40 double D.

> People are biased, sterotyping assholes.
Indeed.

> I have very few complaints.
Couldn't find your email program, huh?

"Although we see no startling breakthroughs, and indeed, believe such to be incompatible with the nature of software, many encouraging innovations are under way. A disciplined, consistent effort to develop, propagate, and exploit them should indeed yield an order-of-magnitude improvement."
  -- Brooks

I can't agree this was the least right of all of his predictions - he said exactly what you intimated he was wrong about. On that, he was bang on, and it's less surprising since it was an epistemological prediction. The area he was least right about was the rate of technological progress, which is much less fundamental, and therefore underestimated how quickly tools, storage, and compting speed would increase, with a consequent impact on the size of development team, production of documents, automation of testing and so on.

It still doesn't work - if the poor performance was realised in the exit price for selling stockholders, they were at fault since they had governance, no matter how poor, over the firm.

If the poor performance wasn't factored in the exit price, the selling stockholders suffered no loss, but the current stockholders did.

Lastly institutional investors are also professional investors, and should not be investing unless they have believe they have appropriate governance and so forth,

But your last point rings true. All that matters is where there are pools of money to go after, the logic of it be damned.

It doesn't make sense to allow this kind of action.

If there is a valid case on behalf of investors, is the money paid to come from IBM? If only some investors are paid, they have found a way to subordinate the other investors holdings to their interests. If they are able to proportionally remove any holdings by responsible executives, you'd better hope it's less than the lawyers get.
If all investors are paid, they will receive "their own money" in a different form, again less the take from the lawyers.

So the only way this would make any kind of sense is if the action was against the board or executives in their own capacity, or e.g. banks or auditors who did not meet their professional obligations.

That could only be the case if you deliberately run everything you buy until it breaks.

Even as a single individual I have had experience of owning probably over 100 hard drives over 30 years. The vast majority were still working correctly when I end-of-lifed them, after 2, 5, or in some cases 10 years.

So...
1) dramatic variation: uneven enforcement OR uneven adherence to regulations?
2) low variation: no-one is looking OR that violations are petty and adherence is relatively good?

We need to understand which case it actually is - otherwise we are pressuring the overseers to "fix" the problem by gaming the numbers or having a quota of violations found.

No, I was agreeing with him.