Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion that the safety culture started to break down after 1997 after the merger with McDonnell Douglas?
Yes-- this represents formal acknowledgement by a regulatory agency. The hope is that agency can now use this formalization to enforce change within Boeing.
Yes, I know some pension fund somewhere is invested in Boeing. No, I don’t care. Will we ever solve corruption and climate change if we refuse to actually change our ways?
Regarding climate change I have hope, but again, same greed, kind of would dictate that at best we will slow it down.
Whatever you will decide to do with boeing, you will have to make employees, shareholders and numerous clients (incl. Us military) content.
Btw. I own a share of a fund which has shares of boeing. Should I go to jail?
people are greedy
Whatever you will decide to do with Boeing, you will have to make employees, shareholders and numerous clients (incl. Us military) content.
What if many of the smart, motivated Boeing engineers would be more productive in a dynamic marketplace of smaller firms? What if there's a warp drive concept lurking in the mind of an underutilized systems analyst deep in the basements of their valley? Investing all these resources, especially public fiscal ones, into a company that has proven again and again to prioritize suicidally negligent, short term, excessively selfish thinking... well, it seems criminally unjust.
TL;DR_1: I don't need him, he needs me!
I own a share of a fund which has shares of boeing. Should I go to jail?
Yes, I think the people who lobbied for cost cutting and dividend/buyback programs within the company deserve to be criminally investigated. I am so far from a lawyer and doubt our exact current laws and policies (esp. SEC) would be enough, so the most specific I can get is "charges related to negligence and greed" TBH.
But no, I was being unclear when I said "owners" -- not all owners of any amount of the stock are complicit, other than in a broad ethical-consumerism sense. You're on Hacker News, so I have no doubt at all that you're living your life in good faith.
TL;DR_2: capitalists != investors
> that specific companies that are found systematically guilty of some sort of crime should be forcibly disbanded.
There are limitations what can be actually done to boeing, even if a lot of people agree that boeing is faulty.
It is not feasible to just nuke it from the orbit. (As in, “there was boeing a minute ago, and now there is vacuum”) For example, somehow supply/services to Us military MUST be kept. Maybe restructuring, maybe some execs investigated, maybe penalty, but military must be supplied. (Not disagreeing with the sentiment regarding accountability per se, but implementation must be compatible with current reality)
> You're on Hacker News, so I have no doubt at all that you're living your life in good faith.
Thanks for that, but I would caution you to adjust this heuristic. As I see it, HN is a good filter for tech curiuosity, but it is orthogonal to a lots of things. I’ve read that suicide bombers frequently were engineers.
She is the least knowledgeable person to be anywhere close to a Boeing strategy of change.
And, just like "Eat The Rich" is rhetoric, so is "..and it's, like, twelve people." It's not 12, it's anyone making more than $X00,000, wherever X makes her more popular with her base.
I lost all credibility by quoting a politician I like in a relevant way? Seems like an awfully fragile conception of credibility.
Re:it’s not literally 12 people, thanks, I know. It’s not 1% either. I don’t hate the rich, I hate capitalists; I’ve never had any capital and maintain no empathy for the monsters who do. They do things like defund safety programs so much that planes literally disintegrate in mid air.
If the Jack Welch style of capitalism is failing, it can be changed. For example, there is a national Labor relations board because we don't do this anarchically.
Unless/until Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe’s manage to gut the NLRB with their recent legal challenges.
No, they just have to make following a safety culture less expensive than not. For example, by conducting proper audits. If not following safety requirements means that new planes are not certified and the others get grounded before it is fixed, then it is going to get more costly for Boeing than doing it right to begin with.
That's what regulations are for.
And undermining quality is often not profitable. That's because their customers also want to maximize their profits, and a bad plane, one that doesn't last, requires frequent repairs, is unreliable, has a bad reputation with passengers, etc... isn't going to be very valuable. Customers will pay more for a good plane that offers better returns on investment. This is the same for any B2B company. Consumers are a bit easier to fool, especially with good advertising (which is also expensive), but at some point, they too will realize that a brand is worthless.
Outsourcing and building the Max fast led to good numbers at the annual shareholder meeting. Arguably it still does because what is anyone going to do? Buy Airbus? They have waiting lists too.
It can be channeled, directed and mitigated. That is what regulations and regulatory agencies do. Although of course you need to watch the watchers so they don't get captured.
* and even if it were, we channel, direct, and mitigate forces of nature all the time, if not always to great success, or without consequences
I don't cut Boeing much slack, but some of this also falls on the FAA for delegating certain oversight activities to the manufacturer. I assume they do it for manpower reasons (ie there just aren't enough FAA employees to do the job sufficiently).
It is understandable that regulators would take a lighter hand to a company which has shown good ethics — which was historically the case of Boeing (more of an issue if that is because of not being able to handle the load), it's a problem if they go completely hands off.
I don't think the FAA is the sole culprit here either, we've not heard much of non-american regulators. While it makes sense that the FAA would be the primary regulator for Boeing, that regulators would cooperate internationally, and that non-primary regulators would have to be careful e.g. around the risk of being called out for trade restrictions, I still feel non-US regulators should have been a lot more involved with and suspicious of Boeing following the MCAS mess.
If you ask a company, any company, what the most important aspect of their product is, they’ll proudly crow “the quality of it.”
And yet, we still, for some reason, have to deploy the FAA to make sure profits didn’t take a front seat to not killing hundreds of people.
The FAA shouldn’t need to exist. It only does because private industry _never_ holds up its end of the bargain. It’s a race to the bottom. Unfortunately it’s not just consumer products that eventually get enshittified, it’s also big things that can kill us (737 Max 8s and Tesla autopilots apparently).
No, just make it very costly to have quality lapses. Capitalism takes care of the rest. When it's effective government regulation makes companies pay for costs that would otherwise be externalized.
That said, I hope to god you’re a socialist lol. The stance “capitalism inevitably leads to corner cutting, but it’s still the best we’ve got” would have the potential to literally break my mind with consternation.
Not sure if confirms the cause of those issues or where/when the infection took hold.
Spreading manufacturing all over the US is also more to do with getting kore congressional districts “pregnant” than with national defense. In war you want multiple, as in redundant, supply lines so if one is cut, you can source matériel from somewhere else. What we have is multiple, as in single point of failure, supply lines. Lose one and everything collapses.
Everything Wendover Productions makes is so helpful!