Diversity is Why Nothing Works Anymore

A former Boeing engineer explains why Boeing can’t build quality aerospace projects anymore.

Once upon a time Boeing had an excellent reputation for quality and performance on contracts. Then the big aerospace layoffs hit – they absorbed MacDonald Douglas and adopted their crappy penny pinching management. That’s when the big layoffs hit as well – but there was one other thing that happened then. I was working at Boeing and one day we were called into a “all hands” meeting of the engineers by management. We were told to look around the room – virtually everyone there was white males. Then we were told that very soon only 15 percent of the engineering staff was going to be white males in the near future. This was around the mid 90s and shows DEI was already being adopted by some corporations. Because I had specialist knowledge, after I was laid off I was soon recalled and “What do you know?”(tm) I was the only white male in the team – which worked out to 15 percent. I retired a few years later but I can’t help but wonder if the reason Boeing now sucks is they went down the DEI rabbit hole.

Equalitarianism is antithetical to quality. And diversity means convergence, which indicates the eventual inability to perform the organization’s primary tasks.

The USA is no longer the USA of 1980 or 1950, much less 1920. Adjust your expectations accordingly. Because both Russia and China lack diversity relative to the USA, they now possess all the advantages of having a smarter and more capable work force that the USA did prior to 1965.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Problem of Shrinkage

As with gun violence, inventory shrinkage actually just a diversity problem:

Target (TGT) has become a target for major thefts, and it’s taking a huge chunk out of profits.

The retailer estimated in its earnings release Wednesday that inventory shrinkage — mostly the theft of merchandise — would clip profits by a whopping $500 million this year. Factoring in an about $700 million profit hit from inventory shrinkage in 2022, Target is on pace to see $1.2 billion in profits go up in smoke, due primarily to organized retail crime.

Target Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell says the problem is getting worse, is nationwide, and across various merchandise departments.

“The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry. And when products are stolen, simply put they are no longer available for guests who depend on them,” Cornell said on a call with reporters.

“Left unchecked, organized retail crime degrades the communities we call home. As we work to address this problem, the safety of our guests and our team members will always be our primary concern. Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results,” he said.

Once more, we see that the materialist perspective is totally incapable of explaining the corpocracy’s embrace of diversity and inclusivity.

Gordon Gecko lied. Not only is greed not good, it’s not even the causal factor it is assumed to be.

DISCUSS ON SG


Hide Mode Activated

It’s not only the neoclowns who are in retreat now. If this 2020 article from Commentary is to be believed, it appears that Jews are increasingly concerned with scrubbing their early lives from Wikipedia.

My new best Wikifriend’s user name was “Coffee,” and he’s a conscientious editor. He politely informed me that it was appropriate to introduce my faith into my entry because it was “covered in a reliable source,” a Wikipedia standard for inclusion. That turned out to be the Times Book Review’s “ham-eating Jew” reference. Other Jewish professionals may not have had their religion listed because there was no such source for the citation. I had been kept from editing the insertion because Wikipedia protocols blocked removing properly sourced material. “I know that’s not the answer you were looking for,” he conceded.

He was right. It’s possible, I wrote back, that the “editor” who introduced Jewish identity into my and many other entries was so proud of the Jewish contribution to journalism and literature that he wanted the world to know about all these accomplished Jews. But, given the recent spate of overt anti-Semitism here and in Europe, it was certainly plausible that the intruder was trying to stigmatize Jewish “notables,” in the Wikipedia term of art. It seemed to me possible that Wikipedia was naively invoking a valid standard—reliable citation—to enable its material to be doctored by a stealth anti-Semite.

Ten days later, Coffee replied: “I have taken the description off…your article and am now in the process of combing through the thousands of edits made by this user to remove other violations. We determined that even though a reliable source covered your upbringing it was not enough to support the claim in your article. This was based on it not being of due weight to your notability, and because there is not a consensus of sources covering you in such a way. I’m applying this standard to every article…that this person edited and will likely have to look at others than just [those that] this editor has added as well (as this seems to be a rather big issue”).

In two weeks, he’d found more than 250 intrusions he considered inappropriate in entries of not-previously-identified Jewish “notables” and 1,142 in Wikipedia’s lists of Jews in 32 fields. These lists include everyone from cartoonists (43, including Jules Feiffer, Rube Goldberg, and Al Hirschfeld) to poets (28, including Allen Ginsberg, Emma Lazarus, and Delmore Schwartz). And there were hundreds more articles to vet. Most of the “Jew-tagging” had been in articles about notables in media and writing, but Jews in finance and retail were involved, too. Reviewing “tens of thousands” of interventions by one “editor,” Coffee found that he or she had added religious descriptors almost exclusively for Jews.

Jew-Tagging @Wikipedia, Commentary, May 2020

How, one wonders, is the identity of Emma Lazarus and Allen Ginsberg deemed unworthy of note, given the way in which it served as the foundation of the work that made them notable? Not that the retroactive scrubbing will serve to hide anything at all. Because, as has been the case for most of written history, it’s not their identity that is the issue, but rather their evil, observable, and societally-devastating actions.

Even a ticket-taker like Elon Musk knows: “Soros hates humanity. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.”

DISCUSS ON SG


Elon Musk Lied to You

Karl Denninger proves, conclusively, that Elon Musk is not “adamant about defending free speech” no matter what he claims to be.

I posted the following about his new CEO in response to the NY Post (they asked “who is this chick?”):

@nypost A: A WEF lackey and jab-happy mastermind who in fact conned 2/3rds of this nation, on purpose, into taking said jabs under false pretense. She deserve the gallows but then again Musk has billions of reasons to not care about the PEOPLE in this country and, indeed, worldwide.

This drew me an INSTANT 12 hour suspension for “harassment.”

It is, according to Twitter, harassment and “abusive behavior” to factually state that she is indeed a WEF lackey (she JUST spoke there) and that she in fact while at NBC Universal, as her last major project, did indeed work to advertise and promote the jabs — which we now know were in fact based on the lie that you would not get Covid if you took them.

Let’s be clear folks: It is considered “abusive” by Twitter to state two truths about a public figure and call for them to be punished as a direct consequence of the harms that occurred to others due to their own personal and willful actions which they took for the purpose of profit, whether professional, monetary, political or otherwise.

Elon Musk is observably not on the side of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. And yes, my @voxday account is still “permanently suspended” and that status was recently confirmed to be correct by Twitter customer support.

As Karl points out, the reports about Tucker Carlson making Twitter the foundation of his next platform tends to raise serious questions about which side Mr. Carlson truly serves.

DISCUSS ON SG


Corporate Cancer Code Red

There isn’t much doubt about what stage of convergence Levi’s has reached now that it has brought the old SNL skit about Woke Jeans to life.

Jennifer Sey was an executive at Levi’s when the brand debuted its gender-neutral campaign. But Sey told Fox News Digital the greatest profit for the company came from traditional gender-focused products. Sometimes men buy women’s clothes. Sometimes women buy men’s clothes.

“It wasn’t a reinvention of the product line,” Sey said. “I still think it’s woke washing. If we want to call it that. And yes, I did it and I would probably do things a little differently now.”

So it seems the gender-fluid line is simply a marketing tactic — pandering to a small portion of the population.

“Levi’s has always been a brand for everyone. Just leave it at that,” Sey said. “Why wade into controversial politics around gender ideology? Now? When the Bud Light backlash caused a more than 20 percent decline in sales in April for their flagship brand?”

Companies are blinded by ideology. And they are pressured by a small minority of employees, consumers and activists. These parties have, in Sey’s opinion, lost sight of the fact that the purpose of business is to deliver profits.

“This approach Levi’s is taking alienates a significant portion of the population who takes this to be the company furthering a controversial ideology that says biological sex isn’t real,” she added. “Not a good move, with the stock price already down more than 20 percent this year and 50 percent from two years ago. Just stick with Levi’s is for everyone.”

But corporations seem to be more interested in furthering their reputations as “do-gooders and altruists,” she said. As evidenced by Dylan Mulvaney’s more than $1 million in sponsorship deals.

Interesting to see how SJWAL, published in 2015, and Corporate Cancer, published in 2019, laid out precisely how this sort of thing would happen, and how a small group of individuals in key positions would make it happen.

DISCUSS ON SG


Pfizer Knew Pregnancy Risks

And yet the company aggressively pushed the vaxx on pregnant women even though it knew the vaxx would have adverse effects on the MAJORITY of pregnant women.

The April 2023 batch of Pfizer clinical trial documents released under court order by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) contains a shocking, eight-page document titled, “Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review.” The data in the Cumulative Review are “…from the time of drug product development to 28-FEB-2021,” and Robert T. Maroko of the FDA approved the Review on April 20, 2021. It reveals that Pfizer and the FDA knew in early 2021 that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine, BNT162b2, resulted in:

  • Adverse events in over 54% of pregnant women including:
  • Fetal deaths.
  • Fetal tachycardia requiring early delivery and hospitalization of the affected neonate for five days (outcome “unknown”).
  • Premature labor and delivery resulting in:
  • Neonatal deaths.
  • Neonatal severe respiratory distress.
  • Neonatal pneumothorax, which is a collection of air between the lung and the chest wall that develops when air leaks out of the lung.
  • Moreover, in the Cumulative Review, nineteen percent of babies exposed to Pfizer’s COVID mRNA vaccine via lactation (breast milk) were reported to be suffering from 48 different adverse events

These people are damnable servants of evil. Never trust either “the science” or the corpocracy. It is safer by far to assume that literally everything they say is inverted.

DISCUSS ON SG


Tucker Leaves Fox News

FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.

It will be interesting to see if Tucker is bigger than Fox now or if it was Fox that was propping him up. Either way, he’s in a remarkable position going forward, and if he plays his cards right, he could set up an organization capable of competing successfully with CNN and MSNBC before the end of the year.

DISCUSS ON SG


Mike Lindell, Thou Art Avenged

Bed Bath & Beyond has somehow managed to go bankrupt despite the fact that there are more US residents than ever who still presumably need bedrooms and bathrooms:

The once-dominant home goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond has filed for bankruptcy protection after months of losing shoppers and money.

The company, which also owns the BuyBuy Baby chain, has struggled to regain its financial footing after a series of turnaround attempts that proved to be mistimed or ineffective.

“Millions of customers have trusted us through the most important milestones in their lives – from going to college to getting married, settling into a new home to having a baby,” said Sue Gove, the company’s president and CEO. “Our teams have worked with incredible purpose to support and strengthen our beloved banners, Bed Bath & Beyond and buybuy BABY. We deeply appreciate our associates, customers, partners, and the communities we serve, and we remain steadfastly determined to serve them throughout this process.”

The company said that for now its 360 Bed Bath & Beyond and 120 BuyBuy Baby stores and websites would remain open, but that over time they would be closed.

Since first warning of a bankruptcy in January, the company has exhausted numerous last-ditch efforts to shore up financing, including store closures, job cuts and several lifelines from banks and investors.

Bed Bath & Beyond previously cited “lower customer traffic and reduced levels of inventory availability” as it flagged “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” A preliminary report for the holiday-season quarter showed sales falling 40% to 50% from a year earlier. Sales had fallen similarly in the quarter before that, down 32%.

Bed Bath & Beyond was once a dominant “category killer” that absorbed or outlived many early rivals. As recently as 2018, the chain had over 1,500 stores.

Economic centralization is a community killer. We see the pattern again and again and again. A financialized corporation devours all of the local suppliers, takes over the entire industry, then somehow manages to go bankrupt despite the fact that it doesn’t have any serious competitors.

How is this even possible? The answer is straightforward: vampire finance.

As recently as 2022, Bed Bath & Beyond’s revenue was higher than it was in 2009. But by then, it was already seen as being in trouble and on its way out. The problem, of course, is financialization and the systematic draining of profit from the financialized corporation’s operations. A healthy company pours its resources back into the business and grows as a result, leaving everyone better off. A dying company is one that has had its resources methodically drained from it by the financial vampires, thereby leaving everyone worse off except the people who killed it.

DISCUSS ON SG


Nothing Works Anymore So Plan Accordingly

It’s perspicacious, so read the whole thing. On a related note, I’ve literally been working on finding a solution for the shipping problem for Europe all morning. And the steps we are probably going to have to take to resolve the issues involved are absurd to the point of bordering on the comedic. The good news is that should we ever feel the need to branch out into trafficking various forms of contraband, we will have a comprehensive network in place.

There’s a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that’s basically, “markets enforce efficiency, so it’s not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive”. We’ve previously discussed Marc Andreessen’s quote that tech hiring can’t be inefficient here and here:

Let’s launch right into it. I think the critique that Silicon Valley companies are deliberately, systematically discriminatory is incorrect, and there are two reasons to believe that that’s the case. … No. 2, our companies are desperate for talent. Desperate. Our companies are dying for talent. They’re like lying on the beach gasping because they can’t get enough talented people in for these jobs. The motivation to go find talent wherever it is unbelievably high.

Variants of this idea that I frequently hear engineers and VCs repeat involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would’ve outcompeted them and done it already.

There’s a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it’s a debate I’ve often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it’s so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would’ve come along and won based on being more efficient or better. Talking purely abstractly, it’s hard to settle the debate, but things are clearer if we look at some specifics, as in the two examples above about hiring, where we can observe that, whatever abstract arguments people make, inefficiencies persisted for decades.

When it comes to buying products and services, at a personal level, most people I know who’ve checked the work of people they’ve hired for things like home renovation or accounting have found grievous errors in the work. Although it’s possible to find people who don’t do shoddy work, it’s generally difficult for someone who isn’t an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. You can try to get better quality by paying more, but once you get out of the very bottom end of the market, it’s frequently unclear how to trade money for quality, e.g., my friends and colleagues who’ve gone with large, brand name, accounting firms have paid much more than people who go with small, local, accountants and gotten a higher error rate; as a strategy, trying expensive local accountants hasn’t really fared much better. The good accountants are typically somewhat expensive, but they’re generally not charging the highest rates and only a small percentage of somewhat expensive accountants are good.

More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it’s fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good. When people happen to choose a product or service that’s right for them, it’s often for the wrong reasons. For example, in my social circles, there have been two waves of people migrating from iPhones to Android phones over the past few years. Both waves happened due to Apple PR snafus which caused a lot of people to think that iPhones were terrible at something when, in fact, they were better at that thing than Android phones. Luckily, iPhones aren’t strictly superior to Android phones and many people who switched got a device that was better for them because they were previously using an iPhone due to good Apple PR, causing their errors to cancel out. But, when people are mostly making decisions off of marketing and PR and don’t have access to good information, there’s no particular reason to think that a product being generally better or even strictly superior will result in that winning and the worse product losing. In capital markets, we don’t need all that many informed participants to think that some form of the efficient market hypothesis holds ensuring “prices reflect all available information”. It’s a truism that published results about market inefficiencies stop being true the moment they’re published because people exploit the inefficiency until it disappears.

But as we also saw, individual firms exploiting mispriced labor have a limited demand for labor and inefficiencies can persist for decades because the firms that are acting on “all available information” don’t buy enough labor to move the price of mispriced people to where it would be if most or all firms were acting rationally.

In the abstract, it seems that, with products and services, inefficiencies should also be able to persist for a long time since, similarly, there also isn’t a mechanism that allows actors in the system to exploit the inefficiency in a way that directly converts money into more money, and sometimes there isn’t really even a mechanism to make almost any money at all. For example, if you observe that it’s silly for people to move from iPhones to Android phones because they think that Apple is engaging in nefarious planned obsolescence when Android devices generally become obsolete more quickly, due to a combination of iPhones getting updates for longer and iPhones being faster at every price point they compete at, allowing the phone to be used on bloated sites for longer, you can’t really make money off of this observation. This is unlike a mispriced asset that you can buy derivatives of to make money (in expectation).

A common suggestion to the problem of not knowing what product or service is good is to ask an expert in the field or a credentialed person, but this often fails as well. For example, a friend of mine had trouble sleeping because his window air conditioner was loud and would wake him up when it turned on. He asked a trusted friend of his who works on air conditioners if this could be improved by getting a newer air conditioner and his friend said “no; air conditioners are basically all the same”. But any consumer who’s compared items with motors in them would immediately know that this is false. Engineers have gotten much better at producing quieter devices when holding power and cost constant. My friend eventually bought a newer, quieter, air conditioner, which solved his sleep problem, but he had the problem for longer than he needed to because he assumed that someone whose job it is to work on air conditioners would give him non-terrible advice about air conditioners. If my friend were an expert on air conditioners or had compared the noise levels of otherwise comparable consumer products over time, he could’ve figured out that he shouldn’t trust his friend, but if he had that level of expertise, he wouldn’t have needed advice in the first place.

So far, we’ve looked at the difficulty of getting the right product or service at a personal level, but this problem also exists at the firm level and is often worse because the markets tend to be thinner, with fewer products available as well as opaque, “call us” pricing. Some commonly repeated advice is that firms should focus on their “core competencies” and outsource everything else (e.g., Joel Spolsky, Gene Kim, Will Larson, Camille Fournier, etc., all say this), but if we look mid-sized tech companies, we can see that they often need to have in-house expertise that’s far outside what anyone would consider their core competency unless, e.g., every social media company has kernel expertise as a core competency. In principle, firms can outsource this kind of work, but people I know who’ve relied on outsourcing, e.g., kernel expertise to consultants or application engineers on a support contract, have been very unhappy with the results compared to what they can get by hiring dedicated engineers, both in absolute terms (support frequently doesn’t come up with a satisfactory resolution in weeks or months, even when it’s one a good engineer could solve in days) and for the money (despite engineers being expensive, large support contracts can often cost more than an engineer while delivering worse service than an engineer).

This problem exists not only for support but also for products a company could buy instead of build. For example, Ben Kuhn, the CTO of Wave, has a Twitter thread about some of the issues we’ve run into at Wave, with a couple of followups. Ben now believes that one of the big mistakes he made as CTO was not putting much more effort into vendor selection, even when the decision appeared to be a slam dunk, and more strongly considering moving many systems to custom in-house versions sooner. Even after selecting the consensus best product in the space from the leading (as in largest and most respected) firm, and using the main offering the company has, the product often not only doesn’t work but, by design, can’t work.

For example, we tried “buy” instead of “build” for a product that syncs data from Postgres to Snowflake. Syncing from Postrgres is the main offering (as in the offering with the most customers) from a leading data sync company, and we found that it would lose data, duplicate data, and corrupt data. After digging into it, it turns out that the product has a design that, among other issues, relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they’re consumed, so the Postgres data source can’t support this operation. When their product attempts to do this and the operation fails, we end up with the sync getting “stuck”, needing manual intervention from the vendor’s operator and/or data loss. Since our data is still on Postgres, it’s possible to recover from this by doing a full resync, but the data sync product tops out at 5MB/s for reasons that appear to be unknown to them, so a full resync can take days even on databases that aren’t all that large. Resyncs will also silently drop and corrupt data, so multiple cycles of full resyncs followed by data integrity checks are sometimes necessary to recover from data corruption, which can take weeks. Despite being widely recommended and the leading product in the space, the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work.

This isn’t just an issue that impacts tech companies; we see this across many different industries. For example, any company that wants to mail items to customers has to either implement shipping themselves or deal with the fallout of having unreliable shipping.

I wish I’d read this six months ago. But at least it confirms the necessity, and the wisdom, of setting up our own shipping centers.

DISCUSS ON SG


Silicon Valley is Fake and Gay

Of course, it has been ever since the end of the semiconductor era.

Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley, along with some schadenfreude and a pinch of paranoia.

Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27.

Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.

Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.

It’s not over. It won’t be over as long as venture capitalists can inflate fraudulent businesses living off their angel and VC money long enough to either a) go public or b) get acquired and let the VCs cash in. Because the Patreons and the Substacks of the world are just as fake as the Franks and the FTXs, as were the Bloggers, Twitters, and Pajamas Medias before them.

None of these businesses actually make money. None of them will ever make money.

DISCUSS ON SG