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Japanese Metal Manufacturer Faked Specifications To Hundreds of Companies (jalopnik.com)
Last week, Kobe Steel admitted that staff fudged reports on the strength and durability of products requested by its clients -- including those from the airline industry, cars, space rockets, and Japan's bullet trains. The company estimated that four percent of aluminum and copper products shipped from September 2016 to August 2017 were falsely labelled, Automotive News reported.
But on Friday, the company's CEO, Hiroya Kawasaki, revealed the scandal has impacted about 500 companies -- doubling the initial count -- and now includes steel products, too. The practice of falsely labeling data to meet customer's specifications could date back more than 10 years, according to the Financial Times.
For rockets the concern is less serious as they generally are not built for a long lifespan, but for airplanes and cars this news could be devastating, requiring major rebuilds on many operating vehicles.
As our Granddads believed it was.
This could explain some conspicuous quality control issues in the materials, if so. There could be a huge lawsuit in the works here.
Sell supplies and advertise twice the lifetime they actually have. Fold the company, let the scandal go public after investing in the company most likely to get rich fixing the problems caused by your fraud.
Double the profit, double the fun!
Seppuku time?
Seriously, though. Holy shit. The only way that company is going to survive in tact is if it is balls deep in some American politician's pocket that's willing to write up a bailout... Yay, capitalism.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
How long until there is a documentable claim that this behavior killed somebody?
Next question that comes to mind: How long until I find out if my car was built with substandard materials?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
It's a lesson when you put unrealistic expectations on people and their performance.
They will cheat to keep their jobs.
And you have to consider how you compensate people too. Incentives can go horribly wrong. Wells Fargo is a perfect example and the financial meltdown of '08 for that matter.
And when I hear from bankers that Dood-Frank can be repealed because the problems have been addressed, I LOL. No they haven't. And it's impossible to address them. Why? Human nature.
They may have addressed the problems (that they know of) but all you need is one Harvard MBA to start pulling 8 figure bonus checks because of a loophole he found. Then others will follow and we'll be right back where we started.
Uh oh... I just hope that they have not been lying about their steak too!
for last week's news
Did Kobe Steel build new headquarters at the earthquake prone area in Japan during the last 10 years by any change?
This is what we in technical terms would call a major oopsie.
It'll be nice to get $30 because my car is affected. In all seriousness I wonder if this will cause recalls?
Coffee: The lifeblood of intelligence in civilization.
I'm surprised this wasn't noticed earlier, if, in fact, the changes were substantial. All of the companies described in the summary have their own materials and finished component testing labs to verify strength, fatigue life, hardness, corrosion resistance, and so on. This is both to check incoming raw material and subsequent processing steps. No one in safety-critical industries trusts the word of a vendor without significant quality control agreements and auditing programs.
Were their metals not properly massaged and marbled as advertised? This sounds familiar...
The Japanese car majors are reporting "no problems" with Kobe aluminum they've tested from the past three years. Japan Rail has said similar about undercarriage parts. There are more years, more metals and more manufacturers involved, but the pattern is clear; these issues will be pencil whipped. There is margin for error engineered into transportation products and no one is going to rip up the floor boards over paper work unless there is a demonstrative problem.
Right or wrong that's how it will be.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
True, but not much tensile strength...
I could imagine how the forum posts would generalize this event to.
They are engineered to the limits of strength-to-weight, and they don't fail gracefully.
I would not put it past Indian or Chinese companies. But I have greater regard for Japanese and American companies. Used to trust Germans too, till Volkswagan diesel emissions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The stock holders are the ones who just got killed.
Yeah? So?
I hope the stock holders are able to "Claw back" the money...
Were Kobe investors some special breed of stock holder that valued quality work and integrity over share prices and dividends? "To hell with earnings! Make sure that paperwork is in order!" said no investor, ever.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Wow, you fucking astroturfers really hate it when I connect the dots for people, don't you?
until they can inspect their fleet. They didn't explicitly call the reason out but it's pretty obvious. The best part is these are likely to be structural problems not easily fixed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I've been hearing about Kobe on English language broadcasts for a while. One constant throughout is a complete lack of contextual information.
We all know they "Falsified data" on strength and durability of aluminum and copper... what does this mean in real terms?. Did they just check the "A-OK" box and fill in fake data without bothering to run the tests? Did they run the tests and then knowingly alter results? What is the difference between what they reported and actual conditions of materials sold? What is the risk? I would be most interested in any references that address these basic questions.
So far every downstream manufacturer who has looked into this has not been able to find anything wrong or at least they are not admitting it publically.
> That is fraud. Whether someone died because if is irrelevant.
It's pretty relevant. If my grievance is that you sold me crappy metal, the resulting litigation will ultimately result in some type of restitution based upon loss of value directly, possible loss of market value, etc. If instead my grievance is that your crappy metal, sold to somebody else, cost me a family member, you are facing a much more open ended amount of damages- you could meaningfully be destroyed by a number of such lawsuits.
Jet fuel melts steel beams.
How closely you need to monitor the specifications depends entirely on how close to the limits of the material you're designing to.
For example, if you design a bridge with a 100% safety margin (design can carry twice its rated load), a 5% variation in the quality of the steel is not as critical as it would be when the design only has a 10% safety margin.
Someone using a 10% safety margin better be testing the metal at all stages of the process. Especially if you're relying on the specific properties of a particular alloy.
My departed grandad always called anything from Japan Jap Crap. I suppose that's an apt description in this case.
46137
How much do you destroy
A few cm^3.
You're reading that wrong. It's not the difference between get over it and take action. It's the difference between huge lawsuits and possibly some jail time and even bigger lawsuits and many many years of jail time.
Compare, Japanese metal
And what, you don't need to test quality in house either? Just because you directly employ people, doesn't mean they're never going to make mistakes.
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality.
As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe.
I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
> you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA
Your good options are:
1) Buy from a steel company and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
2) Build and operate your own foundry and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
You need to test either way. The question is, "which is better, buying steel from a company that is good at making steel, or build and operate your own steel company?" If you're in the business of making appliances, or bottle caps, or lawn sprinklers, or anything other than refining steel, buying from an existing steel maker is probably a better idea than launching your own foundry.
Of course there are also two wrong ways to do it:
1) Buy from a steel company and never test any of it
2) Build and operate your own foundry and never test any of it
Either of those will end up with you using sub-standard steel.
Seriously how hard is systemd? So you have to learn something new once in a while. That doesn't mean throw away everything inclluding OS which I seriously doubt was cheaper (man hours, experience, time spent, alternatives required) than just spending a few hours learning how to go from single-layer serial boots to an event asynchronys model..
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality. As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe. I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
The fact that one company got caught doing shitty work somehow translates into the state of quality of Japanese workmanship :/
Now you've gone too far. Babymetal is awesome.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... they "Falsified data" on strength and durability of aluminum and copper... what does this mean in real terms?. Did they just check the "A-OK" box and fill in fake data without bothering to run the tests? Did they run the tests and then knowingly alter results? What is the difference between what they reported and actual conditions of materials sold? What is the risk? I would be most interested in any references that address these basic questions.
Agreed. All that the outlets I've read have let slip was: 1) there was a whisleblower, that got ignored, 2) all the numbers we've heard: 4% of aluminum sheets & rods, 200 buyers of iron powder, ongoing for up to 10 years, etc.
But what was the whisleblower's observation? Is reporting on that kind of detail just beyond the capacities of English language outlets?
My only guess is products which failed internal testing were by some process packed with good product/labeled as passing, the whisleblower had access to those internal tests but probably company's unclear on who misbehaved. Without internal failed test records, how else would they know "it was 4% of sales"?
If you're in the business of making appliances, or bottle caps, or lawn sprinklers, or anything other than refining steel, buying from an existing steel maker is probably a better idea than launching your own foundry.
The production quantities are clearly highly relevant because some businesses are fully vertically integrated and doing very well with it. Brembo S.A. for example, they actually have their own mines, let alone foundries — and control their production chain all the way through primary distribution. But they're the world's largest manufacturer of brake parts (a lot of it just isn't stamped "Brembo" — manufacturers have to pay extra for that!) so they can keep that whole chain busy on their own.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There has been a rash of poorly made steel used in construction where I live recently, and although the link doesn't really say it, most of the failed steel came from Chinese factories.
The reasons for the poor quality might be more complex than just cost saving or poor controls. There is a cultural drive in some Asian cultures towards saying "yes" when the answer ought to be "no" because they find it difficult to stand up to those they see as in authority.
Although I suspect the importers bought the steel because it was cheap, we have a tradition of shitty construction over here.
Google what happened to the CTV Building during the Christchurch earthquake.
Takata, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, scandals just off the top of my head. Japanese workers may still be fanatically devoted to quality but management seems to be cutting corners more and more. Probably due to increasing price pressure from Korea China et. al.
Japanese quality probably reached its zenith in the late 80's to mid 90's.
How was it discovered? TFA does not tell about that.
The last paragraph reads, in part, "For rockets the concern is less serious as they generally are not built for a long lifespan..." So fraud doesn't count for you? Who wants to find that the manufacturer delivered Less than what was Ordered and Paid for? This is illegal in the USA. What an idiotic statement by the article poster!
Well, it of course all boils down to economics. Rising economies produce mass-market goods cheaply, and get better at making stuff. When their perceived production quality comes closer to that of established quality manufacturers, these quality manufacturers will find themselves in a price war, something that they cannot sustain with their recently acquired standards of living. Rinse and repeat.
Your good options are:
1) Buy from a steel company and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
2) Build and operate your own foundry and test a statistically appropriate number of samples
If the steel company is labelling its steel, it needs to test. The buyer also needs to test. You make it sound like the work is equal, but the testing is going on twice in the outsourcing case.
Of course, outsourcing + in house testing can still be cheaper. But some work is repeated due to trust issues.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I'm doing a LAN of things for my off-grid homestead, some of the machines are for example, Raspberry pi's, some intel nucs, and things below that (which run my own opsys). Why restart things? You must be new to the biz. Mysql_safe for example - anything that needs more than 2 9's of reliability needs a way to make sure it stays up even if the odd cosmic ray hits a ram location and flips a bit...and it goes on and on. Starting things at boot after a power failure...well... LAN of things scenario: Dead of winter, sleeting, high winds, nasty out, 3 am. Power glitch that the ups doesn't quite get, or super EMI from nearby lighting. Old DCF is in bed. One of his automation systems glitches, and it controls interesting things like heat, air compressors for the shop, main system battery run-down protection etc. You mean I should have to get up to restart stuff on a reboot over a minimal glitch in power or an EMI event, go out in that weather and do it to all 4 buildings on my campus, which have more than one machine each, after checking which subsystems in each even need that? The old rc.local method worked fine...and didn't change the rules on every apt-get upgrade... It might be easy as you say if you're up to speed with current dox, and aren't by accident reading old ones that didn't die on the 'net. Not everyone running linux wants to be a super hands-on sysadmin - it's one thing for my laptop but another for "real world use" - and you don't for other opsys to get stuff like this to work. Changing the rules...maybe one reason linux is as popular as it is is because Linus has this rule - don't break userland... ,so I can get on with the stuff I really love, ,and not need a team I can't afford on Social Security (or a possible customer can't afford to pay for or amortize on their crap paycheck).
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If the distros shipped updates to the systemD dox when they break stuff...or if I could just never have to do an update (yeah, right) because no apps would develop dependencies on the new stuff (goodluckwiththat)...I wouldn't care. Heck, if there was one clear well advertised source of dox about systemD that kept up with what set of bugs were shipped in every version of every distro, I'd be happy. Even at age 64, I still learn things, being a real serious engineer even well after I retired. But you have to make it not so hard,
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I don't see any benefit for other than people doing cloud instances of all-the-same-crap with no hardware dependencies at all. Sure, that's a paying customer market, which is why Red Hat is chasing it so hard. BUT!!! It's not the world, there's embedded control too, and lots of other stuff.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Actually, I like Babymetal. I'm just not sure it's what most people think of when they say Metal.