Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Brexit Britain is crumbling - time to make hard choices | Andrew Marr | New Statesman" video.

I'm an Australian engineer and just adding to the effects of Human Resources. Its been devastating to the engineering profession. Irrespective of what you do or don't like about engineers we built the modern world including its good and bad things. There is almost not a single thing in your life we don't have a hand in. Everything you have that has metal or plastic or if it went through a factory involved engineering. That includes all the obvious things but also many less obvious things. Almost all of the food consumed in the developed world involves engineering from the tractors, plows and harvesting equipment though the processing, packaging and delivery systems as wheel as the refrigerated storage you all rely on. Similarly almost all of your clothing involved engineering and that again starts in the paddock, goes through the factories that process fibre, weave cloth and then make your cloths you wear. TO BUILD the modern world you all take for granted INCLUDING the computer you are on RIGHT NOW has taken generations of SKILLs and EXPERIENCE and TO KEEP THAT WORKING also requires SKILLs and EXPERIENCE. So when HR arrived and threw away skills and experience for their psychological profiling that was aimed at weeding out anyone who might question management that emphasis on SKILLS and EXPERIENCE went out the door. It gave the world horrible cases like the Boeing Max-8. I did my degree in aerospace engineering. I'm also formally trained in backup safety systems like the MCAS system that flew those planes into the ground. That system broke so many basics it still staggers me anyone thought it was safe and YET all those engineers that HR claimed were the right people in the right place for the right reasons did what they did and all those people died. For decades Boeing (like other companies) had built up systems based on SKILLS and EXPERIENCE and they built damn good airplanes. For decades driving a car has been more dangerous than flying at speeds in excess of 800kmh at altitudes so high that if a person was exposed to the outside conditions they'd die in seconds. So if the great claim of HR is to "put the RIGHT people in the RIGHT place for the RIGHT reasons" then how did the Boeing Max-8 happen? Think about this question next time you get in the car or on a train or on a plane. Did the HR person who picked the engineers to build that car, train or plane have any idea what it takes to make SAFE cars, SAFE trains or SAFE planes or where they like the HR at Boeing?
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@malin5468 The things that aggravate me as an engineer isn't just that people with non-engineering backgrounds think they are technically literate because they took a couple of science classes and can use a computer but they think they're also qualified to make technical decisions on things like energy. My main motivation on informally studying economics was so I could find a way to speak their language back at them as a means to stop them hogging all the oxygen in every public discussion. Between the idiots on the Left and the maniacs on the Right the rest of us trapped in the middle really are in serious trouble. There's a whole raft of things BOTH side of politics have done over the last 40+ years that are now coming into this perfect storm of complete crap BECAUSE they never consider the consequences. I did my degree in aerospace and we're trained different to all others because our systems have such narrow margins of failure. We HAVE to be mindful of effects and consequences. If we don't then stupid stuff like the Boeing Max-8 happens where the computer that was supposed to prevent accidents flew the plane into the ground. The idea of consequences seems to be devoid in economics. I was just pointing out in another comment how economists with their "Greed is Good!" mantra is one of the main drivers of the migration crisis. There's a great doco on tax avoidance here on YT called "The Silent Killer of the Middle Class." About 35 minutes in they describe how bananas bought from Guatemala are traded via the Caymans before being sold in Europe. They do this huge mark up trick in the Caymans that avoids tax being paid. The Guatemalan farmers get squat so pay little tax. The traders in Europe don't make much so they pay little tax. They estimated that a country like Guatemala is NOT getting about $400 Million a year in tax revenue. Just imagine what some of those poorer countries could do with that sort of money if it was spent on infrastructure, schools and health care. Why would people migrate out of desperation when their country actually has a future? This same stuff goes on for all sorts of stuff our corporations pillage from poor countries. Because those countries get no tax revenue they get no chance to develop and as a result the people in those countries try and migrate to Europe, America, Canada, Australia,.... I am very concerned that if the economists don't back off then its going to get very nasty. If you haven't heard we have a series of major scandals here in Australia with the big consultancies (KPMG, PwC, EY & Deloitte). Most of those consultants are economists. They've cost about AU$20 Billion in fees and we've got so many giant piles of crap to deal with we don't know where to start.
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@malin5468 Explaining the Max-8 stall characteristics takes a bit so bear with. FIRST - I have a pilots license and an aerobatics endorsement and I have competed in competitive aerobatics. So I'm pretty familiar with stalls and spins. There was never an actual problem with the engines or the balance of the Max-8. It wasn't even a problem that it had a an abrupt stall characteristic many other planes also have abrupt stall characteristics. To make any plane have very low drag means the aerodynamics are generally fine tuned for level flight. As such there are many planes that you really don't want to ever stall. Like 1,00s of others I first learned to fly in Cessna 152s and 172s. The reason is simple they are super stable including a very benign stall. In fact you actually have to force a 152 or 172 to really stall and drop the nose. After the Cessnas I did my retractable undercarriage and constant speed prop endorsements in Mooney M20s, which is fabulous plane but also designed to be a low drag palne. The Mooney was designed with the aim of doing 200knots on 200hp which is not easy. HOWEVER to do that the Mooney has a very slippery full laminar flow wing that is brilliant in level flight but sucks if it stalls. AGAIN that's nothing odd and is characteristic of quite a few of the fast and slippery light aircraft are similar. But if you stall a Cessna you don't lose a massive amount of altitude. In fact if you recover well it might be as little as 50ft and if you really work hard and fully stall Cessna you can still recover in a few hundred feet. A Mooney however can lose 1,500feet in a stall and do it incredibly fast. Considering that the standard landing pattern is done at 1,000ft then its incredibly important to know and understand what a plane like the Mooney feels like as it gets close to stalling. AND YES I did a lot of that but up at safe altitudes. So please understand this. There never was anything wrong with the concept or design of the Max-8. Even the Airbuses and other similar planes like Learjets ALL HAVE nasty stall characteristics. Make no mistake no pilot ever wants to stall any of those planes, because they will drop their nose and try an punch a hole in the planet. The Max-8 was just a little worse than others so they decided that it needed more than just a set of alarms to tell the pilots to back-off. There's nothing odd about that either. The Max-8 was not the first plane with MCAS or similar override systems. Before I explain the problem you need to understand that in engineering redundancy means having backup. In basic terms a standard redundant system has 2 of something - 1 to do the job and 1 backup. A triple redundant system has 3 and can check them against each other. Its normal that in pilot assistance systems like MCAS they have redundancy. The MCAS problem was HOW & WHY IT WAS DONE. The WHY was to save money -> One of the issues with any new plane is pilot training. The competing Airbus had been done so well it was NOT considered an all new airplane and pilots didn't need extra training for it. It was regarded as an upgrade rather than new plane rather. that made it easy for airlines to buy. One of the genius sales monkeys at Boeing made a deal with one airline for 200 Max-8s. As part of that deal he made an agreement that if their pilots needed extra training then Boeing would reimburse them $1 million per plane or $200 million in total for that training. If Boeing had put in a fully redundant system then under FAA rules pilots would have needed extra training and on that one deal Boeing would have lost $200 million. THAT'S THE WHY. The HOW was by not installing a redundancy in the sensors. Unfortunately that meant if that one sensor faulted in the wrong way and said the aircraft was stalling it would push the nose down irrespective of what was actually happening. As part of the WHY above the pilots were given the minimum of information to also keep the costs down. That meant they were NOT fully informed about the MCAS system on the plane or how it was configured. Sorry if that's long winded, but the problem really stemmed from people who knew nothing about aircraft or flying aircraft making decisions.
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@malin5468 Thanks. Just remember with your foils on your trimaran. ALL aerodynamic foils stall from angle of attack NOT speed. It doesn't matter if they are in water or air. What you can also get is stalling from what appears to be odd situations. You can have what you think is the AoA but that's NOT the actual AoA experienced. its also called the effective AoA. If you're into sailing you'd know that the sail doesn't have the AoA of the wind because the boats speed changes that and creates and effective AoA.
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@dennism5731 Here too in Australia we went down the path of sending 80% of our people to university. Both my parents were high school teachers and in the 90s a bonus system for high schools was installed. For every kid they got enrolled in university each high school got a bonus. That made it untenable for any teacher to help a student get into a diploma coarse at what we call TAFE or do an apprenticeship or go into the military, the police or other similar government institution. That was coupled with the funding of our universities which were remodelled economically in the 90s. They were told to "be more business like" but that was taken as "be like a business" they flipped the priority from educating people into making profit. These monetary functions are just more symptoms of neoliberal stupidity. BUT the real catastrophe was the shortage of skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen. All through the 2000s and into the 2010s we had massive shortages of the people we needed to construct the mines and gas plants to feed the Chinese machine. It ended up adding BILLIONS to the costs. BUT the true stupidity of sending 80% of high school students to university is simple math. An IQ 100 is the average and if you have 100 people 50 will be an IQ of 100 or higher and 50 will be an IQ of 100 or lower. So if you send 80 out of every 100 high school students to university it means 30 of them have IQs under 100. Its genuine idiocy because instead of those people doing diplomas, or doing apprenticeships or something else they end up wasting time going to university which costs money. Many of them drop out because they can't do the work and end up with no qualifications or useful skills. The ones who do pass go into easier degrees that nobody wants or needs. Its madness.
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