AMZN isn't really losing money, they're just reinvesting it rather than paying it as dividends. Their stock price goes up because they're consistently converting cash into business value worth more than that amount of cash. But they're mostly not making long-term plays, they're making good short and medium-term plays.
And Boeing isn't high-risk. It's high-cost low-risk. Aircraft are very expensive but also well understood.
> The alleged short term focus of investors and companies requires them to be fools (as a group).
The consequence is a result of structural failure, not individual failure. We put abstraction layers between investors and their investments. John has a 401K, he invests it in a mutual fund, the fund invests it in corporations, the corporations invest it in business units, the business units invest it in research. At every layer of abstraction, the level above doesn't want to spend resources understanding the details of the bottom tier, they just want to see numbers that are higher this quarter than last quarter. Because John doesn't have time for that and if he is only looking at quarterly results then the mutual fund manager's incentive is to produce quarterly results, which flows all the way down to the bottom.
The only solution is for investors to know what they're investing in, which requires more smaller corporations and fewer layers of abstraction.
In a sense it's basically the case that wide diversification is free-riding on the analysis done by the other investors in the same stocks, but the more people who do it the less efficient the market becomes because there is less thought going into where money is invested.