Flying Blind: The 737 MAX and the Fall of Boeing, Peter Robison (Doubleday, 2021). Such a frustrating book! Such a missed opportunity! The premise is great: “how a subtle change in corporate culture led inexorably to planes falling out of the sky and the deaths of 346 people.” Alas, the execution is not there, and it becomes increasingly clear as you read this that Peter Robison has
Minor nitpick: you have your specification page-lengths for the 777 and 787 reversed. It was 2500 pages on the 777, and just 20 pages on the later 787 (the problem was that Boeing massively under-specified a lot of components, leading to coordination issues down the line).
Work from home and outsourcing both seem to open the door to fragility. Reminds me of Taleb’s (PBUH) assertion that restaurants, music scenes, etc are anti-fragile on a macro scale even while the individual units involved are very prone to failure. You get the same people hopping from kitchen to kitchen, bar to bar, band to band, able to quickly share what works and what doesn’t. Those are industries that can’t exist detached from space and they don’t even have to be aware of the pitfalls of working from home or saving money by exporting the jobs somewhere 13000 miles away, so grounded they are to place in particular. Techne of any sort is art at its core, and the boardroom would be remiss to pretend that engineers aren’t artists
“When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs…”
"One of the great discoveries of modern ecology is that apex predators, macrofauna, the plants and animals we notice and admire are perched precariously atop a vast network of invisible supports. A tiger is the temporary result of too many worms gathering in one place."
My perspective on changes happening is bracketed by looking at much older industries, especially fashion, music, and insurance. Fashion built the biggest outsourcing infrastructure ever. It's still the biggest. Music indentured almost all its greats under contracts, until a common knowledge of how awful contracts can be got out. Insurance learned how to regulate risk-shifting, by contracts and by limiting reinsurance, and it's learning now how to work with selection effects in a richer information environment. I wonder when tech will catch up to older developed industries.
OTOH, older industries all evolved *in tandem* with govt intervention and non-intervention, whereas govts differ more wildly than ever now in capacity compared to the past. Everyone recognizes the presence of oligarchies, i.e., Gramsci is anodyne now, but there's no consensus on how to value (as in valuation) oligarchic domains, and how to balance or oppose or manage them. Bounding and naming oligarchic coalitions has hardly begun. The only institutions with deep knowledge of oligarchic coalitions are private banks and intelligence agencies.
On top of the above is the new phenomenon of microbranding, where individuals can brand themselves cheaply and join managed collectives, weakening the span of oppressive contracts immensely.
Reading groups and secret societies have always operated remotely, apart from initial intensive f2f periods of initiation and occasional meetups. That will just continue. I do suspect, where the fear of remoteness arises, is with respect not to reading groups and secret societies, but to the next layer of schools and coteries led or guided by their members, or (if also required) larger gatherings with a few present to be cherry-picked, sponsored by cherry-pickers.
Cores of innovation have long been intelligensia (for example, the engineer parents of engineers, or the economist parents of economists) and autodidacts. What's new in this developing internet age will be their microbranding and the market for sponsors of their education.
Minor nitpick: you have your specification page-lengths for the 777 and 787 reversed. It was 2500 pages on the 777, and just 20 pages on the later 787 (the problem was that Boeing massively under-specified a lot of components, leading to coordination issues down the line).
Work from home and outsourcing both seem to open the door to fragility. Reminds me of Taleb’s (PBUH) assertion that restaurants, music scenes, etc are anti-fragile on a macro scale even while the individual units involved are very prone to failure. You get the same people hopping from kitchen to kitchen, bar to bar, band to band, able to quickly share what works and what doesn’t. Those are industries that can’t exist detached from space and they don’t even have to be aware of the pitfalls of working from home or saving money by exporting the jobs somewhere 13000 miles away, so grounded they are to place in particular. Techne of any sort is art at its core, and the boardroom would be remiss to pretend that engineers aren’t artists
Bravo!
“When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs…”
"One of the great discoveries of modern ecology is that apex predators, macrofauna, the plants and animals we notice and admire are perched precariously atop a vast network of invisible supports. A tiger is the temporary result of too many worms gathering in one place."
Hot dang do I wish I could write like this.
I'm really enjoying these excursion-dumps, fwiw.
My perspective on changes happening is bracketed by looking at much older industries, especially fashion, music, and insurance. Fashion built the biggest outsourcing infrastructure ever. It's still the biggest. Music indentured almost all its greats under contracts, until a common knowledge of how awful contracts can be got out. Insurance learned how to regulate risk-shifting, by contracts and by limiting reinsurance, and it's learning now how to work with selection effects in a richer information environment. I wonder when tech will catch up to older developed industries.
OTOH, older industries all evolved *in tandem* with govt intervention and non-intervention, whereas govts differ more wildly than ever now in capacity compared to the past. Everyone recognizes the presence of oligarchies, i.e., Gramsci is anodyne now, but there's no consensus on how to value (as in valuation) oligarchic domains, and how to balance or oppose or manage them. Bounding and naming oligarchic coalitions has hardly begun. The only institutions with deep knowledge of oligarchic coalitions are private banks and intelligence agencies.
On top of the above is the new phenomenon of microbranding, where individuals can brand themselves cheaply and join managed collectives, weakening the span of oppressive contracts immensely.
Reading groups and secret societies have always operated remotely, apart from initial intensive f2f periods of initiation and occasional meetups. That will just continue. I do suspect, where the fear of remoteness arises, is with respect not to reading groups and secret societies, but to the next layer of schools and coteries led or guided by their members, or (if also required) larger gatherings with a few present to be cherry-picked, sponsored by cherry-pickers.
Cores of innovation have long been intelligensia (for example, the engineer parents of engineers, or the economist parents of economists) and autodidacts. What's new in this developing internet age will be their microbranding and the market for sponsors of their education.