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?

The history lesson we all need

You should all take a little time to read David Neiwert’s century of lynching and rioting by white people in America, because we sure as hell didn’t get any of this in our public school history classes. This is the stuff that ought to be taught in fifth grade, except that a) a lot of white parents would scream at administrators about their kids being shown a picture of Grampaw smirking in a mob that’s dismembering and burning a black man, and b) I’d be afraid that there’d be some white parents smirking now and drilling the wrong lesson into their kids.

Even now I look at my fellow white people in that photo and wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. How do you participate in such horrors and ever again claim that you are on the side of what is right?

People would be concerned at teaching such graphic horrors in our classrooms now, but look at that — they were bringing their kids to a lynching, like it was a field trip to the local textile museum.

How does it feel being the willing enablers of an Evil Empire?

This video starts off with a Fox News interview in which a couple of apologists for Blackwater explain an incident in Iraq in which mercenaries “neutralized a threat” at an intersection, a very bland and seemingly everyday event in an occupied country. After seeing Fox misrepresenting the whole affair and calling the mercenaries heroes, the video reveals that this was the Nisour Square Massacre, in which a group of unprofessional gun-toting American assholes went on a murder spree, killing 17 civilians and blowing up vehicles left and right. Fox avoided mentioning the victims and was shockingly dishonest in their misrepresentation; this report pulls no punches and describes their murder.

Fox News is a criminal propaganda front, and we might as call it what it is, the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda of the Republican Party. Erik Prince is pure evil, and the use of trigger-happy hirelings to run rampant in a country we ought to be trying to reconstruct is unconscionable and self-destructive. Iraqis are justified in regarding Americans as unforgivable villains.

Cobweb construction under way #SpiderSunday

I had set up a bunch of new cages for my new generation of lab-born spiders (I keep wanting to call them azi) yesterday, and I popped in this morning to see how they were doing. They’re looking great! They still seem so small to me, but they’ll grow, I’m sure.

One of the signs that they’re doing well is that they started filling up all the open spaces in their cardboard frames with cobweb. This little Parasteatoda has been zipping back and forth all night to make lots of strands of webbing.

They also seem to have eaten all the flies I gave them yesterday. I may have to give them a few more tomorrow.

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!

That is the most on-brand thing I’ve ever seen

It’s a masterwork. Some advertising genius was asked to encapsulate Joe Biden in a single phrase, and they thought hard about it, and distilled him down to two words.

It’s perfect! You see “malarkey”, and you think “antiquated, old-fogeyish” and it’s a natural to associate that with Biden. It’s going to go over well with timid old boomers.

In a particularly nice touch, in smaller print on the back of the bus, it includes a dictionary definition of “malarkey”. I guess that’s their idea of outreach to the young folks.

Where is Patrick Kessler, and how much was he paid?

Didn’t the NY Times find it suspicious that this is the only photo of Kessler they’ve got?

This guy calling himself Patrick Kessler sure had a brilliant scam. He talked to rich people and institutions and told them that he used to work for Jeffrey Epstein, and had been hired to set up encrypted servers that stored the thousands of hours of secret video recordings Epstein had made of rich, famous people raping young girls at his house, and that he now had the keys to the server and was willing to make them available to lawyers and the media. As proof, he’d show them grainy, porny still photos on his phone and say, “That’s Prince Andrew” or “That’s Alan Dershowitz”, and the gullible lawyers would fall for it. He kept the scam going for months, constantly evading any attempt to get any concrete evidence out of him.

He played off multiple marks. First he’s negotiating with David Boies and John Pottinger, two lawyers who were supposedly representing Epstein’s victims, and then he’d sneak off to the NY Times and tell them he didn’t trust the lawyers and wanted to deal with them. He invented convoluted schemes for transferring files, and would then at the last minute announce, “Oh no, the servers are on fire!” Everyone was dancing to his tune.

Then, the best part is unstated. The NY Times finally reports on this story, and I notice something is missing. Read it yourself, you’ll notice that the con artist, Patrick Kessler, just quietly drops out of the picture as his marks start turning on each other and pointing fingers. Has he been arrested? Has he fled the country? We don’t know. Apparently the reporters don’t care, either, since they just stop mentioning him. I might also ask if Kessler had been paid anything — he strung them along for months, are you saying he kept the con going just to sponge off the lawyer’s expense accounts for dinners and alcohol?

I’m actually impressed. He scammed a couple of high-priced New York lawyers, and he scammed the NY Times, and now he has disappeared and none of his targets will admit that they were stupid and got taken. If this were a crime novel, it would be a page turner. I want Carl Hiaasen to write it, because I think only he could adequately skewer Boies, Pottinger, and the NY Times while laying out the story.

And this is just legal corruption.

Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger discussed a plan. They could use the supposed footage in litigation or to try to reach deals with men who appeared in it, with money flowing into a charitable foundation. In encrypted chats with Kessler, Mr. Pottinger referred to a roster of potential targets as the “hot list.” He described hypothetical plans in which the lawyers would pocket up to 40 percent of the settlements and could extract money from wealthy men by flipping from representing victims to representing their alleged abusers.

The possibilities were tantalizing — and extended beyond vindicating victims. Mr. Pottinger saw a chance to supercharge his law practice. For Mr. Boies, there was a shot at redemption, after years of criticism for his work on behalf of Theranos and Harvey Weinstein.

Who is the real con artist here, Kessler or Boies/Pottinger? It seems to me that the lawyers were drooling at the prospect of getting blackmail material they could use as leverage to get rich people to cough up large sums of cash in return for suppressing the evidence, and they got to skim 40% off the top, while the rest would go to the clients they represented, or to charities, to make it look “ethical”. Further, they could get paid by billionaires who aren’t even in the recordings, like the contemptible Sheldon Adelson (at least, I don’t think Epstein would have had an Adelson sex tape, but who knows…). Adelson wanted to influence elections in Israel by buying incriminating videos of politicians he didn’t like.

Mr. Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate in Las Vegas, had founded one of Israel’s largest newspapers, and it was an enthusiastic booster of Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Pottinger wrote that he and Mr. Boies hoped to fly to Nevada to meet with Mr. Adelson to discuss the images.

“Do you believe that adelson has the pull to insure this will hurt his bid for election?” Kessler asked the next morning.

I guess this isn’t illegal? Or it is, but we’re going to quietly sweep it under a filthy rug somewhere?

It’s also weird how, throughout this story, they get all sensational about what men were possibly engaging in sex with underage girls in these photos. “Could that bearded man be…?” or “Is that actually Famous Man having sex…?” and the women are all invisible. No one seems to stop to consider that juicy compromising photo of some guy is also a photo of a victim — a victim who ought to have some rights, rather than being nothing but a pawn in photographic evidence of a crime.

But mainly, I read the entire NY Times story and wondered how bad journalism can get, when they don’t even ask, let alone try to answer, the major questions.

Where is Patrick Kessler, and how much was he paid?

Regressive taxes are good!

That’s what Bloomberg says, anyway. We should tax poor people more, so they can’t afford to buy things like sugary soft drinks, which would shorten their lifespan. Apparently, if you’re rich, you never indulge in stuff that might harm you.

Some people say, well, taxes are regressive. But in this case, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money. And so, higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So, I listen to people saying ‘oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do.

The question is do you want to pander to those people? Or do you want to get them to live longer? There’s just no question. If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s just no question that full sugar drinks are one of the major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease and cancer and a variety of other things.

So…who in New York has a guillotine? I think it’s time to wheel it out and take care of some patronizing jerks.

Spiders: The Next Generation

This is how I spent my morning:

I was cleaning up cages to set up more space for the next generation of spiders. The previous generation were all wild-caught; these are all lab-born, raised in isolation, so they’ve never seen another spider, which is why they are all flagged with a big “V” for virgin. The plan is to let them get cozy in their roomy new boxes, put up some cobwebs to decorate the place, and then next week I’ll introduce males to them, one by one. I’m going to watch them and then, as soon as the male has accomplished his duty, I’ll scoop him right up and put him in a vial, nice and safe.

I’ve got more juvenile females to set up with cages, but the remaining spiders are still on the small side. These spiders are small, too, especially compared to the behemoths I caught at the end of the summer, but they’ve got to start sexing it up sometime.