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Comment by downrightmike | Hacker News Reader

Unless you look at long term focused companies like Amazon, which is creating all kinds of value without bowing down to short term market analysts. Had Boeing looked beyond the immediate future and planned to upgrade the 737 frame, or make a new one so it could support the much larger engines, they wouldn't be in this situation. But short term costs and profits, outsourcing and negligence is running the company. Break them up until the have some competency in what they are doing.

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Amazon is a case of purposely cultivating long-term investors and analysts. Somehow they made a case that their intangible NPV is much larger than other companies with similar profits. However, history indicates that a CFO will soon take over, start outsourcing, and they will be more profitable, but their long-term investors will sell to short-term investors and give them short-term valuations (lower NPV).

Jeff would never give up any control, at least not until there are O'neil cylinders in orbit.

He is selling Amazon stock every year to fund Blue Origin. I sure hope he can start turning a profit on his space company and gets his O'Neill cylinders before he runs out of cash.

If Boeing hadn't subscribed to the view that pilots were an inconvenient expense to be slowly dispensed with with ever more "sophisticated" automation like MCAS they also wouldn't be in this situation.

It's uncomfortable to think about but a management fashion that silicon valley helped promulgate killed those 600 people.

Boeing didn’t create the MCAS system because they thought it was a superior design or a labor saving mechanism. They did it to compensate for bad design of the physical plane.

And if the pilots had been trained to turn it off at the right time it would have been safe. They weren't (the plane was advertised as requiring no new training), and boeing made MCAS deliberately hard to turn off.

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