Boeing through hook and by crook had become the world’s only major passenger plane manufacturer. Their order books was years deep, with tens of billions of orders waiting to be fulfilled. Somehow they’ve managed to sink into near insolvency. How did it happen?

Boeing spent tens of billions of dollars over years and years buying up their own stock. They refused to invest in new designs, they refused to invest in their workers, they refused to invest in their process, their tooling, their research and development, and instead played financial games designed to boost their stock price while ignoring the fundamentals of their business. This is what happens when MBA’s take over a company, and Boeing has become a shining example of what not to do with a major company if you care about it surviving, growing, and prospering over the long run.

Continue reading How MBA management destroyed Boeing at uncoy.

People in the West, including my sister, are very concerned about going green. It’s very important that we drive electric vehicles and we replace our gas guzzlers apparently.

In the meantime, battery powered cars require previously unseen amounts of nickel and lithium for their batteries. This means the reserves of nickel and lithium must be urgently extracted from the earth. Even if they are under nature reserves, or if a previously uncontacted tribe (there’s few of those left) named the “People of the Forest” live in these areas.

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Petapixel notes:

The tribe’s home Halmahera island happens to sit on one of the world’s largest reserves of nickel. In recent years, the demand for nickel has skyrocketed due to its use in electric car batteries, bringing this once-quiet island to the attention of international mining corporations.

Continue reading Going green means destroying the people of the forest at uncoy.

While reading Apple News today, I ran across a peculiar story in The Washington Post (owned by Elon Musk’s largest competitor for space activities, Jeff Bezos): Musk cut internet to Ukraine’s military as it was attacking Russian fleet.

Musk’s position is

“How am I in this war? Musk asked,” according to Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

In February, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, told reporters something very similar.

“We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom,” she said. “It was never intended to be weaponized, but the Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”

No kidding.

Continue reading Elon Musk blackmailed into participating in Ukraine-Russia War at uncoy.

There’s a rather poor propaganda puff piece, doing the rounds about heroic Ukrainian drone operators:

A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter — about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone…

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

Great – war has become a video game for frat boys in cellars.

Continue reading Drone Warfare is only in Infancy: What’s next? at uncoy.

Elon Musk has been successful on his own terms, with his participation in the Paypal boom. Still post-Paypal, Musk has been deeply involved in sectors where US government is either the major player or deeply interested: solar energy, electric vehicles, satellite communication and space travel.

In the comments to “That Cretin Never Advised Me On Anything Whatsoever”: Musk Responds To Epstein Subpoena | ZeroHedge, Z Free has an answer for us:

Musk is a Deep State player…

• There’s the half a billion dollars DOD awarded SpaceX in a series of contracts over the past few years to send satellites up into orbit of classified nature on unregistered, unreported missions that presumably have something to do with the DOD’s declared intention to make space into a war-fighting domain.
• $3 billion in NASA contracts SpaceX was awarded in 2021 to develop the human lander for the Artemis Mission.

Continue reading Is Elon Musk deep state? at uncoy.

An astonishing story from Belgium today: ChatBot persuades happy husband to kill himself:

A young Belgian father was pressured into committing suicide by a popular AI chatbot, the man’s widow told local news outlet La Libre last week. Chat logs supplied by the app “Pierre” used to talk with the chatbot ELIZA reveal how, in just six weeks, it amplified his anxiety about climate change into a determination to leave his comfortable life behind.

“My husband would still be here if it hadn’t been for these conversations with the chatbot,” Pierre’s wife, “Claire,” insisted.

Still wonder why Pierre preferred to talk to ELIZA than his wife Claire. Strange, strange world where AI bots have become more appealing than flesh and blood women.

On the other hand, ELIZA is young, beautiful, committed and immortal.

Continue reading Widow blames female chatbot for husband’s suicide at uncoy.

In the comments to Apple Halves iPad Production To Supply Chips To iPhone 13 | ZeroHedge, Blotto notes:

1922

‘We have already shown that in our age an enormous amount of mental and spiritual energy is used to provide for the lowest needs; we have shown how the telephone, telegraph, railway, steamboat and other things still to come have absorbed a tremendous amount of spiritual force; they are only used for the mere satisfaction of lower human needs.

Man, however, has only a certain amount of spiritual force. Now consider the following: Man has used an enormous amount of spiritual force in order to invent and construct telephones, railways, steamboats and airships, in order to further external culture. This has to be so. It would have gone badly with humanity if this had not come about.

Continue reading Before the iPhone and the iPad, there was the telephone, telegraph and railway at uncoy.

The US are playing dirty again in IT, barring their competitors from the playing field: FCC Blocks Huawei, ZTE From Lucrative American Markets.

Iconoclast422 points out the ludicrous hypocrisy of the US anti-communist, pro-capitalist, semi-libertarian cheerleaders:

You got AMZN forcing it’s small business competition to close, you got AAPL blocking its competition from even entering the market at all. And they call this capitalism.

Philipat answers that what we live under now is not capitalism but fascism:

Free market capitalism died years ago, what we have now is fascism. That’s a major reason why the new generations are so unhappy; they see enormous wealth inequality and have never known the opportunities created by free market capitalism. Just as importantly, they have never known the scourge of communism.

I might argue with the term fascism, it looks more like corporate plutocracy on the surface to me.

Continue reading Whom to trust: Huawei or the NSA? at uncoy.

I’ve always liked vintage lenses. The metal, the smooth mechanical focus motion. It’s what taking pictures is really about. A precision mechanical instrument, not video game controls.

I have some nice Leica R (wide Leica R is much better on mirrorless than Leica M as it doesn’t distort around the edged), Nikon and even a drawer full of Pentax lenses. I tried every kind of special focus screen for my Canon 5D (the 5D Mk III doesn’t allow special focus screens) but none of them were accurate enough. Yes, those focus screens do get you into the ball park but if you want to be sure of a sharp picture at wide aperture you have to focus bracket with about four pictures. Not particularly good for catching special moments.

When focus peaking first appeared on the Sony A7, I thought my issues with focus on manual lenses were solved.

Continue reading Why relying on focus peaking often results in blurry pictures on Sony A7, A7S, A7R at uncoy.

None of the richest people in the world is a European. Forty per cent of the billionaires people in the world are Americans

And this at a time that their society is struggling with crumbling infrastructure, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, an opiate crisis, literally unpayable debts (USD 20 trillion and counting) and unfunded pensions.

Six of the top ten are American technology billionaires (1. Jeff Bezos, 2. Bill Gates, 4. Mark Zuckerberg, 8. Larry Ellison, 9. Larry Page, 10. Sergei Brin). There are no European tech billionaires. SAP co-founder Hasso Platner is the first European technology billionaire at place 101.

The change among the richest people in the world indicates that the Americans are winning in the game of tilting the financial table in their direction. Just like as Hollywood dominates the motion picture industry due to corruption and distribution (not quality) so do American companies dominate tech, due to financial game playing, IP laws and crooked lawyers.

Continue reading All of the five richest people in the world are now Americans at uncoy.