I work in the aerospace sector, and am directly regulated by the FAA and routinely sign documents they review. They have my signature on file and compare it when reviewing docs I sign off on. I have been in this stuff for a whole bunch of years. I own an airplane, but do not hold a current license to fly (the plane's currently not airworthy but I hope to restore it to that status at some point).

I think, perhaps, you did not read my post closely enough, you got over-excited and only skimmed, or perhaps you suffer from poor reading comprehension. I explicitly stated what you seem to think I did not.

Private and recreational pilots are prohibited from making money from their flying. Passengers can pay THEIR SHARE of the costs of a flight, but not more (i.e. the pilot cannot gain financially from the flight if he does not hold a commercial license). The FAA has revoked the licenses of YouTubers (NOT just the moron who deliberately crashed his plane) after they ran channels in which they MONETIZED (or the FAA believed they'd monetized) their flying videos while not holding a commercial license. The smartest pilots on the web who stream their flying videos specifically demonetize the videos they shot in the air while flying on a private license. Those who do not are just gambling that they'll not get noticed and contacted.

For those who find raw federal legal documents unreadable, here's a more gentle version. Note that while there's no clear text saying "you cannot take pictures for hire from your plane", the text makes it clear that you, as a pilot without a commercial license, may not profit financially from the flying (though you MAY share the costs with your passengers as long as they're not paying a larger share than you are, thus giving YOU a profit). Like all federal regulations, there's sadly a degree of interpretation involved so not every FAA person is as picky, but if you only hold a private or light sport license then you're gambling if you are making money from pictures/video from your flying (NOT videos ABOUT flying that are shot on the ground - those are not in dispute). You can probably get away with a passenger monetizing photos or vids shot while you are flying, as long as YOU are not profiting (MY guess, but NOT actual legal advice, and I have not personally tested this).

I know this from other sources, but let me point you at this guy so you can see both [a] how seriously the FAA takes even a joke when done by a pilot, and [b] pay close attention to his comments at one point where he makes a point of saying how careful he is at 4:48 about not even taking anybody's pro-rata share of fuel expenses (he's smart to be so careful about this stuff). How a pilot gets treated in these situations can depend on your local FSDO (which is NEVER how federal regulations SHOULD work, it should be all uniform and predictable). I don't have time to write a novel here, and everybody is free to read the federal regs and hire a lawyer to go through it with them, but pilots HAVE been busted for monetizing their flying with internet videos, and I figure not enough people know about it.

If I just saved your license from future revocation/suspension, you're welcome.

The FAA will not let YOU buy a cheap drone and fly it over your house to take pictures unless you equip it with a new transponder, which you probably cannot find and/or afford (the regulations mandated something that did not exist at the time, and for which there was no complete spec or FCC approval plan). The transponder has no safety function - it does NOT broadcast as part of the ADSB system, so it does NOT make your drone visible to air traffic control or to pilots of planes (it's for the local police to be able to find you and stop you). If YOU have such a transponder, YOU still could not legally take pictures from that drone and sell them to anybody without getting a permit from the FAA (that sale of pics is a commercial act, and thus the FAA wants it's piece of the action). Also, YOU cannot get in a private plane (assuming you have a private pilot license and plane) and fly over the city and take photos of your neighbor's homes and sell them the photos (you'd need a much more expensive and harder to get (and maintain) commercial license) but the government is fine with some company making money flying planes or drones over your home and photographing it as they conspire with another company to take away your home insurance. Amazon and Pizza Hut etc will have no problem operating drones over your home (THEY, as mega-corps will be able to get and afford (or just make themselves) all the required transponders and pay for any permits etc). YOU as a citizen are slowly seeing your rights to the air over your property get stolen and transferred to government and industry - our founders PRESUMED that a citizen owned the air over his land and would be completely stunned by any other assertion.

I know, somebody will defend this saying "it's apples and oranges" and "the commercial operator DOES have a commercial license" etc. I agree, but that's NOT my point. There's nothing inherently more dangerous in YOU flying a drone over your own home and taking pics, or in YOU flying a cessna over your home while your buddy in the right seat snaps a few pics of your home and your neighbors' homes - and certainly none of these becomes more dangerous if you later sell the photos. This is about regulatory capture (Government making extra costs raise the bar to entry into an activity, which in-turn benefits some businesses or business models or industries) and the reduction of freedom for the individual. It's also about government and corporations working hand-in-glove to ramp-up the control they have over the general population (who are SUPPOSED to be the ones in control in a Constitutional Republic).

"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" - Elizabeth Willing Powel, to Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

“A republic, if you can keep it.” - Benjamin Franklin

what you other guys do is every bit as bad. When you point to any major American corporation today and say something like "See there! That's PROOF that capitalism {or free markets, or libertarianism} doesn't work!" you are completely missing the point; NO major American corporation is currently operating in a free market economy - ALL these bad behaviors are in a non-free market economy.

Big aerospace firms like Boeing are entirely wedded to the government; some of their biggest customers are governments (primarily buying stuff from their military divisions), the industries they are in are regulated in the extreme, and their customers are NOT the people in the plane, but rather other major companies (the airlines) who are similarly NOT operating within a free marketplace. Boeing is in bed with politicians and regulators and would not know a free market if it was hit over the head with one.

Same thing with health care. In the USA, Obamacare is in [nearly] full effect; the only bit not in effect is the federal penalty for not buying insurance. The vast majority of all money in healthcare is entangled with government - Medicare, Medicaid, state programs, verteran programs, etc account for most of it and the government sets all the rules that drive the record keeping and bureaucracy and cost-shifting. The American health biz is no longer even within sight of a free market.

Politicians NEVER go after the billionaires who give them their money when they promise to "soak the rich". It absolutely, positively, NEVER happens.

FDR was going to go after the rich, and even set their tax rates up around 90% (where the public would see the "justice"...) but actually provided so many loopholes the public would never hear about, and could never understand without degrees in both accounting and law, that nobody actually paid at those rates and the rich got richer while vast swaths of the population thought FDR had their backs in punishing the rich.

LBJ sure soaked the rich. So did Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Barack Obama too... he sure taught all those mean nasty greedheads a lesson!.

Of course, the super-rich, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the rest somehow get richer and richer and keep giving piles of money to the people supposedly soaking them. Hardly a normal human reaction to being robbed. Most any of us ordinary people who found a politician going after us and taking money from us dis-proportionally and making nasty comments about us being unfairly wealthy would react by NOT giving that politician more money.

Ahhh, but if you're rich and you are NOT supporting the politicians in power, if they THINK you're more helpful to their opponents than to them, then suddenly they just *might* be open to roughing you up a bit with added burdens and fees and taxes.

Of all the places where one could go to get more money for the federal coffers, commercial spaceflight is hardly an obvious one...but it is indeed one where you essentially only hit two rich guys; that guy you used to love, but who took over Twitter, and that quasi-libertarian guy who started an online bookstore. It's not like going after Gates or Zuck or Buffet or Soros, etc...

The United States of America is a Constitutional Republic. It's government is divided by that document into three parts, the Legislative branch, the Judicial branch, and the Executive branch. The executive branch in the USA is what is called a "unitary executive". All the authority of that branch is vested in ONE PERSON - the President of the United States, who may employ people (like cabinet secretaries and agency heads) to help him run things... but those people are all under his authority and only exercise the executive branch power allocated to them. Politicians in BOTH parties love to obscure all this (usually to hide accountability as they do stuff the voters HATE) by pretending that some executive entities (like the DoJ and FBI) are "independent" and off doing the stuff they do on their own. They also like to pass laws that seem to give various powers to various members of the executive branch, but none of those is actually a Constitutional Amendment and thus none actually un-does the underlying principle that we have a unitary executive. What we've all been living under for many decades is a grand game of "The Emperor Has No Clothes" in which the nation's elites all pretend things that just ain't so... and it all holds up as long as nobody points out the fraud.

Biden is, in fact, responsible for the actions of the people HE put in charge of the FAA, just as he is responsible for the people HE put in charge of the Southern Border. The only place where the presidential authority gets a bit wobbly in reality is with the afore-mentioned DoJ and FBI, where congresses and presidents have for so long declared them "independent" and granted them so much power that they MAY actually be rogue agencies at this point as both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could probably (in private, of course) agree. Recall that GOP senator Lindsay Grahm told the NYT years ago that he would help the Democrats remove Trump from office if Trump fired then-AG Sessions... hardly something the nation's founders would have accepted, and a direct under-cutting of the basic Constitutional order. That threat which to some SEEMED like some sort of protection against a possibly-corrupt president was actually a removal of all accountability (to the citizens) for the actions of the justice department. A bad justice department overseen by a bad president is accountable to the voters, who can punish that bad president. A bad "independent" justice department is not accountable to the voters at all - even presidents and congresses must fear it. Think about it.

The FAA had NO ROLE in spaceflight. None. Zip. Zero. Nada....

Rockets only minimally fly briefly up through the airspace and then [sometimes] back down, but until Musk came along, the descent was never within US airspace. The FAA has no legal [direct, Constitutional] authority over airspace outside of the USA.

Then, as commercial space came along, the FAA wanted in on the game. They asked the congress to give them a role... purely to be helpful, of course. The congress, being mostly stupid idiots, were easily persuaded to give the FAA a role in helping this new activity... and within a very short time, the FAA was demanding tons of paperwork before granting "launch licenses" for rocket launches, and now requiring "reentry licenses" for vehicles returning through the atmosphere (even for reentries into the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific). The threat, of course, is that if a company does not play along with the fraud that the FAA has jurisdiction over the South Pacific, then the FAA won't issue the [now required] launch license (which IS within US airspace). This has all worked very well to embed the claws of the FAA into spaceflight where it never belonged. We now have years of experience and a track record that establishes several points:

[A] The FAA had no expertise in spaceflight and therefore nothing to offer to people like Musk with actual experience (well, nothing other than the previously non-required regulation and oversight)

[B] The FAA's role in spaceflight is to slow it down and make it more costly. Before the FAA got involved, no innocent civilians were ever negatively impacted by rockets launching or re-entering/landing (it turns out, that harming civilians is bad for PR and insurance rates, so rocket people have always been responsible folks in this regard WITHOUT an FAA "helping them"). Now, as we saw with Musk's recent Starship test, the FAA is willing to inject itself into launches to delay them for environmental studies (not previously the purview of the FAA) which included analysis of whether falling rocket debris MIGHT kill a shark in the ocean (something the NASA that put men on the moon never had to worry about), whether fresh water dumped onto a beach might be a problem, and (by strapping headphones onto sea turtles and blaring them with simulated rocket launch sounds) whether turtles might be upset by rocket launches. The turtles in question survived the tests, but they're not saying how they felt about what to them must have seemed an "alien abduction" complete with probulation...

[C] The FAA is already performing very badly at its core job (maintaining safety in the airline biz, see: Boeing) yet finds itself on a power-mad totalitarian streak so extreme it now claims dominion over ALL the nation's airspace (starting at zero inches above the grass in your backyard and reaching all the way to orbit) to the point that it now demands that children's toy drones and model airplanes have transponders in them that the police can use to hunt-down operators (nothing to do with air safety - the transponders are NOT part of the ADSB system used in manned aviation). Having so extended its "mission", the FAA now routinely demands more power and authority and money from congress. Indeed, is recently announced that it was so far behind in processing launch licenses because it needs nmore people and more money, which it would not need had it not insisted on jamming its nose into space flight and model airplanes.

[D] With the imposition of large new fees that no previous rocket companies had to pay, but which all current operators will be able to pay, the FAA is engaging in the most-classic and most-corrupt government action ever invented: Regulatory Capture. Any new entrants into the market will have an additional hurdle, and those already in the market will eventually grow to love the fees as an anti-competitive play, while they then ramp-up political lobbying and (eventually) "campaign contributions" (AKA "bribes") as well as job offers, board seats, and stock options to former government bureaucrats and politicians (aka "bribes").

[E] now that they have ripped-off their mask, we can now see that the FAA is, like every other damnable government agency, on the prowl for money and power. This was NEVER about "helping" the fledgling commercial space industry - it was about grossly expanding the power of the agency and its totally unaccountable, un-elected, and largely anonymous career employees. If this were TRULY about de-conflicting the airspace to keep airline passengers safe from those nasty rocket things, there was already a FREE way to do it: erect a permanent NOTAM restriction around every launch site, and simply require each launch provider to notify local air traffic control of the dates and times when activity would occur in these areas with perhaps a 24 hour lead time. The Coast Guard must similarly protect mariners, which they do. Hopefully THEY won't try to grease their way onto the same gravy train...

Note for those of you NOT in the aerospace sector: The FAA is NOT what has made airline travel so safe. That distinction goes to an EXCELLENT government outfit called the NTSB whose people ARE experts in their fields and whose job it it to get to the root cause of all transportation disasters and then tell government and industry how to avoid repeating them. The combination of the NTSB, with [mostly] responsible people in the aerospace industry and the customers and insurers, all of whom have a big stake in safety and drive the sector to mostly adopt the recommendations of the NTSB, are the actual reason for the safety of the system. The FAA are the guys who did not trust semiconductors enough, even into the 1980s and 90s, and thus caused the air traffic control system to still run on vacuum tubes YEARS after the rest of the world were using computer chips [finally resolved now]. They're also the guys causing deaths in private aviation every year by [1] being the main obstruction to the average small plane having an Angle of Attack Indicator, [2] having access to new cheap reliable and accurate semiconductor-based instruments - relying instead in decades-old "steam gauges" because they cannot afford the over-priced-due-to-regulation better stuff. and [3] over-regulating small planes and pilots so it's nearly impossible to be profitable mass-producing ready-to-fly affordable planes for individuals, and so challenging to get and keep a license that people end up being deceptive on medical issues rather than properly managing medical matters and continuing to fly safely. The FAA is an agency BLIND to the damage they do, and too amped-up on government power and control.

The founders of this nation, who went to war [the mass-death and destruction kind] over relatively minor things like a tea tax, would be absolutely shocked to see that the FAA even exists, let alone that it thinks it controls all the air over the nation from altitude zero-inches-AGL to space. Ben Franklin could not have flown his kite with the FAA around. The Wright Brothers could not have succeeded at Kitty Hawk had the FAA been around. Probably NONE of the greats of early aviation would have become famous/great with this Washington DC beast on the prowl. Not Lindburg. Not Wiley Post. None of them.

Certainly longer than the lifespan of streaming, which can disappear without warning when your service decides to drop a title, or goes out of business, or changes its terms, or raises your rates enough to get you to drop it...

As a general rule, renting anything you will use more than once is a bad idea. There's a reason so many people get rich running businesses that own stuff and then rent it to other people, who are usually NOT getting rich by renting stuff. Think about it. Young people have been severely mislead by the tech bros and mega corporations into thinking it's a good idea to rent a place to live, rent transportation, rent entertainment, rent storage on servers, rent nearly everything. They use the line "you will own nothing, and you will be happy". They're counting on young people to not notice that the people and companies pushing this unwise behavior are planning on being happier by owning everything and convincing the young to rent from them.

Are the guys who keep looking for water and life on Mars so busy filing papers that they never give a thought to the most-basic science?

Mars is SMALL, about 1/10th the mass of the Earth. Low mass = Low gravity, and sure enough... Mars surface gravity is IIRC about a 3rd of Earth's. Low gravity = less ability to hold an atmosphere, and yup.. about 0.004PSI (as opposed to Earth's 14.7PSI). Low pressure = water boiling-off into vapor [H2O vapor pressure is 2.3 kPa], becoming part of the atmosphere, which Mars [surface pressure approx 0.6kPa] lacks the gravity to hold onto. Oh, and the place is COLD, in part because of the thin atmosphere being unable to trap heat, but also because [duh!] it's MUCH FARTHER FROM THE SUN and a little thing called The Inverse Square Law applies.

If Mars ever had significant water, it was probably from a comet or some such thing and it would have boiled off rapidly. Nothing that happened there was from global warming, or runaway this, or runaway that, it was simply the result of basic physics. Low mass = low gravity = minimal atmosphere = liquid water cannot remain in a liquid state. The only mystery here is how so many people can write and publish so many papers about the missing water on Mars without being seen as a comedy act in a club for geeks.

Lots of MAGA types are all over the place, and plenty are streaming on the web and they're NOT denouncing Reagan as a "woke liberal"

You're simply proven to be wrong by the facts on the ground. Find ONE leading well-known MAGA person on the web who has accused Reagan of being a "woke liberal".

Now on the other hand, take the things John F Kennedy believed in 1960 to ANY modern progressive Democrat gathering and poll people on THOSE positions and watch for the reactions. JFK would be seen by current wokesters as some sort of right wing reactionary fascist racist homophobe mysogenist. The man did not openly support gay or trans anything, or abortion, or women in combat, or any number of other things the modern left demands be supported. He also was very pro-military, supported a hyper-muscular foreign policy, and some of the biggest tax cuts on record, while opposing the unionization of government employees.

Today's REPUBLICANS would not be politically viable in the Republican party primaries if they were as far to the right as JFK was in 1960. Indeed, today's GOP is far to the left of where Democrat president Jimmy Carter was in 1980. The Overton Window is a real thing, but as Elon Musk pointed out not too long ago, the window has moved to the left by quite a lot, leaving people like him standing in the same place but suddenly perceived by others as having moved right.

Such a well-reasoned and logical fact-filled argument you made there! You could have at least injected a word like "carbuncle" to either amuse or cause somebody to suspect at least some literary tendencies...

Next time, please try to make an actual argument worthy of Slashdot.

"...after watching what happened to insulin prices under Pharma Bro..." ... ahem... Pharma Bro happened while Obamacare was in full force! Run that through your head a few times while you fawn over heavy-handed government regulation as a form of political/social salvation.

The federal government was given NO role in medical ANYTHING by the founders of the country and the Constitution they wrote. All healthcare was left to the states and to the people themselves. The people were free to come up with any sorts of medical arrangements they wanted. Collectives would be ok, insurance schemes would be ok, even state-wide socialist schemes would be ok (the damage from THAT bit of idiocy would be naturally limited to the individual state...). The federal government had NO ROLE. This was hijacked to the greatest extent by FDR in WWII when he implemented wage&price controls. When FDR froze wages, and companies like plane makers and ship builders needed to recruit and maintain the skilled workers needed, they did what business ALWAYS does- they innovated. When told they could not raise wages for workers, they offered a new thing called "health insurance" which was not, strictly speaking, a wage increase but could become very valuable to a worker who became sick or injured (or had a family member sick or injured). This government action, and the responses of corporate America were the initial poison that screwed-up healthcare in the USA by tying a person's healthcare to their job.

In the decades since WWII, every single damned "reform" of healthcare in the USA is another attempt to use government to fix more bad side-effects of the initial government action that screwed up healthcare in the first place and the subsequent "reforms" that added more screw-ups to the previous ones. Also, over the decades, the federal government has found it convenient to hide other bad ideas, blended with political pork and policy disagreements within our healthcare system. When LBJ came along with his "great society" programs, lots of people were promised "free" healthcare (which meant massive government-forced cost-shifting as the costs for people getting "free" care were actually being piled onto the backs of Americans with private health insurance). Obamacare, which so many ignorant fools thought would finally fix everything was in fact doomed to only make things worse (as it was predicted to, and as it has) since it was just a doubling-down on the model of "put a bunch of politicians into a room with medical and financial lobbyists" and inject even more government into the system. Now, with Biden, we're adding MILLIONS of illegal aliens to the country every year, and they're all being signed-up for "free healthcare" (meaning THEIR costs for care are also being added into the system and cost-shifted onto people with insurance). Things are getting more expensive, waiting rooms are filling up, lines are getting longer, and we're seeing shortages of critical drugs. NONE of this is caused by free market economics, by Republicans, or Libertarians, etc. These bad effects are ALL the result of deliberate bad acts undertaken by a bloated and arrogant federal government acting completely outside the bounds of the Constitution, and yet some people think the fix is even more of the same.[sigh]

American healthcare, under the current system which is Obamacare (Republicans failed to repeal it, so it's still in effect and is the law of the land), is such an abusive monopolistic (with politically-connected mega corporations reacting by gobbling-up medical practices and hospitals) and borderline fascist scheme (government designing insurance plans, setting the prices, saying when plans may be bought, then ordering the citizens to buy) that the old robber barons of Standard Oil etc would blush in embarrassment.

Go ahead... call for even MORE government in healthcare. You're gonna get government provided euthanasia and even eugenics if you push much more... There's NOTHING government does that is free from politics, since government is run by politicians, and there's no amount of politics that you can add to healthcare that will improve healthcare. You're like the carpenter who keeps cutting and cutting his piece of wood and is surprised that it's still too short.

Some people REFUSE accept human nature for what it is, and then refuse to to learn from history.

Fascism is not about race, though some fascists have been racists.

Fascism was the invention of Benito Mussolini, who was a journalist, an atheist, and a socialist (actually at one point called himself an authoritarian communist). He parted ways with the "normal" socialists when he backed going into WWI (the socialists in Italy were for neutrality at that time, but Benito saw it as an opportunity for Italy to free itself from the old European monarchies). After parting ways with the socialists, He swerved into Nietzsche and Plato and saw socialism as ineffective, offering his new fascism as a better form. Instead of everybody owning the means of production (which did not work very well), he wanted a better (in his mind) model where some elites (not generally racial, but rather motivated men of action) would control the all-powerful state through syndicates (the sticks in his bundle of sticks that were the symbol of the strong fascist state). Basically, the state would be one party rule, with party elements controlling businesses and the media etc all bundled tightly together. The illusion of independent business would exist as long as those businesses were playing their role as sticks in the bundle, and this would perform better than the socialist model. Mussolini's left-wing orientation and socialist/Marxist resume don't fly too well with the modern left, so they try to use the old French political model of left-right definitions and try to call his Fascism "right wing", but there's nothing about it that aligns with the American conservative/right political movement which wants the US Constitutional form of government with a small and very limited central government as uninvolved in the private sector as possible and which tends to be religious rather then atheist.

Mussolini and his Fascism were Darwinian and thus saw different races as more or less evolved and more or less valuable, but he and his government were not genocidal. Hitler adopted Mussolini's fascism and added genocide to the mix, but that was not a core element of Mussolini's fascism and HE, not Hitler, was the originator of the movement. Fascism is a bunch of intertwined political and economic things, but it's NOT "declaring the dominant RACE of the nation to be the only significant people"... that's "racism", a different "ism". Incidentally, opposition to racism is not an idea that followers of Darwin naturally gravitate to, given that Darwinism fixates on the genetics of creatures and things being more- or less-evolved. The abolition of slavery as an institution was NOT driven by a bunch of followers of Charles Darwin, and likely never would have been; it was a Christian thing.

Note: an earlier poster was also wrong when posting "Fascism is literally raising the idea of the nation as the highest ideal.". In fact, this poster not only does not understand "fascism" but also clearly does not understand "literally" [facepalm].

Everybody in the USA is throwing terms like "fascist" and "NAZI" around, far too easily these days. While I have pointed out that in some ways the Biden administration has swerved in the DIRECTION of fascism, NOT as a direct accusation but to highlight their hypocrisy as they concentrate the power of their party with the state and big corporations and the media while calling other people fascists, I don't think I have ever actually called them fascists. The term is serious and I think the people the world most needs to be concerned with as possible ACTUAL fascists are the current Chinese government which has quite a lock on one-party-rule with control of government, corporations, and the media - and also ties this to a mono-racial, supremacist, atheist ideology as it looks to grab lands beyond its borders while having nuclear weapons and playing with chemical and biological weapons and publicly saying it's working to develop a weapon that will kill anybody who is not genetically Chinese...

Just stating a political attack as a fact does not make it one.

Please cite the exact government positions Trump plugged his "kids" into, and the dates they were on the payroll, and the credentials those positions required but which the kids appointed did not possess.

Trump has three sons, and two daughters. His oldest son, Don Jr held no government position. His second oldest Eric was specifically left out of government in order to take the helm of the family business. His youngest son, Baron, was a minor and lived in the White House as a teenager whose only role was the unofficial role of presidential child. Trump's older daughter, Ivanka, served as an advisor [unpaid at first] and was in several related roles including making a trip to India (ALL presidents have such advisors, who are considered political, rather than career, staff and the roles they hold are defined by the presidents themselves, unlike positions created by laws and overseen by congress). Trumps remaining kid, Tiffany, was a college kid at Georgetown working on her JD degree during the Trump presidency.

Are you alleging that Trump has some other, undocumented, kids who were mysteriously employed by the federal government? Was there a secret Trump kid serving as secretary of defense or secretary of HUD that you have some super-double-secret insider knowledge of?

Factoids are this that might LOOK like facts, BUT ARE NOT. Just as a spheroid is not actually a sphere. Stating something that looks like a fact and implying it is a fact does not actually make it a fact, and is in fact a pernicious form of a lie.

"Oh not this again." - yes, again, because it's IMPORTANT

"As if Boeing wasn't ruthlessly focused on profit before the merger, like all large companies." - Yes, they were, BUT Boeing was always an safety and engineer-focused and run company that balanced these things. When the old Boeing management team was dumped, the balance was destroyed and the corporation became an MBA-degree run shop with a focus entirely on money.

"Most of this whining comes from legacy Boeing employees that lost out come promotion time to MD employees in the merger." - Nope. The merger happened a long time ago (this has taken many years for the safety-inertia to run down and the rot to set in) and the old Boeing management guys are largely old enough they'd be retired now no matter what. The problem is that when they went, their experience and mentoring went too, and thus the following generation of people in mid-level Boeing management who SHOULD have been inculcated with a safety-first and good-engineering-matters attitude were not - they were instead pickled in a mindset of money-is-all-that-matters. The old former Boeing guys I know are not concerned for themselves, they're just sad about the fate of the company they loved.

"Boeing's problem, like all other large corporations, is the culture of outsourcing." - THIS is the main source of my [facepalm]... Old Boeing management wanted to do everything in-house where Boeing had all the expertise and control. New Boeing management (the MCDonnell team that was brought in with the merger) was brought in largely BECAUSE they were known for out-sourcing assemblies to cheap foreign sources and the board saw this as a way to squeeze more profits out of the plane maker they were invested in. You seem to completely misunderstand that this outsourcing thing IS ENTIRELY TIED TO THE MANAGEMENT CHANGE and is as close to ground-zero of the entire controversy and disaster as one can get.

"Every large corporation in the world has these problems..." - NO! Boeing did NOT have these problems pre-merger. Boeing was a stellar example of a giant American company that DID NOT have these problems. It must take real effort to miss the point by this wide of a margin. Boeing was what one would wish every giant American company would be... profitable, yes, but profitable BECAUSE it had a well-earned reputation for being safety-focused, reliable, attentive to customers, and just generally excellent. This was all flipped by the same exact attitude that nearly destroyed Apple... the Board of Directors (the biggest investors or their representatives) decided to squeeze more money out by hiring new "more-businesslike" idiots in suits who like golf carts to run the place in stead of the annoying engineer-types. With Apple, the board tossed Jobs aside and brought in a Pepsi salesman. With Boeing the board tossed the guys who gave you the B-29 , the B-52, the 727, the 747, etc and brought in the team who nearly killed McDonnell Douglas. These cases should be studies in colleges as examples of what not to do... and then all MBA courses and degrees should be cancelled. If an executive did not build the company and does not understand how-and-why the company's products work, then he/she should NOT be an executive there; there's simply no place for a category of executives who are stupid about everything other than being an executive.