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China’s Cryptocurrency Plan Has a Powerful Partner: Big Brother - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/technology/china-cryptocurrency-facebook-libra.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/10/16/business/16Chinacrypto-illo/00Chinacrypto-illo-facebookJumbo.jpg

BEIJING — When Facebook announced plans this year for a cryptocurrency called Libra, it said its goal was to reinvent money for the internet age. What the company probably didn’t imagine was that its efforts might spur China to get there first.

China wants to start replacing the cash that people carry with a digital currency soon, a long-discussed project that went into overdrive after Libra was unveiled in June. Facebook has been fighting to defend its initiative against skeptical regulators, and key corporate partners have pulled out of the project. But Beijing’s ambitions appear to be moving ahead at full speed.

The system emerging in China looks very different from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that enthusiasts have championed as tools of emancipation from big banks and governments.

A state-issued e-currency would help China’s government know more — much, much more — about how its citizens spend their money, giving it sweeping new powers to fight crime and manage the economy while also raising privacy concerns.
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“It’s extraordinary power and visibility into the financial system, more than any central bank has today,” said Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Not even half a year has passed since Facebook unveiled Libra, but the tech giant’s foray into finance has been met with a steady stream of doubts and questions.

The Federal Reserve says it has “serious concerns.” European officials have threatened to block the project from moving ahead on the Continent. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, is set to appear on Capitol Hill next week to discuss the plans.

For Beijing, Libra has provided another urgent motive for digitizing the currency. China blocks Facebook’s platforms within its borders, but Chinese leaders see in Libra the potential start of a new world financial system, one that could bulldoze the traditional authority of governments and central banks — China’s included.

“If Libra is accepted by everyone and becomes a widely used payment tool, then after some time, it is entirely possible that it will develop into a global, super-sovereign currency,” Mu Changchun, a top official at China’s central bank, said in a recent online lecture. “We need to plan ahead to protect our monetary sovereignty.”

Facebook says Calibra, its digital wallet for holding and spending Libra, will require ID verification, and the company is vowing to use your financial data responsibly. It says it will not, for instance, take note of your pain reliever purchases to push Instagram ads for clinics.

China has suggested that it, too, will keep spending information away from marketers — but not from the authorities. The banks and electronic payment companies that will distribute the new digital currency already require users to authenticate their names and identities. And officials have made clear that the central bank will be able to view data on transactions.

Chinese consumers have for years paid for everything with their phones, and the country’s two dominant mobile payment services, Alipay and WeChat Pay, have become pillars of the Chinese economy. Alipay says it has processed as many as 256,000 payments per second. By comparison, Visa says it can handle 65,000. Libra is promising to do 1,000, at least at the start.

But many transactions on the Chinese platforms move exclusively between digital wallets, never making contact with the state-dominated banking system. That means the Chinese government has to go through the platforms’ privately owned parent companies, Ant Financial and Tencent, if it wants to track and scrutinize those movements.

Not so with the new e-currency.

#Monnaie_numérique #Libra #Chine #Surveillance

Boeing Pilot Complained of ‘Egregious’ Issue With 737 Max in 2016 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/business/boeing-flight-simulator-text-message.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/10/18/business/18BOEING-01/18BOEING-01-facebookJumbo.jpg

Il y a deux choses fascinantes dans cet article :
– l’usage du mot « culture » pour définir l’ensemble des pressions qui s’exercent sur une entreprise dans son ensemble... mais qui évite d’élargir la question à la « culture » de la société en général, qui fait de la concurrence, de l’innovation et du lancement de produit sans véritable certification son modèle de la réussite (i.e. la Silicon valley).

– la pratique de la « complicité » par des acteurs d’un marché, qui vont jusqu’à mentir sciemment à des autorités pour cacher ou minimiser des problèmes. Une question majeure : il n’y a pas de domination sans complicités internes. Comment un réseau d’influence peut-il pousser les gens à mentir et se mentir pour répondre à des injonctions extérieures à leur propre métier/compétences/pratiques ?

Cette affaire Boeing mérite plus encore de réfléchir à la société qu’a construite le néolibéralisme. Une société toxique au plus fort sens du terme.

For months, Boeing has said it had no idea that a new automated system in the 737 Max jet, which played a role in two fatal crashes, was unsafe.

But on Friday, the company gave lawmakers a transcript revealing that a top pilot working on the plane had raised concerns about the system in messages to a colleague in 2016, more than two years before the Max was grounded because of the accidents, which left 346 people dead.

In the messages, the pilot, Mark Forkner, who played a central role in the development of the plane, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was acting unpredictably in a flight simulator: “It’s running rampant.”

The messages are from November 2016, months before the Max was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. “Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he said sardonically to a colleague, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed on Friday by The New York Times.

The Max crisis has consumed Boeing, and the revelation of the messages from Mr. Forkner comes at a particularly sensitive time. The company’s chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, is scheduled to testify before two congressional committees, on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30, the first time a Boeing executive has appeared at a hearing related to the crashes. Boeing’s stock lost 7 percent of its value on Friday, adding to the financial fallout.

The existence of the messages strike at Boeing’s defense that it had done nothing wrong regarding the Max because regulators had cleared the plane to fly, and potentially increases the company’s legal exposure as it faces civil and criminal investigations and multiple lawsuits related to both crashes. Facing competition from Airbus, Boeing worked to produce the Max as quickly as possible, striving to minimize costly training for pilots. Last week, a task force of 10 international regulators released a report that found that Boeing had not fully explained MCAS to the F.A.A.

Mr. Forkner was the chief technical pilot for the Max and was in charge of communicating with the F.A.A. group that determined how pilots would be trained before flying it. He helped Boeing convince international regulators that the Max was safe to fly.

In the messages, he said that during tests in 2016, the simulator showed the plane making unexpected movements through a process called trimming.

“The plane is trimming itself like craxy,” he wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, a fellow 737 technical pilot at Boeing. “I’m like WHAT?”

Mr. Forkner went on to say that he had lied to the F.A.A.

“I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Mr. Forkner says in the messages, though it was not clear what he was specifically referring to.

Lawmakers, regulators and pilots responded with swift condemnation on Friday.

“This is the smoking gun,” Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview. “This is no longer just a regulatory failure and a culture failure. It’s starting to look like criminal misconduct.”

The Times, which was the first to disclose Mr. Forkner’s involvement in the plane, previously reported that he had failed to tell the F.A.A. that the original version of MCAS was being overhauled, leaving regulators with the impression that the system was relatively benign and would be used only in rare cases.

Eight months before the messages were exchanged, Mr. Forkner had asked the F.A.A. if it would be O.K. to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual. The F.A.A., which at the time believed the system would activate only in rare cases and wasn’t dangerous, approved Mr. Forkner’s request.

[The New York Times was the first to report on Mr. Forkner’s role in the development of the 737 Max and his request to the F.A.A.]

Another exchange, in a batch of emails among Mr. Forkner, Boeing colleagues and F.A.A. officials, was also reviewed by The Times on Friday. In one email from November 2016, Mr. Forkner wrote that he was “jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by F.A.A.”

A lawyer for Mr. Forkner downplayed the importance of the messages, suggesting Mr. Forkner was talking about issues with the simulator.

Mr. DeFazio, who as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is overseeing the investigation into the crashes, said he had reviewed other internal Boeing documents and emails that suggested employees were under pressure to produce planes as fast as possible and avoid additional pilot training.

“Boeing cannot say this is about one person,” Mr. DeFazio said. “This is about a cultural failure at Boeing under pressure from Wall Street to just get this thing out there and make sure that you don’t open the door to further pilot training.”

#Boeing #Culture_entreprise #Concurrence #Mensonge #Autorité_régulation