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Comment by _wldu | Hacker News Reader

The USA really needs to stop rewarding the quarterly profit driven stock market approach to management. It's the same thing that caused Boeing to build bad airplanes and the same thing that causes companies to build insecure software. We need to get back to engineers and architects (who actually know what they are doing) making decisions and building solid solutions and products. Companies can be reasonably profitable and have sound products and software too without farming everything out to the cheapest bidder of the week.

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Easy to say now. How many people would be willing (and able) to pay, say, 20% more for an iPhone?

If you rephrase that as, "pay 20% more for an iPhone, but your chances of dying in the next pandemic or war are reduced by an order of magnitude", it might prove more popular. Of course, that depends on how convincing you are... but the present events will provide a basis for those arguments for a long time to come.

We'd see some adaptations though.

Apple would make cheaper, less fancy versions.

A lot of people would stop upgrading every year or two. That's hugely wasteful anyway.

More people would buy used.

It's also the think that drove innovation in those industries to begin with

We must start asking: is this good for the bottom line and the country. Fiduciaries, including business executives are currently required to do everything within the law to maximize profits for shareholder - even if that means doing things that are bad for the country in the long term. The current "race to the bottom" approach seems like a great way to run a country into the ground - which is now on spectacular display as we see the impacts of relying on an authoritarian, communist regime for PPE and many other essentials.

This fiduciary responsibility is often brought up, but is largely inaccurate. Many companies, quite legally, do things that don't contribute to the bottom line, and in fact may damage it. And the courts have been fairly lenient in ruling in these companies favor.

I don’t think this was ever a real thing. DC-10 had terrible problems. When you bought a car in the 50-60s you’d have a notepad in the car and write down the issues you found. You’d then have warranty work. I agree with your goals but let’s not get into a Make America Great Again mindset.

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