulators would take a lighter hand to a company which has shown good ethics — which was historically the case of Boeing (more of an issue if that is because of not being able to handle the load), it's a problem if they go completely hands off.
I don't think the FAA is the sole culprit here either, we've not heard much of non-american regulators. While it makes sense that the FAA would be the primary regulator for Boeing, that regulators would cooperate internationally, and that non-primary regulators would have to be careful e.g. around the risk of being called out for trade restrictions, I still feel non-US regulators should have been a lot more involved with and suspicious of Boeing following the MCAS mess.
One of the looming risks is that other nations lose faith in the FAA to certify their aircraft. Particularly smaller nations, which, in effect, inherit the FAA certification as safe instead of levying their own.
If you ask a company, any company, what the most important aspect of their product is, they’ll proudly crow “the quality of it.”
And yet, we still, for some reason, have to deploy the FAA to make sure profits didn’t take a front seat to not killing hundreds of people.
The FAA shouldn’t need to exist. It only does because private industry _never_ holds up its end of the bargain. It’s a race to the bottom. Unfortunately it’s not just consumer products that eventually get enshittified, it’s also big things that can kill us (737 Max 8s and Tesla autopilots apparently).
Both major cases of regulatory lack of oversight in USA involved presidential mandate to "deregulate" and "free" the airliner market (DC-8 cargo door failure history, and 737-MAX)
No, just make it very costly to have quality lapses. Capitalism takes care of the rest. When it's effective government regulation makes companies pay for costs that would otherwise be externalized.
Well, how about, just enforce laws already passed by congress? Monopolies are illegal. They have been for 100 years and it has yet to "undo capitalism."
Undo American capitalism :). A true capitalism would have strong regulations to prevent this sort of thing, and companies that recognize that making bad products is bad for themselves and society in the long run.
That said, I hope to god you’re a socialist lol. The stance “capitalism inevitably leads to corner cutting, but it’s still the best we’ve got” would have the potential to literally break my mind with consternation.
Really started when Congress decided they were supporting too many aerospace companies and some asshat got the idea that forcing some of them to merge would be a good idea.
Spreading manufacturing all over the US is also more to do with getting kore congressional districts “pregnant” than with national defense. In war you want multiple, as in redundant, supply lines so if one is cut, you can source matériel from somewhere else. What we have is multiple, as in single point of failure, supply lines. Lose one and everything collapses.
It's been covered for at least the last 5 years by many reputable news orgs. That HN link (you looked at the link right?) includes several refs, and a Google search dozens more.
Too many people think that remote work means "working from home" or that co-working means "working from WeWork". There are tons of different variations that let you get out and be around other people while working remote. I have long wanted to start a small fun workspace with space for 5 or so people that's really just a place for us all to do work together without being in a traditional office or our houses. A space we can define ourselves (or I define and invite others) that is not my house and also not a stuffy office.
The biggest problem with Amplify is not any of it's underlying technologies. These are all great services. DynamoDB is one of the best things in the entire AWS service portfolio.
The biggest problem with Amplify is that it hides complexity that the developer really needs to have a firm grasp of when designing their application. You really need to think a lot about your access patterns before using DynamoDB. DynamoDB is OLTP and not OLAP. You aren't going to have a ton of ability to do ad-hoc queries with DynamoDB. that's just not a use case it's well suited for.
HOWEVER - AWS Amplify is marketed without that warning - people use it without really understanding that. Then they get stuck when they start trying to treat it like a traditional RDBMS datastore, which it is not.
Amplify "dumbs down" something that really should not be dumbed down. That's it's biggest problem and the reason I also stopped using Amplify some time ago.
> You really need to think a lot about your access patterns before using DynamoDB. DynamoDB is OLTP and not OLAP. You aren't going to have a ton of ability to do ad-hoc queries with DynamoDB. that's just not a use case it's well suited for.
This was a trap that I fell into. While I didn't go with Amplify, I went with DynamoDB assuming that "it's a high performance database, surely I'll be able to bend it do what I need it too, right?". I feel like AWS should be more upfront about the limitations of DDB, it's a great database but they sell it like the solution to everything, and it simply isn't.
This is spot on. Parts of Amplify are aimed at people just getting started with Cloud and Programming, which is good and bad. You can shoot yourself in the foot if you drive the car too fast. I think a lot of more advanced people use Amplify services along with the Amplify client SDKs and then do the provisioning using CDK rather than the Amplify CLI.
DynamoDB is a sad hack that heavy marketing had elevated in absence of better offerings on AWS at the time. It's not particularly good as KV store let alone something more serious.
> It's not particularly good as KV store let alone something more serious.
Nonsense. DynamoDB is a pretty good KV store, and a killer feature as part of AWS' free tier. I dare you to present a cheaper and more performance KV store.
My experience coding for it on an IoT Hackaton, has made me decide to never touch it again unless there is no other option, like the customer wants it.
Really nothing that could earn my heart over traditional RDMS offerings.
You haven't missed much. The overall developer experience is still... poor.
Dynamo has its use cases. Imagine a database with 100K+ of devices sending different metrics out every minute or so. You need to retrieve metrics by device ID:metric and date/time range. I migrated a similar DB from Cassandra to Dynamo, and it worked really well (for that use case!)
In the years since, I've worked at other companies and seen Dynamo used where it was a really poor fit: tons of filtering/scanning, relatively tiny datasets that require many secondary indexes. I even know of one app that starts up and loads an entire DDB table into memory! If you're not absolutely sure Dynamo is a good fit, it isn't. Use a relational database.
> Lets start by the way one has to explicitly create indexes
I never heard anyone complain that they had to explicitly create primary keys when creating tables in RDBMS.
> or query types for what one can search for.
I never heard anyone complain that they had to put together SQL queries to get data out of a RDBMS.
It seems your only complain boils down to pointing out nosql databases aren't SQL databases, and you didn't bothered to onboard onto the tool you knew nothing about. That's hardly insightful.
With Dynamo, it's not creating indexes that's the problem: I also have to change my code to use those indexes. I've been using DynamoDB off and on, at several different companies over the past 10+ years. I've been using SQL databases for 25+ years. The DDB developer experience is less than optimal.
I'm curious if you can give a long form critique? I've never heard any complaints of it from folks using it "in anger."
I have heard a lot of complaints on it not doing as much. But I swear every time I've taken a dive on those complaints, it has been by folks that don't pay attention to the costs of what they are wanting. :(
DynamoDB is an absolute beast in the right hands. It is just difficult to use and far less forgiving than a basic SQL database - which should have been the go to for something like Amplify.
maybe you could argument and suggest as to why it is not good as a KVS which is the number 1 use case for dynamoDB and everything in dynamo was optimized to be a KVS which a lot of multipurpose nosql database can't say.
Products like this are great. But if you already know the technology, know what is happening and you are using it to basically eliminate a bunch of coding or setup tasks that you would have to do.
The problem this is only great for a certain type of knowledgeable developer who is also setting up the system.
The next person that comes or a junior developer who does not have grasp of the underlying tech will just see a bunch of magic. But he will be required to be productive with it.
So if the original devs leave and don't get people with grasp of the underlying tech, the new people will start accumulating technical debt at an ever faster rate without ever being able to pay it back. Because with so little knowledge and expectation of performance, whenever something small happens that requires you to learn stuff you will skip learning and just move stuff around hoping some random change will fix it.
So I will amend my original statement:
"Products like this are great." But only if you are working on the project alone and don't expect anybody else to join it in the future.
When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
If OP has only one customer they do not work for themselves, they work for that customer and have a job - regardless of what they like to tell themselves.
That's nonsense. I know plenty of 20K / month consultants that work as contractors, one project for one customer, a couple of months later for another. The shortage of qualified people at that level is such that they have the jobs for the picking. They are self employed in every way that matters, to the tax office, their customers and their bookkeepers.
But in those cases they do have multiple customers, serially. That is still regular market dipped into where pricing can be tweaked.
Working as a contractor for a single company for very long periods of time (say 1+ years), is a very different type of relationship, even if the mechanics are similar. I suspect that's the type of relationship that was being referred to.
It's a different relationship, but it is still not the same as being employed. The people here equating the two are either clueless or disingenuous, I'd hope for the former but I fear the latter.
It's easy to piss on those that manage their one person business over multiple years from the comfort of an actual employed situation, and it is equally easy to piss on them from the position of the manager or early hire of a business with a lot of employees and a lot of customers.
But the amount of responsibility that typically lands on the shoulders of these one man operations tends to be disproportional and they deal with those responsibilities in a much better way than many of those large companies. The main reason that they stay in business in the first place is because they tend to be good at what they do, and reputation damage being what it is in that world the first job you fuck up may well be your last.
I'm not sure this logic follows. I generally take on one client at a time, sometimes for many months (even years, on occasion). I've ended gigs that I was unhappy with, and I've stayed on contracts for extended periods of time.
I still make my own hours and have relative freedom to operate how I please, despite only having one client at a time.
That’s about like people who are so proud to be a “business owner” because they bought a franchise and now work 60 hours+ a week and never take time off. They aren’t “running a business”, They bought a job.
I wasn't in the valley at the time but was part of a startup that lost our angel funding before it happened because the angel's funds were overcommitted already in failing startups.
My view has always been that during the dot com boom, companies were so short staffed that they would basically take anyone on, regardless of their technical skill, with the hopes of training them up to learn programming. Janitor, receptionist, your weird cousin Eddie who ate glue - all of them could get a tech job if they really wanted one.
When the bubble burst, lots of people lost jobs. Both skilled people and unskilled. This was a huge darwin moment for people who'd worked at startups. Lots of people went back to whatever they were doing pre-bubble. The better people typically found work, even if it took a little while to do so.
In my view, it really did serve as a healthy shake-out of talent in the long run. This very well may happen again soon...
