Sadly those who own the robots are the ones who benefit the most. I seem to recall something about owning the means of production, but my American public education didn't seem to cover that subject.
With 70+ years of examples of how collective economies work, are you seriously arguing for Marxism?
First world problems: we have all the guns, money, and influence but our country is "in decline" because the price of chicken nuggets is up this week and someone has purple hair.
In case you haven't been to a grocery store, car dealership, realtor, college bursar, etc lately, the price of pretty much everything is up. Maybe you're making so much money that you hadn't noticed.
We have more guns than everyone else.
It's not even that so much as "Do as we say or we cut off trade/investment/loans/grants".
America may be in decline, but it still has a lot of influence, money-wise.
Is there a way to opt out of this protection racket?
Sure. Declare strict neutrality, and pay for your own defense.
It would be more accurate to say that POTS technology is being phased out. "Landlines" are simply transitioning from POTS to VOIP. Fewer people have home phones, but they'll always exist, and they're simply being moved to ATA adapters.
Link to the Boeing announcement
Quick summary
There's a link to a letter from the CEO, but both my ad-blocker and my pi-hole object to it. Great job, Boeing, where the heck did you put that letter? Right next to the door-plug removal documentation?
None of this matters, because they're being replaced by people within Boeing that worked very close with them. It's not like they're bringing in fresh blood. This is the appearance of "doing something".
Boeing's problems have very little to do with DEI. The primary problems came from when Boeing merged with the then struggling McDonnel Douglas and somehow the MD management ended up almost completely in charge. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737-max-corporate-culture/677120/. They even moved the corporate headquarters to be deliberately further away from the factories and engineers. So what was once one of the most engineering focused of businesses became completely business focused.
Oh not this again.
From the article:
But in 1997, Boeing bought another aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in what turned out to be a kind of reverse acquisition—executives from McDonnell Douglas ended up dominating and remaking Boeing. They turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.
As if Boeing wasn't ruthlessly focused on profit before the merger, like all large companies.
Most of this whining comes from legacy Boeing employees that lost out come promotion time to MD employees in the merger. The legacy Boeing people have been the source for many of these articles, like your source in the Atlantic, and they've been out of the company a long time. Most of them have no idea what's going on inside today.
Boeing's problem, like all other large corporations, is the culture of outsourcing. This is not unique to Boeing in any way. Witness the horrific problems Lockheed Martin has in producing the F-35, where an audit found that some aircraft had parts installed backwards. Lockheed spread production out across most of the Continental US, helping to ensure political survival of the project, but raising the cost and spreading production out among an unmanageable web of subcontractors.
Every large corporation in the world has these problems because every large corporation in the world is now essentially just a logo slapped on a product assembled by a third party in a low cost country or area. Apple's reputation for quality is due to their zeal in controlling every step in production, and even they are slipping here.
Ask any appliance repairman how much you should spend on a new refrigerator, washing machine, etc. He'll tell you to buy cheap, because none of it lasts anymore anyway. We all have that grandpa or uncle with a refrigerator in his garage that's been running for 50 years. And yet I can't get one to last more than 6 or 7 these days. The issue of quality is worldwide, and Airbus has them too, they're just not in the news as much. Airbus just settled a lawsuit last year over fuselage quality issues.
From the article:
This 900-square-foot home will cost roughly $300,000 - about $100,000 less than a similar custom-built home...
It will rent for $2,000 a month.
I understand that this is a Proof of Concept, but I have to wonder if anyone involved has an idea as to what "affordable" means.
There's no way in hell that over a quarter-million bucks for a pre-fab home is reasonable. This experiment is gonna fall on its face.
The real problem is over-crowding. Everyone is forced to live in the same place, which is driving land prices up and up. Instead force jobs to move elsewhere, that will bring down the demand for the same piece of land.
No one is forced to live in expensive areas. Those areas are expensive because of the sheer number of people that WANT to live there. They could, in most cases, live and work in cheaper areas, and have a nice house and job. But New York is New York Expensive because legions of twentysomethings have a romantic itch to live that "New York Experience", and so the city is constantly stuffed with people trying to get in.
Everyone can't have a pony. And everyone can't live in the most expensive areas.
With all problems at the border, in public education, debt and so on they chose to take on porn sites? Why?
Your state government can't do more than one thing at a time?
And speaking of the Border, Texas IS trying to do something about it, all while the Biden Administration sues them, trying to prevent them from doing anything about the border.
If they were really serious about this severe problem, they would kick all the people out of their state, so that nobody would ever see anyone else. Until humans are eliminated, Texas' vision cannot be fulfilled. FUCK HUMANS! (Err, I mean that figuratively, of course. You should never literally fuck a human. That's not even a thing, kids, I swear!)
Next step: State of Texas sues all their ISPs.
Do not look down on trades. If you're motivated and smart you can do as good if not better there than in most other career paths you can mention, and their job security moving forward is absolutely guaranteed.
I am in no way looking down on the trades. I'm an admirer of men that do such jobs, and I consider those jobs both highly important, and well-deserving of high compensation. My point is that some people are not cut out for various fields, and while people doing trades are in no way "dumb" (in addition to skill, many trades require a lot of knowledge and more than a good bit of practical math that average people would probably struggle with), they're still not cut out to do things like software development, which takes different mental talents.
Bottom line.... just as that, contrary to what we tell our kids, not everyone can be an astronaut or President, not everyone is cut out for CS or high-knowledge white collar jobs. And that's the larger problem: the media, politicians, high schools, etc, seem to think that CS and software development IS something that anyone can do, that it IS a field where any coal miner can learn to be a programmer with a few weeks of classes.
Learn what in trade school? IT? Then maybe. In California, a plumber's median income is 50k. A construction worker
A software engineer... not just a basic programmer, but a real, full-stack software developer... isn't comparable to a plumber or concrete tech, though. So the comparison is a bit unfair. Those are skilled jobs, but a full-stack developer with a CS degree is more like a CPA, a white collar professional. One of the reasons that CPA and devs make the kind of money they do is that most people don't have the cranial firepower to do them... or there'd be more devs and CPA's. Which is also another reason why it's batshit silly to require CS to graduate high school. It's part of the same mindset that said "every child is an undiscovered math prodigy" that we saw in the 80's and 90's. Again, it's just not the case.
We have a LOT of people in IT that shouldn't be (just like college), and to a great extent they're in the field because guidance counselors and parents seem to think that anyone can be a network admin, or sysadmin, or dev, etc. And many would be better suited learning welding, plumbing, or some other skill.
How on earth would it pay out more than it takes in? That's impossible. You don't actually want a payout. Do you not understand the point of insurance?
Some insurance sectors don't make their profits on premiums. They make money by investing premium income somewhere else, and that money puts them in the black. This is especially the case in the reinsurance market.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
