alt Hacker News> The laptop class doesn't always grok that the shift-work labor class ...
I think it's more than this. Industrial control system upgrades are serious business and (at least if you're doing them properly) require a lot of planning and consideration. Particularly when the subsystem being replaced is decades old already.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (including on hn) have no understanding of how complex industrial systems are - even as-built, but particularly after decades of evolution. Doing proper engineering in these spaces is expensive.
You can reasonably blame supermarket chains for being insecure, but we certainly aren't currently enabling them (or anybody else) when it comes to fixing these issues.
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I work in SCADA development, and believe me, there's a reason the industry moves slowly.
Yeah the margins are tiny because private equity has spent the better part of the century destroying American dynamism and outsourcing all externalities including getting hacked to the people.
Is it more expensive to keep your systems upgraded and maintained or to have all your product get destroyed one arbitrary day and then have to pay to do the upgrade anyways so that the arbitrary property destruction doesn't keep happening?
In before "but insurance"; yes insurance can in theory mitigate some of this, but I feel like people on HN have no understanding what it's like to deal with a multi-million dollar insurance claim that the insurance company 100% does not want to pay out. The legal battles over such things take years and are on their own incredibly expensive.