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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

No, fire every member of the board of directors and bar them from ever serving on the board of a public corporation again.

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You're both thinking too small.

Force the members of the board to constantly fly on the affected models until questions are answered and fixes are delivered.

Call it "ultimate dogfooding".

I like this. It's a little bit like the Hammurabi code. It's a very simple way to ensure compliance - assuming that the board member on the plane is competent enough to judge that the plane is good enough to fly on.

Planes, even Boeing planes, are the safest form of transportation, at least in the US, if not globally. This punishment makes exactly 0 sense.

Boeings own staff said they wouldn't fly on the 737-Max.

Either they're being hyperbolic and there's zero risk to the board members, or they aren't and thus the board members have a vested interest in making sure the planes become a lot safer a lot quicker.

It's a win either way.

People forget the time that Thomas Midgely Jr, you know, the leaded gas guy (which was only superior to ethanol enriched like we do nowadays, which was 100% viable back then, in that it made gas companies more profit) explicitly poured TEL (the leaded additive) all over his hands and smelled its vapors to "prove" it was safe. He literally suffered lead poisoning from this event and working on the product in general. He knew it was harming people and still did the public PR stunt.

Execs will 100% do the dangerous thing to make more money even if it puts themselves in immediate danger. Execs rarely have a well developed understanding of risk, and will happily take an 80% risk with the downside being dying.

They are gamblers, not rational.

Why not both?

I’d argue grounding is more serious as it inflicts pain on their customers as well.

this is a hilarious take. It's certainly more serious for their customers, but is it more serious for the responsible parties (the board of directors)? It seems clearly not.

They all have golden parachutes, I’m sure. What consequences will they actually face even if canned? I’m serious.

Also bar them from serving as an officer of a public company. That will hurt.

You know 'enough money to live very very very well' isn't enough for people who climb to the top to be on the board of such of a corporation. They care just as much about reputation, further ability to work to make more money, and more money.

Observing the whole debacle I very much doubt they care about their 'reputation'

Do you have their names memorized? If you met one dining with their family at a country club, would you know what they did?

Their personal reputations are still largely intact.

> Do you have their names memorized? If you met one dining with their family at a country club, would you know what they did?

> Their personal reputations are still largely intact.

Well person who would be attending country club would know that they raised shareholders value and more than likely helped to them to gain X millions of Dollars.

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