Machinists & engineers over machines and MBAs!

For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of news about Boeing lately. Are you, too? Is it just that the company really is in the news right now, or is it some weird algorithmic quirk where the web notices that I grew up near Seattle, therefore I must be obsessed with Boeing? I was, once, because growing up in a place or time where one employer thoroughly dominated your family’s welfare was a worrisome experience, but really, I moved away and got better.

Anyway, I ran across two bits of Boeing news that were interesting and had nothing to do with my upbringing.

  • The day the machines take over may have been delayed a little bit. Boeing tried having robots assemble these finicky curved metal panels that make up the fuselage of an airplane, and discovered that human machinists did a better job and didn’t entail all the development costs of making the robots work. This makes sense: humans are incredibly flexible general purpose machines, numerous and cheaply made, and I suspect that there will be niches in the future Robot Economy where skilled labor that can execute diverse tasks will flourish. We’re not obsolete yet! Also, there are real labor skills that ought to be more highly valued.

  • There are also cases where human greed is the grit that wrecks a company. This is a sad story, where Boeing might have once been a capricious giant that tormented the Pacific Northwest, but at least it had an impressive engineering culture; now, the Suits have taken over, and useless MBAs run the show and are in the process of running it into the ground. I’ve been away so long, I hadn’t realized that Boeing management had taken flight and moved their executive headquarters to Chicago, where the people who run things are completely out of touch with the daily reality of a company that builds things.

    As the aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia recently told me, “You had this weird combination of a distant building with a few hundred people in it and a non-engineer with no technical skills whatsoever at the helm.” Even that might have worked—had the commercial-jet business stayed in the hands of an experienced engineer steeped in STEM disciplines. Instead McNerney installed an M.B.A. with a varied background in sales, marketing, and supply-chain management. Said Aboulafia, “We were like, ‘What?’“

    It’s horrifying how the obsession with shuffling money around has taken over the actual business of being productive. It reminds me of the catastrophe that killed Sears, which was, in a nutshell, capitalism run amuck. It’s happening again. They should pay more attention to machinists than MBAs, but those MBAs will run off with personal fortunes carved out of the carcass of the company they should be managing, so they’ll be the ones thriving.

Uh-oh. Now that I’ve actually used the word “Boeing” a couple of times in a blog post, those nefarious web algorithms are going to slam me with even more news about the company, aren’t they?

I get email

I get the impression that Phillip Jones is not a fan.

Pz Myers how dare you trivialize the inhuman and insidious horrors of Nazi concentration camps by comparing them to ICE facilities! Yes the conditions in those places are unsanitary and unacceptable, but they are nothing like concentration camps which were specifically intended for genocide. Stop pretending you oppose concentration camps PZ! Communists and Socialists like you always lock people who don’t agree with collectivist ideology up when you get into power! You always torture and murder them too, because you know that people won’t abandon their individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence for your pipe-dream, hammer-and sickle utopia! The discovery Institute has written about you too, asshat! They remarked, completely and accurately, that you are a crusader/bully determined to silence and Malign anyone who disputes your talking points, even if they agree with you on most everything else. Even if the person is a leftist and evolutionist like you, if they don’t agree with you in every minute point, you attack them like a rabid dog!! Dawkins and Harris aren’t perfect, but they are better men than you!! And they continually publish scientific research; you haven’t published research in more than four years! You’ve spent nearly all your time trolling and trash talking on twitter!!! You should have been disowned by Atheist Ireland and it’s allies a long time ago!! If Dawkins, Harris, or any other new Atheist dies as a result of your defamation, like Pim Fortuyn was, I will make sure you and all the other hate-mongering, Islamic appeasing, Ameriphobic , uber-left wing pricks who’ve been lying about and bashing them are held accountable. Dawkins is in danger of being killed like Taslima Nasrin. Because of bin ladenist, brown-shirt lefties like you!! By the way, the Federal Government, while refusing to charge you with treason and sedition like they should, informed me that they have you under surveillance, and are waiting to catch you committing some act of insurrection or violence against the government so they can arrest and charge you. And don’t tell me you’d never do that, you said you hoped for a revolution to erase the stain of America. And you support Antifa violence against right-wingers like Andy Ngo. I wouldn’t be suprised if you’re plotting to bomb a bridge, like those Occupy Cleveland nuts!! If this country is so terrible get out!! I’m going to boycott any appearance or association with you asshole!!

Twenty three exclamation points. Not a high score, but respectable. I appreciate how it gradually escalates from “how dare you trivialize…” to “new Atheists will die as a result of your words” to “you’re plotting to bomb a bridge”.

Extra points for going to the Federal Government, and gloating that they said I was under surveillance and are awaiting any excuse to arrest me, while at the same time claiming that I’m the one who wants to take away individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence. Always nice to be reported to a police state for daring to suggest that they’re a police state!

Bad sex

Pssst. Wanna read some porn? The short list for the Literary Society’s Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. You can also read some longer excerpts, if the short quotes in the first link are insufficiently repellent.

I almost liked this one.

She gave a yet deeper, moaning sigh. Like breathing in he saw the word he had said shiver and expand inside her. Her arms moved now, and flexed: out of here, Venus de Milo. He watched the death-life fill her growingly. She grabbed and caressed him with more muscle, more zest, than ever before. Her long lean arms were spider arms, while her kisses roved and dug.

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘You are the female praying mantis, devouring her mate.’

‘I am. You are. I shall eat every shred of you.’

‘Mouthful by mouthful.’

But nah. The author is just trying to trick me with the spider allusions, but there’s no substance here.

Actually, all of the choices are out of date and obsolete. They’ve all been superseded by one brief tweet on Twitter.

Mmm-mmmm. Now that’s bad sex.

He did it. They finally let Sergio Canavero carry out a head transplant.

I said it couldn’t be done. That the proposal was unethical. That Canavero couldn’t possibly get a spinal cord to regenerate. Then his head transplant volunteer rejected the plan.

Apparently, Canavero found new volunteers, and went ahead and did it. The result is even more horrifying than I ever predicted.

I think I’m going to be sick.

You fools! You argued over whether you could, when you were supposed to care about whether you should!

The War on Thanksgiving?

I am weary after many years slogging in the trenches, drafted to serve in a war I didn’t want to fight. Every year, in December, we’re called to go over the top and assault the Christmas redoubt in our bloody war on the name — never mind that we never actually do, preferring to sit back and sip our wine and enjoy a feast instead, it’s the thought that we’re expected to clamber over barbed wire to somehow force people to say “Happy Holidays”. It’s tiring. And the truth is, I don’t really give a damn. It’s just the fucking Christians wanting to pretend to be persecuted again.

And now, this silly escalation.

OK, which of my fellow Lefties was asking for this? Was it you? I didn’t hear a word about this until Trump suddenly started whining about how we’re attacking him. Come on, people! We’ve got to be coordinated about these attacks!

Again, I don’t really care. I don’t celebrate a bunch of long-dead Europeans feasting at the onset of their invasion of a new continent, I just like the day off, visiting with my kids, and seeing my students recharging with their friends and families before the conclusion of a semester. If that’s the War on Thanksgiving, I guess I’m a combatant. Once more.

They better not try to declare a War on Halloween, though. We have the witches on our side in that one.

Tony Robbins, super-creep

There’s been a new development in the Tony Robbins case. It ought to be enough that he’s a charlatan with no skills other than a glib line of patter who gets millions of dollars every year for telling people what they want to hear, but he also has a history of harassing young girls. There is, as seems to be common in these cases, a long line of accusers.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News published a series of investigations revealing how multiple former staffers and fans have accused Robbins of sexual misconduct over three decades. Ten women have said Robbins groped them, exposed himself, or sexually harassed them while they were at his seminars or working for him, and nine of them said they were upset by his actions. Other records showed that he had berated victims of rape and domestic violence. He has denied every allegation and accused BuzzFeed News of “flat-out lying.”

Afterward, former SuperCampers reached out to BuzzFeed News about the 1985 incident. Reporters then contacted other former campers and staffers — dozens of whom independently recalled hearing about it. Many also remembered a heavily sexualized seminar delivered by Robbins to campers as young as 13. Several said they had been waiting years for a reporter to contact them. This is the first time Robbins has been accused of assaulting a minor — and it is also the first allegation of sexual misconduct by the guru that could be corroborated by eyewitnesses.

Robbins is following the usual play book of these predators — hit-and-run sexual encounters, denial, accusing his victims of trying to get his money, denial, shaming women, denial — but there was one more box he had to fill in on my bingo card. He had to file a lawsuit against anyone who reported his behavior.

Bingo!

Bonus points for filing in Ireland, of all places. It turns out that Ireland has extraordinarily slack defamation laws — the entire burden of proof rests on the defendant, with everything skewed to benefit wealthy people who are offended that someone dislikes them. It’s an interesting twist on the usual strategy of filing a SLAPP suit in states that lack strong anti-SLAPP laws. He has instead gone international in his venue-shopping. He’s rich, he can afford to kick the peons where ever he wants.

We win!

Good news, everybody! The Richard Carrier lawsuit is kaput. He finally, after 3 years of this nonsense, approached our lawyer and begged for mercy: he agreed to walk away from the lawsuit with prejudice if we agreed to do likewise and promise not to hurt him anymore. This is a comprehensive surrender, agreeing to quit harassing me, Amy Frank, Lauren Lane, Stephanie Zvan, Skepticon, The Orbit, and Freethoughtblogs with his legal bullshit. Here’s the SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT if you want to savor our victory a little more.

We still have to finish paying off our legal debt, so we’ll still be begging for donations for a while. If you’re one of those terrible people who supported Carrier in his attempt to silence people, I hope you appreciate what a bad investment you made, and excuse me while I dance on your failure, losers. Your champion is crawling away, defeated.

Minor accomplishments!

Minor, but I intend to celebrate them.

  • I gave the students a pop quiz Friday, and got it graded by Saturday! In fact, I am completely caught up in grading for the first time this semester.
  • I got an exam written for Monday delivery! I could look on the dark side of that, in that it means I’m only caught up until tomorrow, but I’m going to pretend that writing a new and original exam is a good thing.
  • The temperature in my office is currently around 33°C, which is miserable and made getting the work done harder, but I finished anyway. On the bright side, my sweat glands work!
  • I revamped a lot of things for FtB, with some more on the way, and all the other bloggers here are happily tearing through old applications, saying yes or no. I guess I was the bottleneck holding everyone back. But I’m not anymore!
  • This is going to be a short week since there’s some sort of holiday on Thursday. We’re planning to bring my oldest little boy, Alaric, home for a day. We’ll probably continue our tradition of putting up the Atheist Tree while he’s here, preparing for Atheistmas next month.

I guess that’s four good things with one in the works. It counts!