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Call me a partisan hack but the fact of the matter is this situation is murkier politically than a lot of other similar controversies. There is a direct conflict of interest between our president and the CEO of a major American multi-national country and due to an amazing lack of transparency we have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

President's divest from their holdings upon taking the office for a very specific reason, the fact that Boeing's CEO is a customer of one of the president's properties really should be scrutinized heavily. If these crashes happened on our soil there would be no doubt in my mind that this plane would be grounded.

It's a conflict of interest of course. The good thing is that it hurts a lot of people, especially people with disposable income with the power to change things, and especially people with stores of capital/influence. It's like a SaaS product, where sales/marketing (the most important division of a company) literally cannot do their jobs if engineering-provided services go down. It's much less easy to gouge engineering in such a situation than say releasing a waterfall build, and having it fail after the sale.

If POTUS & Co. restrained themselves to separating children at the border and disappearing them into pedophile rings that they may frequent later (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/children-separat...), people may not be as outraged, because it doesn't affect them. Instead, they flaunt their power in our faces, in a way that may affect our physical safety. They don't whisper, and that's good.

What would be really concerning is if people think this is okay, and the people with means realize the only way to really stay safe in a world where laws don't mean too much is to become part of the government, like in Russia. Then you have things like ambulance limos (https://jalopnik.com/ultra-rich-russians-hire-fake-ambulance...). I wouldn't know how to work backwards from that.

> and the Secretary of Transportation is the Senate Majority Leader's wife who is also lobbied by Boeing

When Mitch McConnell's wife Elaine Chao got assignment as the secretary of Depart of Transportation, Mitch McConnell should resign already.

Additionally, FAA's no-action silent "we don't know if 737Max8 is not safe" approach as oppose to "we know it's safe" is unacceptable.

> So if you're concerned because Boeing's CEO is a Mar-A-Lago member with direct access to POTUS (who wants his club fees), and the Secretary of Transportation is the Senate Majority Leader's wife who is also lobbied by Boeing, and the FAA hasn't had an official administrator for two months, and the FAA can't approve safety fixes by Boeing due to government shutdowns, and aircraft manufacturing consolidation means Boeing is "too big to fail" ...

Sure corruption is something we need to avoid but another way to look at this is that sure the high functioning successful people you want running the government are naturally going to have connections to high functioning successful people in the private sector. It is not in and of itself a bad thing.

I think that's true to a point, but we are way past that point. We're at the point where when the government works with the private sector, a worse result is created than if the government had created it alone, or if the private sector had created it alone, where you could form a total ordering. There is no recognizable gestalt, and whole point of public/private cooperation is to generate those gestalts.

Another way I look at this is, "what needs to be true for this situation to be the best possible situation for the parties involved? How does this make sense?". When I look at it this way, the FAA not grounding this plane doesn't make sense if you follow a path benefiting the general public, barring some extenuating private knowledge. It seems to be a long path of short-term optimizations.

A fundamental problem with regulation of an industry is one needs to have experts in the industry create and enforce the regulations. But how does one become such an expert? By working in the industry.

The alternative is having incompetents doing the regulation and enforcement.

The problem, I think, is there's no established protocol in this situation. Congress leaves entirely too much decision making up to the executive branch. How hard is it to write a law such as "If the same (public) commercial model plane crashes with fatalities more than once in an 18 month period, that model plane shall be grounded indefinitely until a root cause is established and mitigated"

This would have some interesting knock-on effects such as maybe airlines would value diversity in the fleets just a little bit more.

> How hard is it to write a law such as "If the same (public) commercial model plane crashes with fatalities more than once in an 18 month period, that model plane shall be grounded indefinitely until a root cause is established and mitigated"

The problem is if you write a law like that, then even if the FAA still otherwise nominally retains its existing power, the mere fact of the "2 in 18-months" rule in statute will have an effect of discouraging groundings with less than two crashes, or with 2 crashes more than 18-months apart. So, unless Congress is going to replace the FAA's decision making role and manage the details of response to each incident, which I think we can all agree would be a disaster itself, its probably not a good idea.

EDIT: Which is why Congress' role of executive oversight and accountability is as important as its role of writing legislation; sometimes there is no good safeguard available through more statutory rules, the best you can do is assure competence and dedication in the executive and apply consequences if there are shortfalls.

> will have an effect of discouraging groundings with less than two crashes, or with 2 crashes more than 18-months apart.

I don't see why this is necessarily the case. Clearly, there should be some established baseline to prevent regulatory capture by the industry.

> Which is why Congress' role of executive oversight and accountability is as important as its role of writing legislation

I think it's fair to say that object executive oversight has gone completely out the window in the last 20 years or so.

> I don't see why this is necessarily the case.

It is not necessarily the case in the sense of logical implication. Its just almost certainly the case, in the way in which laws effect implementing behavior in the real world.

Legislation which is mindful only of logical implication and not practical implication is a good way to screw things up.

> I think it's fair to say that object executive oversight has gone completely out the window in the last 20 years or so.

It is, and that's a problem that should be fixed. Asking Congress to micromanage by legislation rather than fixing the problems with executive oversight is not a solution, however.

>airlines would value diversity in the fleets

aka much more money to certify pilot crew, aka more expensive fares, aka less experience for any given pilot with some particular aircraft type.

Also on the upside, we now have a list of countries that place more value on consumers than the US.

So, all of them?

There is a downside to consumers to grounding those airplanes. Since there are lot of those airplanes in service, it'll result in delays, difficulty booking flights, and significant ticket price increases.

FWIW, Trump just ordered the 737Max to be grounded, not sure whether it's despite of FAA decision or overriding them.