I worked for GE, back in the 1980s. It was the “Neutron Jack” era.
The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional.
I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time.
Once, the VP of our division, called an “all-hands” meeting, to tell us that he was a lawyer that didn’t have a computer, didn’t like software (we were a software company), basically, didn’t like us, and that we’d better get on the stick, and make number go up.
Ah…fun times…
passwordoops · 1h ago
Sounds similar to the stories I hear coming out of Boeing
roenxi · 11h ago
The "5. The Human Wreckage" section is probably the most interesting - on paper, everyone came out much worse (losers identified are workers, pension holders, shareholders, investors and executives which seems superficially comprehensive).
However it is important to recall that the people who actually made all the money extracting the wealth got out years before, retiring and/or selling stock. They're bystanders now and probably happy to run the whole operation again.
Although as an aside who these people are who think corporate pensions are a good idea is beyond me. People really should be in charge of their own savings in preference to their employer, expecting some random corporation to cover the cost was always a bit crazy even when it seemed sort-of possible that the system was stable. It is easy to have some sympathy but, as a practical matter, it was never going to work and it isn't a surprise that it didn't.
rlkf · 5h ago
In Norway, the companies are required by law to pay the pensions into a special type of investment account where withdrawal are not allowed until you are retired, but you can choose your own investment profile: A mandatory 401k.
The arrangement where the _company_ controls the account seems to me to be more of a allowed delay in salary payout, to the benefit of the company, than a retirement account for the employee.
varjag · 2h ago
The savings are managed by bank or insurance companies' subsidiaries who are entirely unrelated to the employer. In other words it has nothing to do with mid century corporate pensions.
lazide · 1h ago
The real fun situation is when the 401k requires mandatory investment in the company stock.
None of the responsibility, all the moral hazard.
collinmcnulty · 19m ago
This was made illegal in the US after Enron.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
>However it is important to recall that the people who actually made all the money extracting the wealth got out years before, retiring and/or selling stock. They're bystanders now and probably happy to run the whole operation again.
And therein lies the problem with modern society. Whether you're an MBA wrecking a company or a voter wrecking the local economy there is no mechanism for the people who you've wronged to get at you so there's no incentive not to behave that way.
WalterBright · 5h ago
The free market is a chaotic system of creative destruction. Expecting a company to still be solvent decades from now is naive. Tying your investments in with the same company that provides you a job is also risky.
Defined contribution is a much less risky retirement scheme.
azalemeth · 5h ago
Something nobody is saying is that there genuinely are synergies in GE's businesses. Take MRI for an example (albeit one I know a lot about...):
-- the superconducting magnet shell requires the accurate creation of 'nested doll' cryogenic containers, built to withstand magnetostatic forces in a highly regulated environment with defined safety requirements under catastrophic failure modes. Solving the design problem is equivalent to solving a huge set of nasty, coupled PDEs subject to loads of material constraints. This is directly analogous to aspects of jet engine design.
-- inside the bore of the magnet (but not in the cryostat) goes a device called the gradient set, whose job is to generate \partial B_z/ \partial_{xyz} as a function of time (that, very much indirectly, the radiographer specifies). This is a water cooled, resistive set of magnet coils with a defined frequency response curve, linearity requirements, etc. The current into them is generated by a set of three huge amplifiers, which have to actually take a signal delivered on a timebase of microseconds and volts and amplify it with negligible delay and deliver kA into a large inductor centimetres away from a patient. This is a formidable (power) electronic engineering challenge with huge parallels to various aspects of electrical engineering – e.g. managing (preventing) dielectric breakdown, thermal management, inverse solutions to Maxwell's equations in a quasistatic region (people use streamfunctions to do this well), etc.
-- the RF side of the system has to transmit kV and receive microvolts within microseconds into a definitively challenging electrodynamic environment with constraints on harmonics. Everything has to keep to a hard realtime constraint. The ADC must have a huge dynamic range and the problem is conducted massively in parallel. This is directly analogous to problems in telecommunications or RF design, but harder -- intermittent pulsed not continuous wave, and a hard requirement to accurately measure analogue voltages. Designing the RF coil ("probe" in NMR speak or ≈"antenna") is a further horrible (full-wave) EM design problem that even GE often subcontract out to one of about five specialist firms worldwide.
It's not a priori obvious to me that lots of competing companies would be better at creating stuff that requires the interaction of disciplines like this. Rather, I view the split up of GE and all of the woes of the article as evidence of a business mismanaged by MBAs. The defined benefit pensions should have been protected by law and overseen by an independent regulator - like my defined benefit pension that sits above my employer and shares risk among many different universities.
irjustin · 5h ago
The saddest thing to me about this - is the cut of pensions.
My parents view pensions as gold standard. That it cannot be messed with and clearly this article shows that it can. The promise for your years of service can't be paid out.
Now something you believed would allow you to not worry until your passing, perhaps leave a small something to your children, won't be. Instead, you're beginning to worry about how you'll make ends meet in a few years with all the rising prices.
omcnoe · 4h ago
This is a great example of the kinds of problems with "defined benefit" pensions compared to "defined contribution" plans.
Defined benefit plans rely on the firm to correctly manage their pension plan, allocate funds for it, invest them wisely etc. In public sector there is political pressure to reduce forecast costs of a defined benefit pension. In many places it's completely legal to operate an underfunded defined benefit plan. Defined benefit plans are also traditionally fixed to a single employer, they don't fit well for a more mobile labor force.
For defined contribution plans individuals actually have control of the pension funds - they are just locked from access til retirement. They are generally government run, you aren't locked to a single employer. Individuals can set their own risk appetite and make their own decisions regarding fees etc.
Defined benefit plans are really popular because the pension amount is "guaranteed" but this guarantee is just an illusion. You can't magically make risk go away, just move it somewhere else. Many examples of defined benefit plans that blew up/were restructured/cancelled etc. Defined benefit is just a plain bad concept.
lmm · 4m ago
Defined contribution is far worse, it's just a way to shift the risk onto the individual who is far less able to manage it, and then tell them it's their own fault they don't get a pension.
Defined benefit pensions work great outside of massive frauds. A better way to address that would be a government guarantee paired with prudential regulation and prosecution of frauds.
bradfa · 2h ago
Defined benefit plans work best when administered by an authority higher up the chain than a single employer. Like a union, trade organization, or government entity. Defined benefit plans work well when risk is spread, proper actuarial oversight is used, and especially for lower income jobs.
Defined contribution plans in the USA typically have an extremely small contribution by the employer. Works out great for the employer. Doesn’t work out so great for lower wage earners as they struggle to fund the plan.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
I fail to see how that solves anything. You'll just wind up with the same mismanagement and "whoops, we're too big to fail, guess the taxpayers have to pay for it" that plague state government pension systems.
CPLX · 41m ago
It might be worth me mentioning that our decision to never prosecute elite and white collar crime might be at the core of all this.
omcnoe · 2h ago
Whether the employer or the employee is contributing to a defined contribution or defined benefit plan, ultimately it's all coming out of the same "employee costs" bucket on the employer side.
Maybe they can work well with proper oversight, but the status quo for the majority of defined benefit plans is to be mismanaged and underfunded. See the role (union negotiated) defined benefit plans had in the US auto industry collapse. 60 out of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit plans in the US are underfunded, more than half! Chart in that article shows that 40% being funded is actually unusually high, historical trend is 15-20% of plans meeting funding levels. https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-u-s-pension-plans-are...
Funding a defined benefit plan for lower wage workers vs paying lower wage workers more and contributing more to a defined contribution plan has exactly the same costs on the employer side. The only way the defined benefit plan appears to work out better for both parties is because we have legalized the employer not funding these plans to the appropriate level and hanging the supposed beneficiaries of the plan out to dry when it goes south.
Even ignoring the rampant underfunding issues defined benefit plans are a classic example of the principle agent problem where the interests/risk appetite of the fund manager and the fund members don't line up perfectly.
mgh95 · 5h ago
Honestly, I think people are beginning to see pensions through the lens of the common adage "if something is too good to be true, it probably is". I just think it's a sign of the times where the population isn't expanding as rapidly and the promises made by pensions simply can't be kept.
hoseyor · 5h ago
It was always a fraud of future promises, an actual and literal con job. It is the inherent risk of trusting others, strangers nonetheless, with your own future, let alone “retirement”.
It is another one of those core metrics, even if a lagging one, that should be used to evaluate whether government has failed; the delta between how secure someone would currently be if they had just invested all the pension/social security money that was stolen/defrauded from them.
Most of our governments would be exposed as the failed governments they are.
mgh95 · 1h ago
This goes directly to the question of the PBGC giving bailouts (https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa) rather than windups and dissolution.
These bailouts -- and the decisions if a pension fund should be forcibly closed -- are political in nature. For example, Biden bailing out the Teamsters pension fund (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...) or the decision by congress to ignore the fact that CalPERS has continuously below the 80% recommended funding for non-governmental pensions putting a 1.7T time bomb in play.
In essence, government is failing to play one of its more essential roles of regulator.
WalterBright · 5h ago
Social Security was always a wealth transfer scheme, not an investment scheme.
zdw · 11h ago
Note that GE is one of the example companies in the Collins/Porras book "Built to Last".
I'd love to see an explanation of what went wrong from those guys.
Hilift · 2h ago
Those were great books, but it doesn't age well when you fawn over Walgreens and a few years later the books have an aged like milk patina.
I worked for GE for a couple of years. They are a conglomerate. They acquired other companies. I worked for a company where GE was the largest customer, and GE acquired it. If a company started to perform poorly, it wouldn't be long before it would either be sold or split apart. The company I was working at probably would have failed anyway due to rapid competition, but since GE used a lot of its products it was sort of a no brainer until an alternative was found.
Acquiring and sunsetting companies is not uncommon now, but back then it wasn't received well and backlash accumulated over time. They had/have a huge part of the jet engine market. Due to their size and executive connections, they were capable of landing large contracts, such as defense and aerospace.
They aren't successful if compared to Meta for example, that nets $70 billion per year.
GE acquired the power grid component of Alstom, a French company in 2014. That company was previously fined by the US DOJ for $772 million for FCPA violations (bribes). (This was back in the US World Police days).
Personally, I want capital markets that are dynamic enough that some fraction of $n00 billion businesses become $(n-k)00 billion businesses (check out the aggregate market cap today of GE’s progeny).
I’m not even sure there’s a counterfactual world where GE is a $m trillion business: The global economy has largely evolved beyond these massive, diverse conglomerates, and likely all to the good.
What does a “wow, GE really has been managed wonderfully since 1980” story even look like? I imagine they split up much earlier, each spinoff establishes their own brand, and there’s no “GE” to talk about.
gwintrob · 9h ago
There's an alternative world where they didn't focus so much on financing and GE Capital. You make a good point that they still would have a diverse set of businesses that would be hard/awkward to build in parallel.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 3h ago
There was a link on HN claiming that business books are just entertainment and that you don't learn anything about business. And then listed some self help books.
THIS is a book about business.
squeedles · 11h ago
Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc. Wonderful read and really provides perspective on why modern corporate America is what it is.
Light Out by Gryta and Mann follow up by focusing on the Immelt years and how he tried to keep the ball rolling despite the hole that Jack left him in. Also an excellent read.
Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.
tonyarkles · 10h ago
> Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc.
The parts about Boeing in that book are... rough. Not rough as in "poorly-written" but rough as in "holy hell is that ever a brutal way to ruin a good company". Excellent book but lol it's not a feel-good read :)
Barbing · 9h ago
Maybe a decade ago I read from critics concerned a shift to an aggressively globalized supply chain was certain to wreak havoc on Boeing’s quality control.
e.g. safety-critical nuts and bolts used to be produced down the street, now you get a few nuts from say Thailand and a few bolts from Malaysia… the critics complained it was certain to lead to problems.
Was that a part of what you read about in that book?
tonyarkles · 8h ago
Not significantly no, it was much more focused on the McDonnell-Douglas reverse acquisition. To summarize: McDonnell-Douglas was failing and bought Boeing with Boeing’s own stock (technically Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing stock but in practice McDonnell management assumed control). MD’s executives were Jack Welch protégés and did the same thing to Boeing that happened to GE.
p_l · 1h ago
The part that story always stays silent is that Boeing then-CEO was big fan of Welch-ism apparently and oversaw major changes that caused long-term issues
... while new people (albeit not execs) from McDonnell-Douglas were publishing internal memos about how MD has experience on why the actions taken by Boeing (not MD!) CEO will cause problems.
tonyhart7 · 26m ago
basically business man running engineering company
delibes · 11h ago
GE "created the jet engine"? British would disagree
Context: "Sir Frank Whittle, an English engineer, is credited with inventing the jet engine. He patented the design for the turbojet engine in 1930, and his work led to the first operational jet engine in 1937. Independently, Hans von Ohain in Germany developed a similar jet engine, with the first flight powered by his design occurring in 1939. Both are recognized for their pioneering contributions, but Whittle's work laid the foundational concepts."
WalterBright · 5h ago
All modern jet engines are based on Ohain's axial flow design, not Whittle's radial flow one. Ohain's engine first ran in 1937. The Heinkel HE178 was the first flying jet airplane, with Ohain's engine.
The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.
jansan · 1h ago
> The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.
I think "Ohain's engine concept" would be more correct.
Ohain worked at Heinkel and developed the HeS 011 engine. However, the Me 262 was equipped with the Junkers Jumo 004, which was based on Ohain's design, but developed without him. The first test flights were actually done in 1942 with two BMW Typ P 3302 turbines (later called BMW 003).
KnuthIsGod · 4h ago
Looks and reads like LLM dreck.
Perhaps it is time to have rules about the submission of AI generated trash to HN as faux-articles.
getnormality · 2h ago
I don't think it's entirely AI-generated. The review selects details and explains them logically, e.g. why GE was able to financialize itself. AI slop doesn't have logic, it just treats the text as a bag of words and vaguely gestures at the overall vibe.
On the other hand, the Key Quotes are not really that key, and some of the bullet points don't really work (it's not clear how the LTC insurance time bomb can be considered an accounting trick).
fisherjeff · 6h ago
"Jeff has the unfortunate task of following a legend. It's like being a baseball player and following Babe Ruth." - Jack Welch, 2001
God that’s insufferable, even by Jack Welch’s standards.
rtpg · 11h ago
Recently read "Lights Out", which was a fun book covering the past couple decades in good amount of details. Basically a hit piece on one of the CEOs, but hey if you're flying around with a "backup" private jet you probably deserve a couple hit pieces.
JackYoustra · 3h ago
I read this book. Going into it, in my head, I thought flannery always got the shorter end of the stick and was unsure if welsh or immelt did the company bad.
After reading it, Welsh was great (his creation of GE credit, while merely just a shadow bank, was a bit innovative, not to the point of lionized but certainly worth a merit, but his day-to-day running and operation and cost cutting / discipline, outside of a couple deal heat moments seemed really quite good).
...except for hiring Immelt, Immelt was a ridiculous disaster of a CEO that my god should've been fired nearly immediately, and Flannery got completely shafted, someone threw him out, grabbed his plan, and basked in the credit. Super tragic to see.
rkagerer · 10h ago
"financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon"
actionfromafar · 13h ago
”The company ran on quasi-religious faith that the right leader could bend markets and reality itself.”
I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed.
Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them
SoftTalker · 9h ago
Widespread mask mandates were still a few weeks away on March 5.
ivraatiems · 13h ago
I don't think this article was written by AI - at least, I am not sure it is - but the way it is divided up, the bullet lists and "key quotes" and breaking a relatively short article into even shorter sections, makes it feel AI generated.
Sounds like an interesting book but the article says remarkably little.
gwintrob · 12h ago
Thanks for the feedback. I try to keep track of quotes I like when I'm reading. This was an attempt to bundle them up into some useful themes. I'll try to expand into something more opinionated for the next one :)
Cogito · 11h ago
Just reiterating what cogogo stated in a sibling, but the thing that threw me was the 'review' in the title. I was expecting some critique or comparison but instead saw summary and highlights.
I enjoyed the summary and highlights, and learnt about some details I would likely have never otherwise seen, so I think it's just the framing that seemed 'off'.
Depending on your intent consider reframing or adding critique, but I think the content is good and I appreciate you making it.
[edit] There is some critique and comparison in the opening: "Shakespearean tragedy" and "The result is equal parts invention history, boardroom knife-fight, and forensic accounting thriller." but I think these are the only ones. I would love to know why you think this, and what you like about your "favorite ideas" (and any things you didn't like!)
peterldowns · 11h ago
Did you use AI to write this review, or was it entirely by hand? The structure, emphases, and conclusion directly match the way ChatGPT tends to answer my requests to summarize/analyze/compare.
gwintrob · 9h ago
I came up with the organization and the quotes but I definitely used AI to help improve it. For example, a friend pointed out that a word was overly flowery so I asked Claude for some alternatives (https://imgur.com/a/k3sQ7lR). I believe not using AI is going to be like not using a word processor soon. AI will help people communicate more, sharpen their thoughts, and learn faster.
This does have me thinking more about what causes things to look AI-generated. The uncanny valley effect. It seems like some people don't like the header image but I thought that was a nice touch to have a visual element.
What's ironic is I normally use ChatGPT but they have a bug that caused my account to be downgraded so I didn't have my "normal" AI tool today.
avhception · 5h ago
While I'm certainly no stranger to letting an LLM help me streamline some technical documentation, I also think it will eventually grind down everything to a sea of "lowest common denominator" speech.
A friend of mine recently used an LLM to help write a condolence card, and I found that appalling.
Who I am as a person is the sum of my experiences, and I'm not even talking about the great cornerstones but random stuff.
Like that one time I accidentally still had our cordless house phone in my pocket as a kid when I went to play in the woods and lost it there.
There are thousands of these little things, and it's what makes you unique and influences how you talk and think.
I am saddened by the thought of "not using AI will be like not using a word processor soon". It will grind away all the little weirdness, all the little unique aspects.
I would have loved to read "apotheosis". I didn't even know that word!
jrowen · 10h ago
That's interesting. I didn't consider that it was AI at any point while reading it, and I don't use it very much. Going back I see what people are saying but I think it's more cohesive and compelling than what AI would write.
I agree that it's more of a "key takeaways" than a critical review but I appreciated that the author didn't make it about themself.
Barbing · 9h ago
Great reception here.
Based on your attitude I know I’m safe to note something, something potentially all but irrelevant in the coming years: as soon as I saw the artwork I did a reverse image search and concluded it was likely generated.
I am unable to articulate exactly why, but it seemed to take away from the piece. Weird huh? (non sarcastic)
cr125rider · 11h ago
I liked how it was laid out. I consume information like that well. Thanks for the write up.
Felt like a summary - not sure I even considered AI even if it didn’t read like a critical review. I do really want to read the book. Jack Welch is a case study in hubris. And I worked for a startup that had a relationship with Immelt. We kept trying to use breakfasts and dinners with him as a marketing ploy…
SoftTalker · 9h ago
That style had become popular in news stories even before AI. I call it “writing for 8th graders”
staticshock · 9h ago
Ignoring for the moment the fact that this particular article is a book summary, a task LLMs excel at, it's interesting that the (warranted) comparison to LLM outputs casts doubt on the credibility of the writing, and in some ways maybe even caps its implied utility.
Just like how human beings choose different ways of presenting themselves to the world (e.g. masculine/feminine, gay/straight, goth/punk/preppy) as a form of social signaling, today's LLMs emit a certain "I'm AI" signal that humans pick up on, and human writers will likely have to continue evolving the counter-position(s) to that signal.
If the results of relatively simple, unsophisticated prompts get better at passing for human-written articles/blog posts/forum comments/etc, that'll increase the fraction of human writing that falls into this uncanny valley, and exacerbate the need for stronger counter-positioning over time.
Aurornis · 9h ago
It’s funny how this works. The writing style did not tickle my LLM detectors, but the structure certainly looks like common LLM formatting with the sections and key quotes at the end.
The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional.
I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time.
Once, the VP of our division, called an “all-hands” meeting, to tell us that he was a lawyer that didn’t have a computer, didn’t like software (we were a software company), basically, didn’t like us, and that we’d better get on the stick, and make number go up.
Ah…fun times…
However it is important to recall that the people who actually made all the money extracting the wealth got out years before, retiring and/or selling stock. They're bystanders now and probably happy to run the whole operation again.
Although as an aside who these people are who think corporate pensions are a good idea is beyond me. People really should be in charge of their own savings in preference to their employer, expecting some random corporation to cover the cost was always a bit crazy even when it seemed sort-of possible that the system was stable. It is easy to have some sympathy but, as a practical matter, it was never going to work and it isn't a surprise that it didn't.
The arrangement where the _company_ controls the account seems to me to be more of a allowed delay in salary payout, to the benefit of the company, than a retirement account for the employee.
None of the responsibility, all the moral hazard.
And therein lies the problem with modern society. Whether you're an MBA wrecking a company or a voter wrecking the local economy there is no mechanism for the people who you've wronged to get at you so there's no incentive not to behave that way.
Defined contribution is a much less risky retirement scheme.
-- the superconducting magnet shell requires the accurate creation of 'nested doll' cryogenic containers, built to withstand magnetostatic forces in a highly regulated environment with defined safety requirements under catastrophic failure modes. Solving the design problem is equivalent to solving a huge set of nasty, coupled PDEs subject to loads of material constraints. This is directly analogous to aspects of jet engine design.
-- inside the bore of the magnet (but not in the cryostat) goes a device called the gradient set, whose job is to generate \partial B_z/ \partial_{xyz} as a function of time (that, very much indirectly, the radiographer specifies). This is a water cooled, resistive set of magnet coils with a defined frequency response curve, linearity requirements, etc. The current into them is generated by a set of three huge amplifiers, which have to actually take a signal delivered on a timebase of microseconds and volts and amplify it with negligible delay and deliver kA into a large inductor centimetres away from a patient. This is a formidable (power) electronic engineering challenge with huge parallels to various aspects of electrical engineering – e.g. managing (preventing) dielectric breakdown, thermal management, inverse solutions to Maxwell's equations in a quasistatic region (people use streamfunctions to do this well), etc.
-- the RF side of the system has to transmit kV and receive microvolts within microseconds into a definitively challenging electrodynamic environment with constraints on harmonics. Everything has to keep to a hard realtime constraint. The ADC must have a huge dynamic range and the problem is conducted massively in parallel. This is directly analogous to problems in telecommunications or RF design, but harder -- intermittent pulsed not continuous wave, and a hard requirement to accurately measure analogue voltages. Designing the RF coil ("probe" in NMR speak or ≈"antenna") is a further horrible (full-wave) EM design problem that even GE often subcontract out to one of about five specialist firms worldwide.
It's not a priori obvious to me that lots of competing companies would be better at creating stuff that requires the interaction of disciplines like this. Rather, I view the split up of GE and all of the woes of the article as evidence of a business mismanaged by MBAs. The defined benefit pensions should have been protected by law and overseen by an independent regulator - like my defined benefit pension that sits above my employer and shares risk among many different universities.
My parents view pensions as gold standard. That it cannot be messed with and clearly this article shows that it can. The promise for your years of service can't be paid out.
Now something you believed would allow you to not worry until your passing, perhaps leave a small something to your children, won't be. Instead, you're beginning to worry about how you'll make ends meet in a few years with all the rising prices.
Defined benefit plans rely on the firm to correctly manage their pension plan, allocate funds for it, invest them wisely etc. In public sector there is political pressure to reduce forecast costs of a defined benefit pension. In many places it's completely legal to operate an underfunded defined benefit plan. Defined benefit plans are also traditionally fixed to a single employer, they don't fit well for a more mobile labor force.
For defined contribution plans individuals actually have control of the pension funds - they are just locked from access til retirement. They are generally government run, you aren't locked to a single employer. Individuals can set their own risk appetite and make their own decisions regarding fees etc.
Defined benefit plans are really popular because the pension amount is "guaranteed" but this guarantee is just an illusion. You can't magically make risk go away, just move it somewhere else. Many examples of defined benefit plans that blew up/were restructured/cancelled etc. Defined benefit is just a plain bad concept.
Defined benefit pensions work great outside of massive frauds. A better way to address that would be a government guarantee paired with prudential regulation and prosecution of frauds.
Defined contribution plans in the USA typically have an extremely small contribution by the employer. Works out great for the employer. Doesn’t work out so great for lower wage earners as they struggle to fund the plan.
Maybe they can work well with proper oversight, but the status quo for the majority of defined benefit plans is to be mismanaged and underfunded. See the role (union negotiated) defined benefit plans had in the US auto industry collapse. 60 out of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit plans in the US are underfunded, more than half! Chart in that article shows that 40% being funded is actually unusually high, historical trend is 15-20% of plans meeting funding levels. https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-u-s-pension-plans-are...
Funding a defined benefit plan for lower wage workers vs paying lower wage workers more and contributing more to a defined contribution plan has exactly the same costs on the employer side. The only way the defined benefit plan appears to work out better for both parties is because we have legalized the employer not funding these plans to the appropriate level and hanging the supposed beneficiaries of the plan out to dry when it goes south.
Even ignoring the rampant underfunding issues defined benefit plans are a classic example of the principle agent problem where the interests/risk appetite of the fund manager and the fund members don't line up perfectly.
It is another one of those core metrics, even if a lagging one, that should be used to evaluate whether government has failed; the delta between how secure someone would currently be if they had just invested all the pension/social security money that was stolen/defrauded from them.
Most of our governments would be exposed as the failed governments they are.
These bailouts -- and the decisions if a pension fund should be forcibly closed -- are political in nature. For example, Biden bailing out the Teamsters pension fund (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...) or the decision by congress to ignore the fact that CalPERS has continuously below the 80% recommended funding for non-governmental pensions putting a 1.7T time bomb in play.
In essence, government is failing to play one of its more essential roles of regulator.
I'd love to see an explanation of what went wrong from those guys.
I worked for GE for a couple of years. They are a conglomerate. They acquired other companies. I worked for a company where GE was the largest customer, and GE acquired it. If a company started to perform poorly, it wouldn't be long before it would either be sold or split apart. The company I was working at probably would have failed anyway due to rapid competition, but since GE used a lot of its products it was sort of a no brainer until an alternative was found.
Acquiring and sunsetting companies is not uncommon now, but back then it wasn't received well and backlash accumulated over time. They had/have a huge part of the jet engine market. Due to their size and executive connections, they were capable of landing large contracts, such as defense and aerospace.
They aren't successful if compared to Meta for example, that nets $70 billion per year.
GE acquired the power grid component of Alstom, a French company in 2014. That company was previously fined by the US DOJ for $772 million for FCPA violations (bribes). (This was back in the US World Police days).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations
I’m not even sure there’s a counterfactual world where GE is a $m trillion business: The global economy has largely evolved beyond these massive, diverse conglomerates, and likely all to the good.
What does a “wow, GE really has been managed wonderfully since 1980” story even look like? I imagine they split up much earlier, each spinoff establishes their own brand, and there’s no “GE” to talk about.
THIS is a book about business.
Light Out by Gryta and Mann follow up by focusing on the Immelt years and how he tried to keep the ball rolling despite the hole that Jack left him in. Also an excellent read.
Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.
The parts about Boeing in that book are... rough. Not rough as in "poorly-written" but rough as in "holy hell is that ever a brutal way to ruin a good company". Excellent book but lol it's not a feel-good read :)
e.g. safety-critical nuts and bolts used to be produced down the street, now you get a few nuts from say Thailand and a few bolts from Malaysia… the critics complained it was certain to lead to problems.
Was that a part of what you read about in that book?
... while new people (albeit not execs) from McDonnell-Douglas were publishing internal memos about how MD has experience on why the actions taken by Boeing (not MD!) CEO will cause problems.
The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.
I think "Ohain's engine concept" would be more correct.
Ohain worked at Heinkel and developed the HeS 011 engine. However, the Me 262 was equipped with the Junkers Jumo 004, which was based on Ohain's design, but developed without him. The first test flights were actually done in 1942 with two BMW Typ P 3302 turbines (later called BMW 003).
Perhaps it is time to have rules about the submission of AI generated trash to HN as faux-articles.
On the other hand, the Key Quotes are not really that key, and some of the bullet points don't really work (it's not clear how the LTC insurance time bomb can be considered an accounting trick).
God that’s insufferable, even by Jack Welch’s standards.
After reading it, Welsh was great (his creation of GE credit, while merely just a shadow bank, was a bit innovative, not to the point of lionized but certainly worth a merit, but his day-to-day running and operation and cost cutting / discipline, outside of a couple deal heat moments seemed really quite good).
...except for hiring Immelt, Immelt was a ridiculous disaster of a CEO that my god should've been fired nearly immediately, and Flannery got completely shafted, someone threw him out, grabbed his plan, and basked in the credit. Super tragic to see.
Hm, doesn’t ring a Bell.
https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html
I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed.
CNBC Reporting Live from Jack Welch's funeral, March 5, 2020: https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE
Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them
Sounds like an interesting book but the article says remarkably little.
I enjoyed the summary and highlights, and learnt about some details I would likely have never otherwise seen, so I think it's just the framing that seemed 'off'.
Depending on your intent consider reframing or adding critique, but I think the content is good and I appreciate you making it.
[edit] There is some critique and comparison in the opening: "Shakespearean tragedy" and "The result is equal parts invention history, boardroom knife-fight, and forensic accounting thriller." but I think these are the only ones. I would love to know why you think this, and what you like about your "favorite ideas" (and any things you didn't like!)
This does have me thinking more about what causes things to look AI-generated. The uncanny valley effect. It seems like some people don't like the header image but I thought that was a nice touch to have a visual element.
What's ironic is I normally use ChatGPT but they have a bug that caused my account to be downgraded so I didn't have my "normal" AI tool today.
A friend of mine recently used an LLM to help write a condolence card, and I found that appalling.
Who I am as a person is the sum of my experiences, and I'm not even talking about the great cornerstones but random stuff. Like that one time I accidentally still had our cordless house phone in my pocket as a kid when I went to play in the woods and lost it there. There are thousands of these little things, and it's what makes you unique and influences how you talk and think. I am saddened by the thought of "not using AI will be like not using a word processor soon". It will grind away all the little weirdness, all the little unique aspects. I would have loved to read "apotheosis". I didn't even know that word!
I agree that it's more of a "key takeaways" than a critical review but I appreciated that the author didn't make it about themself.
Based on your attitude I know I’m safe to note something, something potentially all but irrelevant in the coming years: as soon as I saw the artwork I did a reverse image search and concluded it was likely generated.
I am unable to articulate exactly why, but it seemed to take away from the piece. Weird huh? (non sarcastic)
The apparently-AI artwork doesn't help. From some googling it appears to be a direct rip-off of this: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-great-amer...
Just like how human beings choose different ways of presenting themselves to the world (e.g. masculine/feminine, gay/straight, goth/punk/preppy) as a form of social signaling, today's LLMs emit a certain "I'm AI" signal that humans pick up on, and human writers will likely have to continue evolving the counter-position(s) to that signal.
If the results of relatively simple, unsophisticated prompts get better at passing for human-written articles/blog posts/forum comments/etc, that'll increase the fraction of human writing that falls into this uncanny valley, and exacerbate the need for stronger counter-positioning over time.