Making It Worse
Cost cutting and the decline of venerable brands.
Defector editor David Roth wonders, “How Will The Golden Age Of Making It Worse’ End?” After a long setup about American male hero fantasies, he gets to the titular question:
As someone who has been on four different Boeing-made airplanes in the last week, I can attest to the limits of this fantasy in the face of the prospect that a door on your airplane—the production of which was outsourced and subcontracted by a flub-prone duopoly to save some money; the installation and inspection of which was overseen by an overworked and multiply pressured person working in a conflicted and careless system, also to save some money—might blow off at altitude. There are some problems an individual is not equipped to fix, and “airplane now has moonroof” is one of the classics, there. More to the point, the bad people enabling or actively authoring those problems can seem not merely out of reach but safely within a parallel reality that is, if not any less brutish or ugly or stupid, notably better insulated. You think less of mounting a Jack Reacher-style offensive on Boeing’s executive suite, in that situation, and more about how strong an airplane seat belt is, really, and I guess also how reliable the subcontractor that produced that seatbelt was, and how carefully that was inspected.
There’s a bit in Maureen Tkacik’s comprehensively damning 2019 feature about Boeing in The New Republic that I keep coming back to, both here and in general. The central tension of that story is about how, as a former Boeing physicist told Tkacik, “a long and proud ‘safety culture’ was rapidly being replaced… with ‘a culture of financial bullshit.'” The supplanting of that purpose—of any purpose, really, at just about any business in just about any industry you can think of—with the blank nihilism of financial capitalism’s profit-driven imperatives is familiar by now; management’s quest to see how much more cheaply an increasingly poor product can be sold at the same price and under the same name as what came before is, at bottom, the story of basically every industry or institution currently in decline or collapse.
If it was always foolish to expect the free market to make things better, it feels more fanciful by the day to imagine a future in which the cynics and sociopaths in charge of that market do anything but continue to make it worse; they’ve evinced no capacity for that, but also no interest in it. Whether this deterioration is the result of buccaneering libertarian delusion or just a bloodless calculation that concepts like “safety” and “quality” are more nice-to-have’s than need-to-have’s, it appears to be the only idea that any of these people have. As this slips further into abstraction—if those mishaps-at-altitude don’t really ding the stock price enough to bother any of the parties capable of doing something about them—the problem compounds and compounds. In the case of my industry, there is the sense that the business dipshits smashing up various institutions and lives simply care more about their divine right to smash things up than they do about anything else; something new can be built around the ruins they make, but the needless, ugly, colossal waste of it all is offensive all the same. Also none of us know how to make airplanes.
The erosion of Boeing’s former, engineer-driven culture and the rise of its ravening and reckless financial-capitalism one can be traced, in Tkacik’s story, in part to Boeing’s 1997 purchase of the failing aerospace company McDonnell Douglass. The merger was more or less the corporate equivalent of inviting a vampire to cross your threshold. The heedless, shortsighted cost-cutting and contingency of the smaller and more dysfunctional company took hold at the larger and more effective one; little by little, and then all at once, Boeing got to work on making its products worse—as much worse as they could be without tanking the stock price, and occasionally, tragically, even worse than that.
My view of this is slightly less cynical but equally depressing. Yes, capitalism has a culture of greed that prioritizes profits over everything else. The potential cost of settling lawsuits and paying fines for the results of negligence is sometimes simply just another factor in the equation. But a large part of this is the commodification of everything.
I don’t fly as frequently as I used to for various reasons. But the entirety of my experience as an adult buying my own plane tickets, dating back almost exactly four decades now, is one in which I’ve treated flying as a commodity in the same way I do gasoline. While I factor in convenience, especially the avoidance of layovers, I have never once considered the manufacturer of the airplane on which I would fly. Indeed, I seldom have that information before I board and, even when I do, it’s subject to change.
Because regulators have allowed industry consolidation, there are essentially two manufacturers of commercial airliners: Boeing and Airbus. They’re both known to produce high-quality planes that, recent incidents notwithstanding, have remarkably fantastic safety records.
So far as I know, the only ones routinely deciding between them are the airlines, not their customers. And I strongly suspect that they choose in much the same way I do: price, convenience, compatibility with their existing servicing infrastructure, and the like.
To the extent Boeing executives are trying to cut costs, it’s about maximizing profits, to be sure. But it’s indirect: they’re trying to deliver a cheaper alternative to Airbus products because they figure, rightly in my estimation, that airlines consider the two major providers interchangeable and are therefore shopping on price.
Given the consequences of unsafe planes for the end users—who, again, aren’t the direct customers of the aircraft manufacturers—regulation is certainly warranted. But there are already considerable regulations from both the US and EU and, again, commercial aviation is remarkably safe and has been getting more so for generations now. The degree to which more regulation is needed is beyond my expertise.
Oddly, for a piece about a Golden Age of something, Roth provides only one example of the Making It Worse phenomenon.
It’s by no means a universal one. Consumer electronics are radically better and yet cheaper than they used to be almost across the board. Automobiles, including the much-derided American brands, last much longer than they did a generation or two ago while providing far more in the way of amenities. I’m sure readers can name many more examples of Making It Better.
At the same time, it’s clearly the case that, for many products, venerable brands have gradually diminished their value over time in order to cut costs. In some cases, it’s clearly greed and cynicism driving that process. Mostly, though, it’s about the commodification that I mentioned earlier.
The conclusion of the most recent of my posts on the enshittification phenomenon coined by Cory Doctorow, pointed to a furniture expert declaring that consumers could be better off spending a few thousand dollars to reupholster a thrift-store find or hand-me-down because “Most often the construction of vintage sofas will be superior to what’s made now.” To which I observed,
This, alas, is likely true for a whole array of products. Even relatively simple and inexpensive items like shoes and boots are mostly junk now, even if one buys from a longstanding brand with a great reputation. Partly, that’s a function of new ownership sacrificing craftsmanship for mass production, with little concern for the long-term damage to the company’s reputation. Mostly, though, it’s an understanding that quality goods are competing with “fast fashion” crap from China that can be purchased for pennies on the dollar.
One of the examples that I had in mind when I wrote that was cowboy boots. Almost all of the venerable American bands have experienced a pretty steady decline over the last four decades or so because few American consumers differentiate on quality. Few are going to shell out $1500 or more for a pair of handmade boots from an American craftsman when they can get a pair for $200 out of Mexico* or $100 out of China.
Three of the oldest American makers, Justin, Tony Lama, and Nocona, merged decades ago. All of them make considerably worse boots than they did thirty or forty years ago. And, indeed, there is a surprisingly large market for second-hand boots from the olden days. Even Lucchese, probably the most venerable brand with a large footprint, has supplemented its more-or-less handmade line with cheaper lines, most of which are outsourced overseas.
Naturally, most customers aren’t spending hours on research to differentiate the various lines. So, they think they’re getting the Tony Lama or Lucchese boots of their youth—or, perhaps, their father’s day—and are mostly getting a pale imitation.
But, again, while we can accurately describe this phenomenon as Making It Worse, I see it less as fraud than adjusting to the realities of the market. There’s just not enough consumer demand for the high-end product—at least not at a commensurate price—to keep the companies in business.
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*Mexico actually has its own artisan bootmakers, notably in Leon, but they’re not radically cheaper than their American counterparts in El Paso.
‘I Would Tell My Family To Avoid The Max. I Would Tell Everyone, Really…’ Experts And Ex-Boeing Employees Issue Warning On Max
Articles like this won’t make for good days at neither Boeing’s exec suite nor at the airlines.
But some good news on the executive front, Musk’s wallet will be thinner.
But stuff is getting worse, particularly things we view as commodities. Yesterday, I noticed a shirt that was purchased last year from a leading outdoor store, was already fraying where the sleeves met the cuffs, due to not enough overlap between the pieces.
Wait, James I have been told on good authority that the Boeing issues are the fault of Black peop… err, DEI.
Beyond that snark, no notes.
I will add that this is why some of us really, really hate it when businesses complain about litigation costs and ask to be protected from “trial lawyers,” requesting special carve-outs because all of these lawsuits are killing business.
I want everyone to think about that plane door plug blowing out every. single. time. you hear anyone complain about lawsuit costs, because what a lot of these companies are asking for is protection against the bad effects of all of this cost cutting.
The answer should be “No, pound sand. Make stuff that doesn’t get you sued.”
Yes, but it takes effort and resources to keep it safe.
One reason planes are safer now is redundancy. There’s so much of it, that planes can fly safely after a major failure. say if an engine goes out.
And here we get a bit into cost cutting and making things worse. one reason two MAX 8s crashed was the lack of a redundant angle of attack sensor as standard equipment. This wouldn’t have been an issue without MCAS, but it was with it. Ergo the redundant sensor should come standard for safety reasons.
Not to mention the whole reason we have MCAS is Boeing wanted to save money further modifying a 50 year old regional jet design, rather than replace it with a clean sheet plane. It wound up costing them a lot more.
BTW, Spirit Aerosystems, the company that makes the B737 MAX fuselage for Boeing, is not some random company Boeing picked to make a pretty major component of its main aircraft. It’s the company that bought Boeing Wichita, which used to be a part of Boeing.
Why did they sell it? To lower costs.
This in itself is not wrong. Spirit has diversified and also builds components for Airbus now, something Boeing would never do. But fuselages are something you want good control over, in particular good quality control.
But then, that costs money, which drives down share prices.
As to how airlines decide which planes to buy, that’s a complicated issue involving many things other than acquisition, operating, and maintenance costs. There are such considerations as fleet commonality, type rating commonality, crew training, etc.
The rule of thumb is this: large mainstream airlines will buy planes from both remaining manufacturers, because neither can supply all the planes they need when they need them.
Low cost and ultra-low costs airlines will try very hard to stick with one type, even sometimes at the cost of growth. If Ryanair bought one A320, they’d find they have no pilots that can fly it. they’d need to hire some who are rated on it, or retrain some of their 737 crews. They’d also have to retrain cabin crews (seriously), and hire or retrain mechanics who know how to maintain and repair it (or outsource maintenance to someone else).
China’s C919 or Russia’s MC-21 might find buyers in Asia or Latin America, if the duopoly can’t supply these fast growing markets soon enough. Or if Boeing keeps having potentially fatal issues with their MAX line.
As I’ve written a couple of times in this blog, in addition, in 2001, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, emphasizing its interest in financial engineering rather than real engineering.
Side story. In the 90s, while in the Air Force, I worked on the McDonnell Douglas C-17 cargo aircraft program. Made numerous trips to Long Beach. The program at the time was in deep trouble and you could see physically see it on the factory floor. Disorganized and disorderly, confusion everywhere. Conflicts between the engineering staff and production staff, etc. Under huge pressure (and about $1B dollars in additional funding) from AF and Pentagon leadership, the C-17 PM was fired and a new one brought in. In about a year, you could see the huge improvement physically and programmatically. Today, the C-17 is considered a success.
Another point to make is that with consolidation, there is quite frankly a clash of cultures (different histories, policies, procedures, etc.), not just in the corporate suites but in the engineering, production, and other functions. These are not easily overcome and requires leadership to overcome. Financial Wall Street wizards are not interested in overcoming these issues. They are interesting in looting the firms and moving on. Like the extraterrestrial locusts in Independence Day.
When COVID hit Trump saw it not as a medical problem but as a political problem. I would suspect most of the discussion in the Boeing C suite is about how to address their PR problem, not how to address their quality problem. Also, the critical search for scapegoats.
@gVOR10:
I mean, it’s the same answer for both: defer to engineers and others who care about quality, rather than to b-school bean counters who ruthlessly place profit and share pricing above safety and craftsmanship.
40+ years into the Reagan Devolution, corporate America will be hard pressed to unring the bell of blind greed. How many times have we heard some form of ‘their only fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders’? This wrongheaded thinking explains the Boeing mess. End stage capitalism at its finest.
It took me a long time to get to my current understanding of how big businesses work and (believe it or not) I’m humble enough to realize I could have further insights, but FWIW here are a few things I’ve learned:
1) Big businesses don’t develop significantly different products than what they are currently selling. The executives are not entrepreneurs and any entrepreneurial leanings they ever had were beaten out of them long before they ever reached senior positions. There is no significant incentive to make a dramatically new or different product and much incentive not to. The primary one: almost always, the rollout of a truly new products cannot be exactingly planned beforehand. For this reason, large companies add to their product line by acquisition or imitation.
2) Big publicly held businesses are driven on a quarterly basis and their entire senior executive class is heavily rewarded to make the numbers they negotiated in their budget, and even more heavily rewarded to exceed them. Missing a quarter and making it up the next quarter, even if you more than make it up, doesn’t even get you back to zero in the eyes of the CEO and the analysts. The thing that gets reported is that divisional head Joe Jackson missed his quarterly goals. And god help you if you miss a yearly goal! Missing one of those even once means your chances of making CEO are greatly reduced. Missing twice in a row means you are about to become the scapegoat for all the companies woes. So any method to achieve the numbers growth you signed up which has an unpredictable timelines can must be avoided.
3) Because of 1) and 2) together the safest way (career-wise) to make your numbers is to cut costs. And the most predictable way to cuts costs are to either lay people off without reducing productivity or to remove cost from the design, manufacturing, selling or marketing of your portfolio. Those things are almost certainly going to make the product worse.
I recently had a conversation with someone who helped design a product line that has literally hundreds of thousands of variants: electronic connectors. He commented that the best time to buy a connector is in the first 2-3 years after release. They design the hell out of it to insure they meat all of their quality goals. Once they have enough data to verify that, the product family is turned over to sustaining engineering, whose job is to reduce cost until they just barely make the quality goals. This isn’t a one off. This is how the whole business is structured.
I asked ChatGPT how much labor it takes to make a high-quality pair of hand-made cowboy boots. The answer:
So let’s take the lower 40 hour figure. At a $20/hour wage, that $800. Add the employers overhead of about ~25%, materials, marketing, the value adds down the line and it’s easy to see why hand-made boots could easily cost $1,500, even in a low-labor cost country.
And I think that’s the thing people complaining about enshittification don’t understand. There is usually a tradeoff between quality and price, and the vast majority of consumers shop on price. Consumers aren’t stupid for deciding they would rather pay $150 for cowboy boots every couple of years and use that $1350 for something else.
Secondly, you can’t get the price down except by lowering labor costs for labor-intensive products like hand-made products. There is no world in which hand-made boots will ever be priced anywhere close to factory-made products, even at slave wages.
We’ve recently had threads here on the state of journalism. It’s the same concept. Journalists need to be paid and it’s a labor-intensive industry. Despite the claims about the evils of “profits” in journalism, the problems are not at all about profits but about a sustainable business model that doesn’t completely sacrifice the core standards of the profession. Even the non-profits are not doing well.
A lot of this “Golden Age” stuff is from a time when labor was cheap or protected from competition.
As for the airplane industry, the notion that the current problems are the result of “libertarian” policies is laughable. This is one of the most regulated industries on the planet. As you noted, there are only two major global manufacturers, the result of a consolidation process husbanded by regulators. There is basically zero room for any new company to enter the market and compete because the regulatory barriers are so high, to say nothing of the financial barriers. The potential problem is rather the opposite – Boeing is too big to fail, is a company of strategic national importance to the US, and even more than a venerable company that has favor in DC like GM, has political influence. Those are preconditions much more consistent with regulatory capture and political rent-seeking than any anti-capitalist dreck the author in the quote piece posits. After all, half of Boeing’s income comes from government contracts.
And the safety regulation system is the gold standard. Airplanes are so safe today that people take it for granted. The current problems with the 737 Max will get fixed and there will, I’m confident, be lessons-learned that will be incorporated to improve inspection procedures and such in the future. This is what the NTSB and equivalents in Europe are very, very good at.
@DK:
Being an engineer, I wish it was that simple, but quality is a culture and engineers are as likely to have a poor quality culture as anyone else. If I had to give a simplistic solution it would be to hire a sensible but very tough and very experienced head of Quality, someone who has a history of not getting pushed around, and then back that person up at the CEO and Board level even when the changes and reviews they demand affect the bottom line.
BTW, if that person was ever an engineer it would have been at least a couple of decades since they fulfilled such a role.
@gVOR10: You’re probably right, that *is* how a lot of companies view their problems. The right PR firm can make all the difference…I worked for a large, global PR company that knew *their* reputation mattered. I remember clearly one instance where a potential client kept saying they had a “Google problem” (bad results, etc.) and wanted to hire us to “fix” it. Finally, one of the EVPs in the pitch meeting said “you don’t have a Google problem. You have manufacturing and customer service problems. You need to fix those first.”
@Andy:
There is some truth to that but I think a bigger factor is that those golden age items cost a lot more as a percentage of your salary than we are willing to pay nowadays. As an example, when a professional owned two pairs of dress shoes (the newest pair and the older one), they expected to pay prices equivalent to Allen Edmonds prices, which are still astoundingly well made in the USA. And that despite the fact that they have held their prices steady for the 15 years I’ve been buying them, despite rising inflation.
In 1992 I spent long enough in Houston that I got invited to go line dancing by the factory employees I was working with at the time. One of them commented that although jeans and a nice but casual shirt was all I needed up top, people would be judging me by my shoes, or more specifically, by my cowboy boots. I asked how much his had cost, “$800” and then said a name that I assume was evidence of their bona fides. The equivalent price today would be $1750. For a factory worker.
You can still find quality equivalent to that of 30 years ago, but you have to pay proportionally that much for it.
@Sleeping Dog: My scheduled flight from Chicago to San Diego was cancelled this past Saturday and United shared that the cancellation was due to the plane being a Max that was being grounded. I’ve never been so happy about an added 4 hours to a layover in my life.
@Andy:
Yes. Or even expensive and protected from foreign competition. Going down a rabbit hole a couple months ago, I came across a short Esquire piece from 1976 with John Wayne raving about the quality of boots made by Sam Lucchese. Boots were $300, which is $1600 in today’s money. I suspect that, even in 1976, most people couldn’t afford Lucchese’s hand-made boots. But the alternative was a pair of Justins or Tony Lamas that were, say, $100 and still partially hand-made with some machine assistance and of very good quality.
@MarkedMan:
I think that’s absolutely right—but precisely because of widespread availability of cheap knockoffs has skewed our perception of what’s reasonable. For those of us of a certain age, that’s compounded by having price setpoints in our head that are decades old. While we intellectually know that inflation is a thing, most of us are pretty bad at doing the calculations in our head, much less adjusting our setpoints.
@James Joyner:
Thats my thinking too, although I also wonder how many people knew about, say, Lechesse boots in the first place? It’s not like the internet was there to let you research all things boot before you went to the store.
I used to have a poster behind my desk at an old job. (I am an engineer.)
The poster had a big picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The caption read:
This is the fundamental problem with “market discipline”. People make off with gobs of cash leaving a crap company, bad products, and angry customers behind. Phil Condit got paid 60 million bucks to leave Boeing. All this stuff went in motion on his watch. It will probably take Boeing decades to fix this all.
Frankly, the slogan above applies to couches, too.
You said:
I don’t agree with this. I can think of half a dozen examples. However, the companies in question are New Economy companies – they are organized and structured differently, they design products differently, the sell things differently. Take a look at Henson Shaving, for instance.
In these times, any product can be sold to anyone in the world who values it. If you manage your cost structure, and establish some serious credibility with a product that really is better, you can be successful.
Flying is a tough cookie, though. There are so many economies of scale, and the carriers are under so much financial pressure, they can’t take a lot of chances.
However, the 737Max is not really a low-volume product, not as far as the aviation world is concerned.
@MarkedMan:
That quote goes back to the 1950s, if I recall correctly. Indeed, one of the problems that General Motors had during the fabled years of the “Murkan cars are nothing but junk” 70s and 80s was that the most profitable segment of GM at the time was GMAC (whose slogan was “the car finance people”)–which had loaned me $5000 to buy a piece of artwork at the time. If we’re still arguing about this theory being a problem 50 years later, color me not optimistic about finding common ground on a solution anytime soon.
I’ll just toss this in. One of the things all of them are struggling with is that so much of the product is now software. Not just Boeing. Airbus has software problems. Lockheed Martin’s F-35’s software has been the source of many problems, and not just the avionics in the F-35. LM started delivering F-35s with a gun, and a trigger in the cockpit, but the gun couldn’t be fired by the trigger because the software that tied the two together was two years behind the hardware.
The airplane manufacturers are not alone in this. Consider how many auto recalls there have been in the last few years to patch the software.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: (BTW, not my quote)
I have nothing but contempt for the Harvard School of Business. It’s not that they are arrogant know-nothings who literally pride themselves on not having to understand a product before “fixing” the company that makes it. There are plenty of people like that coming from all kinds of business schools. It’s just that Harvard MBA’s along with McKenzie consultants, have such outsize influence on the way businesses are run, almost always to the detriment of those who buy products or interact with that business as an employee, vendor or customer.
@MarkedMan:
Okay. But try on a different formulation of the first point for size. How about “…cost a lot more…than we are able to pay…”–does that fit comfortably? I know that the factory worker’s problem with is that his wages probably haven’t kept pace with inflation. They certainly didn’t in the industry I was in.
Now, if you want to go with the “those days were an anomaly; we can’t afford to pay everyone what we did then,” go ahead. It’s not like that argument hasn’t been used a lot around here. And while I’m here, let me just note that it might be that my hearing is defective, but the “For a factory worker” comment at the end had a sort of “who does he think he is–a worker buying fancy shoes like some n**….-rich po’ white trash” tone to it. (But my inner Marxist hears a lot of the stuff you guys say about economics that way, so, as I said, it may just be me.)
@Jay L Gischer:
The mainline medium haul narrow body is the plane made in larger numbers by all commercial airplane companies. Today it’s the MAX and A320 families. In the past it was the 727, 737NG and 757. Airbus didn’t really take off as a major force until it developed the A320 in the 80s. That’s what drove McDonnell Douglass to merge with Boeing.
That’s also why Lockheed didn’t succeed in the jet age commercial airplane business, as it had in the propeller era with designs like the Constellation and Electra. Besides getting in late, they went for the widebody market with the L-1011 Tri-Star.
@MarkedMan: Didn’t intend it as your quote, just a quote to start my comment related to your overall comment. ETA: Still in all, I would also note that quote, being from the 50s, IIRC, predates Harvard Business School philosophy by a decade or two–though it may well be a precursor to the philosophy driving the curriculum.
@MarkedMan: @Just nutha ignint cracker: I believe the business idea that all business decisions should be made for solely the benefit of the stockholders was started by Milton Friedman in the 60s. It gained traction in the business schools in the 70s. I know that it was pushed at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University when I attended 1976-78. Of course, the curriculum there extensively used the Harvard case method and materials. I remember specifically writing an objection to that idea in an essay response to a case.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It’s a corporate bootlicker’s argument lifted Ayn Randy’s tortured prose, and it’s specious. The corporate class can afford endless stock buybacks and the exorbitant executive compensation packages that have produced an unprecedented class of mega-billionaires hoarding wealth at levels not seen since days of fuedalism. They can afford to pay workers more, and stay in the black.
Wall Street apologists love to wax on how labor is supposedly so expensive compared to 50 years ago, while pretending inflation is just invisible magic and not greedy profiteers making an active choice to gouge as much as possible. They never get around to comparing the executive pay and 1% wealth of 50 years with today’s levels.
50 years ago, American society did not tolerate the richest Americans hoarding almost all the economic growth via slave wages and unchecked price gouging. Wage growth was more commensurate with overall economic growth. Since 1979, wages for the top 1% have grown 138%, while wages for the bottom 90% have grown only 15%.
More of us could afford nice things if the working classes had more money to save and invest. Or if we just gave the poor gobs of cash, as with the trillion-dollar PPP slush fund for millionaires and billionaires — generating a fraction of the whining about ‘unfairness’ that greeted a one-time $10,000/per student debt writeoff. Because Americans have been brainwashed into scapegoating the poor while the selfish rich rob the country blind.
Arms get tired faster as you age?
@Andy:
I find it sadly amusing that, in a thread about declining quality, someone asks ChatGPT for information and then trusts it.
Because there is no provenance to where the information comes from, or how it is combined, the current round of AI is dangerously flawed at its core. When they scraped the internet for training data, they got the New York Times, Cowboy Boots Weekly and JKB, and no real way to tell the difference.
Maybe the information it gave you was accurate. It happens more often than not. But the error rate is disturbingly high, and it will almost never say that it doesn’t know. They’ve automated an idiot with poor media literacy, extreme confidence, and a tendency to make shit up.
Thinking about idiots with poor media literacy, extreme confidence, and a tendency to make shit up, I wonder how my brother is doing.
Yes, absolutely this. Tho that just might be the exception that proves the rule.
@Gustopher: I was most intrigued by the notion that a person hand making boots could seemingly only make one pair at a time. The likelihood that all of the processes in handmaking anything would occupy 100% of the time of the craftsperson was interesting, but I suspect that there is some overlap where while one thing is happening the craftsperson would be doing some other task on a different project. I have no experience as a craftsperson, though, so I don’t know how the division of tasks changes the outcome. I suspect that it does though.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I think you’ve misread my comments. I was making the point that high quality stuff costs roughly the same proportionate to wages as it did 30 years ago. I wasn’t comparing it to inflation, but to actual wages. And the reason I used a factory worker as an example was because it is that factory worker who serves as my single data point into what people are willing to pay for a pair of cowboy boots. This was an unskilled worker in Texas in a non-unionized plant that scraped together $800 to buy a pair of boots, and that seems relevant to me. Definitely more than a weeks take home pay at the time.
My father was a farmer and then a laborer. My mother was a farmer and then a housecleaner. I know a fair number of people that punch a clock and punched a fair number of clocks myself in kitchens and repair shops and what have you before I graduated college. I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up punching a clock somewhere after I retire. From the people I know well enough to have an opinion, I have not noticed any correlation at all between level of income or education and any metric I hold important: honesty, decency, dependability, openness, etc. None.
Of course, I don’t know any self made billionaires.
@Andy:
As per Niven’s Law: no method works if it’s not used.
Boeing got a lot of latitude from the FAA during the certification of the MAX. This allowed the MCAS to slip through the cracks. Since then, oversight has been more effective. See the issues in certifying the MAX 7 and 10, and to a lesser extent the 777-9. But also see the gaping hole in the Alaska MAX 9.
@OzarkHillbilly: Another exception: electronics, specifically TVs. I remember that my father bringing our TV into the repair shop was a fairly regular thing. Heck, when I was a boy my local supermarket had a tube tester at the front of the store, so you could bring in tubes from your TV or radio and test them, and buy replacements for any that were blown. I bought my tunerless TV Display in 2015 and haven’t thought about it since.
@MarkedMan: Fads come and go, which may account for lower demand for high end cowboy boots. But I see a lot of what look to be blue collar people sporting $60K+ pick ups.
@Kathy:
This is why I am wary of some arguments from comparison, like aviation being one of the most regulated industries. Such comparisons can beg uncomfortable questions, as opposed to arguments from merit.
Trump once defended himself by asserting he was “the least racist person in the room.” That begs, who else is in the room, sir? If it’s a room full of Confederate sympathizers and tiki torch Nazis, being the least racist there is not a flex.
Aviation may indeed face more regulatory scrutiny than other industries. But is that because its corporate decision-makers are the least trustworthy left to their own devices? And compared to what regulation baseline? Given corruption, favoritism, and loopholes in government oversight, Boeing could be one of our most regulated companies and still not scrutinized properly or enough. Both can be true.
HA! I remember tube testers too. And your right, TVs have gotten better. TV programming on the other hand… (yeah, some good, some not so good, some just simply trash)
Speaking of which, the wife and I have been watching the Mallorca Files. It’s a humorous buddy cop show that takes place on her home island. It’s kind of cool for us because we are seeing all the places on the island that the tourists* have no idea of. We sit there and go, “Look look, that’s Puig Major!” or “The train to Soller!”
* by tourists I mean all the drunken louts who hang out on the beaches making lecherous passes at girls, not the rock climbers etc.
Don’t get me started on those idjits and their constant whining about how much tires cost and gas costs and…
I drive a 2005 dodge 1/2 ton with over 250K on the odometer and I hope to keep the old rust bucket till I kick it. Lousy gas mileage, but last year I drove it a total of 6,000 miles.
@MarkedMan:
There are random factors, too.
I had a Samsung LCD HD TV. It failed about three weeks after I bought it. It was repaired under warranty, and soldiered on for a few years (I’m not sure, but I think I bought it in 2008). It failed again sometime in 2021. So not a bad run.
The new one is Philips, with a bigger screen, 4K, and a LED or OLED display (I no longer have the box handy to check). And it’s “smart,” meaning it has a small computer inside to handle the Roku OS and a several streaming apps.
We’ll see how long this one lasts.
For good quality I nominate my 2011 Corolla. It still hasn’t broken down once in almost 13 years.
@Scott:
We are in dire need of more men like you.
@MarkedMan: No, I didn’t miss your point, I was suggesting that the difference between then and now is that uppity factory worker from then has lost purchasing power now.
@Gustopher:
For years people in blog comment sections have trusted Google-served “facts” from search terms designed to have Google give the answer they want (often an op-ed or a single abstract from a single study) to assert as a “fact” to try to win some blog argument. What do you think is generating those search results – AI!
And “trust” is doing a lot of work here. I was looking for a quick, rough estimate for a blog comment, not designing a nuclear weapon. AI does a much better job at this than me clicking through search results.
I can’t be the only one who has noticed that search engine quality has declined considerably when it comes to searching for basic stuff like this. We can add this to the enshittification list.
I put the same question in Google, and half of the results on the first page were irrelevant. The others were mostly from boot makers or random authoritative sources like Quora (lol) or forums (also lol) that gave estimates in hours, days, or months, depending on the context. Given the choice between an AI estimate and one I have to come up with based on that morass that a search engine gives me, I’ll defer to AI for something trivial like how long it takes to make a boot.
It’s actually those kinds of questions where AI is useful – as a starting point. When you want a quick estimate (note: estimate, not fact – there is a difference) or other specific types of information (not any type of information), AI is pretty reliable for your first round of research. Obviously, if you are seriously looking at any question with any depth, you can’t end there, just like you can’t end with some Google results.
I’ve found AI to be very useful for a number of purposes and worthless for others. Like anything else, it’s a tool, and all tools have their limits.
@Kathy:
Yes, this is why I pointed out that the real danger is regulatory capture.
@OzarkHillbilly:
One of my long-standing pet peeves is how few consumer electronics companies care about user interfaces. Even Apple, which has carried everyone else for decades in this department, is starting to become crappier.
@Kathy: The main reason Lockheed was late with the L 1011 was the failure of Roll Royce to deliver the engines. Development cost overruns forced Rolls Royce into bankruptcy. The GE engines for the DC 10 were a possibility but Douglas owned the patents for the nacelles and wasn’t anxious to provide them to a competitor. Also, the GE turbofan engine was not compatible with the L1011’s s ducted center engine. It was only after Rolls got guarantees from the U.S. government that engine development was completed, and the L1011 could go into production. By that time Lockheed had lost some of its contracts to Douglas.
@a country lawyer:
Such a pity. It was a better airplane than the DC-10, and had no major safety issues I’m aware of. More pleasing to the eye, too, than the DC-10.
Still, the market for widebodies wasn’t exactly crowded, there being two competitors at the time the Tri-Star entered service, but the demand for widebodies was lower than today*.
Suppose they had instead launched a twin engine, narrow body along the lines of the 727 or DC-9, but with turbofans rather than turbojets. The former use up less fuel. regulation and all, it would have sold well, perhaps better than the Boeing or McDonnell Douglas products.
*Paradoxically, they were used in more routes through the 70s and 80s. For instance, many transcontinental flights in the US and Canada were in widebodies. Also many in the longer medium haul flights like MEX-JFK.
The paradox resolves itself when you consider bigger planes mean fewer frequencies.
It’s not a question of cheapness vs quality. Fashion is a red herring. Nobody buys fast fashion thinking it’s going to last. But the people who pump out Uniqlo or Shein know what’s happening in Milan, Paris, and New York. They know what streetwear is and what the trends are.
What’s happening is that people who don’t care about anything and have no feel for what they doing are taking control of certain corporations. Using AI for journalism is not the same as trying to spin out a trend in blouses into something extremely cheap and not durable. Journalism isn’t fatal. Bad journalism can’t be worse than Bari Weiss. Weird finance dudes talking in circles as doors pop off jets is more of a problem. And this seems to be the trend, i.e. Elon Musk who is basically r—– when it comes to anything he does. It’s like if everything petroleum company who paid money to tell conservatives and libertarians that climate change is a hazy issue applied the same scientific logic to their actual equipment. Everything would blow up and fall apart and they would lose their money. I.e. they would never have dared. But the guys coming in after them are going to do that.
Note that the anti-engineer culture at Boeing only started after regulators force-merged the already-bankrupt McDonnell-Douglas into Boeing.. and for some reason history will judge badly, the CEO of McD-D became the leader of the merged company.
The phenomenon crops up in all sorts of unexpected places. There’s a major dam not far from me which has effectively been condemned as unsafe. A new dam will be built below it. Residents downstream have been assured the dam isn’t going to collapse and drown them. Probably. Unless there’s a one-in-500 year rain event, which seem to happen somewhere in Australia every year now.
The dam was built earlier this century, using a new technique that cut down on the quantity of concrete used. A government inquiry into the failed dam heard that the quality control inspectors during the construction wrote numerous reports, none of which ever made their way to the engineers who had designed the dam. In fact the reports were basically meaningless paperwork filled out to satisfy the requirements of a voluminous manual which the contractor had to submit to comply with an international standard. Following the “best practice” which was one of the construction industry’s mantras at the time, the contractor was responsible for its own quality control. The inquiry suggested delicately that unwise cost-cutting in construction had perhaps contributed to the dam’s partial failure in a 2013 flood. Unfortunately few of the people involved could be located to give evidence.
I was very familiar with the contractor in question. Its management had decided at the turn of the century that it was no longer viable in a market increasingly dominated by multinationals. They were looking for a buyer. No doubt a recent profitable contract like the dam made them more attractive. In any event they were bought by a European company. Neither it nor its Australian subsidiary are in business any longer, victims of the GFC.
The whole sorry saga is just an end chapter in a story that began 70 years ago, when public infrastructure was largely built by government agencies using their own employees, and saw over the years an increasing loss of public sector expertise as infrastructure construction was gradually handed over to private contractors in the name of greater efficiency and saving taxpayers’ money.
@Andy:
I missed this yesterday. Ironically enough, there’s a fair amount of evidence that at least some of the reason search engine quality is declining is because of AI use, and it will likely get even worse over time.
@Andy: Are you seriously trying to claim there’s no difference between asking chatgpt a question and using google to look at what studies/examples exist that answer the question?
That would be the weirdest claim I’ve seen involving chatgpt and a google search. Chatgpt will straight up lie to you citing nonexistent studies/cases/etc. At least with a google search you can see the original content/sources. I’m curious what “training” if any you used to get the information you wanted. My search result came up with a bunch of useful information including detailed information on how to hand make boots. The information provided was both relevant for component costs and time needed.
I certainly do think that people are going waaay too gaga over AI. You’d think AI will solve every problem in existence…