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Boeing put Wall Street first, safety second ahead of Alaska Air blowout
- supercanuck 3y agoIt has been like that for 20 years.
- flandish 3y ago* all the years capitalism has existed. This is bog-standard capitalist formula. Profit over people. Worker and customer and public alike.
- whythre 3y agoAs opposed to the other big economic system, the one that always seem to involve a lot of camps and mass graves.
- aaomidi 3y agoPretending that capitalism doesn’t kill people doesn’t really help move the conversation. There’s also more options than Soviet Union’s state capitalism and US’ “market” capitalism.
- piva00 3y agoCapitalism has its own ways to kill people as well, just with some extra layers to blame the victims.
- readthenotes1 3y agoAnd government run monopolies don't? E.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_accidents_and_incid...
- piva00 3y agoDid I say that?
- flandish 3y agoWhat other system? Capitalism has camps and mass graves. The other system has never been implemented. You know this.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoAs somebody from Eastern Block, it is not much worse. Government will forcibly create monopoly businesses, they have no reason to improve their products and to top it off, you can't create competing business, because government does not allow that. Just look what was the result after 1989 - companies who could compete with western ones, because government did not required innovation last 40 years and 5 year plans were solved by throwing more people at the problem or outright lying. Result was that products were often obsolete long before manufacturing even started, what was made were poor quality (i.e. we called it finish it at home) and much more expensive than in the rotten West.
- jqpabc123 3y agoEven longer. American business operates like a feudal system with lords and peasants. Management are the lords and everyone else are the expendable peasants. Occasionally, the lords are forced to acknowledge that the peasants are just as essential as they are. Without them there is nothing and no one to "lord" over. This is the abherrent phase that Boeing has just entered. The system will be forced to either return to normal or simply cease to exist a la GE.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Management are the lords and everyone else are the expendable peasants Boards are the lords. Management without a board seat are the bourgeoisie; Boeing engineers, too. To the degree we have peasants in modern America, it’s in agriculture and retail, not at Boeing.
- spxneo 3y agoI was quite surprised how authoritarian American/Canadian business environments were and subconsciously/covertly racist without saying it outright. I still vividly remember when I was in my 20s, an American executive from a fortune 500 company forgetting to unmute himself and accidentally unmasking himself and the attitude of those around him. They were at the forefront of "woke" and "diversity". This is when I learned it was just another slogan like "human rights" to make the citizens feel good about themselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoBecause Boeing is so important to national security, everyone involved in leading this from the CEO to the board of directors should be treated as traitors and have all their assets seized and spend the rest of their life in a maximum security federal prison.
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoCareful you don't hurt yourself with reactions like those.
- fwip 3y agoYou believe it's so traitorous to try to cut costs that it should result in life in prison for all members of the board and CEO? And why maximum security, do you believe they are going to be tunneling out with spoons?
- RobotToaster 3y ago> And why maximum security, do you believe they are going to be tunneling out with spoons? Boeing makes military hardware that plenty of people would (literally) kill to get their hands on even just the plans for.
- temp0826 3y agoTraitorous does seem strong. But gross negligence that can result in hundreds of deaths per mistake? Mistakes that may not happen if share prices weren't the number one priority? Yah something heavy should happen.
- chmod775 3y agoIf it's really that important it should be government-owned, like Airbus. You can't give random people free reign and then punish them if you retroactively didn't like it.
- ahartmetz 3y ago(Airbus is only ~25% government-owned)
- kingkawn 3y agoHow is this putting wall st first when they have tanked their rep and stock price
- fwip 3y agoWell, obviously, they weren't planning on this outcome.
- inetknght 3y ago> they weren't planning on this outcome Unless they didn't plan at all (an answer I would not accept, or would advocate for prison terms if true), then they absolutely did plan for this outcome. Putting safety importance somewhere except the most important factor in manufacturing commercial passenger planes puts this exact outcome in the "planned" category.
- fwip 3y agoWell, no, that's clearly not the case. It's always possible to improve the safety of a plane by spending more money. Airlines could do a 72-hour safety review of every plane after every flight. Planes could have 7 copies of every system/sensor instead of 3. We could stick 6 pilots up in the cockpit in case the first 5 have simultaneous mid-air heart attacks. Deciding to shift the needle from "safety" toward "economic feasibility" is very often the correct thing to do, and vice versa.
- graemep 3y agoOn a short term view. The problem is that keeping investors happy, it is keeping investors with a short term outlook happy. If anything more than two years is too long term to care about, then the best strategy is to take risks and hope it does not catch up with you before then.
- dv_dt 3y agoAmazon succeeded in large part because they ignored the complaints of short term investors for years. So while I think that the widespread short term outlook is definitely an issue, it is a choice of boards and CEOs. Ultimately if the company tanks on being blind to long term risks - short term investors will be the fastest to leave the stock.
- recursivedoubts 3y agoin the long run we are all dead and so are our passengers
- sbarre 3y agoWhen public companies get fined, those fines should come 100% out of profits, not revenue. That might help resolve this kind of conflict of interest.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- dvnguyen 3y agoHow do you fine profits?
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoExtra percentage points on their tax rate? The question is if they could use more aggressive tax avoidance schemes to counteract this?
- tracerbulletx 3y agoWhat? Fines are expenses, they do "come out of profits" to whatever extent that has meaning. They also aren't deductible expenses for taxable income if that's what you're talking about.
- sbarre 3y agoSure my comment was probably over-simplified, but I was imagining fines as coming out exclusively of whatever slice of money goes to the beneficiaries of public companies, vs. something that comes out of a bank account or operating expenses. So any money that _would_ have been paid out to shareholders (bonuses, dividends, buybacks) is what goes to pay the fine, until it is paid. This would dis-incentivize decisions that benefit shareholders at the risk of breaking rules. We all hear about fines being "one day of operating expenses" and so on.. So who cares about getting fined then. In retrospect I'm sure this isn't that realistic as companies would just do accounting gymnastics to get around this, as many do for other accounting rules. And it would probably impose an undue burden on auditing to make sure money is put in the right buckets etc...
- spxneo 3y agoBoeing, once a symbol of American prestige and hegemony has fallen. Greed, hatred, delusion has poisoned the American psyche and its manifesting across all walks of life. Boeing is just one of the many examples. This is the end of the American era.
- DarkNova6 3y agoIt is not the end because it is still getting only worse.
- knowaveragejoe 3y agoThe US has been through far worse, let's cool it with the histrionics.
- spxneo 3y agoand it gets worse right before the end as it has for multiple empires in the past and i've identified these tall tale signals: 1. devaluation of its currency and rise of ponzi finance (Ex. dutch gild decline and tulip mania). 2. declaring perpetual war on an invisible enemy like opposing ideology, terrorists, drugs, poverty, etc There's a third signal but its too controversial to talk about here.
- haswell 3y agoWhat comes next is a choice we will all collectively make. We can use these growing scandals as warnings and take corrective steps. We can take seriously the worsening trends and reorient our life’s work toward finding solutions for the next generation. The next chapter has not been written, and the current state of worsening points directly at the reality that things can indeed be better.
- spxneo 3y agoThe fish rots from the head never from the tail. Good luck.
- ks2048 3y ago
- cyclecount 3y agoCapitalism killing people, nothing new or out of the ordinary here. Companies are innovative when growing and competing, but if they win they’ll reach the final form for a successful firm: monopoly. From then on, the only innovation will be in new ways to rebrand corruption and avoid regulation.
- javiramos 3y agoWe don’t need regulation. Let the free markets take care of Boeing. /s
- pants2 3y agoWell, considering Boeing stock is down over 70% vs it's primary competitor, I would say the free market has taken care of them to some degree.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the free market has taken care of them to some degree It’s pricing in the risk of fines, the cost of groundings and the potential penalties thereafter. Put another way, the market is reacting to regulation, actual and potential.
- rhelz 3y agoCurious how we assign moral blame. Sure, Boeing put Wall Street first ahead of safety. But why isn't the headline "Wall Street put profits ahead of safety". Or "The electorate chooses capitalism over safety." During the oil crisis, highway speed limits were reduced to 55 mph, to ease the gas shortage. But an unexpected side effect was that about 4,000 less people died in car crashes each year. Would you be willing to drive slower to save lives? Put it another way: how many people would you be willing to kill to be able to drive at 65mph? Its so easy to sit there and put the blame on some amorphous, anonymous, abstraction like "Wall Street" because it exonerates you and you can feel all self-righteous. But if you were in the same position, are you so sure you'd give up your annual bonus? Or put your stock options underwater? When you knew full well that if you didn't they would just fire you and hire somebody who would?
- flandish 3y agoEasy: If this is proven to be a criminal act, even of criminal negligence, charge not only the people making decisions, the board members, but also shareholders, relative to their holdings. Including grouped stocks such as funds. All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing Right, you wouldn’t invest in American business, period. (Also, how do you criminally charge someone on a pro rata basis? Do you send every American with a pension to jail for 1/31,000,000th the jail time?)
- flandish 3y ago>pro rata Yes. Yes you do. You set a minimum then fine below that minimum.
- Rutjjt 3y ago[flagged]
- jostmey 3y agoIf corporations are people (remember that Supreme Court ruling?) then Boeing should be held criminally liable for their missteps
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> remember that Supreme Court ruling Corporate personhood is a centuries-old legal concept [1], finding first mention at the Supreme Court in the 19th century. > then Boeing should be held criminally liable They were charged in 2021, and entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement after paying a $2.5bn fine [2]. It appears the DoJ is already looking into the Alaska Airlines blow-out [3]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood [2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-... [3] https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/justice-department-opens-probe-interviews-crew-in-alaska-airlines-blowout-d4cdfa6d?mod=hp_lead_pos1 https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/justice-department-ope...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flandish 3y agoExactly why I have been calling for all shareholders to be held criminally responsible.
- whalesalad 3y agoI feel like capitalism is a net good, but it is consistently undercut by wall street.
- whythre 3y agoInvestment has become increasingly decoupled from its reputed purpose; it’s not a means to an end, getting short term gains at all costs has become the end goal.
- swed420 3y agohttps://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/bitcoin-24/ https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/bitcoin-24... > Back to Marx here. “The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, from enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling.” So the finance sector carries on just as before, engaging in speculation and regulators cannot and do not stop them. > The answer is not regulation (before or after the event), but the banning of fictitious capital investment. Close down hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and exchange trade funding. Instead, banking should be a public service for households and small companies in order to take deposits and make loans – not funding for a massive financial casino where criminals and swindlers gamble away our livelihoods.
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- lvl102 3y agoAnd the same is happening for AI. It’s destined to blow up spectacularly down the road.