Posted on 06/13/2011 2:08:25 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...[Jim Albaugh] ticked off a list of broad national problems that transcend Boeing:
• Brain drain of talented immigrants:...."Now, the best and brightest come to the United States, get trained, and leave, and go back and compete against us."
• Defense cuts: "There is no industrial base policy in the Department of Defense other than market forces," he said. "Right now, the Boeing Company is the only company in the United States that has a design team working on a new airplane. There are no [all-new] airplanes being developed for the Department of Defense probably for the first time in 100 years."
• Competition from China: "The law of large numbers would dictate that they are going to have more smart people than we are going to have. And their government has identified aerospace as an industry that they've targeted,".....
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited China in January, the Chinese military made a very public test flight of its previously secret J-20 Stealth fighter.
"A lot of people saw that as a military threat," Albaugh said. "I didn't. I saw it more as an economic threat. They will sell that airplane around the world and will take away a lot of the market that's been enjoyed by U.S. defense contractors."
• NASA cuts and private space ventures: "They are trying to commercialize space. ... Getting the reliability requires a lot of redundancy, which requires a lot of cost," Albaugh said. "I think it's going to be a money pit for a lot of them."
He lamented the U.S. government's withdrawal from space exploration as the space-shuttle program winds down: "My prediction is that the Chinese will walk on the moon before we launch an American into orbit again in a U.S. spacecraft."
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
The old Soviet Union was as fascist as they get. Lenninism and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is nothing more than oligarchy and a cult of the personality.
The educational requirements for engineers to enter that profession is nowhere near that of doctors and even lawyers. An engineer can begin working after four years of college; lawyers seven and doctors eight plus various lengths of time in residency.
Those aren't really comparable.
It's ludicrous to believe that those at the academy generally have any better ideas or abilities to move the nation and the world forward than other individuals in society do. I say this from the perspective of someone who spent 18 years after high school attaining and advancing my education and training in my profession.
We have made celebrities of politicians, and oracles of those in academia. Big, big mistake. There are smart people with great ideas in every walk of life, and people with limited vision and bad ideas peppered throughout academia and government.
There needs to be a revolution in education that provides a real leveling of the playing field, eradicates the elite designations, and motivates a wider spectrum of people to achieve. Online education, with national standards that can be tested for and certified, is one way to get beyond the 40-60K / year costs that many students are getting soaked for. If someone who self-educates online scores as well or higher than someone who spent 4 years and a fortune at Harvard, so be it.
So be it.
BTTT
Far more accurate than you might realize. Jim Albaugh couldn't care less about what happens to the US military industrial base, nor I suspect the long-term technological superiority of the US, as long as he gets his cut of the action along the way. His sole focus is to move into the big chair in Chicago once the board sends McNerny packing.
Further, JFA is now in charge of the commercial aircraft business at Boeing. If he's so worried about the Chinese, one has to wonder why he has now accelerated the aircraft manufacturing technology-sharing partnership with the Chinese gov't that Alan Mullaly fought against for so long??
We’ve got an intellectly disarmed president. Whadda ya expect?
Real education, as opposed to union sanctioned daycare, makes some kids feel bad. So kids graduate from college who cannot read and we are surprised the Chinese are eating our lunch?
Remember all the cost savings from firing rightsizing outsourcing offshoring all those jobs belonging to middle-aged white males?
Guess what.
They went and told their kids, don't bother with science or technology: you'll have to study too hard in school for maybe a ten-year career, having to retire when you're forty, forty-five, tops.
And the Universities took the hint and accepted mainly womyn into Greivance Studies programs; allowing mainly foreigners into the STEM classes in the sacred name of "Diversity." White males need not apply.
You and the entire cadre of C-level executives starting from the mid-eighties should be hung and your families' wealth confiscated. Your wives and children should be sentenced to begging scraps for a living.
It's what you did to an entire generation of white male US citizens.
And now you have the nerve to look surprised.
Cheers!
My undergrad degree is in Electrical Engineering (1968) and after a few years working as an EE, I went back to school and became a lawyer, JD in 1976.
Engineering undergrad degrees at the time required about 20% more credit hours than for other majors, so it was really a five year program crammed into four years.
I personally found law school easier than master's level EE classes.
I took a 25% pay cut, by the way, between my last paycheck as an EE and my first one as a newly minted lawyer. However, after a few years of hard work, my income as a telecommunications lawyer was substantially more than it would have been had I remained in engineering.
Jack
They understand it enough to hate it.
Government-controlled industrial policy is not capitalism.
It is mercantilism.
China is deliberately destroying America’s industry. With wide support from “conservative” Americans who would rather sleep through the destruction than recognize what is happening.
Heh, heh. Intellectual disarmament. I gotta remember that one.
Aside from Indians, who do have a democratic country with a rapidly expanding economy to go back to, I don’t know of too many high-tech immigrants who wish to go back to their home countries.
PART of it was the loss of the idea of liberal education, the education proper to a free people, in favor of the idea of education as job training.
While I agree that some of what he says is BS - like no defense company building a new airplane. Ever heard of X craft? Lockheed, Northrup, etc are both also working on X craft projects.
However - being in the technology sector my whole life and living in Silicon Valley I can say with certainty that cutting off immigration for access to our University’s is cutting off our own heads.
Here are some empirical facts for you.
1) In Silicon Valley, roughly 80% of all engineers are foreign born.
2) The percentage of American graduating seniors entering STEM majors is alarmingly low. Of those that do - likely the majority are first generation Americans whose parents immigrated here!
With these two points in mind - why does it make sense to shut down the only really solid source of brain power we’ve got in this country.
This isn’t to say I support H1B programs - that is a DIFFERENT discussion. However, not supporting foreign student access to our universities would sign our own death warrants. It would deny our own engineering companies access to the best and brightest ALONG with starving our universities of funds supplied by these students.
What we NEED is a vibrant economy to keep those graduating STEM majors in this country. If opportunities look better at home than here, then naturally they are going to migrate back to where the jobs are.
You need to separate Mr. Musk’s economic activities from his political beliefs. The simple fact is that he is building a better mouse trap at a lower price. He has attracted government funding because he is doing something that up until now only governments have done, and doing it better!
Space-X has rewritten the book on how you do R&D into construction/launching a rocket. He is also doing it with a large chunk of his own money on the line. Something you don’t see Lockheed or Boeing doing in the Government arena.
Jack - I agree with you (Hold a BSEE myself from 1976). The other simple fact is that it’s a pretty small part of our population that suffer having “the nack”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mpYM4N698s
Whatever, but the disparity in the educational requirements to become a professional engineer compared to MDs and attorneys is great, and that has been and will be reflected in the compensation earned in each field.
Engineering is much more comparable to architecture and CPA work.
And there are plenty of attorneys and doctors and CPAs and others who’d be surprised to learn they work so much less than engineers (because it isn’t true).
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