@asymco
With military expenditure historically more than the next 10 nations combined, I believe it is probably for the best Americans are reluctant to sanction more wars of foreign adventure. Even with that, we’ve voluntarily jumped into Korea, Vietnam, Iraq a few times, Afghanistan, Grenada, etc. usually without much gratitude of the people living there, and justifiably so.

Do not tempt this bear.

@asymco
While I can see the point of dividing by sales here, the day to day experience of how the average engineer is treated by management is not divided by sales. Also, as you’ve shown previously, engineering expense precedes sales, so would be expected to go up in a growing company, which it certainly grew over that time. So, dividing out by sales has a time component, and is not quite this simple.

The plot might also be a lot more instructive if it included the capital return program. We may ask which groups in that plot created that value and which did not.

@rbreich

This is akin to the well known fact that the average investor underperforms index funds by approximately a wide margin, typically losing to inflation. The people who get the index fund performance are those who buy and never do anything again — as a class, dead people. Given his willingness to stoop to grift to secure profits, I sincerely doubt Mr Trump would have had the patience to invest and simply do nothing, at least while still living.

@asymco
“I pointed out how important employees are to the company and my belief that their commitment is probably management’s greatest concern.”

Hah! No. Based on my 21 years there and my friends who are still there, management commitment to engineering has never been lower. They are strangling the engineering staff in the name of profits, particularly with deeply limited hiring. Hiring freezes are no a permanent thing not just a year or two. Policies like return to office designed to constructively dismiss employees are still in place. The supply of irritating CYA legal courses for engineers grows every year. They have concluded they don’t need engineering except to preserve the status quo and would rather make the money on finance and services.

Alternatively, you could have a nice subsidized fossil fuel plant, then make a case with the captive regulator that the sequestration part costs too much, and get approved for atmospheric release instead. Why? Jobs, of course. Better than shutting a “perfectly good” new plant down — we should pay people to accelerate the climate change! What agency in Louisiana would balk at such a request? They certainly haven’t until now.

The time to stop this nonsense was when the lobbyists were in Washington pushing an “all of the above” approach to US energy security. Now that the money is approved, chicanery will follow. Our only hope would be an extensive chemical engineering review of the project to see if it is even likely to be possible under physical law and economic reality, and deny those applications that aren’t.