Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

“You know what doesn’t look good?  A story about gross incompetence.” – American Hustle

My garden shears will never be obsolete, after all, it’s cutting-hedge technology.

My science teacher in high school, who I’ll call “Mr. Johnson” (not his real name except that was totally his real name) often lectured us on things entirely unrelated to science.  It wasn’t a doctrine he was trying to instill us with, it was merely that he was old enough and close enough to retirement that he really didn’t give a damn about 90% of the class.  I don’t think that he even cared if we listened, since he was only talking to 10% of us anyway.

You either got him or you didn’t.

One of his random asides was about the word “crisis”.  Mr. Johnson hated the use of the word crisis except to refer to a single moment in time.  His definition was that the crisis was a moment – the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone was poised to push the button, and yet backed away from world condemning us to live in a world where The View exists.

Regardless of Mr. Johnson’s definition, I think we’re in the midst of a crisis.

Why do I think this stage would smell of old kitty litter and stale chardonnay?

Datapoint:

  • Crowdstrike™

The Crowdstrike© software incident from just two weeks ago brought down at least 8.5 million computer systems, and brought them down in such a way that they couldn’t restart.  To make it even better, once a fix was found, it had to be fixed computer by computer.  Why?  Because they didn’t test the patch.

Right now, the estimate is that this caused at least $10 billion in financial losses, though a communist would tell you that it was a good thing since all of those computer techs had something to do other than play Tetris™ and Minesweeper© while listening to Dan Fogelberg.

I think Boeing® should adopt a “no slippers” policy.

Datapoint:

  • Boeing’s© Starliner™

The Starliner® is anything but, more resembling a large orbiting bucket filled with cash than a spacecraft, it sits, useless, stuck against the side of the ISS.  If it were the only failure to Boeing’s©, name, that would be one thing, but it’s not.  Their planes regularly either fall from the sky due to poor programming kludges, or have random spontaneous partial disassembly of their planes in flight due to spotty manufacturing quality control.

Boeing™ had a pretty good reputation for decades as a company that took engineering seriously – the name of the Boeing® 707 was rumored to be an engineering joke – it’s one over the square root of two.  It kept showing up in their calculations, so they decided that was a good omen for naming their (then) flagship airliner.  In reality, it sounds like it was just a product number, with the 7 series being jets, and they liked the sound of the end 7.

Regardless, they didn’t call it a “Dreamliner™”.

NASA refuses to send a giant duck into outer space – they say the bill would be astronomical.

Datapoint:

  • NASA

I loved NASA when I was a kid.  They were generally seen as a triumph of competence and coolness under pressure.  They did real engineering, and also were great at managing the integration of multiple complex systems in a manner where they worked pretty well, Apollos 1 and 13 notwithstanding.

They literally wrote the book on getting man to the Moon using the very limits of known technology at the time.  Getting to the Moon was so hard that it was barely in our grasp, yet they did it, time and time again.  They even managed to get the ISS built.

But now?  Barrack Obama stated that the primary goal of NASA was Moslem outreach.  During the eclipse of 2017, they even spent NASA resources to make a Braille book about eclipses.  What was that meant to do, taunt the blind kids?  And, yes, the Webb Space Telescope has been pretty cool.  But the Space Launch System costs about $4.1 billion per launch, and each launch takes about six months.

I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.

Datapoint:

  • COVID-19

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 was horrific from an economic and medical standpoint.  From an economic standpoint, the government response was to blindly throw as much cash in as many places as possible as quickly as that could.  This was a bipartisan effort.

The panic and hypocrisy weren’t limited to the economic response, no.  The medical response was just as inept, as Fauci now admits he just made things up as some sort of medical theater.  Ventilators appear to have killed more people than they saved.  The abomination of the “Vaxx” has led to an excess mortality that many reckon has a body count higher than COVID itself.  I, for one, really hope that everyone who took the Vaxx® recovers, but can we forget a government and its accomplices who tried (and in many cases, succeeded in forcing people to take it?

I can’t, though the GloboLeftElite surely hope you forget.  But remember, there are no refunds.

I was wondering if this was going to be too dark, but then I realized it’s all under two and a half miles of water, so of course it’s going to be dark.

Datapoint:

  • The Titan Submersible

In one sense, I certainly admire the guts that it took to build a submarine from a pressure hull and off-the-shelf parts like an X-Box™ controller, but the hubris of the owner remains:  the CEO didn’t “hire 50-year-old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational”.  I wonder if we would have made it to orbit if Von Braun had a similar philosophy?

Well, I guess he paid the ultimate price for his hubris and disregarding competence in favor of the “inspirational” stories.  Most CEOs just lose their shareholder’s money, like Disney™, which I could write an entire post on.

The crisis we face is one where we’ve lost the capacity for competence and will to achieve that we had as recently as the 1960s even as our systems grow far more complex.  Again, one software update cost $10,000,000,000, NASA doesn’t produce spaceships that can fly with any reliability, and Boeing™ went from making some of the most reliable airplanes in the world by the thousands to a company that survives on government contracts, accounting errors, and inertia.

Maybe, though, this crisis will do what the Cuban Missile Crisis couldn’t do:

Free us from The View.  Wonder if they’d like a trip to the Titanic?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

32 thoughts on “Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive”

  1. All of the above reinforces the idea that this is being done intentionally. I still try to imagine telling my much younger self that we would not only not be reaching for the stars but we wouldn’t even go back to the moon and could barely get people in orbit of our own planet back home.

  2. It’s a good thing I gotta get going in ten minutes helping to move my granddaughter to her new college apartment so she can become a student debt wage slave once she fulfils her dream of joining a big company HR department, because otherwise I would be here all day venting my spleen about NASA. The one thing I will say is that the godawful engineering abomination that is Artemis SLS take a LOT longer than six months between launches.

    NASA is still capable of daring mighty things – the JPL motto. This week they made a huge announcement that is going under the radar, discovering a rock on Mars that could very well be proof of past life on Mars. The Percy rover took a sample of it, but the Mars Sample Return mission proposed to bring it back is – you guessed it – in danger of being cancelled over budgetary reasons.

    https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-scientists-find-intriguing-mars-rock

    Fortunately, competence in spaceflight still exists. Maybe Elon can bring that sample back to Earth from Mars…

    1. As long as the daughters and granddaughters keep filling the college chairs and renting campus apartment, everything will fail.

      Ya takes yer pick. Empowered daughters and granddaughters, or your nation. Can’t have both.

    2. Elon could probably bring a terraformed Mars back to Earth’s orbit before NASA could get there.

  3. .707 = sqrt(2) / 2
    Shows up everywhere, especially electrical engineering.

  4. Today’s US Army can’t feed the troops or deliver the mail – on posts inside the USA.

    1. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.

      So – it appears that our armed forces are no longer professional.

      This does not bode well.

  5. Ordered tuna salad on toasted rye yesterday. It was served on cold wheat.

    Both Marty Armstrong & CHS have posted blogs on this subject. As noted above, it’s a daily thing in my world. Call customer service. The operator can’t speak intelligible English. Pay cash and add two pennies; the clerk can’t “make change” correctly. Ask an associate in WalDude for help…oh well.

    Am in agreement this is all intentional. Since forced integration in public schools started in 1970, that system nationwide has been dumbed down to accomodate the Lowest Common Denominator(s)- LeRoi & Lakeesha. And now we have 30MM+ invaders to house & feed.

    It’s only gonna get worse. I fear for my Grandchildren.

    Unk Sugar is close to being broke. When WIC swipes get “blue screens”, that’ll initiate the Mother of All Crises.

    As Scott Adams says, get out of cities now.

    1. We’ve only got two good managers for fast food, but there are five fast food restaurants in town. I mainly go to the two good ones.

  6. Some percentage of the problems with Boeing airplanes are ground maintenance and not design or manufacturing of the air planes themselves. It doesn’t matter how well designed the plane is if the maintenance crews leave bolts out.

    Similarly I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen American pilots say that crashes were due to poor training of the foreign pilots flying the plane and not a problem with the plane itself.

    The worst part of Boeing is the spacecraft side. The SLS system – “the Shuttles’ Leftover Shit” – is so bad it’s going to kill off US space exploration. It costs so much that it can only launch one mission every other year. Starliner’s problem seems to be the supplier they’re buying the thruster system from: Aerojet-Rocketdyne, another old, big-name supplier. The thrusters intended for the next Starliner capsule, now likely not to fly until at least 2026, failed just as badly when they pulled them into test last weekend. Choosing the bad supplier (or telling them to do things incorrectly) is Boeing’s fault. And the biggest problem there is the government gives them “cost plus” contracts so that they have zero skin in the game. No matter how bad they screw up development, they get paid for it. So that they can funnel money back to the politicians that choose them.

    It doesn’t take more than a nanosecond or two to realize that having poor ground maintenance crews can be blamed on the FAA, and the only reason bad pilots can’t be blamed on the them is that they’re not American pilots. Which says the US Fed.gov is the reason for bad Boeing planes and spacecraft.

  7. My employer, a large defense contractor, proudly boasts of its DEI advancements, and publicly states the goal of a diverse workforce with 50% female management. Toward that end, our chiefs-to-Indians ratio on various programs has swelled to the breaking point, since female “managers” are a dime a dozen, whereas competent engineers of any stripe are increasingly rare. Cost overruns, schedule delays and the occasional canceled program due to mismanagement is now the order of the day.

    I’ve literally begged to be laid off, in lieu of retiring early or simply quitting. I want that sweet adieu of half a years’ pay in severance and 3 months additional health insurance while qualifying for unemployment benefits. But my employer flat-out WILL NOT part with even marginally competent employees with experience, knowing that there is no longer a deep well to tap for replacements. I actually spent 5 months this year twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a new assignment when the program I had worked on for decades was snatched away by a cheaper competitor.

    I am old, expensive, set in my ways and have a very narrow set of skills that are well-honed but growing obsolete today. But I am also White and male, with an impressive track record of competence and achievement. Tech companies are losing experienced, competent White men by the droves, while finding out to their horror that stronk, independent females and English-challenged H1-Bs are no substitute for plain old “uninspiring” White guys who quietly made their bones before the diversity madness set in. Several of those who mentored me back in the day began quitting when they found themselves answering to 30 year old female “managers” who checked all the right boxes, but didn’t know a diode from a dildo.

    Interesting times we live in, no?

    1. If ‘interesting’ means ‘evil’ then yes, these are very interesting times.

    2. Never thought I’d see “diode” and “dildo” used together in the same sentence. Of course, with that mental image in my head, Zener diodes will now have to be called wiener diodes.

  8. At popular level (and at popular level only) during the moon programs you were a Christian nation. Now you’re an occult/pagan nation.

    You were a masculine nation, now you criminalize and hate masculinity, and you are a proud feminist nation.

    That’s all.

    1. In 1943 a specific prediction was made:

      ““In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

      Because:

      ““The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

  11. Part of deciding to retire involved the incompetence I was seeing daily. Much of it was due to ignorance, which can be solved with educating. Unfortunately, I was finding laziness, with an unwillingness to be better and more competent. I blame much of it on a lack of discipline, and worse: the ridiculous, constant rewards given for the most tiny of of reasons. There is no exceptionalism, if being in fifteen place has an award. When you add preference due to what’s between your legs, or the amount of melanin in your skin, incompetence become commonplace, and too easily accepted.

  12. I’ve recently heard the latest Boeing embarrassment referred to as the “Stayliner”. Whereever you go in it, you’ll stay there.

    Lathechuck

  13. Hello.

    “I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.”
    Ha Ha Nice. Single malt strictly medication of coarse.

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