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Good. Corporations should be punished when corporate greed leads to negligence which leads to the loss of human life en masse in exchange for short term profit.

Good. Corporations should be punished when corporate greed leads to negligence which leads to the loss of human life en masse in exchange for short term profit. I don’t see how this is a bad thing for the market, if anything there will be more pressure to make safe aircraft.

nolta 7y ago
Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished. But the company should not. In a horse race, if the jockey is terrible you don't shoot the horse.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished For all intents and purposes, those people are the company.
- magduf 7y ago
  What are you talking about? The shareholders, the board, and the upper management collectively are the company. The rest is just employees and assets. Employees don't own the company, they just work there for money and can be let go at any time (subject to employment law). Assets are owned by the company. Your analogy makes no sense at all. The company should die. Its assets of course are still worth a lot of money, and I'm sure some other aircraft manufacturer might like to buy those assets for pennies on the dollar, and also hire the employees right away to get production up to speed as quickly as possible (but on a different design).
  - bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    As one of only two real airplane manufacturing companies (the other being AirBus), I don't see how getting rid of Boeing would help consumers. If anything, AirBus would have latitude to let its own quality control slip, but now their planes would comprise 100% of fleets instead of 50%.
    - simcop2387 7y ago
      The thing is, this isn't someone directly deciding that Boeing shouldn't be in business and that them not being there will help consumers, but instead decisions made by boeing have now severely hurt their reputation and the rest of the market no longer sees them as trustworthy. You can't really mandate that the rest of the world see them as trustworthy.
    - CivBase 7y ago
      Boeing's assets would be sold and someone else would use them to service a market in need of competition. I can think of a few parties who I suspect would be interested. All you have to do is bar AirBus from purchasing those assets. I doubt AirBus would want those assets anyways. It would make them an obvious monopoly and invite even more regulation than they're already facing. Companies rarely outright disappear. They get absorbed and operate under new management.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    >> Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished. But the company should not. >> In a horse race, if the jockey is terrible you don't shoot the horse. > What are you talking about? The shareholders, the board, and the upper management collectively are the company. The rest is just employees and assets. You're splitting hairs. The employees, assets, and their organization are the only part of the company that performs a useful social function. The shareholders, the board, and to a lesser extent the upper management are parasites that can be dispensed with and literally no one else will care.
    - llampx 7y ago
      Show me an Investor that doesn't care who the upper management is.
      - CharlesColeman 7y ago
        >> The shareholders, the board, and to a lesser extent the upper management are parasites that can be dispensed with and literally no one else will care. > Show me an Investor that doesn't care who the upper management is. Investors are a kind of shareholder. And if they were kicked out of the street as payment for the mess they had a hand in creating that is Boeing, they're not going to get much sympathy from me for their personal misfortune.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    This has always been theoretically true. But only in the modern economy is it significantly true. Prior to industrialization individual skill was the primary contribution of value to companies so, while a single person might own the premises, the value of the company was in those employees. In the modern economy employees have been commoditization to be interchangeable and the result is that employee power has been severely curtailed without compensation. Compare a rando factory to a sports team, losing a star player on a sports team can drastically effect your valuation and thus those stand out employees are considered primary assets of the teams (and often times teams will have both injury and sudden contract termination insurance for their players). Your statement that companies generally aren't employees is correct, but it is newly correct and unhealthy for society. Those lower level employees are the only ones actually producing value for the company.
    - magduf 7y ago
      That's true, but they also have nearly zero influence on the company or its direction. And legally, they have zero ownership (unless of course it's an employee-owned company, which Boeing is not), so they simply have no say. It's just like the assets (buildings, equipment, etc.). The company isn't going to be productive at all without its buildings and other assets. But do the assets get a say in things? Do the assets own the company? Of course not, they're inanimate things. Employees are not much different.
      - munk-a 7y ago
        Everything you've said is true of the world we're living in, but they aren't inherent natural laws - our changing culture has devalued employees to the point where they are viewed as having as much of a say as a building, but it's good (while accepting this is the case) to question if it must be the case and consider how else things could work. Given more ownership of the ultimate ends of their labour people are more invested, this is why key employees are often upgraded from mere tools to investors by the issuance of stock options - that sort of thing is never going to happen in a company like Boeing merely because of our culture. If Boeing had granted partial corporate ownership to technical employees they would advocate much harder for the caution that could have averted this incident, bonuses (and the mere promises of such) are a partial salve to this but have other complications around being non-binding, unaccountable and a form of wage insecurity. So, I just wanted to mention that this sort of creeping failure isn't inevitable, it's inevitable in the scenario as presented. Given a different company culture this incident likely never would have occurred and giving employees and vested (and vesting HA!) interest in the company is one such route.
- christophilus 7y ago
  > Shareholders If you own an S&P 500 fund like SPY, you are a shareholder. A lot of folks have BA in their retirement accounts. Litigating against shareholders in a case like this would serve no purpose that I can see.
  - CogitoCogito 7y ago
    If the profits were ill begotten by these shareholders, I don’t see why it matters if it occurred passively or actively.
    - christophilus 7y ago
      I guess where I was going is that it’s likely that you yourself or your parents or your siblings are shareholders. If you have a 401k with an index fund, you probably own a piece of BA. should you be prosecuted?
      - CogitoCogito 7y ago
        This thread of comments began with CryoLogic saying this: > Good. Corporations should be punished when corporate greed leads to negligence which leads to the loss of human life en masse in exchange for short term profit. I read CryoLogic's usage of "punished" as meaning "losing money due to drop in stock value" (which is what occurred in this case). Regular people holding shares in Boeing absolutely should lose money due to the dropping stock prices. They take risks making investments and they must accept that. So no I don't mean that regular shareholders should be prosecuted. I don't think anyone here has argued for that.

nolta 7y ago

Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished. But the company should not. In a horse race, if the jockey is terrible you don't shoot the horse.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished For all intents and purposes, those people are the company.
magduf 7y ago
What are you talking about? The shareholders, the board, and the upper management collectively are the company. The rest is just employees and assets. Employees don't own the company, they just work there for money and can be let go at any time (subject to employment law). Assets are owned by the company. Your analogy makes no sense at all. The company should die. Its assets of course are still worth a lot of money, and I'm sure some other aircraft manufacturer might like to buy those assets for pennies on the dollar, and also hire the employees right away to get production up to speed as quickly as possible (but on a different design).
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  As one of only two real airplane manufacturing companies (the other being AirBus), I don't see how getting rid of Boeing would help consumers. If anything, AirBus would have latitude to let its own quality control slip, but now their planes would comprise 100% of fleets instead of 50%.
  - simcop2387 7y ago
    The thing is, this isn't someone directly deciding that Boeing shouldn't be in business and that them not being there will help consumers, but instead decisions made by boeing have now severely hurt their reputation and the rest of the market no longer sees them as trustworthy. You can't really mandate that the rest of the world see them as trustworthy.
  - CivBase 7y ago
    Boeing's assets would be sold and someone else would use them to service a market in need of competition. I can think of a few parties who I suspect would be interested. All you have to do is bar AirBus from purchasing those assets. I doubt AirBus would want those assets anyways. It would make them an obvious monopoly and invite even more regulation than they're already facing. Companies rarely outright disappear. They get absorbed and operate under new management.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  >> Shareholders, the board, and upper management should be punished. But the company should not. >> In a horse race, if the jockey is terrible you don't shoot the horse. > What are you talking about? The shareholders, the board, and the upper management collectively are the company. The rest is just employees and assets. You're splitting hairs. The employees, assets, and their organization are the only part of the company that performs a useful social function. The shareholders, the board, and to a lesser extent the upper management are parasites that can be dispensed with and literally no one else will care.
  - llampx 7y ago
    Show me an Investor that doesn't care who the upper management is.
    - CharlesColeman 7y ago
      >> The shareholders, the board, and to a lesser extent the upper management are parasites that can be dispensed with and literally no one else will care. > Show me an Investor that doesn't care who the upper management is. Investors are a kind of shareholder. And if they were kicked out of the street as payment for the mess they had a hand in creating that is Boeing, they're not going to get much sympathy from me for their personal misfortune.
- munk-a 7y ago
  This has always been theoretically true. But only in the modern economy is it significantly true. Prior to industrialization individual skill was the primary contribution of value to companies so, while a single person might own the premises, the value of the company was in those employees. In the modern economy employees have been commoditization to be interchangeable and the result is that employee power has been severely curtailed without compensation. Compare a rando factory to a sports team, losing a star player on a sports team can drastically effect your valuation and thus those stand out employees are considered primary assets of the teams (and often times teams will have both injury and sudden contract termination insurance for their players). Your statement that companies generally aren't employees is correct, but it is newly correct and unhealthy for society. Those lower level employees are the only ones actually producing value for the company.
  - magduf 7y ago
    That's true, but they also have nearly zero influence on the company or its direction. And legally, they have zero ownership (unless of course it's an employee-owned company, which Boeing is not), so they simply have no say. It's just like the assets (buildings, equipment, etc.). The company isn't going to be productive at all without its buildings and other assets. But do the assets get a say in things? Do the assets own the company? Of course not, they're inanimate things. Employees are not much different.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Everything you've said is true of the world we're living in, but they aren't inherent natural laws - our changing culture has devalued employees to the point where they are viewed as having as much of a say as a building, but it's good (while accepting this is the case) to question if it must be the case and consider how else things could work. Given more ownership of the ultimate ends of their labour people are more invested, this is why key employees are often upgraded from mere tools to investors by the issuance of stock options - that sort of thing is never going to happen in a company like Boeing merely because of our culture. If Boeing had granted partial corporate ownership to technical employees they would advocate much harder for the caution that could have averted this incident, bonuses (and the mere promises of such) are a partial salve to this but have other complications around being non-binding, unaccountable and a form of wage insecurity. So, I just wanted to mention that this sort of creeping failure isn't inevitable, it's inevitable in the scenario as presented. Given a different company culture this incident likely never would have occurred and giving employees and vested (and vesting HA!) interest in the company is one such route.
christophilus 7y ago
> Shareholders If you own an S&P 500 fund like SPY, you are a shareholder. A lot of folks have BA in their retirement accounts. Litigating against shareholders in a case like this would serve no purpose that I can see.
- CogitoCogito 7y ago
  If the profits were ill begotten by these shareholders, I don’t see why it matters if it occurred passively or actively.
  - christophilus 7y ago
    I guess where I was going is that it’s likely that you yourself or your parents or your siblings are shareholders. If you have a 401k with an index fund, you probably own a piece of BA. should you be prosecuted?
    - CogitoCogito 7y ago
      This thread of comments began with CryoLogic saying this: > Good. Corporations should be punished when corporate greed leads to negligence which leads to the loss of human life en masse in exchange for short term profit. I read CryoLogic's usage of "punished" as meaning "losing money due to drop in stock value" (which is what occurred in this case). Regular people holding shares in Boeing absolutely should lose money due to the dropping stock prices. They take risks making investments and they must accept that. So no I don't mean that regular shareholders should be prosecuted. I don't think anyone here has argued for that.