
You guys have trains?
19 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2023
I was just thinking about the old days. Back in the '80s I basically did the same thing on my computer that I do today; browsing, downloading, some games, a little math & science. This on a 286 over a phone line with a big clunky crt display. All DOS. Now I do basically the same things on an i9-14900k with 129 Gb memory, gigabit ethernet and 3 48" 4K displays. Much faster and visually appealing, but not more enjoyable. What changed and degraded the experience the most over all those years? ADVERTIZING!
It wasn't just the McDonnell Douglas bean counter managers. It was *everybody* from MD. I was there. They came in like an infestation of rabid rodents, looking for places to build their little rats nests and steal everything they could get their paws on. They whacked the R&D budget first. Then proceeded to offshore manufacturing and engineering jobs, went to all-out war against the unions, moved headquarters to Chicago so the executives wouldn't have to suffer the wailing of the rabble, ran a ponzi scheme of buying back $20 billion in Boeing stock to fluff the lazy asses on mahogany-rows' compensation, farmed out every function they could think of that would do the most irritating damage, from finance, IT and HR to janitorial and cafeteria services to maintenance and facilities. Destroyed the pension plan and retiree benefits. Forced skilled white-collar professionals to train their replacements from Russia and India... I could go on, but, well, you name it, they fucked it up *intentionally*. To this day they are hell-bent on draining the life-blood of the heritage Boeing company. Then they will sell off the empty husk. The corruption and greed has infused itself so deeply that I don't think anything can fix it.