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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

It really surprises me that companies can get away with scamming the government so badly, and nobody gets shot (or at least put in jail) for that.

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I dunno, when was the last time the US had an anti-corruption effort where anyone paid any kind of price? I'm old enough to remember Abscam[1], the outcome of which seemed to be "hey, American politicians can be bought for super cheap!" Also: whether or not he killed himself, l'affaire Epstein indicates that our politicians are swine who can be bought off in more simple and sleazey ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam

I was around 3 y/o when Abscam went down. Now, however, I have a pretty good idea why Penn and Teller called their Bell Labs prank "lab scam". Thanks for that.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4

"Hello Senator, let's play golf again next month. Bahamas? My private jet will pick you and your family up, the penthouse at the $LUXURY hotel is booked for you. And your favorites Natalia and Svetlana will be waiting too".

It doesn't even take that much.

Beurocrat A: "Company X really botched the contract, like to the point of near criminal, definitely civil, negligince, we should probably go after them in court so we don't set a precedent of allowing this sort of thing"

Bureaucrat B: "Don't be unrealistic, company X donated amount Y to <campaign of person who's party currently heads up the executive branch of the level of government in question>, there's no way that would stick."

And then bureaucrats A and B proceed to spend the rest of their day doing things that actually count toward whatever their performance metrics are.

Exactly, and I like how you painted neither A nor B as evil at all. Which is how things move along so smoothly. Most people don't love the shit, they just put up with it.

I am sure that there is some of that going on, but it also strikes me as a heavily biased article. Even neglecting that the carrier is most likely an order of magnitude more complex than the tanker, there simply is a difference between creating the first of a kind (or the first 5 of a kind) and series production of iteratively scaled up designs.

I seem to remember a Canadian steel supplier (some years back) that had quit doing quality control years earlier. Of course their steel was dangerously sub-par. Caught with forged testing documentation (zero testing had been done), fined a trivial amount, still supplying steel to the govt.

Kobe Steel out of Japan was doing similar back in 2017. In one week their stock dropped 41%. Compared to immediately before the scandal, it's down 75% in that time.

I'm unsure if the drop is due to their scandal and poor management, something specific to Japan/Japanese steel, or if that's a larger issue in the steel market. Nippon also saw a ~55% drop on the same time period.

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