Boeing Boeing - part the fourth

David Gelles reports on the latest Max news, that a group of survivors have petitioned FAA to fully re-certify the Max, which is to say certify the Max scratch as a new aircraft. I guess that means the Worst Case Scenario. Actually, worse than what I've inferred is needed. Redesigned wing and landing gear is the extent of my Worst Case Scenario, which would not mean a new aircraft cert. We'll see, but it appears the momentum is building.

This could, note 'could', become an arrow in the quiver of whoever is the Dem candidate: the Right Wingnuts favor the Big Corporations over the Little People. The trend to outsource cert to Boeing et al didn't begin with The Manchurian President, but the amended type cert for the Max is in his closet. As recalled in an earlier installment, the signal change to the cert process happened under Dubya.

To earn certification for the 737 MAX 8, Boeing undertook a comprehensive test program that began just over one year ago with four airplanes, plus ground and laboratory testing. Following a rigorous certification process, the FAA granted Boeing an Amended Type Certificate for the 737 MAX 8, verifying the design complies with required aviation regulations and is safe and reliable.

Again, is it possible to fly an inherently unstable aircraft with managing software? Yes, sort of, with the X-29 being exhibit 1. But even in that case, the notion was to exploit instability to generate otherwise impossible maneuvering, which didn't happen.

[T]he whole system as flown (with the flight control system in the loop as well) could not be characterized as having any special increased agility.

It's hard to make the case that the Max design, with engines where they ought not to be, had any benefit to anyone. Just more moolah in Boeing's financials.

Lebensraum

Now if only engines can be built to handle such data!

1U can do 32x EDSFF Long, which means 32x 30.72TB = 983TB ( Just short of a PB ). And that is only on a 96-layer BICS4 3D TLC NAND. And that 41PB in a single Rack!. And in the not far future 100PB in a Rack.

You could fit the whole of DropBox into a few of these Racks!.
-- ksec

Big data? Ok, I'll stuff it in DB2.

Vas Deferens

So, that didn't take long. Again. In Sunday's NYT Business section is a full page puff piece (each is) on Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis. I considered typing a missive on the piece, but let it go, since the sole significant thought I'd had (scrawled under his photo) was:

Why would you want a McKinsey graduate running a drug company?

McKinsey has the well earned reputation as the capitalist's Social Darwinism wet dream defender. Kind of like a high price defense attorney. Confuse them when you can't convince them.

A few days later, now, we know that Novartis has been playing fast and loose with trial data for a $2 million gene therapy. The notion of "I save your life, give me all your future earnings" is so McKinsey. I guess we know why he's running a drug company.

Here's an Axios piece on Novartis and the faked data drug

The future of medicine is in personalized and scientifically advanced drugs, meaning that Zolgensma's imminent approval is just the beginning of the seven-digit price tag era. While drug companies say the drugs' effectiveness justifies their costs, some experts are pushing back.

Later in the article it is mentioned that the underlying drug tech will be used for other drugs. IOW, Novartis isn't on the hook for the drug's R&D for this one indication. Surprise, surprise. And, of course, no forensic accounting exists, publicly, of that R&D spend.

Here's a report that lays out the scheme

As Novartis' departing CEO Joe Jimenez noted in a November 2016 editorial in Forbes, "We want to be rewarded for the tangible outcomes that our products provide the patient, not for simply selling pills."

Left to inference is the simple question: what's the value of "tangible outcomes" in moolah terms? Two possibilities are at the top of the totem pole:
- avoided costs of alternative, existing therapies
- the net present value of a patient's earnings

The first metric is, generally, not a kerfuffle. The second sure is. If there is a truly orphan population at risk, then only the 1% need apply, since their lifetime earnings are much higher. Not that they'd actually turn over any of it, of course. Only that the bean counters can put said 'amount' in the 'value' side of the equation. Thus justifying that multi-million dollar price.

Finally, a dense and detailed review of the drug by medical professionals.

I Told You So - 7 August 2019

Well, the rollercoaster has gone uppy-down (not for the first time over the course of these missives), to quote a Boss Man I had in a food factory long ago. My job was to pull straps of bread pans (thoroughly greased inside and out) stacked on a skid and throw them on a conveyor belt where they were pulled under the dough formers, and thence to the proof racks. Being all of 140 lbs. soaking wet, and the fact that the pans were generally banged up, they generally didn't like being separated. Thus some amount of angst on my part, and so, every so often a strap would end up with the cavity side facing the belt when the process got behind. Then, of course, the doughs would jam up the former, since the doughs had no where to go. So Boss Man would run over to clear the mess and scream "Uppy Down!!!" at me. Not that I cared a whole lot.

Your casual rate inversion is something we should all care about. Thanks to The Manchurian President and his cabal of "the best people", who don't have one complete brain among them, Treasuries are soaring and interest is plunging, even below the 'cut' of a few days ago. The CxO class, still in the realm of really cheap moolah, still can't find profitable places to put all that cheap money. What a wonderful world it would be!

The US Federal Reserve cut rates last month for the first time in a decade. That helped precipitate the decline in long-term bond yields, although yields had been trending lower for some time.

That's a worrying sign: The yield curve, which plots the interest rates across the maturities of debt, is currently inverted. Shorter-term debt is paying higher rates than longer-term bonds, as investors remain fearful of a US recession. An inversion of the yield curve has preceded every recession.

New Gold - part the ninth [update]

Mr. Market is having a nervous breakdown as I type, all the result of a fucking moron running the Damn Gummint. 78,900 other morons put him there. The Fed just put its thumb in the dike, hoping to stave off the flooding recession resulting from The Manchurian President's stupidity.

The amusing part of all this has been the whining from the farm states; 'we can't sell our growing to China!!'.

"The Chinese market is something we've built up over years, and it's been washed away in a short time," said Marcy Svenningsen, who grows soybeans, corn and wheat in North Dakota.

If The Manchurian President really paid attention in his baby econ class (either Fordham or undergrad Wharton), he will know what mercantilism really, really is:

Mercantilism helped create trade patterns such as the triangular trade in the North Atlantic, in which raw materials were imported to the metropolis and then processed and redistributed to other colonies.

IOW, The Manchurian President and his cabal in bidnezz have put the USofA on the wrong side of mercantilism. With all the benefits.

[update]
As usual, that didn't take long.

China's halt of US agricultural purchases will hurt America's farmers in dire need of relief. The trade war has forced Washington to come to the rescue of farmers with billions of dollars in aid. Delinquencies on agriculture loans have tripled since mid-2015 to eight-year highs, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

When will the Damn Gummint send free-money checks to all those city workers put out of work? Once again, the Red states sponging off the Blue.

And

Investors piled into government bonds, driving the 10-year Treasury yield to 1.75%, the lowest level in nearly three years.

Are you surprised?

Probably? Not

It's no secret that I've some problem using pure quant in the arena of human events. The cause and effect of human events are determined, almost entirely, by the rules surrounding said events. And said rules can and will be changed even in-flight if those who seek to benefit from said events see that the desired outcome is not forthcoming. I'm talking to you, Blythe Masters. Time series analysis to predict booms and busts in the economy principally among them. Given The Manchurian President's behavior, would anyone be surprised if he'd managed to threaten BLS and Census Supergrades (aka, SES)? Of course he's tried. Could the really, really rosy numbers coming out of BLS be fudged? If the Secretary of an agency can clear out the Supergrades with a snap of the fingers, what do you think?

Well, here are a couple of reports that might be of interest to those who share my chary attitude.

Should Probabilistic Inference be Thrown Under the Bus?

The real problem is that entire practice of Bayesian inference, and its Information Theory relative, is surprisingly fundamentally flawed in non-linear domains.

The second is older, and closer to the Great Recession "Kill the Quants?": Why risk analysis fails.

The financial crisis featured both models that were wrong and models that were right but were ignored by managers. Modeling errors vied with deliberate misstatements. Federal agencies deferred to the expertise and presumed non-malevolence of private firms.

I really like "presumed non-malevolence of private firms". As if!! Blythe Masters, Blythe Masters, Blythe Masters

Boeing Boeing - part the third

Well, some recent reporting that bears reading. Supports the increased likelihood of The Worst Case Scenario.

[A]fter intense lobbying by industry, [FAA] adopted new rules in 2005 that would give manufacturers like Boeing even more control.

Are you surprised that this was during a 'Business Friendly' Republican president? Didn't think so.

The salient fact of the crashes is that MCAS was not intended or designed to deal with the phase of flight when the crashes occurred. It's one thing to blame the AoA sensor, but it has to be recognized that MCAS is designed to compensate for dangerous aerodynamics, due to engine position, in level flight phase.

The review described a system that would activate only in rare situations, when a plane was making a sharp turn at high speeds.

One might say, when the Max was flying like an F-15! Or, perhaps, the Grumman X-29; given that it was controlled by 80s computers, it might perform using today's components. But, even so, should a passenger aircraft need so much compute just to keep it flying? Not to assert that the Max is as troublesome as the backward wing X-29, but how close is too close? IOW, some more, automation to accomplish otherwise tedious pilot input is one thing, using unbidden automation just to stay in flight is quite another.

Which brings us to the lede, appropriately buried near the end of the article:

The overhauled version would move the stabilizer by as much as 2.5 degrees each time it triggered, significantly pushing down the nose of the plane. The earlier version move the stabilizer by 0.6 degrees.

Yes, that's a bunch different. For those only vaguely familiar with how aircraft wings work, the rear wing, aka horizontal stabilizer in standard wing designs, has two moveable parts. One is the elevator, which is the trailing edge hinged, just as the main wing aileron and is managed by the pilot's control, the yoke. It provides fine control over the nose angle in flight. On larger aircraft (and some small private aircraft), such as the 737, the whole tail wing can be rotated. Setting the stabilizer is normally done to balance the aircraft in level flight. Such rotation, being the entire wing, produces very large force. This is what MCAS moves around. I can't find any numbers on the relative max force of elevator deflection and stabilizer rotation, but given the very large difference in area of the two and the fact that rotating the stabilizer also changes the AoA of said stabilizer, it's no surprise that pilots couldn't counteract the MCAS generated stabilizer rotation by moving the yoke/elevator.

The Worst Case Scenario remains in play.