It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.
They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial
Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.
None of that lines up very well with the summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker, and they couldn't afford an appeal (as they'd have to put up a $50M bond to do so). All this after a Federal court supported their assertions of fair use and First Amendment protections; Hogan then took it to a Florida state court instead.
Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of deprived regions which caused industrial havoc in the South without providing much long-term benefit to the North. The root problem isn't that government didn't try extreme measure, it's that those measures failed at massive cost, so proposed ones are now subject to much more rigorous scrutiny.
Power in the UK is highly centralised in London, but that's not necessarily bad for regional economic development, e.g. the office ban mentioned above would not have been agreed to by southern devolved regions and the redevelopment of the former East Germany was driven by Bonn (former West Germany's capital city). Competition in government also isn't necessarily good for regional development and the corn laws and free trade that the author credits to Northern England's influence caused another famine in Ireland in 1879. It's also worth noting the North East England referendum of 2004, when London's project of devolving power to the English regions was blocked because Northern English voters overwhelmingly didn't want it.
British manufacturing suffered an unusually steep collapse relative to other western countries in the late 20th century that hit Northern England particularly hard, while the benefits of the slightly later financial services boom were inevitably focused on the country's financial centre in the South. The manufacturing collapse was partially driven by government policies, but not in the way generally thought - for decades, pre-Thatcher governments had been taking fairly regular extreme measures in response to various crises (balance of payments deficits, unbalanced regional development, oil shortages, strikes, etc.), that made life much harder for businesses. But the collapse was mainly driven by the fact that Britain in the second half of the 20th century was mind-bogglingly bad at manufacturing. I suspect that the failure of that entire section of the British economy would be a better starting point for an analysis of what went wrong in Northern England.
There's already a literature analyzing this. For instance William Lazonick's 1983 Business History Review article, "Industrial Organization and Technological Change: The Decline of the British Cotton Industry," and his subsequent book "The Decline of the British Economy: An Institutional Perspective" (1987)
Part of the issue with the UK being bad at manufacturing was (ok it’s a cliche but I’ll say it anyway) that Thatcherism in not wanting to deal with the unions and the social powers they represent, defeated socialism by destroying the work and replacing industry with nothing. There’s no reason the UK couldn’t manufacture ships or precision engineering or steel - it was set up for exactly that. But doing so involves negotiating with unionised power, who vote Labour, and it was a quicker solution to merely destroy and keep destroying social cohesion and the unions around it – “there’s no such thing as society” – by destroying and defunding the work. The London-based finance powers also lost interest in funding industrial production and its workers alongside when moving money around and corruption can be done from the office in London without having to negotiate with union bosses and their insistence for a bigger piece of the pie (that they’re baking).
If you look at somewhere like South Korea, who 60 years ago had no major engineering or shipbuilding, the UK could be leagues ahead of them. The difference is that the South Koreans had the appetite and impetus to do it, whereas in the UK the government and finance planners had the exact opposite impetus.
Viewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
He was a Communist until his death in the 1970s, but Communism is a pretty broad spectrum and his beliefs moved about it during his life. His public and financial support for Stalinism in France until the mid-1950s was a bad error of judgement.
The two companies are not the same; their dominant positions are in different markets which means the anti-trust implications of them extending into a specific market have to be judged separately.
As an extreme example, Oracle had a dominant position in the enterprise database market in the late '90s, but it wouldn't have been an abuse of that position if they'd integrated a web browser into Oracle 8.
I disagree somewhat regarding markets, segmentation, and offering.
Both have a Web search function as a headline offering. Both have ad enabled platforms. Both are integrating their AI into office and productivity platforms. Both are running integration APIs for their LLMs. Both are actively engaged in research. Both are large market players.
Breaking one will absolutely give the other an unfair advantage and entrench a market leader, which is against the principles of antitrust.
I can use Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI interchangeably (and actually keep the three open as tabs in the same window). This argument doesn't make sense. Monopoly relief should be applied only to monopolistic products, and not strengthen someone else's monopoly.
In general, the more direct the impact of your role on short-term revenue, the safer you are when your company starts sacrificing people to the gods of quarterly accounts.
Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.
Only if their salesperson manages to hit their number very quarter without fail. I've seen people blow their quota out of the water in Q1, and get shitcanned when Q2 is quiet.
The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s.
1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.
2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.
3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.
Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.
> an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.
I know this is a common sentiment, but I don't quite get it. Engineering is often about optimizing multivariate functions, and cost is just another variable to optimize. If you frame it properly to engineers, they can solve cost problems too.
Agreed. Maybe I have become too much of a PHB, but I find that engineers (or scientists in my case) really love having cost as one of the visible metrics to optimize for, and will generally do a fantastic job at evaluating it amongst quality concerns. At least much better than management can do.
I agree. In most of the places I've worked, devs have always taken costs into account as part of the design and development decisions, to the degree that they can. But at most companies, things like cost, expected ROI, etc. are never revealed to the devs, leaving it to guesswork.
All the good engineers I know will prioritize the product though. "Accountants" will prioritize the cost. The "cheapest good product" and the "best cheap product" are almost never the same. The the latter is what you want to pay for but the former is what you want to have.
I think this is an oversimplification. Engineers prioritize the product, as they should, but what the best solution is depends on the constraints, and that includes things like cost of production, target price point, etc.
"Good, cheap, fast: pick two" is a law of the universe that most engineers deeply understand, and good devs will produce the best product they can according to which two are chosen.
Given the choice between cost optimized and safe, fast, cool, etc very few engineers are going to go for cost savings. If there's no bean counters in charge and no market cnstraints its obvious that the product is going to be really good and really expensive.
So make cost optimization cool. I always enjoyed getting rid of production hardware and running as lean as possible within operational constraints. Incentivize cost reduction with benefits proportional to the savings.
You know what’s cooler than an expensive thing? A high quality thing with higher margins. A very well known and highly profitable company has taken that model pretty far (like trillions in valuation far).
Higher margins are not really cool unless you share them, which the engineers probably did not.
Engineers arent really responsible for these types of attitudes though. Management are. By and large engineers will do as they are requested.
I find it far more plausible that costs ballooned due to an empire building dynamic by management than because engineers arm twisted them into building something "cool". Same reason Uber has, like, 150 people working on a mobile app.
> If there's [...] no market cnstraints its obvious that the product is going to be really good and really expensive.
Well sure, you literally just removed the cost optimization variable. SpaceX vs. NASA is a clear example demonstrating that engineers can do this sort of optimization when it's given to them as a constraint. NASA's rocket designs were all custom, single-use, often down to the bolts because the budget was per-project/launch, where SpaceX rockets were designed for reuse and cost minimization across multiple launches.
Spacex also had the very small advantage of all the basic science being done for them for free. The constraint in the NASA golden years wasn't getting it done cheaply, it was getting it done at all.
Rockets haven't changed much since the 60s. This doesn't explain all of the launches since the Space Shuttle, for example. Furthermore, SpaceX clearly innovated with their reusable rockets, but this is exactly the kind of cost constraint that commercial ventures prioritize which government ventures often don't.
Much of engineering is "bean counting" but not beans. I think that engineers will do some CYA around safety, but they also appreciate the money arguments because they are inherently numeric in their evaluations.
This is too simple. For large endeavors (building a plane) it is impossible to formulate all contributions to all quality criteria/cost and constraints into a technical engineering optimization problem.
Let alone when re-structuring and optimizing the company organization and processes to build those planes at the same time.
> For large endeavors (building a plane) it is impossible to formulate all contributions to all quality criteria/cost and constraints into a technical engineering optimization problem.
It's obviously possible, SpaceX vs. NASA is an existence proof. Maybe you have something specific in mind when you say "technical engineering optimization problem", like a formula you can minimize mathematically to account for every little contribution, but this often isn't necessary. Like when solving physics problems using approximations, you often only need to minimize the first and second order largest contributors to the cost and you'll be in the right ballpark.
This also means you don't need to find the literally absolute minimum and capture literally all of the contributors to the cost during the design process. And of course this is what happens in the real world already, do you think accountants and pointy haired bosses guiding a bunch of engineers are going to find the absolute minimum? Of course not, they find what looks like a minimum from their limited view of a project after the engineers estimate the costs of producing parts and the labour required. Just close the loop without the accountants and bosses and engineers can do this optimization themselves.
I agree with you and you basically make the same point as wanted to make: you can’t just frame it as an engineering problem, it involves accountants and bosses. So your original statement „If you frame it properly to engineers, they can solve cost problems too.“ is too simplistic in my view.
> you basically make the same point as wanted to make: you can’t just frame it as an engineering problem, it involves accountants and bosses.
I disagree that I was making this point. I said it currently involves accountants and bosses, and I'm saying it doesn't have to because you can make it an engineering problem. The accountants and bosses don't have any unique skills or insight here that aren't in principle also accessible to the engineers.
Ok, then I misunderstood, and we can only agree to disagree. I think there need to be people caring about organizational stuff which you cannot fully formulate as engineering problem: setting deadlines, putting teams together, determining team leads, determining how much budget is spent on which branch or discipline or even which part development. In addition, even more technical problems like calculating and comparing costs resulting from parts-Design over the full product lifecycle (design, manufacturing, usability, maintenance, repair, disposal) is not feasible today. And using approximations amounts to making assumption and thereby decisions up-front, where you usually cannot oversee all their implications. Designing complex machinery and shaping the organization which builds them is hellishly complex.
> I think there need to be people caring about organizational stuff which you cannot fully formulate as engineering problem: setting deadlines, putting teams together, determining team leads, determining how much budget is spent on which branch or discipline or even which part development.
These are mostly hacks to get around the fact that the engineers haven't been given enough information. If you just say, "we need product X that can be produced at cost Y/unit and we need to start production by date Z", then this is a satisfiability problem that the right set of engineers can evaluate as possible or not possible. It's fine to assign a team lead with the requisite experience and authority to pull in the engineers, equipment and data they need to answer this question, but then you get out of the way.
Answering this question involves laying out a semi-detailed plan for how to achieve the goal. If it turns out to not be possible within the given constraints, then you at least have that plan to inform you where the expected cost or time overruns are (or the unknowns/uncertainty), and whether that means you have to revise the expected selling price, deadline or you can compromise on the scope to achieve the desired selling price.
I will agree that some engineers and programmers really don't care about this stuff, but I'd argue it's because it's typically not part of their job, and sometimes because worrying about costs and schedules is not an "interesting problem". But it is an interesting problem if you frame it as set of optimization and satisfiability problems.
Industrial espionage does not necessarily improves engineering culture.
When I visited NITsEVT, a big-big-big organization dedicated to adapting of the stolen IBM 360/370 software to Russian language and Russian computer variants - I was amazed at how low the software culture was there. It looked like the only way to implement something was to look at how some American (but not necessarily bright) person has implemented some similar thing.
The whole “adaptation” project led to overall degradation of software culture as compared to 60s, when a lot of Russian system software was an original one. Or so a lot of people were saying.
Is there any evidence that's what happened? As far as I can tell, the NSA was doing it's routine thing of spying on foreign governments and and discovered that Airbus was trying to bribe a gov official.
Maybe you agree with Henry L. Stimson that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", but I haven't seen anything indicating that the NSA was spying on behalf of Boeing, or even directly targeting Airbus. Maybe I missed something, would be happy to learn if you have any sources to share :)
I don't think secret tech or cloak and dagger business moves are what makes an aircraft company win. it's a far more complex amalgamation of government intervention, regulations, institutional knowledge, and company culture. Things you could never steal with spies.
European countries have had aviation industries stretching back to the 1910s. They always had the engineering. But making a good product is not enough. You have to SELL it.
No what made Airbus start winning in the 1980s was hiring a former Boeing salesman. That's when they took off. Convincing air liners to take a chance and order Airbus planes.
>> According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994. The NSA found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official to secure a lion's share for Airbus in modernising Saudi Arabian Airlines' fleet. The planes were in a $6 billion deal that Edouard Balladur, France's then prime minister, had hoped to clinch on a visit to see King Fahd in January 1994. He went home empty-handed.
>> James Woolsey, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounted in a newspaper article in 2000 how the American government typically reacted to intelligence of this sort. “When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,” he wrote. Apparently this (and a direct sales pitch from Bill Clinton to King Fahd) swung the aircraft part of the deal Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's way.
Wow, I knew national industry deals were murky, but damn.
Another way of presenting the same facts is that Airbus has done business with a country where corruption and bribes are the norm. The U.S. intercepted communications and used them to blackmail buyers so that they chose Boeing instead of the best airplanes.
Exactly. It's fair to say that at the level of national champion industries and state-to-state deals, countries' intelligence organizations are always involved.
Maybe they're doing defense (discovering bribes swaying the bid to another country, or monitoring their own country's bribes) or offense (stealing competitor bid data and specifications), but they're not idle.
I don't mind being asked for a source on a difficult to research topic but this was covered in the mainstream press and you clearly didn't even attempt a google search.
The article referencing this and Airbus is rather sensationalized and cuts off half the quote. This was said in reference to Airbus bribing foreign officials to buy from them. The full quote reads:
"When we have caught you at it, we haven’t said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you’re bribing and tell its officials that we don’t take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and your bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal…"[5]
[5] R. James Woolsey, "Why We Spy on our Allies," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2000.
The source unfortunately is locked behind a paywall so admittedly I don’t have the full context either.
1971: Will the Last Person Leaving SEATTLE — Turn Out the Lights
I’d argue the 757, 767 and 737 Classic (i.e. -300 to -500), all of which much more 80s than 70s were much more glorious.
And the 90s brought us the 737NG and 777 which continue to carry more than everything else today and for that matter anything else ever, other than maybe the A320ceo.
I would say even the 787 is a good plane, if it didn't have major build quality issues because of Boeing wanting to reduce manufacturing costs (it was initially built at two plants, Everett WA and North Charleston SC, and it got to a point when airlines only wanted to have 787s manufactured in Everett, but ultimately the production in Everett was discontinued). And now the same major build quality issues start popping up with the 737 MAX (whose fuselage is being manufactured by Spirit Aerosystems, which was originally a division of Boeing but was outsourced in 2005).
