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From my experience I disagree. It's not that we can't do hard things, it's that there's frequently more profitable approaches than taking difficult challenges.

From my experience I disagree. It's not that we can't do hard things, it's that there's frequently more profitable approaches than taking difficult challenges. This is becoming systemic across our culture as ideas drawn from capitalism begin invading all aspects of our lives (including how we interact in personal relationships), not just business. Pushing quicker time to market and cost saving solutions to the brink is part of the driving optimization problem businesses aim to do. This search is done across various contributing costs but inevitably, safety becomes one of factors on the board. I have previous experience with the coal mining industry and I can attest that safety is frequently hit in the name of cost savings. When you think about it, you rarely converge on an optimization solution across a search space from one direction, you typically have to cross boundaries to find the an optimum, especially for highly complex problems with many variables. Inevitably in this search, business interests will conflict with their profit motives as costs are cut down tighter and tighter in convergence. If we're lucky, it's a local optimum and some new technology or finding makes cost savings possible outside of cutting safety.

sisu2019 8y ago
Boeing was capitalist from the start. Why fail now in such a stupid way?
- Frost1x 8y ago
  Obviously Boeing didn't think they'd have planes falling out of the air (that's bad for business), but I suspect the drive to remain competitive and keep shareholders happy led those further down in the organization to push sloppy solutions (as the article described). That's been my lifelong experience working professionally in the US. It's hard to believe those design oversights mentioned were missed by multiole teams of people. As the article pointed out, Boeing did their best to keep these software system changes as quiet as they could, so they wouldn't have to go through a new certification process, which is extremely costly (less costly than having planes crash though). That's not something you do when safety is the top priority but it is when the priority is profit. My central point though is that inherently in the framework of capitalism, the endless pursuit to increase profits by reducing costs (and increasing revenue) will inevitably lead you to the opposite in order to find the optimums you seek. Sometimes, business choices that seem good lead to losses or choices that seem bad lead to gains. You often have to fail (cross the boundaries) in order to see where the boundaries of success lie for various cost saving attributes. All businesses play this game and safety is one of many factors always on the chopping block. Sometimes you have to push safety to see exactly how much investment in safety is truly needed.

sisu2019 8y ago

Boeing was capitalist from the start. Why fail now in such a stupid way?

Frost1x 8y ago
Obviously Boeing didn't think they'd have planes falling out of the air (that's bad for business), but I suspect the drive to remain competitive and keep shareholders happy led those further down in the organization to push sloppy solutions (as the article described). That's been my lifelong experience working professionally in the US. It's hard to believe those design oversights mentioned were missed by multiole teams of people. As the article pointed out, Boeing did their best to keep these software system changes as quiet as they could, so they wouldn't have to go through a new certification process, which is extremely costly (less costly than having planes crash though). That's not something you do when safety is the top priority but it is when the priority is profit. My central point though is that inherently in the framework of capitalism, the endless pursuit to increase profits by reducing costs (and increasing revenue) will inevitably lead you to the opposite in order to find the optimums you seek. Sometimes, business choices that seem good lead to losses or choices that seem bad lead to gains. You often have to fail (cross the boundaries) in order to see where the boundaries of success lie for various cost saving attributes. All businesses play this game and safety is one of many factors always on the chopping block. Sometimes you have to push safety to see exactly how much investment in safety is truly needed.