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Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

I believe it's time to nationalize Boeing, remove their leadership and replace them with engineers.

The people who run the company should be the people who know how to build planes. It's in our economic and industrial and defense interest to have a well run, high quality aerospace manufacturer.

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>it's time to nationalize Boeing

I seem to have lost the thread between that and

> The people who run the company should be the people who know how to build planes. It's in our economic and industrial and defense interest to have a well run, high quality aerospace manufacturer.

As a reminder, the leadership competitions in bureaucracy select for loyalty to the bureaucracy, not the bureaucracy's stated mission. Exceptions are rare and fleeting.

I may suggest that the link between the two statements is exactly to escape from the trap you talked about. If the leadership is elected by the state rather than by internal competition, you don't end up with a group of people who are loyal to themselves but with a meritocratic leadership.

I liked the analogy with hyenas and Saint Bernard's. The Saint Bernard is high-maintenance, require lots of care and attention. They are very loyal but need to constantly be told what to do. The hyena is highly opportunistic, they see and hear everything and need to be monitored constantly or they run off with your company. They over-sell everything specially themselves. The Saint Bernard's all need their own pen or they cant write, if there is one pen in the building all of the hyenas can write.

I'd say reversing the McDonnell Douglas merging via antitrust enforcement would be a more promising route given the issues the US government has with running anything competently.

If the FAA can't hire competent independent inspectors then just let the competitor do the inspection and tie the bonuses for inspectors to finding something wrong with the competition's planes.

FAA can't hire because Congress and Bush Jr. took away the money to do so and instituted a policy of self-checking for corps.

Reversing McDonnell Douglas merger wouldn't really work, the remaining product lines that could be separated are very much non-overlapping.

Yeah, but actually, that nationalize part isn't something in trend in USA, isn't it ?

Gwynne Shotwell, engineer and COO of SpaceX maybe considered from the job of CEO of Boeing. It seems to me more USA-ish move than nationalize Boeing. Don't know witch one is the best for Boeing in the end.

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