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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

"Boeing did not build great planes because of the FAA. They built them because their culture and expertise were aligned to do so."

People say things like this, that when a company is competent, or ethical, or whatever, that it's not thanks to the government.

Yet I hear/read every day where a company says that they cannot do a given sensible, or ethical thing because it is not mandated by law. Every disclosure (e.g. privacy) I get with a financial account says that they cannot give customers more rights than are mandated by law.

I wonder what the reason for this disconnect is?

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The disconnect appeared when companies stopped being driven by shareholders and become driven by Wall Street bean counters. I work for a very large company that lost the CEO because the Wall Street was not happy the guy did not fire enough people to meet their predictions; the next CEO fired the employees and contracted double the number as external suppliers, it was bad for the company and very bad for shareholders, but Wall Street was happy and the guy is still a CEO.

And Wall Street does not care about sensible or ethical things, so the companies are not allowed to. Not anymore.

Government regulation can certainly help, as long as you can somehow ensure adequate expertise and actions are taken. For example, a lot of farm raised shrimp from outside the US is not what it is advertised to be. This impacts legit US producers who want to sell healthy food by putting them out of business. If the USDA and FDA actually were competently regulating, then this would not happen.

Aircraft are much more difficult. When making the 747, Boeing was faced with needing to have it certified by the FAA, but FAA did not have the expertise to do that. So Boeing worked with the FAA to develop the regs and tests and so on. I really cannot imagine how the FAA would ever be able to hold on to a competent aviation grade software engineer for very long. Even if they could hire one, within a year or two their skills would atrophe.

The Faa engineer does not write code. They review archictal level changes and plans. I would be surprised if they even saw the raw code, it’s more likely to be a logic diagram or a higher level schematic and then a test plan to validate it works as expected

> This impacts legit US producers who want to sell healthy food by putting them out of business.

I'm sorry but there is no evidence for this claim. I can't think of a single Big Food company that wants to sell healthy food. Look at the poultry industry. Look at how milk, pork, and beef are produced. There's no reason to believe that "Big Shrimp" would be any more ethical.

Local corporations put profit before health and safety just as much as foreign corporations do.

Yeah, because the people who would have wanted to put healthy food before profit have either overcome that desire or gone out of business. Just as GP's model predicts. The corporations you get are the ones you regulate for.

The tech industry is the same: we'd love to protect users' data better than regulation demands, but it's hard to make the business case because you just do a lot of work to put yourself at a competitive disadvantage while the users don't notice or don't believe the difference. If data protection were effectively regulated then compliance woudn't be a competitive disadvantage, and then we might have a hope in hell of shipping a good product.

As an off the cuff thought, primarily employee owned businesses would possibly bring this back.

> they cannot give customers more rights

They do not give more rights. Because it is easier to do the minimum.

But probably not that much harder to comply with the spirit of the law in addition to the letter, in most cases.

Perhaps it is simply culture, that is, in modern corporate culture, there is only one (usually) legitimate excuse to not do something you are told to, and that is that it is illegal.

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