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Comment by el-dude-arino | Hacker News Reader

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At the very least we should have a corporate death penalty. Force the company into bankruptcy, de-list it from the stock market, and turn it into a worker-owned co-op that can never be publicly traded or be sold to private equity.

Yes I feel this needs to hit the shareholders hard. But they'll just continue to cut costs to get the value back up and we'll be back here in a couple of years. It needs deep institutional changes and I can't see that happening.

Worker-owned companies have a unbelievably shitty record in the aviation space.It's been tried.

The right thing to do at this point is to go the airbus route, make the government responsible for launch aid, and put engineers back in charge of the company.

Even if we had it politicians would rush to protect Boeing. It’s too critical a partner for many large national defense projects.

If it's important enough to national defense, let's nationalize it. Or at least move the parts we absolutely need to the DoD.

They should break the civil aviation business off into a new company.

A death penalty for grossly negligent execs is also necessary.

They'd get their shit together so fast if they faced meaningful consequences to their fuckups.

They should at least revoke financial liability protection for the members of the board.

I am not going to defend execs/board members, but that seems ill advised.

If you had a death penalty for execs, most competent people would refuse the job, and you'd end up in a worse situation.

Where are the competent people taking the job now?

Airbus? The death penalty would apply to them too, presumably.

Prison and even the death penalty should absolutely be considered for the bean-counting Boeing execs that deliberately drove safety into the ground for profit. The blood of innocents is on their hands, and yet they get to cheerfully cash in their stock options.

Airbus execs seem fine[1], so they'd have nothing to fear here.

[1]: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Lol nothing to fear except the death penalty if employees you never heard of 5 reporting lines below you screw up badly enough?

Where do people come up with this stuff. If you want a mass exodus from airline management and sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.

> if employees you never heard of 5 reporting lines below you screw up badly enough?

Sounds like a good way to encourage execs to prioritize safety systemically.

In either case, of course negligent decisions on part of the C-suite would be considered.

> sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.

Compensations would increase accordingly. The industry would be fine.

There is no level of compensation you can give someone to compensate for the risk of sudden execution because they tried, but didn't succeed.

If a corporation can be "punished" to become a co-op, what incentive does that give the employees?

Most workers are already hopelessly alienated and don’t give an eff…

I think GP meant that they might give more of a fuck (in the wrong direction) if sabotaging "just this one bolt" means this they can own a significant chunk of stock in the company they are part of.

According to a quick search Boeing has a market cap of ~150 billion and 150k employees, so if you manage to hide that it was you who installed the bolt wrong then assuming the company gets distributed roughly equally among employees then that's a quick 1 million payday. How certain are you that "hopelessly alienated" employees wouldn't sell out a few hundred anonymous passengers for a million bucks?

Seems the fix is going to co-op straight away then.

Or to skip the co-op system entirely because it doesn't work all that well in practice.

Don't forget that f-er Harry Stonecipher, a man who gave "don't give a shit" a bad name.

The way you phrased it, I figured that "don't give a shit" was a Stonecipher catch phrase or something. Sort of like Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things".

He did say "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" and he does seem to have been successful at making it into something other than a great engineering firm.

Stonecipher was the "leadership" that came in from McD when they effectively took over Boeing, replacing their traditional care with literally anything for a buck.

Yeah and their practices have spread into big tech too.

Their practices spread everywhere, most corporations behave following Jack Welch's MBA teachings: cut costs (massive layoffs are Welch's bread and butter), return as much as possible to shareholders because they are the only important players in the corporate game (fuck society, fuck the workers).

I hate Welch and all of his acolytes with a passion.

Can you elaborate?

Probably they refer to Tesla, Full Self Driving feature but the small print explains that is not "full self driving" the name is just an aspiration, the advertisement statement are also false because are also aspirations etc. AFAIK there is soem kind of investigation about the mode this feature was advertised and I expect that sooner or later the people that were tricked to pay for a FSD would demand their money back since the promises were not kept. About their safety, the human must pay attention all the time so we can judge the safety of the software because the human intervenes when the situation is to unsafe and prevents the crashes, with the exception when the humans do not pay attention and the car kills/injures them.(any idea what happen with that software guy killed in a Tesla? did the family pursue the cause in justice or they got money to give up?)

Amazon was the one that came to mind with prime air/drone delivery https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/amazon-hires-former-boei...

I guess it all really started with everyone’s favorite CEO of GE, Jack Welch. It seems like he created the blueprint for the cost cutting/stack ranking/MBAs/profits over quality that we see today.

It's a shame you can't short their shares during the weekend...

Already priced in

How is Jack Welch implicated?

Jack Welch is (in)famous for his management style and the impact that his style has had on American business.

I won't opine too much on it, but the most concise way to put it is an extreme concentration on producing shareholder value as quickly as possible at the expense of basically everything else.

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