Sometimes the stupidity is breathtaking - as in laughing so hard you can’t breathe. She’s just “asking questions”. And they’re really stupid.
To be fair: Ford, like Musk, had the bad habit of not listening to advice because he believed he knew better than everyone else. Which was why Fordlândia plantation failed and why producing anything other than the Model T took so long.
She resigned as president of the council. She did not resign from her council seat. So she stepped down from the position that the rest of the council members elected her to, but not the position that the public elected her to. I guess that’s fitting since the racist comments she made were about another council member’s children.
Hmm… I guess that LA matter could be followed up in another thread or its own.
Without that “bad” habit, the Model T wouldn’t have existed in the first place. There were hundreds of US automakers around at the turn of the century, pretty much all building cars the way carriages had been built. I’m sure that Ford got plenty of advice from helpful people that his plan is crazy, that hundreds of factories using bespoke manufacturing techniques can’t be all wrong, and that these ideas about interchangeable parts and such will never work out.
There is always the risk that ignoring reasonable-sounding advice will turn pathological at some point. But it’s also the only way innovation happens at all. Since successful innovations like the Model T can pay for quite a few Fordlândias, it’s probably best to have a bias against following conventional wisdom.
Except Oldsmobile, which beat Ford to the assembly line. Henry simply made it move.
Interchangeable parts were the real innovation, to my mind (Ford didn’t invent that either, but he did bring it to the auto industry at scale).
It may sound surprising now, but you couldn’t simply take any two engine components back then and bolt them together with any hope of getting a successful match. The precision and repeatability had to be greatly increased to make that happen. But once you have that, you can just dump a load of parts at each station, each one just adding their piece, and not worry about having to line up mounting holes or anything.
Mr. Cash would disagree with you.
And that’s when we noticed that something was definitely wrong
The transmission was a '53 and the motor turned out to be a '73
And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone
I would strongly suggest you go watch “The Cars The Built America” for a better insight of Mr. Ford.
Dude was a straight up violent asshole that got his striking workers killed by his hired goon.
And while other manufactures had moved on to sleeker more aerodynamic cars that people actually wanted, he was still stuck on the model T. Despite his own son telling him to move the fuck on.
That’s unrelated to whether he was a successful innovator with the Model T. You seem unable to distinguish Ford’s personal qualities with his business qualities.
My point, again, is this: innovators, almost by definition, ignore reasonable-sounding advice. That’s not exactly what makes them successful, but it’s what enables them to be successful at all. The people that listened to the advice have a 100% failure rate, since they never even made an attempt. The people that ignored the advice have perhaps a 90% failure rate.
As I mentioned, this can turn pathological. Most of the time, I’d expect. No one has a magic formula for distinguishing actually good advice from reasonable-sounding but actually bad advice. Which means that innovators will keep doing their thing until they fail badly enough that they lose the resources to keep trying.
In 1798 Eli Whitney built a firearms factory near New Haven. The muskets his workmen made by methods comparable to those of modern mass industrial production were the first to have standardized, interchangeable parts.
It’s not THAT new of an idea.
Didn’t I already say that
I guess I did. Cars have a lot more parts than guns, and require higher precision in the parts that interface with each other. It’s a more difficult problem.
It’s weird that people have this intense need to consider other people on a single axis. Because Ford was a violent, antisemitic asshole, he must not have been an innovator either, because that would mean he’s good on one axis and bad on another. And then they go and search for some complexity in the history, which usually amounts to discovering that the child’s version of the history that they were taught doesn’t quite match the reality, and conclude from that that yes, they were right all along to conclude that because the person was bad at A, then they were bad at B and C. Thought-terminating cliche completed.
Bill Gates didn’t invent Windows, he was ruthless in business and just stole the idea from Xerox. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the smartphone, he was a poopy butthole that parked in handicapped spaces. Etc.
Right, if you ignore “common sense” and that makes you successful once or even a few times, then you are inclined to continue ignoring more and more common sense, even the bits that actually make sense.
Fortunately for the wealthy, once you have wealth, you can pass the cost of your failures onto others.
I am not so sure that anyone is actually saying anything quite like that.
We do point out that founders George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were slave owners, but it is not normally used as an excuse to villify them. Charles Lindbergh was a NAZI sympathiser, but he is still held in high regard. And JFK was a member of America First (opposed to US involvement in that big war over yonder, which arguably cost many more lives because of the delay) but few people say that that made him a bad person. Not to mention that International Business Machines supplied the Third Reich with tabulating machines that aided them in their genocidal efforts, but no one seems to hold that against them, per se.
And a few extra factors on top of that:
- Even legitimately good common sense may only be true statistically, when what’s important is the exceptional case. It probably was true that Ford had a low chance of success; that the odds were that he’d go broke dumping all that money into developing a car for the masses. Even if it was just dumb luck that he succeeded where others failed, well, it was still the case that he was the one that took the risk.
- There is the all-too-human trait of thinking that success in one area translates to success elsewhere. Jobs’ legitimate genius in consumer electronics did not translate to good ideas for cancer treatment.
- There’s no surefire way to distinguish good common sense from bad, anyway. If you’re going to ignore any of it, you’re probably going to ignore all of it.
Where do you place the contribution of luck to a person’s success? This is kind of a non-trivial matter.
It’s obviously a large contributor. But it has the most relevance when combined with (smart) risk-taking. Risk-taking is crucial for innovation, since almost all ideas are bad ones, and the only way we know of separating good from bad is to try them and see which succeeds. But there’s also a large luck factor here, since even among the best ideas, some will fail just due to a bad turn of events.
There is currently a lot of churn in the space launch industry, with hundreds of startups. Almost all will fail, but a few will win big. That’s just the way things go. Happened with autos, happened with CPUs, happened with graphics chips (my industry), and it’s currently happening with space.
I have a great deal of respect for the “glorious failures”, as I expect some of the more out-there ideas to be. I don’t have any need to play armchair quarterback and point out why they were “obviously” doomed, even though it’s likely non-obvious (except in the case of fraud).
In short, we can respect a person’s accomplishments independently of other factors. Luck plays a part, but it only distinguishes successful risk-takers from unsuccessful. Those that did not take the risk don’t even get the lottery ticket.
Senator Ben Sasse, who has been pretending to be anti-Individual 1, has resigned from the Senate just to muddle things for a few months so that he can be the new President of the University of Florida. The announcement of Sasse as President has been met with dismay and anger from Florida’s students, due to Sasse’s past anti-gay comments. His website still calls for the “sanctity of marriage”.
Current reporting has her attacking Jews and Armenians as well during her little rant.
I guess she didn’t want them to feel left out.