https://www.thedrive.com/news/airlines-are-pushing-to-legali...
There is a real danger when bean-counters with no practical experience run a company and look at every component, including the employees, as a cost center that can be trimmed as needed to tailor results for quarterly reports that guarantee that investors will remain engaged.
Shareholders can get in line behind employees as far as I'm concerned.
I'd say even more, if a company is large enough they should get in line behind workers, and society at large.
For such amount of power there should be systemic mechanisms putting society's interests above shareholders. They can get their share of the pie after that, they definitely wouldn't starve if so.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...
I believe that you are mistaken. Everything that I have ever read indicates that he buys companies that are already well-managed with good long-term prospects and then he lets those proven managers operate without interfering.
I could be wrong. As far as BNSF goes, I know that when Matt Rose was running it after BH bought BNSF that he was highly regarded at BH. I think he was rumored to be in line to replace Buffett if Buffett decided to hand off his position to someone else. I don't think that happened but I know that Rose was a good person who was available to speak with anyone on the railroad if they wanted to talk directly to him.
Like I said, I believe that Buffett looks to make his money by owning profitable companies with strong leadership in markets where they can remain competitive for a long time.
Perhaps to you that means that quarterly reports, though required by the SEC, are not important to Buffett or BH since they obviously take a long view before buying the company in the first place. I don't think it means that BH controls the day-to-day operations of any of the companies that they own or invest in.
I don’t think it does either.
> Like I said, I believe that Buffett looks to make his money by owning profitable companies with strong leadership in markets where they can remain competitive for a long time.
Presumably by employing people who make long term decisions. Why would Buffett keep leadership in place that he thinks are making short term decisions to boost quarterly numbers?
While most extreme of the measures were cut, railroads are still far away from operating safely. There is a John Oliver episode on Freight trains. You know things are bad, when he has an episode.
Before the agreement, when it looked to all the trainmen like they were gonna get fucked again, there was a lot of anger and frustration with their near total absence of control of important things in their lives. They were literally meat to be shuffled like rolling stock up and down the tracks at the whim of their employer. As the terms of the agreements became more clear they realized that the railroads had to back off on their most destructive terms such that trainmen can now have a predictable work schedule, a higher rate of pay, better benefits, etc so it is definitely true that a lot of shit on railroads was broken and contributed to unsafe rolling stock and working conditions, some of that has been corrected simply by insuring that crews have sufficient manpower to manage the longer trains that are running and that the crews are more likely to be rested before they get on the trains. There has been a total attitude adjustment about employment conditions such that there are fewer trainmen looking to change jobs.
This whole collective bargaining exercise began with a majority of trainmen feeling like they had no opportunity to change anything and has resulted in a new-found respect for union leadership in effecting changes that benefit the people doing the work. The railroads, the FRA, the unions, and the administration sat down and worked through problems in a way that gave the employees tangible concessions and that was one thing that most employees would never have counted on happening since the unions had been nearly neutered since the previous collective bargaining agreements were signed around 20 years earlier.
That's why trains have a dead man's switch but planes don't. Though I guess at some point in the future they may. Cirrus already has a system that can be engaged by the passengers in case of a problem with the pilot and that will perform a completely autonomous landing. That's on tiny aircraft though.
Anyway, the point is that if "the computers" had been flying, this would never have happened in the first place. Perhaps we just need one pilot to take over in case there is some emergency that can't be handled by the autopilot.
In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with the aircraft. This is a deficiency in the first officer's instrument flying.
Care to share some of these?