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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

> damaged Boeing economically so much already

It bothers me that when lives are lost, our first response as a greedy capitalistic society is to cut funding, considering there aren't really many competitors, and the switch-over costs for airlines would be prohibitive.

We should be funding efforts to investigate the heck out of this and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused, but I certainly don't want Boeing cutting more corners and hiring less-competent lower-salary aircraft engineers because they are now low on funding and need to get the plane out before some damn quarterly earnings report.

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If Boeing was socialized, that'd be one thing.

Boeing paid $11.7 Billion dollars in stock buybacks in the two years preceding this fiasco. All the money they ever needed was already there.

Instead, they spent the money inflating executives portfolios. And now you want more money going to them? If they want to privatize the gains, they can privatize the losses. Your sympathy is very misplaced, IMHO.

> And now you want more money going to them?

No, I clearly said "I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused". I want more money going to engineers, not the executives. But I do like to think with a forward-thinking mindset about how to make that possible instead of dismissing the problem and saying cutting funds in the right answer, because that definitely doesn't get more money in the hands of engineers to debug problems.

Perhaps more money to engineers + a third party audit company appointed by the court + fire the executives that did wrong, I don't know, but I'd like to be optimistic about it. Taking away funds is only going to strip engineers even further of funds for fixes, make unsafer planes, that's for sure.

The executives that inflated their portfolios while knowing there was going to be safety issues -- I support punishing those individuals. Not Boeing as a company though, since we pretty much depend on them.

Boeing paid $11.7 Billion dollars in stock buybacks in the two years preceding this fiasco

I didn't know that. What kind of development budget did the Max have? If they'd taken 10% of that to do $1B more safety related engineering during the project, might that have helped?

probably not. As the joke goes, how long will it take for you to finish the project? one year. How long will it take if we put 5 devs on it? two years. How about if we put 50 devs on it? It'll never be done.

That, except for money.

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