Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric

Debate over the article’s style and AI use

• Many readers felt the piece “looked AI-generated” due to its segmented structure, bullet lists, “key quotes,” and generic header image; several compared it to common LLM answer formatting.
• Others said it read more like a “summary/key takeaways” than a critical review, and suggested retitling or adding more opinion and comparison.
• The author disclosed using AI as an editing aid (e.g., word choice, polishing) but not for core structure or content selection.
• Broader worries surfaced that routine AI use will homogenize writing, sanding off individual “weirdness”; others argued AI will be as normal as word processors and can improve clarity.
• The AI-style artwork sparked ethical concerns as an uncredited derivative of a Getty image.

GE, Welchism, and corporate financialization

• Multiple comments connect Jack Welch’s ideology to the broader financialization of US corporations: short-termism, financial engineering, “imperial CEO” worship, and stack-ranking cultures.
• Other books (e.g., on Welch and the Immelt era) are cited as showing how this mindset spread into firms like Boeing and helped erode engineering quality and safety culture.
• Some readers revise their view of Welch: operationally competent and innovative around GE Capital, but ultimately responsible for choices (including his successor) that set up later collapse.
• Personal anecdotes from ex-employees describe constant reorgs, contempt for software, arbitrary leadership, and “make the number go up” pressure.

Conglomerates, synergies, and GE’s breakup

• One camp sees GE’s decline as part of a natural shift away from sprawling conglomerates; in a “good” counterfactual GE would likely have been broken up earlier.
• Others argue there were real engineering synergies (e.g., MRI, jet engines, RF, power electronics) that large diversified industrial labs uniquely enabled—but were squandered by MBA-style management.
• GE Capital’s ability to capture financing margins is seen as both a powerful profit engine and a key vulnerability exposed in 2008.
• Current GE is framed as a very different, slimmer aerospace-centric company; some employees and investors report it is now in significantly better shape.

Pensions, retirement risk, and “human wreckage”

• The “human wreckage” theme resonated: workers, pensioners, and smaller investors were left worse off, while those who extracted value early retired or sold out.
• Long subthread debates:
  • Defined benefit vs defined contribution: DB praised for risk pooling and criticized for chronic underfunding and political games; DC praised for portability and control but seen as dumping risk onto less-informed, lower-income workers.
  • Examples from Norway, Australia, New Zealand highlight mandatory, individual-account systems as alternatives.
  • Several note that early postwar corporate pensions made more sense in an era without index funds, discount brokers, or modern retirement vehicles.
• Broader frustration emerges about lack of executive accountability and the ease with which costs of failure are socialized via bailouts or underfunded pensions.

Wider reflections

• Some commenters emphasize that financial engineering often shades into “lying to investors” when internal realities are obscured.
• Others stress that this thread itself drifted heavily into AI-authorship policing rather than engaging deeply with GE’s business lessons—seen as symptomatic of current discourse.