Great Expectations, Part B

When you tell people to expect great things, they may be disappointed with what are actually adequate outcomes.

NOTE:  In response to my last posting, as expected, I did get e-mails from some viewers who claim that speeding tickets are indeed a revenue generator and the whole system is set up to make money from motorists.   If so, it is a horribly inefficient system - given how much it costs per hour to run a patrol car with at least one officer in it - I doubt it breaks even.   Moreover, in a way, it is a stupidity tax, like the lotteries.  If you don't want to pay, then don't play.

I haven't had a speeding ticket in over 20 years - since I stopped speeding.   Funny how that works, eh?   If your really want to boycott the system and starve them for revenues, then just slow down.   As an added bonus (the real bonus) your insurance will drop down to trivial amounts.   I get ads from insurance companies saying they can save me $480 a year on car insurance.   That would be a neat trick, as that would mean they were paying me to insure my car.   Just stop speeding and driving like a jackass.   Speeding doesn't save any time, and it wastes a lot of money, and annoys the crap out of the rest of us.  Oh, and its dangerous.

That might not have anything to do with today's posting.   But then again, maybe it does....

* * * 

People treat pedestrians differently in Canada than they do in the United States.  In some parts of America, particularly in the South, it's basically open season on pedestrians.  In Atlanta, you take your life in your hands if you even cross the street.  Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind, was arguably of Atlanta's most famous citizens.  They still ran her down and killed her.

In other parts of the country, and in Canada, pedestrians are given great deference. Pedestrian crosswalks are clearly demarcated, and motorists are expected to stop when a pedestrian is even about to enter the crosswalk.

This is a little disconcerting for someone who is used to how pedestrians are treated in places like New York City.  There, it's every man for himself and you have to fight your way across the street.   You're not used to people stopping or being nice.

But somehow, I think this great deference to pedestrians could produce unexpected and disastrous results.  We were driving through a campground to our campsite and the place was filled with children on bicycles. We are driving very slowly to avoid hitting the small children.  One of them, who appeared to be as young as Cindy-Lou Who, zig-zagged in front of us and said to her companion  "don't worry, they have to stop."

She assumed that since the law stated that motor vehicles should give right of way to pedestrians, that this would protect her from being run over by a 4000 pound truck.  And while maybe that is the law, it's still not a very good idea to march out in front of moving vehicles.  Laws are not effective 100% of the time as I've noted before.  And people are prone to making mistakes.  It's a predictable outcome that you'll be run over by a car, if you continue to march out in front of them with the law as your only protection.

But then again, even young law students have told me that illegal things "can't happen" because "they are against the law!"  Makes you kinda sad, don't it?

This got me to thinking that these children must have gotten this idea from their parents, who told them that under the law they are entitled to cross the road and the cars have to stop.  This struck me as a very wrong thing to teach children.  Rather, they should teach the children that the cars are supposed to stop but they should never assume that a 4000 pound car is going to stop in time, all of the time.  All it takes is one slip-up and they are one squashed kid.

When I was eight years old, one of my classmates was run over by a car. He was playing in a pile of leaves in front of his house, and some teenager decided it would be fun to drive through the pile of leaves by the curb.  Back then, we all raked  our leaves out into the road, and the city would come by and vacuum them up with this big vacuum cleaner.  People don't seem to do that anymore, but it was a thing back in the 1960s.  Anyway, this teen thought it'd be fun to drive through this giant pile of leaves and smash it to smithereens, not realizing there was a small child playing inside that pile.

Fortunately, my friend was not killed.  But he was in a full body cast for many months and it was a horrific thing to see.  He eventually recovered, thanks to this youth.  But I'm sure it probably he still has side effects from that incident even today.  And like I said, he was lucky, others are just squashed to death after they encounter a car as a pedestrian.

But beyond cars and pedestrians, I wonder if this teaching doesn't set young people up for failure later in life.  If you are told early on in life that things are always perfect and that there is an idealized view of society that everyone should live up to, one would be rather disappointed to find out later in life that things are not nearly as cut-and-dried.

Life is messy.  People are inefficient, lazy, venal, and corrupt.  The system doesn't always work as it should, and never has.  If you go through life with expectations that everything should be as it was taught to you in grade school, you will end up bitterly disappointed.

And I wonder, if perhaps some of this resentment we see from the younger  generation today is result of this sort of teaching.  Young people are told to be idealistic and told about the great ideals of our society.  They then graduate from high school and leave the comfort of suburbia, only to find out that in the harsh real world, things aren't always as they are set forth in the textbooks.  Suddenly, they are outraged.  There are people making far more money than they are!  There are other folks who are being discriminated against!  And yet there are others who were wrongly convicted or others who were victimized!   It's all so horribly unfair!  After all, people are supposed to obey the law, right?

Maybe this is where the "justice boner" comes from.

While it is a good idea to teach young people about these wonderful ideals that our society strives for, it is also a good idea to ground them in reality.  Rather than tell a grade school child that is okay to ride out into traffic, because the cars will always stop as required by law, it is a better idea to teach them to take precautions in case the car cannot stop, or doesn't see them, or merely disregards the law.

Ideals are fine at all, but it's better to come to grips with reality and not live in a fantasy world.  That is sort of the whole point of this blog.  We should all strive for the ideal world, but be prepared for the shortcomings that always accompany any endeavor of man.

If you want to get ahead in this life, act rationally in an irrational world.   Don't expect the world to suddenly become rational.

Why We Have Speed Limits And How They Are Set

Speed limits are not mechanisms to generate revenue through speeding tickets.  If you believe that, you are externalizing.

I grew up in the dark days of the 1970's.   Sure, in retrospect, it seemed like fun and games - snorting coke off the mirrored tables of Studio 54 while dancing to disco music, driving home in a block-long Monte Carlo.  The reality was, people did drugs to anesthetize themselves to the reality of the day - the high crime rates, murder rates, corruption, inflation, high interest rates, and unemployment.  And that Monte Carlo barely made 100 hp, sounded like a bucket of bolts, had parts fall off it at the dealership, and rusted to death long before the decade was out.   You don't see a lot of survivor cars from that era, doya?  The signature issue of that decade, of course, was high gas prices.  

How high?  Gas was rationed to even and odd days.   You could not buy gasoline on alternate days.  And even on those days, often the station sold out before noon.   But you kids today - you have it so rough, with your fractional inflation, negative interest rates, all-time-low unemployment, and so on.   What was their complaint again?  Oh, right, someone else has more money than they do.

Getting back to the 1970's, it was so bad that they enacted a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour.  Again, most people today weren't even born back then, so they claim this never happened.  They claim that Nixon - a Republican - never enacted wage and price controls (!!) or that Reagan (another Republican, although not as revered today) never granted amnesty to illegal immigrants.   How times have changed for the GOP!

No one liked the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit.  Try driving it sometime on the Interstate, if you don't get honked at and run over first.   It feels like you are walking.   But the gasoline situation was so dire, that we needed to cut consumption as a matter of national security.  We were dependent on a number of odious foreign countries for our oil back then (Today, we export oil!  How times have changed, yet again!) and many "experts" predicted the world would "run out" of oil, by the year 2010 or 2020 at the latest.

Of course, people continued to speed.  Radar detectors became big sellers, and songs like "I can't drive 55!" were popular tunes.  There became a cache or lore about speeding - idolized in such movies as Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run.

Speed laws back then were about behavioral modification to save gas, not about safety.   And people predictably revolted against them.   And this was a bad thing, as an entire generation was raised on the idea that laws were arbitrary and should be broken when inconvenient.   When people lose respect for the law, laws become hard to enforce.

The 55-mile-per-hour national limit was raised to 65 mph during the Reagan years, and eliminated entirely during the Clinton era.  Today, some roads have speed limits as high as 80 miles an hour - perhaps more.  States determine the safe limits for their own jurisdictions.

Funny thing, too.   Now that people can drive 70 or 75 miles an hour, many chose not to.  On our own section of I-95 in Georgia, I see most people driving at about 65 miles an hour or so, even though they are entitled to drive faster.   A few blow by at 80 miles an hour (usually with out-of-state plates, with predictable results down the road,  You have heard of Georgia speed traps by now, right?  Bring Cash).   But given the chance to go faster, many people don't and for various reasons.

To begin with, most cars seem to drive more comfortably around 62-63 miles and hour.  Wind noise is less and the car seems to track better.  I have noticed this trend on a number of cars.   In addition, the stress of driving faster makes it more tiring to drive.   People subconsciously drive at the speed they feel most comfortable at.

When towing a trailer, even moreso.   At 63 mph, it is stable and calm - "hands off" driving.   At 75, it is a swaying white-knuckle nightmare, no matter how robust your lashup is.   The amount of time saved is trivial going faster, and the experience is anything but relaxing.  Oh, and you get much better gas mileage at the lower speed.

But another reason is also subconscious - but also the reason speed limits are set where they are.  People go faster when they see clear road ahead of them, and also when they see wide open spaces on each side - so-called "runoff" zones.   If they had to stop suddenly for an accident or disabled vehicle, it is easier to spot them when there is less traffic, and you have more "run off" options with wide open spaces on each side.

When driving in traffic, we notice this - people not using cruise control subconsciously slow down when the roadway narrows or the sides off the road are narrower.   When they come to a straightaway and see a line of tail lights, many slow down, thinking there is traffic ahead - when in fact the traffic flow is the same, they are just noticing it now.

Speed limits are, oddly enough, set on these same concepts.   In areas with wide "run off" spaces on either side of the road, limits can be higher.  In areas where there are narrow bridges or rows of trees on either side of the road, limits are lower.  It is just common sense that you want your reaction distance - which is your speed divided by reaction time (the latter being fairly constant) to mirror the available options.

The same is true for urban streets. If you are some kid driving 50 miles-and-hour through a neighborhood, you have few options left to you when Soccer Mom backs her minivan out of the driveway.  And that is not something that is "her fault" but something you should expect when driving through a residential neighborhood.  Sadly, teenagers often don't get this, thinking the best speed a car should travel at is it's maximum one.

The more driveways, cutouts, parking spaces, and whatnot, the lower the speed limits.   At our lake house, a neighbor wanted to install a driveway out to State Road 90, which had a speed limit of 55 miles per hour.  The State refused his permit, as his driveway would be too close to an adjacent driveway.   They had a limit on how many driveways and intersections there could be per mile, in order to maintain the speed limit in that area.   Yea, someone thought of all this.   There are books galore which list standard rules of thumb and engineering principles on nearly every aspect of road constructions - I know, because I've read them.   One of my assignments at GM was to design a new driveway for the plant.   Heady work when you are 18 years old.

That being said, I still drove like an 18-year-old, convinced my youthful reaction times and "driving skills" (ha!) would bail me out if something bad happened.   I've learned a lot since then.  And my reaction times, hearing, sight, and physical strength have all deteriorated since then as well.

Now, some folks argue that speed limits are set artificially low, because they expect that people will drive 5-10 mph over the limit.  And maybe there is some truth to this - sort of like how my Dad tried to call us to dinner, early, in a raging war of passive-aggression.  You are not likely to get a ticket going 60 mph in a 55 zone, or 75 in a 70 zone.   As one policeman friend of mine said (and yes, police are people too!  They actually have friends and family members!) he doesn't even bother to look up unless the radar is reading over 80.   Plenty of people to catch, even so.

Speed enforcement is, of course, an uneven thing.  Because we are all so concerned about our "rights" (but not those of the people we run over) we don't allow speed cameras in the USA (but for some reason allow red light cameras - go figure).   If we installed speed cameras, even a few of them, speeding would be reduced considerably - or perhaps eliminated.  You could, with today's technology, install a simple governor in each car that would keep it from going faster than the speed limit in that area - the technology already exists.  And if robotic cars become a thing, no doubt they will be programmed not to speed.  Speeding may become a thing of the past, along with drunk driving.   Well, don't count on it - but it may be reduced by a factor of ten.

But like anything else, the threat of enforcement is enough to slow down the majority of people. There will always be a few jackasses on the Interstate trying to go 10 mph faster than traffic flow (and causing traffic flow to slow down as a result, as they jam on their brakes over and over again when they encounter slower traffic doing "only" 5 mph over the limit).  There will always be the kids on "crotch rockets" who "lane share" at over 150 mph and hopefully don't bruise their liver too much when they finally buy it into the back of a semi.   But the threat of enforcement is what keeps honest people honest - just as locks keep out the average Joe, but are no deterrent to the hard-core criminal.

There is, of course, another deterrent.  Once you've been in a few wrecks, and maybe a few near-misses, or had friends who were maimed or killed in wrecks, or worse yet, killed innocent others, you realize what a charnel house the local roadways have been since the dawn of the automobile.    Hard to believe, but when I was a kid, we had steel dashboards on cars and no one wore seatbelts.   No one. They were kind of useless, anyway.  The few cars that had them, had only lap belts.  If you hit a lamp post at 30 mph it often was fatal.   Today, you can roll an SUV at 70 and maybe even walk away from it.  Best not to test how effective those airbags are, though.

So what's the point of all this?   Well, as a follow-on to my last posting, in part.  Speed laws are not arbitrary - at least not since the abolition of the Federal 55-mph limit in 1995.  There are very good reasons they are set where they are set, and the argument that they are just "revenue producers" is a loser's argument.   As I noted in my speeding posting, you can jack your insurance rates through to the stratosphere - higher than your car payments - if you want to routinely speed.   You are not saving much time, if any, and are wasting gas, tires, and wearing on your car - and yourself.

Rather than look at laws as arbitrary infringements on your liberty, think about why they are in place, and maybe learn something from them.  Just a thought.

UPDATE:  In response to my last posting, as expected, I did get e-mails from some viewers who claim that speeding tickets are indeed a revenue generator and the whole system is set up to make money from motorists.   If so, it is a horribly inefficient system - given how much it costs per hour to run a patrol car with at least one officer in it - I doubt it breaks even.   Moreover, in a way, it is a stupidity tax, like the lotteries.  If you don't want to pay, then don't play.

The argument that speed traps are "revenue generators" and "unfair" is classic Externalization.  It isn't your shitty driving that is to blame, or your unreasonable desire to go faster than is necessary - no, it is the government's fault your insurance costs thousands a year!   Yea, right.  Go sell crazy somewhere else, please.

And back when I got speeding tickets, in my 20's, I used to believe all that crap, too.   Then I gave up on externalizing and realized I could control some aspects of my life after all.

I haven't had a speeding ticket in over 20 years - since I stopped speeding.   Funny how that works, eh?   If your really want to boycott the system and starve them for revenues, then just slow down.   As an added bonus (the real bonus) your insurance will drop down to trivial amounts.   I get ads from insurance companies saying they can save me $480 a year on car insurance.   That would be a neat trick, as that would mean they were paying me to insure my car.   Just stop speeding and driving like a jackass.   Speeding doesn't save any time, and it wastes a lot of money, and annoys the crap out of the rest of us.  Oh, and its dangerous.

All Or Nothing Arguments

Just because something doesn't work 100% of the time is no reason it should be thrown out entirely.

One argument that has become popular as of late, which is also an entirely specious argument, is to point out that whatever rule, regulation, or law is being proposed or discussed, if it is not 100% effective all of the time, it therefore should not be enacted or if already enacted, abolished.

Whenever you hear this argument being made, you can be sure that the person making it is lying to you.  And you know how I feel about liars.  And if somebody's going to lie to you once, chances are going to lie to you again and again.  So just walk away from liars and their specious logic.

A classic example of this argument is the one that the NRA makes every time there's been some sort of mass shooting.  In the aftermath of such tragic events, people propose all sorts of new laws and regulations.  Perhaps we should expand background checks so that they cover the giant loophole known as the gun shows.  Or perhaps mental illness should be more carefully tracked and guns taken away from people who make wild threats or act irrationally.  Or perhaps we should limit the size of gun magazines and also what types of firearms can be purchased.  Perhaps.   These proposals may be effective at least some of the time in preventing such tragedies.

No matter what the proposal is, the NRA response with the same tired old song. They will point out that none of these measures would be effective 100% of the time and therefore there's no point in enacting any of them.  Even if some measure would be effective 50% of the time, they feel this is not sufficient to warrant what they perceive as infringing on their second amendment rights.

Of course, this is a ridiculous argument. You can make the same argument about any law enacted, ever.  Why bother having speed limits when many people speed anyway?  You might as well just abolish all speed limits let people drive at what speed they think is reasonable.  Unless speed limit laws are 100% effective and eliminate all accidents, you might as well just abolish them, because they don't work.  It's a ludicrous argument.

And I use that as a crazy example, but some people actually believe this.  We live in a crazy world.  Some of these folks call themselves "libertarians".

I see the same argument being made in my own field of endeavor - or what I should say is my former field of endeavor - intellectual property law.  People argue that the existing Patent, Trademark, and Copyright laws are unevenly applied and result in unjust outcomes on occasion.  Thus, they argue the entire system is flawed and should just be abolished and everybody be allowed to copy everybody else's intellectual property without paying any fees or royalties.

And granted, they are right in that in many instances injustice has occurred.  People who invented nothing end up collecting royalties by using aggressive litigation techniques and arguing that their patent to an unrelated technology applies to someone else.  These so-called "patent troll" suits usually go after customers of manufacturers and not the manufacturers themselves. Thus, for example, a fellow with a patent on a phone system doesn't sue the phone company but rather a large company like Coca-Cola, which has a number of phone systems installed its offices worldwide.  Companies like that don't want to deal with some trivial patent matter, and they usually settle quickly for less than the cost of attorney's fees.  It ain't right.

And on the other hand, there are instances where inventors with great inventions, have them ripped off by it companies or overseas competitors. Unless they can pony up the money to obtain patent protection in almost every country in the world, and then pay to have those patents enforced, they cannot enforce their intellectual property rights.  And often, these small inventors don't have those kind of resources, so their inventions are freely ripped off and they rarely see a profit from their efforts.

On the other hand, there are cases where inventors have made money from their patents of their inventions. It doesn't happen very often, but usually the invention has to be something that's significant enough to be worthwhile litigating, and there's somebody willing to invest in litigating the patent. This does often mean that the inventor has to sell off a huge share of his invention to some other party, which you may argue is unjust, but that's the nature of the system.

Throwing out the entire intellectual property system is not necessarily a good solution.  Regardless of how flawed our system is, does encourage people to innovate. It is not necessarily the actual result that drives people to invent things, but the implied promise of reward for your inventive work. The fact that the system isn't perfect 100% of the time is no reason to just throw it in the trash heap.  The end result would be that no one would innovate, or that innovators would be even less valued than they are now.

Border security is another area in which we see this argument being raised. Our current immigration laws are severely flawed and both liberals and conservatives decry the uneven results in our immigration system, particularly the cruel results under the current administration.  Many on the left argue that we should just abolish the agencies in charge of border security and just open our borders to anyone who wants to come in.  This is a ludicrous argument.  Just because the system is flawed doesn't mean it should be discarded entirely and replace with absolutely nothing.

Fixing existing laws and systems isn't easy.   It takes a lot of tweaking and adjustment to make things work properly.  Obamacare is a case in point.  The law is deeply flawed and needs an extensive overhaul to work.  But the only solution offered by Republicans is to merely abolish it entirely and throw everyone into the abyss and let them see if they can sink or swim.  I think most would end up sinking.  Sadly, even Democrats have abandoned this signature piece of legislation of the Obama era.  Seems the Democrats are eating their own - first Clinton, now Obama.

Criminal justice seems to be another area where this argument is made.  There are injustices, so let's let everyone out of jail.   Hey, I saw a show on Netflix that said everyone is innocent, right?  It's on television, so it has to be true!   Comrade Sanders has a plan to let half of all people in jail go free, even though 88% of the prison population are in State prisons on State charges, which a President cannot affect.  And never mind that most of them are not in on drug charges (despite all the hoopla you've read) but for violent crimes - rape, robbery, assault, murder.   Never mind all that, some of these folks got a raw deal (yea, right) and we should just abolish the Police (they're bad, it goes without saying) and let everyone go free.

It is this sort of insanity that will re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.   It is sad, too.

The next time someone says abolish this or let's get rid of that, simply because the item in question isn't 100% effective, think of what the alternative consequences would be. Unless they have some sort of proposal to fix the existing system or come up with an alternative, chances are they're just blowing smoke.  Just because a system isn't perfect doesn't mean it should be thrown away.

Death of WiFi - Part II

As a means of accessing the Internet, WiFi may be dying.  As a means of accessing your internet appliances, it may still have a life.

Years ago, I opined that free WiFi is a great way to access the Internet.   But after travelling by RV for a number of years, I realized that having your own WiFi hotspot - particularly as part of your mobile phone - is a lot easier to deal with, and oftentimes cheaper.   Yes, "free WiFi" is often not free - but has staggering charges attached to it.

As more and more people use their phones to access the Internet, fewer and fewer people bother logging onto WiFi routers at cafes, hotels, and campgrounds.   Like the sad and broken telephone wires (remember those?) at campgrounds, and the more and more disused cable TV coaxial cable connections (which seem almost as quaint), many campgrounds are abandoning their WiFi networks as fewer and fewer people actually use them.

Often, these networks break down over time - a cable is snapped, or a router is broken.  Since no one is using it, no one bothers to complain to the front desk.   Eventually, the owner of the campground finds the fault, but figures, "no one is complaining, why fix it?"

From a user point-of-view, WiFi is just a hassle, a possible security risk, and often an expense.  We used to make sure we got the "WiFi code" when we checked into a campground.  But more often than not, the campground WiFi would be difficult to connect to, due to the distances involved, or if connection was possible, very slow to load anything, particularly when the guy next to you decides to stream all of season six of The Waking Dead or whatever.   And in many cases, the campground owner farms out the WiFi operation to a for-profit concern who wants $10 a day or more for the privilege of connection.

Our AT&T GoPhone (which was renamed to AT&T prepaid), is $56.50 a month for 22GB of data (they have since changed plan rates and actually lowered rates and gone to unlimited data).  They say you can't stream with it, or use it for a hotspot, but for over a year now, we've been doing both.   It seems to fill our needs - we've never gone over the data cap, and we've even dumped our internet landline AT&T "U-Verse" internet connection.  Our regular landline died years before that.

It's a wireless world, and WiFi as an internet connection makes less and less sense.  I am typing this in Ucluelet, BC, which is on Vancouver Island.  Even though I am in  a "foreign" country, I get better service (3G) through Roger's Wireless (via AT&T prepaid) than I would from a local WiFi network.  It simply makes no sense to bother with WiFi anymore.

This raises an ugly question.   We recently got a new A/C system which came with an annoying WiFi thermostat, which worked fine, once I disabled all the WiFi features.  Since we have no "router" anymore, there is no way to connect to the thermostat over the Internet, unless we configure it to run through the phone (which I have done, just to configure the thermostat not to use WiFi!).

If more and more people "cut the last cord" and go to an all-wireless configuration, what does this leave for the nascent "internet of things" or "internet appliance" business?   While a lot of tech-y geeks have WiFi doorbells and whatnot, this stuff is only just starting to penetrate to mainstream America.   When I told the A/C installer we didn't have a WiFi router, he looked at us like we were queer or something (or something).  He was even more amazed we didn't have cable TeeVee or even a sat-e-lite antenna!   What were we, Communists?

It begs the question, though.   Is it worth it to spend $100 a month on an internet connection and WiFi router in order to be able to control your thermostat and see who is ringing your doorbell? (or who is stealing all the crap you order from Amazon?).   Maybe to some - not to me.   Unplugging from the web is not a bad thing, but a bonus.

We still stream the occasional video now and then - over the phone to a pad, computer, or the television (which is not hard to do - most TVs today have a screen mirroring feature, or better yet, are WiFi enabled and can stream data through your phone just fine).   But increasingly, what I want to watch isn't on these online networks, and what they want to charge seems obscene to me.

I recently had lunch with a reader (yes, they actually exist) and they told me they check out DVDs from the local library - yes they still exist, libraries that is.  I find that used DVDs can be found for a buck or so - and swapped many a time, particularly at these RV parks which usually have a library of DVDs you can borrow for free.   No adverts, no fees.   Free is a price I like, when it is really free.

"But Bob!" you say, "How you keep up with the latest shows!  The new releases!  Explosion movies!  The new first-person-shooter video game!  The latest vampire zombie romantic saga?  What about all your sports channels!  You have to have those! Surely there has to be a better way!"

Maybe.  But deciding you don't need something that is a want, is perhaps a better way.

Boeing! Boeing!

It's not all fun-and-games at Boeing these days

We went on a tour of the Boeing "factory" the other day.   That was a week ago, and they still have a $50 hold on my credit card.  Perhaps they need the cash for this 737 MAX fiasco.  By the way, they are ferrying the unfinished planes to South Dakota, apparently, so they are not cluttering up the aprons at Everett.   Funny thing, on the tour, the 737 wasn't mentioned much.

It is an interesting tour, but part of me felt like it was a bit of a time warp.  Boeing started doing the tours when the wildly successful 747 was introduced.   People would flock to see the "Jumbo Jets" being produced.  And a few were still being made - freighters, of course.   It was not clear whether these were new freighters or 747 BCF models - Boeing Converted Freighters - reworked from old passenger jets.

Off in the distance were the new 777X models with folding wings - but we weren't allowed to see those up close.  The facility is huge - so large that the airplanes look like toys.  I never thought of a 747 as "small" but it looks pretty tiny in that big building.

The building is so big and the planes are so huge that it doesn't appear anything is going on, even though thousands - tens of thousands - of employees are at work.   You have to study the scene closely until you see a small figure, like an ant in an anthill, working on part of an airplane.   Other than that, it seems deathly still.

Boeing, of course, is hemorrhaging cash these days, as unsold planes pile up.  They don't get paid until planes are delivered, and the longer the 737 MAX stays out of service, the worse things will get.  Worse yet, the new 777X is now delayed due to engine development problems, and Boeing's cash crunch may delay or even cancel the rumored 797 project.

Some readers and commentators have mentioned to me that the fault of all this lies in management, which tried to ramp up production too quickly, to outproduce Airbus.  I am not sure where the fault lies, but usually in a nightmare scenario like this, the head of State is sent to the guillotine.  For some reason Boeing resists this.

I sold my airline stocks and Boeing stock last year.  I heard a report quoting some airline President saying that "losses are a thing of the past!" and realized that losses were going to be coming really soon.   When recession occurs, airline travel will be the first thing to be cut from people's budgets.  And this will trickle down to the airplane manufacturers, which have huge "books" of orders which can usually be cancelled with little or no penalty.   We are already seeing some foreign airlines going bust, in Europe and Asia.   Many over-extended themselves and borrowed too much money.   Others are facing labor actions by pilots and crews whose salaries have been crammed-down over the years.

The interesting question to me is whether Boeing's travails will be one of the causes of the next recession, or merely exacerbated by it.   When plane orders dry up or are merely delayed, this will have a domino effect on Boeing's suppliers, particularly engine manufacturers (which technically are not suppliers as "engines are sold separately" according to the tour guide) - in particular General Electric, which has enough problems of its own, without some short-selling scheme being played upon them.

What also impressed me about the visit was how antiquated a lot of the equipment seemed - or at least what we saw.   Boeing, like the car companies, is less of a manufacturer than an assembler of components.   A lot of the high-tech stuff, such as the construction of composite 787 fuselages, is performed by outside contractors - all over the world.  Not so many union employees are bucking rivets at Everett these days anymore.   The enormous jigs for bending aluminum sheets into 747 fuselages and wing spars sat empty during our visit.  Maybe the demise of the A380 will spur a revival of the fabled queen of the skies - or write its epitaph.  Or perhaps this new 777X will be the next 747.   We'll see.

It was an interesting experience, but the overall impression I got was of a company living in denial and resting on its past laurels.