Even if it was a suicide, that still doesn't mean it was self-motivated. People who care enough to be whistleblowers, would likely care enough about wellbeing of their family or other people - enough to sacrifice themselves once again under sufficient threats and pressure.
Or, even more likely, end things not because directly being requested to, but because of having no other way to NOT be forced to back out and cower at the very end, and betray themselves and other people.
All of which is unfortunately making it almost trivial for the adversary to steer things into that direction.
Reminds me of Ian Gibbons, the Theranos scientist who spoke up about the company's practices. He took his life shortly before he was set to be deposed in one of the lawsuits.
According to John Carreyrou's book, the company hired law firms to stalk, harass and threaten employees; law firms which -- unlike Theranos -- are still operating, having apparently never faced any consequences for their actions.
Granted, a movie, but something that portrays this well is The Insider (about big tobacco).
Choice quotes:
> Mike Wallace: Who are these people?
> Lowell Bergman: Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure, Mike. What the hell do you expect? Grace and consistency?
And:
> Lowell Bergman: I fought for you and I still fight for you!
> Jeffrey Wigand: You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now - staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it's all dark except for the tenth floor. That's the legal department, that's where they fuck with my life!
> Lowell Bergman: Jeffrey, where are you going with this? Where are you going? (Pause) You are important to a lot of people, Jeffrey. You think about that, and you think about them.
“We need more information about what happened to John,” attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, who represent former Boeing manager John Barnett, said in a statement Tuesday. “The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public.
“We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life,” they added. “No one can believe it.”
> The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
> "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
I think we could agree generally that "the hostile work environment at Boeing ... led to his death." It is appalling that they could apply this kind of pressure to one of their own .
I'm not familiar with the process here, but does anyone know if the officer makes the determination that this is a "self-inflicted gunshot wound"? I thought that kind of assessment was for the coroner to determine over the course of the investigation.
Was it a handgun? I haven't seen weapon type reported anywhere.
> despite South Carolina's lack of reciprocity
There are no gun transactions in SC that require a carry license. Guns can also be transported on airplanes without carry licenses. They can also generally be transported via car without a license.
> with his native Washington state.
He is a Louisiana resident.
> so you think he stayed two weeks
I don't know how long he was there, but it doesn't matter. Not only is there is no waiting period for buying a gun in SC, he could have brought one with him on his trip.
> at the seedy motel?
It was a Holiday Inn, which is a hotel and is typically 3-star.
> I say he went back home between dispos.
Does a source say that, or are you making it up?
> So he skated background check after three days of non-response from ATF which automatically allows him to secure his firearm purchase?
NICS typically takes a couple of minutes to process. In SC, like the vast majority of the US, a firearm purchase takes 30 minutes or less.
Source on Occam's razor being anything more than a philosophical framework? Kind of silly to even bring that up in this scenario without looking at the possible motivations or lack thereof.
I would agree, except it is not some random average guy in a vehicle.
This was a concern citizen, who was a whistleblower against his employer, who had just begun a legal deposition, and there are billions of dollars at stake.
So - the scenario possibly just isn't that simple.
The coroner did say it appears to be self-inflicted, but that is not the final and formal judgement.
> The office of Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O'Neal said that Barnett, who had been living in Louisiana after retiring from Boeing, died "from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
> Charleston police say detectives are actively investigating the case and are awaiting a formal cause of death as they try to determine the circumstances surrounding Barnett's death.
Suicide note? Given his interview, where he did not seem at all concerned (Jan 31) and his upcoming scheduled testimony (after years of pursuing this), call me suspicious.
He was scheduled to appear for day two of his deposition testimony the morning of his death. Had he died Sat night instead of Sat morning, the transcript of Saturday's testimony could have been read to the jury during trial. Obviously that can't happen now and whatever he was going to say in Saturday's testimony is lost forever.
> In Barber v. Page, 390 U.S. 719 (1968), the Court recognized a common law exception to the Confrontation Clause's requirement when a witness was unavailable and, during previous judicial proceedings, had testified against the same defendant and was subject to cross-examination by that defendant. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this exception in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), holding that "the Framers would not have allowed admission of testimonial statements of a witness who did not appear at trial unless he was unavailable to testify and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination." Further, the Court in Crawford overturned Ohio v. Roberts (above).
The article said he was cross-examined by Boeing's attorneys last week and he now unavailable because he's dead, so it seems to be his deposition would fall under this exception.
It does not apply to dying declarations and statements made under impending death, this is well established in law. [1] Otherwise mob bosses would just pop off every witness and go fully free if it is completely inadmissible . There are limits not everything is admissible however not everything can be thrown away either
And depositions are taken under oath, at least, so it is at least sworn testimony rather than just random conversations or documents that would normally need to be sworn to at trial to lay a foundation.
Boeing going to throw all their weight at motions to exclude these transcriptions, though.
Witnesses often write sign and submit a written witness statement into evidence before appearing. It's probably up to the judge now.
The written evidence gets sent to prosecution and defence. There would be a question whether witness actually did write the statement... but might be better than nothing
The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.
Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.
The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy
This is a problem. Would you really see a whistleblower as your enemy? Is your identity so intertwined with your job that you take legal action against your employers so personally? Do you think your employer has that much loyalty to you? Boeing just had layoffs in December. I'm sure the issues this guy was uncovering played a part in that. We should all hold our bosses accountable. If they mess up, it's going to be bad for us.
Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.
This is ahistorical. These are institutions that largely exist to settle disputes between the rich and to punish the poor, and came into existence to balance the interests of debtor royals with those of the rich commoners who held that debt.
Corporations were a way to formalize public-private partnerships in which the sovereign would be able to shed the risks of beneficial ventures in its interest, by in exchange shielding private groups taking on those ventures from the normal legal consequences of their actions.
Employer health insurance got its start in WW2 when Roosevelt instituted wage freezes. Shipping companies could not raise wages to attract more workers, so they raised wages indirectly by offering health insurance.
... except the rich can hire enough lawyers to use the courts as a weapon, and in the US, campaign contributions or other rewards for compliant politicians can mean that legislatures are often on the side of corporate interests.
> The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.
Hmm I don't know, if I were a whistleblower I wouldn't really care what my colleagues would think. And I'd probably not continue working there anyway. After all I'd hate the company and my colleagues for all the wrongdoing that was the whole reason for the whistleblowing in the first place.
Of course people react very differently. And I'm very much not a team player so I'm pretty insensitive to peer pressure. I'm sorry that this person felt so bad.
> Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.
When there's billions in market value on the line I don't think this possibility can be overlooked, no. I don't think it would have happened here but I don't think it's impossible
Don't know anything about this guy, so just speculating, but I can easily see having a self-destructing behaviour being correlated with becoming a whistleblower since it is usually done at great personal expenses.
A piece of information in this article which is not in that article:
> The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
> "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
Being direct cause of death is treated very differently based on mens rea, or intent. Assassinating somebody and causing a death by accident or by negligence carries very different penalties. Being a cause of something and being guilty of it are different things.
Why does a whistleblower need to be identified? Why can't it be an anonymous tip to the regulator, who then uses the tip during audits to dig deeper and get to the truth? If they can't get to the truth even after being provided a tip, then their audit process is too broken? This whole business of non-anonymous whistleblower has too much power-imbalance and always seems to end badly for the individual.
The universal answer as to why (there is no fair, working system implemented) is, as usual, 'cui bono?'
Any strategy to make whistleblowing power-balanced is by proxy heavily undermined by all forces that do not want it.
Those forces, big corporations and their third-party henchmen, have heavy financial interests to bring down any just way of whistleblowing. They have a lot more money, time, manpower, influence and corrupt people who execute the dirty work.
To have incorruptible lawmakers lay the ground work is only the first step.
Then the laws have to pass in their original intention, ie. waterproof wording without loopholes. Any unintentional loopholes have to be identified and fixed.
Then the law has to uphold to "accidental" mistakes, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, official or secret changes, additional laws that reverse them, ....
But if the regulator is building a legal case in the US against a company and the only evidence they have is what the whistleblower provides, right to face one's accuser (a right we do not give up lightly) demands that the whistleblower be named.
Yeah, for case against human individuals that standard is absolutely essential. But for case against corporate entities that are already under periodic regulatory audits, that shouldn't be required. Then, within that non-compliant corporate, if there are individuals who committed the crime (criminal negligence, intentional malpractice etc) that lead to non-compliance, then to prosecute such individuals, they would need further evidence etc. But at least, the bad airplanes won't make it to airlines, just with anonymous tips.
Corporations are made up of humans and are, fundamentally, owned by people.
It should still be necessary that the State let people face their accuser before the State uses its monopoly on violence to deprive people of their property via the judicial process. Otherwise, I can think of all kinds of methods that a corrupt executive or judiciary could leverage against poeple ("we're shutting your company down." "Wait, why?" "Anonymous whistleblower. Definitely not because you're contributing legally to a PAC that's making it harder for the President to get reelected.")
Note that here I'm assuming that the whistleblower's participation is necessary. I think you are assuming a more happy path where the whistleblower can nudge the State in a direction to put more scrutiny on a company that they don't realize is a problem. That already happens and sometimes works, but we also have whistleblowers because only they have access to internal documents that the company has chosen not to divulge (legally or illegally). When the case hinges on those, it's still quite just that if the State says "We're shutting you down because you replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum," the accused has the right to say "What? Who the hell is telling you we replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum, and what evidence do they have?" Because without that back-stop, it's just the government presenting evidence that they got... somewhere... and that's open to even more abuse than the status quo.
Corporate rights aren't human rights, but the right to face one's accuser should be extended to any entity under the judicial process.
I don't think it's wise to just hand the government the power to dissolve corporations on evidence they got from... Somewhere, they don't need to tell you. Imagine how that could be abused by a corrupt executive or judiciary.
It was a breach of their guidelines to report a method of suicide, so it sounds like they were just fixing that. This is standard in the UK because of evidence showing that reporting methods can be followed by further suicides.
Suicide, Attempted Suicide, Self-Harm and Eating Disorders
5.3.45 Suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm should be portrayed with sensitivity, whether in drama or in factual content. Factual reporting and fictional portrayal of suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm have the potential to make such actions appear feasible and even reasonable to the vulnerable.
Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in output except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the context. We should not include explicit details that would allow a method of suicide to be imitated.
All these guidelines are what is making BBC unreadable for me. The language they use is just so artificial. I understand why they do, and how they feel like they have a responsibility to "optimize" language for some metrics, but in my opinion what really matters is the objective reality, not the phrasing. Maybe they could report more on the NHS inability to cope with mental health patients rather than avoid using the word gunshot in a country where gun ownership is so scarce.
>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.
Another source backs this up, and seems to have interviewed the man's attorney in the past. [0][1]
It's tempting to dismiss foul play on the basis that it's too brazen in the middle of a deposition. However, that's also the height of plausible deniability because cross examinations can get personal and thus emotional.
---
I can't help but be reminded of a film quote:
"But that's the way it works with corporate murder. Boss gets wind of something, calls in his head of security, who talks to someone, who talks to a friend of someone. Finishes up with an answering machine in a rented office, a couple of sensitive gentlemen in a blue pickup truck. They will never know who ordered the hit." [2]
Edit: In all seriousness, I don’t think the situation presented in the aforementioned movie quote is implausible, though I’m inclined to doubt foul play here unless there’s specific evidence to that effect. Depositions can be extraordinarily stressful; compound that with the anxiety of being a whistleblower, and I can see how someone could snap. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there was foul play.
Suppose you believed that a particular someone is responsible for, through incompetence or on purpose, deaths of 500 people and is making your life hell. Do you:
I think that when someone is experiencing extreme anxiety over an extended period of time, their actions aren’t necessarily going to be logical. Most people will recover once the stressor is removed. Some people will give up and choose option A. Still others will choose option B.
Nobody said anything about the CEO. Not sure exactly what you are arguing here. You seem hellbent on proving everyone who wants to listen that it's absolutely impossible for someone to act as an agent of a corporation in killing or ordering someone to be killed in the interest of the corporation. I understand 'movies aren't real, brah' but you seem to have some sort of superior understanding that the rest of us is lacking in order to be so determined.
If anything, the film quote is less realistic here insofar that it's not in context of a defense contractor with a large Rolodex.
Professionals tend to leave doubt rather than evidence. That said, even they make mistakes and therefore—to your point—it's unlikely it would be risked despite layers of intermediaries.
On the other hand, media cycles are short and PR is already in the trash can. This took place at the height of plausible deniability, and barring irrefutable evidence proving it wasn't foul play, it will be giving other potential whisleblowers pause.
The man's own attorney wrote:
"They found him in his truck dead from an ‘alleged’ self-inflicted gunshot."
I'm not convinced. Boeing doesn't want more attention, depositions are stressful, and whistleblowers are predisposed to martyrdom. If you're Boeing, this doesn't make the problem go away, it makes it worse.
if you are Boeing the company that would be stupid sure
but what about some specific arbitrary high level figure from Boeing?
One which if the person says certain things might lose their job because of this or which is afraid to lose more then their job (e.g. due to them knowingly acting in gross negligence for personal gains).
Did you not realize that almost all crimes that have ever been committed, very much including by smart accomplished people with a lot to lose, violated and belied this theory of rational behavior?
One thing I've been realising over the last few years is that that prison population is almost completely unrelated to actual crime rates.
My standard example is heroin, which is in the most severe rating category of illegal drug. In the UK, the number of users of just that drug on its own is close to triple the entire prison population.
You're talking about a company that shipped MCAS in its new planes without training pilots on what it was or how it worked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.
So, an argument that this murder wouldn't be rational, gives me zero confidence that it didn't happen.
Pilots were trained in how to deal with runaway stab trim. There were three MCAS incidents. The first one you never hear about because the crew followed the runaway trim procedure and safely completed the flight. The second one did not and they crashed. The third received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that reiterated the procedure, apparently forgot about it, and crashed.
Yes, the MCAS design was defective. The crews didn't follow their training, either.
You shouldn't be convinced, no one has presented any evidence of anything happening or not happening. Being suspicious means the situation warrants investigation.
If there were foul play, the person who made the decision may not agree that this is worse for Boeing, or may not even care about what effect it has on Boeing at large. Being accused of something no one can prove might be greatly preferable to having specific evidence come to light, especially if the scrutiny will fall on a massive company instead of on you in particular.
Boeing doesn't order assasinations. If he was assasinated, it might have been someone at Boeing, who still has a clean slate but knows that the whistleblower knows something he did, and has the right connections from working for a defense contractor.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's well documented that the CIA take a "keen interest" in Boeing (and indeed that European security services do so with Airbus), undertaking corporate espionage and sabotage on their behalf. They consider aerospace to be "strategic" or some such.
Certainly people have committed suicide in stressful situations, but there is no situation where it makes sense that someone would kill themselves, and countless people get deposed who don't.
Continuing to depose someone to get them to shift their story is a reasonable strategy if their story can't be backed up by evidence and you aren't worried about anything coming out in the testimony. It's a terrible strategy if the witness is about to reveal where the skeletons are buried.
Thank you. You put it far better than I could. And this man was in the right position to know exactly where they all were.
A Quality Manager's entire job is to investigate and track why everything bad happens, and when they aren't allowed to fix it, who is responsible for the decision to intentionally not fix, and the rationale provided to justify an overrule. Though I've heard in some strange foreign lands (safety critical industries), the Quality Department isn't hamstrung by being worked around by a member of the C-Suite.
I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.
Corporations can be shielded from liability when this happens. One executive could end up charged with a crime but the company itself can always paint them as a rogue agent who acted independently.
IMO, this will keep getting worse. Commodification of scapegoats.
I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. The East India company was a good example, they had their own army & fought wars of conquest.
Yes, there were very few such corporations before and they were not at the core of a nation's economy as they are today. The fact that they failed spectacularly should have been a lesson for us to avoid them! Instead, we've enshrined the concept of corporate personhood into law.
Kind of insane to think that we have a construct which at the same time claims that a corporation is a person but also that the corporation is not liable to legal prosecution for its crimes as a person is. I.e. a corporation itself cannot go to jail as a person can. The corporation can do whatever it wants and continue operating unimpeded so long as it can keep finding new people to serve as scapegoats.
Imagine if some people would have the same rights as corporations; the bosses of mafias could assassinate anyone, pay a fine, throw a scapegoat under the bus and continue 'business' as usual. Police couldn't even reach a plea deal with the scapegoats because no matter what information the scapegoats revealed about the big boss, it would be inadmissible because actually, in that very special case, the big mafia boss is not a person but, conveniently, an abstract entity and therefore it cannot physically go to jail. How about shutting down their operations for x amount of time? That should be the bare minimum... It could be applied to corporations, why is it not?
>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.
A YT video speculated (wildly one would say) about someone's recent death simply because the cause was not announced by the family as it was under (UK) inquest. In some jurisdictions it is inappropriate (or even illegal) to state or speculate on a cause of death when it is under investigation as a suspected suicide, even just to limit the possibility of copycat or revenge cases: Only since 2016 is it legal (in NZ) to report, broadcast or even post on the internet that a death is a suspected suicide before the coroner releases their findings. AFAIK, posting any details about _the method_ is still not allowed in NZ.
This may sound antiquated (and frustrating) in an age of instant news, but jumping to conclusions can have real consequences, at least legally in some edge cases.
I am not going to be skeptical until they tell me exactly how hey got to the "self-inflicted" wound. How can you tell it was self-inflicted?
Any witness? Recording? C'mon!
It's not a technical article. It's a lurid media topic* about a suspicious-looking alleged suicide with zero information for a substantive discussion, and tons of fuel for sinister speculation. That's not what HN is supposed to be for. However, we can give this one a pass because the ongoing Boeing saga is of interest and there's clearly a community appetite to discuss this development.
Edit: even though the thread is terrible, which is just what one would expect from a sensational topic with zero information for a substantive discussion.
* Edit 2: I changed the word 'story' to 'topic' because I don't mean to disparage the BBC article itself - anigbrowl's reply is right on that
Flatly untrue. It's a soberly worded recitation of the available facts with multiple caveas; the frenzy of speculation stems from Boeing's increasingly tattered corporate reputation, not the story. This was written to far higher standards than (for example) a story from the Daily Mail or New York Post; I'm astonished that you would characterize this way.
Sorry—I'm tired and expressed that carelessly, and you're quite right. I wasn't talking about the article and am glad that it is as good as you say. In fact I merged the other thread into this one precisely because the BBC article was better.
What I mean is that the story itself, i.e. the significant new information, is a lurid apparent suicide, and there aren't any details about that, other than it happened. Not because the article is bad but because that is the only piece of information available.
The interest in such a story is neither technical nor intellectual and we shouldn't pretend that it is. It's a suspicious death story with sinister overtones. The curiosity here is not primarily intellectual, which means it's not really a good story for HN, but I'm giving it a pass because it is strange enough to be different and there's a community appetite to discuss it. Normally the latter isn't enough to justify a story remaining on HN's front page but there are degrees of community appetite and I recognize this one.
I also think there are 2 different ways of discussing this - one is on mental health (if it's truly a suicide), shadowy agencies, Boeing's failures, and about corporate whistleblowing and its risks in general.
The other discussion is speculation on what this truly is - which is a more political/controversial topic.
There are lots of discussions on the former set of topics which are fairly popular on HN which explains why this thread is popular. I do think such discussions are valuable if there isn't a ton of speculation, which I think this thread is handling decently (although maybe I'm late enough to see all controversial comments already dead).
The required explanation is unnecessarily unreadable, so I explain it again.
As I wrote in my other comment, I meant the article as it relates to technology. My original comment is hidden below so I explain it again here.
The safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.
So I wrote "concerning safety culture of engineers". Your interpretation is a complete misunderstanding. At least the points voted on my above comment indicate that your interpretation is not the majority. Hence, thanks to the many supporters, my above comment received many votes and was moved to this thread and this thread was eventually returned to the top page.
We must not remain ignorant or indifferent to unsafe working environments.
Dang, it would be nice of you if you at least addmitted that the front page as opposed to /active is heavily curated and hand-picked by you and other moderators. Anyone who has been on HN long enogh can see this, there is no point in phrasing it otherwise. And I guess people will be ok with this as long you guys are transparent about it.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and especially not as a way of working around moderation.
If a comment is in some state that you think it shouldn't be, you can ask us to change that and we can at least have a conversation about it, but just reposting it is not ok.
I don't know why you start making such belated arguments but the upvotes for that comment indicate that it was much more helpful to the viewer than flagging it to make it unreadable. And it does not avoid any moderation. What moderation was done? Here the flag serves only as censorship. It lacks objectivity and impartiality. Most people can't read what was written, they can only read your argument.
Moderation isn't driven by upvotes; it's there to compensate for the failures of the upvoting system. If HN could operate by upvotes alone, that would be great—it would be so much less work. Unfortunately, it can't.
A lot of the things you're complaining about have been established practice on HN for many years. If you want to learn how HN works, I'd be happy to help with that. But it's time that you stopped posting off-topic complaints and trying to stir up drama about these things. 18 of these comments in one thread is quite enough.
So what is the avoided moderation and the failures of the upvoting system? Your rebuttal has too many irrelevant new arguments.
All I am saying here is that if some statements can't be read, others can't read the argument. An argument where others can't read one side's statements is not an equal argument. You must at least be able to make every comment you have conversed with readable. Otherwise it is just your speech.
I've replaced it with 'media' at the top. When I say something like that, I just mean the big media websites and they way they cover often-sensational stories.
Excuse me? MSM, a common acronym for the widespread and uncontroversial term "mainstream media", is now a "far-right dogwhistle"? I must have missed that memo.
I can only imagine the bubble you must live in if you think that the "far right" are the only people who see reason to distrust mainstream media.
I am a deeply liberal American. MSM is not a far right dog whistle in the US.
Words are indirect references to ideas and don't have any meaning without a receiver. All of these words have to be contextualized based on the speaker and receiver.
The right are known for lying with the truth which makes a good amount of their rhetoric stick.
Washington is a swamp, almost any American will agree no matter which side, that's why the statement is powerful and effective.
The MSM in the US is irresponsible. Again regardless of which side you are on, you generally understand that US Media is owned by billionaires and corporations or at the very least people who don't have your interest at heart and want to manipulate you rather than inform you. It is not a far right dog whistle at all so much as a statement towards the general non-quality and lack of journalistic integrity in American's most prominent media. The left acknowledges the existence of "MSM" and blames them for giving the previous president attention and therefore power. The real difference is what MSM is actually referring to. One side generally means "all cable news but fox news" and the other generally means "all chiefly advertisement supported news you could find a newspaper of or see on cable."
Woke is a word that around the times of George Floyd meant something to the effect of "waking up to the idea of systemic racism and acknowledgement of it's generational consequences." Now it is largely a word used to describe "politically correct" policies or social policies that are contradictory to radical fundamentalist Christianity.
I think you are probably thinking about the previous president's fake news and lying press rhetoric which I don't think is a dog whistle because I don't think most conservative Americans are educated enough to tie that to its Nazi "Lügenpresse" heritage. You generally won't hear someone on the left say "fake news" or "lying press" unless it's in a mocking way.
Contextually all these things can be shibboleths based on context, which is probably more accurate for what you mean than dog whistle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Democrats are known for lying for sure. Establishment democrats like Pelosi, definitely. If that's what "left" references OK, I don't really disagree. AOC and Bernie, Stewart, and other progressives are not generally known for lying.
> which is why both sides are constantly bitching at each other.
No. This is some weird false equivalency thing that is popular with "enlightened" people. Some of Americas top brass (Mattis and Milley) have nearly explicitly said that republican dogma is to divide and conquer.
Mattis accused the president of pursuing a divisive strategy.
"[he] is the first president in my lifetime who does not
try to unite the American people— does not even pretend to try.
"Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences
of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years without mature leadership," he said.
If one party explicitly tries to drive division, you are going to get it. It's no different than Ukraine's lack of unity with Russia. Of course there cannot be unity. Of course they are "bitching at each other." One is attempting to dictate to the other how it is going to be.
> reputation destruction
This is a load and a bad faith argument.
For one, it conflates reputation harm with reputation destruction in order to justify actions that should cause reputational harm. Second, when there is "destruction", it usually follows doubling down on the anti-social behavior that caused the reputational harm in the first place.
A world where reputations can be harmed is absolutely a better world. You can argue that sometimes there is non-proportional harm, ok, but that's not the usual argument. "I am against cancelling" is too often equivalent to "I am against consequences."
The very same people against "canceling" will turn around and claim that a store theft or car window smashing should be punished progressively disproportionately until it is a real deterrent to crime including death. Reputational harm until it is a deterrent to the thing that caused the reputational harm is the very same principle.
It wasn't. The downvote told me that here is the place to be careful about saying thank you. Well, those who downvote against thank you will downvote anything.
No one has claimed that the term "mainstream media" has its origins in far right politics. The claim made upthread is that the term "mainstream media" is a dogwhistle term often employed by the right wing.
I will not be providing evidence of that, as ample enough evidence for that can be found easily with a simple internet search.
I really try to avoid getting sucked into political arguments online, but what you're saying is so absurd and deranged that I can't let it go.
First of all: what exactly do you think the term "dogwhistle" means? Are you suggesting that when RWers say "mainstream media", they really mean something else? To what are they referring?
Secondly, you're going to have to tell me what terms to search for because I just performed several "simple internet searches" and I see no evidence of what you're claiming.
Thirdly, what can be found easily with some simple searches is that "mainstream media" is an extremely common term that's widely used by everybody left, right and center.
E.g. here's Bernie Sanders talking about the "mainstream media":
Here's the Morning Star (a far-left newspaper that was originally founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain) talking about the "mainstream media":
>First of all: what exactly do you think the term "dogwhistle" means? Are you suggesting that when RWers say "mainstream media", they really mean something else? To what are they referring?
No. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite in my comment. Although the term was popularized by the right wing in reference to their belief in a vast leftist conspiracy controlling all forms of media (the thesis under which Fox News was born and the premise by which it claims to be the only valid news source for the right), obviously not every instance of every right winger using the term uses it within that context. However the context does exist and is often employed in right-wing speech.
But given your tone, the fact that you obviously didn't bother to read my comment in good faith, and your personal insults towards me, I won't be engaging with you or your comment any further.
That source doesn't match your claim at all. In fact it completely explains the observed behaviour?
> Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the inevitable flame war).
High comment rates on a recently posted story will weigh the story down. This is by design, and the quality of comments presently on this story does much to demonstrate the reasoning behind that choice.
Most likely the story will be reposted or "second chance" resurrected in the morning, when all the grownups are awake and not just those of us having a touch of insomnia.
Sometimes when there is an inane story floating around on page one/two, I'll comment on it without up voting; its basically like a downvote as far as the algorithm is concerned.
Meta comments about how the story is ranking or explaining the ranking algorithm to people complaining about how the story is ranking are a great subject for an empty comment.
The lack of information renders such speculation necessarily vacuous, and it quickly degrades into dueling assertions of worldviews. There are lots of websites where that sort of thing runs unchecked. To the extent this isn't one, that's one of the reasons I prefer this one.
Enough at least to reserve substantive comment until I have enough sense of what I'd be talking about to have something worthwhile to say. Takes all kinds to make a world, though.
No, HN has worked this way since long before dang was running it; I believe pg implemented the feature. It's a good feature, in that it tends to bury threads that bring much more heat than light.
No, the presence of the function is not evidence that something is due to that function or the absence of other functions. Many people blindly believe only the speculations that support them and it is unfortunate that much easy confirmation bias believing this misunderstanding has also been observed here due to my not explaining it right away.
My understanding is that it’s relatively common for airlines to change a flight's airplane for any number of reasons (mechanical, scheduling, etc). Even if you book a flight that's not on a Boeing, you might be assigned to one anyway.
the USG will never allow that to happen. boeing itself is both a significant hard-power (military contractor) and soft-power (export authorizations provide a national bargaining chip, impact on domestic economy, etc) asset for the united states.
it is like intel in a lot of ways: sure, they're massive fuckups but there simply is not any chance that the US allows one of only three leading-edge fab companies to go under. As much as things are going to suck for a while, and especially as much as things could suck for individual employees... at the end of the day the fab side is not going to go under and the USG will shovel cash into the furnace to make sure of it. It is like Boeing - think of it as "buying at a discount, for an indeterminate future time", because the value cannot ever go to zero.
And even on the IP side the ownership of x86 and the x86 license is a significant soft-power asset for the US. Having everyone on the planet able to implement their own ARM cores is not really a great thing, when you could instead use it as leverage (like we do with ASML's machines).
Suicide in a car is a “popular” way of doing this because there is less cleaning afterwards. Crime scene cleaning of a room costs like $20k.
Bodily fluids go everywhere.
Is cleaning a car less expensive? I feel like it would be harder, just considering that it's a cramped space that seems difficult to scrub and full of stuff that is not easily washable.
I feel like most people would rather just scrap it if they can afford to. Even if someone else were willing to pay a large sum of money for the car, I'd be too weirded out to go sell it.
That doesn't make sense, what if car cost 50k (or more), do you think anybody would ever want to drive in it? Family traumatized by just looking at it, heck any similar car, ever ?
Low cost would be ie in your backyard, jump from the bridge (with added 3s thrill), OD on opiates or some poison you don't feel or similar. Or go fight russians if you really stand up for western values, that may actually cure the need if you make it through.
> do you think anybody would ever want to drive in it?
You can sell the car and the new owner might not know about it (or care if the price is good enough).
Car offers a certain level of privacy in your last moments while being considerate to the family by not doing it in your home.
> Low cost would be ie in your backyard, jump from the bridge (with added 3s thrill), OD on opiates or some poison you don't feel or similar. Or go fight russians if you really stand up for western values, that may actually cure the need if you make it through.
Those are suicide fantasies of people without depression / under extreme pressure.
The timing is suspicious but that doesn't mean it wasn't suicide. If he was determined to kill himself there might be several reasons to do it today. Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing. Or maybe he didn't want to testify - could be tons of reasons for that. I have no idea. Just saying the two events could be connected without it being murder.
suicidal people are, be definition, crazy. It's impossible to put yourself in their shoes. When the switch flips, suicide just seems like the logical solution and is very matter-of-fact. It's impossible to really understand what's going on in a suicidal person's mind at the time.
He should have done like Snowden. Got out of the country before exposing material. Shouldn't a witness in a high profile case like him been granted some sort of police escort by the court?
Guy paid the ultimate price for freedom of speech and informing the public. Wonder if someone will sustain there is no threat to freedom of speech because the lawsuit involved the company where he was employed, not the government.
I'm also reminded of Aaron Schartz, as well as the ordeal Steven Donzinger went through against Chevron. Fortunately survived, but had to serve some prison time[1].
See, that's why I don't post on any social platform regularly because the majority don't see the overall connection and picture, and refuse to accept the facts in any way they can. Whatever I write generally get deleted or hidden with no reason given, which I get quite used to, and society just hopelessly never changes.
In RL I never do such, as I know how to pretend and survive, for my own good. What I pointed out is that the dead guy did it with courage, with of course his life being the cost. Scaling it up I see something, and with the overall disappointment I find place to suit myself better in the future. And I don't plan to go a super long way with the majority anyway. This book is strongly recommended to read: "The Crowd" written by Gustave Le Bon. Tiktok swipers don't need to bother.
Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that you are a high-IQ Übermensch.
If you want to communicate with us hopeless blockheads, you may wish to lower the level of your discourse, and write in bite-sized concepts that our mini-minds can grasp.
For someone who doesn't post "regularly," you have commented quite a bit in this thread.
On the one hand, violence is always a threat to speaking freely. This is not new. At the very least getting fired is what most people can expect if they speak freely about legitimately confidential things at work. Even things like disparaging co-workers, in a public setting, or harassing people at work by saying inappropriate things can get you fired.
You are free to speak freely, but there are consequences, Free Speech does not imply uou can say what you like consequence free.
In some (criminal) industries, speaking freely will get you killed. If Hollywood is to be believed, speaking against the rich and powerful can get you killed. (I suspect it happens, I suspect its nowhere near as common as Hollywood makes out.)
To your point though Free Speech (capital F) has a specific constitutional meaning, and covers the consequences the govt can apply to your speaking freely. It does not promise no consequences by companies.
There is no threat to Freedom of Speech here, because what he was doing was not that kind of speech. Of course there is a chilling effect on speaking freely, his speaking out had consequences (regardless of the hand that pulled the trigger.)
In short you can't just say whatever you like (as E Jean Carrol understands) without consequence. That's not what Freedom of Speech means.
No one care about your constitution outside your borders while the concept of Free Speech is universal and isn't defined by a geographicaly limited piece of paper. I'll never let your regressive law colonize my thoughts.
What I don’t understand is how does Boeing expect to make the issues go away? Covering up the problems just kicks the can down the road. They still have shoddy planes out in the world. Is quarterly performance now more important than not having planes fall out of the sky somewhere later on? I guess I’m naive here.
Boeing isn't a person, it's a collection of individuals all trying to further their career. That's another executive's problem, their job is just to maximize their career earnings / potential while at boeing and then jump ship when the timing makes sense to.
The pathological incentives pressuring people to behave in this way must be distinguished from the (perhaps idealized) job itself, as well as from actual people's actual behavior, which is not homogenous. When we describe things as you do, we risk reinforcing the diffusion of responsibility and slash and burn careerism that leads to this sort of mess.
People can maintain integrity and agency in environments which discourage such. It takes some sacrifice, but the more people tend to agree with and embody the previous sentence, the less it takes from each individual, and the more social inertia kicks in to aid the resistance.
The belief that some outcome is inevitable is often the primary obstacle to its evitability.
The NTSB is bearing down on Boeing to give up the names of the staff that worked on the Alaska Airlines aircraft whose door plug blew out. At this rate, Boeing wont have to worry about whistleblowers. The investigation alone will be enough to open that can of worms.
It's just crazy to think how much things can change. Boeing was once the pinnacle of innovation; a company which achieved something seemingly impossible at commercial scale and then perfected it to an incredible standard. It's just crazy to think that such perfect company could decline to such low standard both on the technical side and ethics side.
It looks like a HR problem. They replaced people who are very good at building stuff with people who are very good at politics. But no amount of bullshitting can substitute engineering excellence when it comes to keeping aircraft in the air.
THis isn't an HR problem, it's not an engineering problem, this is a "think about quarterly profits only, bean counting" problem. Engineers need time to do quality work, constantly rushing things for upping the rookie numbers before the end of the quarter is paramount at Boeing these days rather than proper engineering from all the stuff I've seen. Seems like a clown circus of executives over there.
With reports of a federal criminal investigation under way, very suspect. Civil judgments and penalties are one thing, the possibility of prison time is a whole different level of motivation.
Change this to Russia and what is your first thought? Another mysterious death...
In a way it's better to indirectly choke a whistleblower to the point of death than to have to make them shoot themseleves twice in the back of the head on throw themselves off a skyscraper. That sort of thing.
Well-known Boeing critic and whistleblower John Barnett was found shot to death Saturday in Charleston, South Carolina. According to the BBC, the local coroner’s office said the gunshot wound that killed him was “self inflicted” and that police are investigating. Barnett’s body was found in his truck in a hotel parking lot. He had completed two days of depositions concerning a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit against Boeing. He was found after he failed to show up for his third day of testimony. Boeing told BBC it was saddened by Barnett’s death.
Regardless of whether there was foul play or not, it's looking pretty bad for Boeing.
They, or someone else with a stake of protecting the company, killed someone, or they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.
Or someone with an interest in making Boeing look bad, such as Comac or a foreign government that wants to tarnish the reputation of one of America's largest exporters.
Why would someone do that? Boeing are plenty competent and making themselves look bad. Just fly a couple planes into the ground, forget a few nuts and bolts here and there, they are doing fine.
> they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.
Give the man some agency. If he chose to end his own life, that was his decision alone. And it may be entirely unrelated to Boeing. Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.
>Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.
You'd think after he was done with hearings, something he was been advocating and trying to have happen since 2017. Why would he do Boeing a favor and kill himself before he could inflict further damage to the company?
Regardless, as a practitioner in the Quality field, I find the timing exceedingly suspect. Even if Boeing did rip him a new one in deposition, (which 32 years of employment and a documentation heavy culture more than equips a legal department to do) you don't close the ticket until it's resolved. He may have intended to do this all along; but not before all the dirty laundry got aired.
There is no way that any of this doesn't smell to high heaven. Not with a Federal criminal probe in the wind.
Even if Boeing did rip him a new one in deposition,
(which 32 years of employment and a documentation heavy
culture more than equips a legal department to do)
There is no joy in this situation whatsoever but if these weren't matters of life and death, it would be darkly humorous to imagine Boeing's legal team attempting to simultaneously explain that he was a bad employee and that they for some reason chose to employ him for 32 years.
I'm really trying to steel man the suicide angle. If he was unstable enough coming out to go through with suicide, but according to all other sources was eager and ready going in, that'd suggest something happened between time_entrance & time_left that reduced a man with the conviction to take on his employer of 32 years on behalf of the public and his own standards; to a suicidal wreck.
Either
A) They seriously ripped him a new one, by presenting evidence that countered the accusations being levied in his case sufficiently that he realized there was no further point going on.
or through rhetoric, or trickery, opposing council got him to believe that it was all his fault somehow.
B I can see, maybe. As someone whose done the work before, in spite of hostile management even, it iis very easy for a company to drum up every mistake or failure ever committed to paper. Sitting through 32 years of opposing council's best attempts to discredit you would be rough.
A I just can't see. Not with what we know. I could even understand a suicide after all depositions were done. We all collect ghosts; and they haunt us so well. Not before every last name was named. I dotted, and T crossed.
I suppose a C) could be an offer that couldn't be refused that would ensure his family'd be taken care of, but even that'd be ludicrous given what he already knew of their trustworthyness.
I guess I'll have to wait for things to end up in RECAP to read and make a conclusive decision.
I wonder if there's a clause where retirement benefits are clawed back if you choose to become a whistleblower. That would hurt; 62 years old, your whole life spent at Boeing, and then all your retirement suddenly evaporates because you chose to cause problems.
I'm just going to take this story at face value, there's an infinite number of alternate explanations that I'd be powerless to talk about.
I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.
Mr Barnett worked for the same company for over three decades and physically watched it stop caring about building airplanes. I know that can take a toll, and the stress of martyring yourself to let everyone else know has to be intense.
>my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.
I was pondering today about how the current economic condition of the populace incentivizes workers (everybody) to ignore moral concerns. If you saw something that really bothered you morally and were to blow the whistle and it hit the news cycle, you would never be able to work in your field again. You would probably get sued (legitimately or not). You could no longer provide for yourself or your family; probably for the rest of your life.
I worked at an immoral company; a small health insurance company that constantly weaseled out of paying claims. They even fired a new worker who had gotten in a car accident just so they wouldn't have to pay for it; the health insurance provided to employees was from the company's product line. They would always say, "we're not denying you care, we just aren't going to pay for it." One time a disgruntled customer or family member showed up with a gun to the office. This was decades ago and I did the only thing I felt I could do. I left when I could and I feel pretty good about it. They were eventually shut down by the state for not paying claims. I would have left earlier but I had rent and bills to pay. That's how modern economic conditions incentivize people to ignore moral concerns.
Long story short, if you feel you are working at a company that forces you to ignore moral concerns and you can't overcome it, work towards getting the fuck out as soon as you can financially.
Or killed by a nation state that thrives on creating conflict by amplifying two sided situations that lead to increased polarization and more instability… the problem with speculation is it’s just that speculation… I’m going to wait and see
I'm definitely not saying that's what happened here (I find it highly unlikely), but if a nation state did do that, there could be a desire to sow additional mistrust of a major US company.
Edit: this is just because someone asked what a hypothetical motive could be
There are a lot of reports of Putin actively interfering to destabilize the west, and also reports in places like the NYTs about the US expanding bases in Ukraine to provoke Russia into the war. These aren’t Twitter rants, they’re in our mainstream “big” media outlets.
World leaders have way too much on their plate to be personally involved in assassinating random foreign citizens for high-degree political effects.
If you see this headline, and story, and immediately think of Putin, that is an unhealthy level of conspiratorial thinking. There is literally no evidence to support this line.
I don't think anyone actually believes Putin personally organises many individual operations in foreign countries. You're just getting hung up on a common shortcut: "Putin" means "someone under Putin's (not even direct) command" here.
This is a niche, US specific issue. Assassinations expose agents that take years to plant. If Russia wanted to get involved, they would honey trap executives, hack them, etc.
Getting involved at this low level is absurd.
It’s like finding a Turd on you lawn, and claiming it’s part of a Russian Plot.
Ah yes, a rival nation would want a whistleblower that brings bad press on their rival to be silenced right before further hearings. Funny how that works out in Boeing's favor more than anyone else.
I don't know, if one counts interference by the number of puppet governments created I know which of this pair would come out on top. And usually the installation of a puppet government sends a country on a downward spiral that's hard to recover from. See: Haiti, Iraq, Egypt.
Somehow, most people fail to see the obvious: The ongoing FAA audits at both, Spirit Aerospace and Boeing (so far it looks horrible based on initial reporting) will identify each and every single verifiable whistleblower claim anyways.
So no, despite the general retaliation against whistleblowers out of princial (for the record, that alone is illegal and should be punished a lot harder and more often), Boeing as a company or individual employees have nothing to gain here.
Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.
That's the whole point. And the reason why retaliation against whistleblowers ia mostly illegal. Proving reprisal actions can be so difficult so that it amounts to retribution itself.
All the reason more to honor those few brave souls who do it, I know I propably wouldn't. And claiming this particular one was killed is absolutely not doing that.
>All the reason more to honor those few brave souls who do it, I know I propably wouldn't. And claiming this particular one was killed is absolutely not doing that.
What greater honor than to have Justice ultimately done, and the Truth be set free? My wager: Boeing council did everything they could to try to turn things around on him, and the poor bastard in that moment, exhausted, at mental wits end, believed them. My guess is the answer will be in the transcripts as long as Boeing doesn't get them redacted/sealed.
As long as our court system is tilted in the direction of those that can afford to more effectively fund gaslighting the populace, we'll continue to see tragedies like this.
To come down to the general quality of discusion: reasons.
On a more serious note: Reporting states that Boeing and Spirit failed a third of their audits, so there is that. Also, FAA stopped Boeing from expanding their 737 MAX capacity. Also also, EASA can audit them as well (and very well might, deoending on what findings the FAA audits have; same as the FAA can audit Airbus in Europe).
But hey, if you think up even bigger, broader and deeper conspiracies necessary to make the initial obe believable, I cannot help you, or anyone.
Not the first time I think about quitting this place, for a couple of months now, discussion quality ain't any better than then comment section of my local newspaper. And thus really not worth the time.
And he not only watched the company fail spectacularly, in several of those cases those failures were connected to deaths, which I imagine he could feel personally responsible for not preventing, even if the corporate machine is really where the responsibility lies.
Those depositions are extremely stressfull. Add in years if not decades of emotional stress, prior. So yes, that can cause depression and can lead to suicide.
Another case where this happened was Therabis Edit: Theranos, obviously (my Pixel 7 keyboard and I won't become close friends any time soon): one of their lead scientists, who very much opposed cheating and their approach, developed a depression because of that and him being completely sidelined. He committed suicide the day before his scheduled depossition in a patent case.
Both cases are tragic, as is every suicide. Just because his death is convenient, doesn't mean in it was foul play...
So the guy goes on for years being an outspoken whistleblower telling his story to anyone that would listen, and decides while in his hotel waiting for his deposition that now would be the best time to end it and not move forward with holding Boeing accountable.
Occam's razor isn't pointed in the direction you think it is.
I mean, you are welcome to believe that, but if I was a betting man (or had money to bet), I doubt the company had him killed.
Corporate malfeasance, even that kills people, is rarely likely to put people in jail and executives are still likely to end up wealthy. Conducting the most obvious corporate assassination possible under extreme public scrutiny would lead to criminal prosecution of individuals that would definitely result in prison time.
Meanwhile, suicide is extremely rarely logical, and people who end there often were anywhere from having their entire future ahead of them to being amidst some of their most profound success.
This is hard, but typically, it happens when their interest doesn’t lead to the same decision as “the right thing.” This might not be inherently wrong: if you have a family who depends on you, keeping your job and making money is a morally valid choice.
What you want is for people to frequently see “doing the right thing” as the same as acting is what they see as their own interest: if being kind and polite gets you allies at work, and that’s how you get heard, respected promoted, or find a job, then people will be kind.
Things like cost-cutting to the point where there are legitimate risks to life are hard to find; therefore, people see others cost-cutting and getting promoted because they “stayed within budget” but (within their limited direct observation) never sanctioned. Engineers see project leaders getting away with it, but there are not good reputation mechanisms individualized enough: it’s “project managers always push for the cheapest…” Therefore, any PM who tries to go against the grain faces both prejudice and sanctions for not cutting costs.
You can implement reviews, promotions and reputation mechanisms that encourage behaviors that align short-term personal interest with the long-term benefit of the larger organization and stakeholders, but it’s really hard and non-trivial. Large organizations are far less efficient than they could be because of all the self-interested rent-seeking behavior, but the economies of scale are so strong that it doesn’t matter.
Not OP, but for me it was recognition that this perception is my own problem to solve, that the vast majority of the entire world is trying to do the right thing by their own perception, and that I lack enough context to be the judge. Which isn't to say there are no bad actors, but right about the time you think everybody but you is wrong, it's worth taking a step back and reevaluating.
Humanity has had people who did not care about doing the right thing since forever, and still we thrived. As long as someone is doing the right thing, we're on the right track.
It helps to give power to people who care about doing the right thing, instead of to people who don't care. Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.
No, your skepticism is warranted. Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing, but of course people interested in power will try to game the system by pretending to do the right thing.
I think that’s right. It’s hard to know from a distance “they are definitely doing the right thing” so the appearance of doing the right thing is valued. Then, as a politician, appearing to do the right thing is sufficient and then pretending to do the right thing is often cheaper/higher output per unit of input, so pretending is rewarded.
The problem is not democracy (everyone getting an equal vote) but representative democracy (everyone getting a vote on a person once every N years who then gets the power to do what they want which they hopefully did not lie about in order to get those votes).
Delegation (everyone getting an equal vote on all issues but being able to designate someone else to vote on their behalf on any given issue without forfeiting the right to vote directly on other issues) does not suffer this problem and is arguably more democratic.
Additionally certain forms of representative democracy make this problem worse like first-past-the-post voting resulting in strategic voting, i.e. voting not for the person you think best represents your interests but most likely to win while still representing some of your interests, encouraging politicians to do the bare minimum and avoid taking strong stances on divisive issues to remain "electable".
The problem is that representative democracy centralizes power in a ruling class (sometimes literally, due to nepotism and dynastic reputations) whereas delegation maintains decentralized power while allowing for that power to be temporarily centralized (e.g. many people delegating to the same individual) but always with the understanding that everyone is free to reclaim their power by withdrawing it from their delegate on a case by case basis. In Germany a variant of this was promoted by the Pirate Party under the label "liquid democracy" - although they of course heavily focused on a possible technological implementation of it rather than promoting the idea itself first.
I've been thinking about something similar. Before the internet, this sort of system would be extremely impractical, and representative democracy is a pretty obvious choice, given the limitations of the time. But now, with the internet, it's a lot easier to handle this in a fluid way with little friction.
The only downside might be that deep discussions of nuanced topics between the delegates might be useless if most votes ignore the discussion. Compromise might get a lot harder, and nuance and depth might be lost. On the other hand, it might also kill corporate lobbying. It's worth a try, and definitely an improvement over first-past-the-post systems and those where politicians are bought by corporate interests.
The problem with "liquid democracy" is that it's unappealing to those who would have to implement it because it takes away their power (and financial prospects in the form of lobbying). It's the same problem as with trying to replace first-past-the-post voting (i.e. why should the major parties that always get to be in government do something that would give the smaller parties a better chance).
That reminds me of Bruce Schneier's notion of security theater [1]. Implementing ineffective measures that give a feeling of being the right thing on superficial view, in security or elsewhere.
Populism has understood that thoroughly.
> people interested in power will try to game the system
There need to be heavy consequences. You used to be ostracized, at least for some short period of time and in some scenarios, for selfish behaviour. Now, it seems like we approve of and even encourage douchebags because everyone's gotta get theirs.
> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing
If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe possible, were we to try) rather than relative perspective, etc, instead of being led around by their noses like oblivious if perhaps well meaning schoolchildren by these people?
Yes. And they do. The functioning ones, at least. Corrupt democracies obviously don't, but that's the nature of corruption. But I'm pretty sure the best education systems are generally found in democracies.
Do "democracy", "functioning", "obviously", "don't", "is/am/are", have precise, useful and non-misinformative meanings in this context?
In other important fields (anything involving money for example, or programming), do we sometimes discuss things accurately, and consider things with respect to what is or may be possible, and (actually, objectively) true (basically: pursue optimality)? Might it be at least plausibly beneficial to consider applying that rigour to evaluating and designing our democracy?
You can deconstruct language all you want, but it's not going to change basic facts. You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.
You can state your vague opinions as facts all you want, but it doesn't make them facts.
Imagine if we wrote code the way we talk about political matters, where trying to be correct was considered wrong, worthy of punishment or banishment.
Or for a more apt analogy: imagine if the inaccuracy and untruthfulness in threads like this was tried in a thread about technology right here on HN: do you think that would stand unchallenged, and do you think those challenging untruths would be considered to be doing it wrong?
> You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.
Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?
And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?
Perhaps I missed the class where we learned we should not think about such things - rather, whatever intuition pops into our minds is correct, necessarily.
I have no idea what kind of weird language game you're trying to play. If you have a problem with vague opinions, maybe you should be more clear about what you're trying to say there. You make vague claims of wrongness, inaccuracy, untruthfulness, and even punishment or banishment, without making clear what the fuck you're hinting at.
You doubt that democracies tend to have better education than dictatorships? Why? Do you have any basis for that doubt?
If you look at lists of countries with the best education, the top is dominated by democracies, with Finland usually at the top. Lots of dictatorships around the world are not exactly known for their quality education. The only exception to that that I can think of are communist dictatorships: Cuba has apparently pretty good doctors, the old USSR was pretty big on research and engineering, and China is currently investing heavily in engineering.
But their educations tend to focus entirely on STEM fields, and not on fields that might lead people to question the politics of the system; it's vital for the survival of dictatorships to suppress that kind of thinking.
> Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?
I don't see why. There's always room for improvement.
> And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?
Americans always claim that their country is too big to replicate the successes of Europe. I think that's bullshit; there's a political drive to keep government programs that help the people underfunded, to keep people stupid and poor, particularly from the Republican party that's increasingly pushing the US towards dictatorship. Because they know critical thinking is not going to help their case.
Imagine a scenario where a technology is invented, and it is working pretty good, and in some places it is objectively better than other places (it is better on a relative basis), which results in it having the appearance of being very good on an absolute basis.
Now, add in someone suggesting that it could plausibly be much better (for the sake of argument lets say 50% better), and this improvement could be very beneficial to humanity (let's throw in some compounding, self-reinforcing positive feedback loop effects), and this person just so happens (in this thought experiment) to be correct, though it is not possible to know he is correct (perhaps because of the nature and quality of the technology itself). However, for this 50% increase in optimality to actually happen, it just so happens to require substantial (say, 10%) public support, but that support cannot be achieved because of limitations caused by the technology itself.
((It would be nice to be able to branch thought experiments....I think doing one with and without that last attribute would produce interesting results.))
Now, we could swap in various object level technologies into this thought experiment, and see how things appear. My suggestion is that when swapping in education, this resembles the situation we are actually in, but because of the nature of this particular variable, we are not only not able to realize it, we cannot even consider it.
Hopefully this is clearer?
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Or another angle: consider how we are constantly improving so many things, like really working hard at it (that's what I do all day every day where I work), yet: are there (or might there be) some things that we are not working really hard at improving, that an omniscient Oracle could see (and maybe we could as well, if we were able to look, or at least try) contain massive amounts of unseen, low-hanging fruit? And, might education be one of these things? (Or: culture, "democracy", etc?)
Or another angle: do humans in 2024 have any sacred cows?
>> Sacred cow is an idiom, a figurative reference to cattle in religion and mythology. A sacred cow is a figure of speech for something considered immune from question or criticism, especially unreasonably so.[1][better source needed] This idiom is thought to originate in American English, although similar or even identical idioms occur in many other languages.
Background
>> The idiom is based on the popular understanding of the elevated place of cows in Hinduism and appears to have emerged in America in the late 19th century.
>> A literal sacred cow or sacred bull is an actual cow or bull that is treated with sincere respect.
>> One writer has suggested that there is an element of paradox in the concept of respect for a sacred cow, as illustrated in a comment about the novelist V. S. Naipaul: "V. S. Naipaul ... has the ability to distinguish the death of an ordinary ox, which, being of concern to no one, may be put quickly out of its agony, from that of a sacred cow, which must be solicitously guarded so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference."
I think a legitimately relevant reference to things like climate change, nuclear weapons, etc could be made here (with respect to the "so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference"....if we don't smarten up, we may be walking blind into big trouble), but I have to get my ass into work!
A bit. You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle. I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements that care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.
Of course there's a contradiction in there, and one that many people today are struggling with: the ideas that promote that restrictive/dogmatic society could themselves be a threat to an open democratic society. Should we allow those ideas and risk our open democratic society, or should we restrict them and thereby become less open and democratic? What happens if people vote against democracy? Which is essentially the same question as: does freedom and bodily autonomy mean you can sell yourself into slavery? Popper's paradox of tolerance also feels related, although that's easier to resolve.
But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.
> You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle.
Yes, the omniscient oracle is a representation of the ability in thought experiments to know via the definition of the thought experiment what is true (virtually, within the thought experiment). This is unlike the object level reality we live in and are discussing, where what is true is only somewhat known (which itself often cannot be known) - for example, in this scenario, it is not known:
- what goes on behind closed doors in political circles
- what the intentions of all political participants are
- to what degree each individual person within our "democracies" are optimal
- to what degree the complex structural design of our "democracies" is optimal, or is as advertised/perceived to be <---- this is, the point of contention
> I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements....
Let's see:
> ...that...
Wait minute....what is the nature of this "realness", where you can somehow possess knowledge of many thousands of object level actors and activities whom you have never met, and have no way of monitoring?
> ...care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.
Here you seem to be comparing "democracies" to dictatorships, an easy win, as if somehow the point of contention in the text of the conversation above is that. It is not.
You have not ~disproven or even argued against the speculative question/proposition contained within the thought experiment, but rather dodged it.
> Of course there's a contradiction in there....
That is not the only problem in there.
Noteworthy: accurately and comprehensively discerning the ideas contained within language (thought experiments, etc), with proper usage and references to object level vs abstract representations of reality (which can easily be mistaken for the thing itself, people being what they are) is a fairly sophisticated skill...one that needs to be learned, and that can easily not be noticed to be lacking, particularly during the discussion of "culture war" topics like this one.
Here you are referring to "democracy" the abstract concept, but there is another existence of democracy: the object level entity that manages our affairs (and all the other things that the individual actors do within it: some known, some unknown, some hallucinated), and like any object level entity, it is only as good as it is. And, our ability to know what that is, is limited, a factual phenomenon which many people's knowledge of is also limited. And, this state of affairs is directly downstream from our education system.
> But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.
Yes, and it may not be possible to be otherwise, which I would say is strong evidence for my very point: the quality of our educational system is suspiciously (to me) low, on an absolute scale, and that it is very interesting that many if not most people do not have the ability to question, as they could easily do with most other things (how fast a car can go, how efficient an algorithm is, whether an ideology opposed to one's preferred ideology (ie: dictatorships) is flawed, etc), the very organizations that exert control over the world they live in more than any other.
I really struggle to understand how this can be so universally uninteresting, and I truly wonder if it is purely organic.
Only if all the political parties benefit from people being able to make good judgements. If you have a party that benefits from an uninformed or misinformed public then it's significantly easier to lead them around through fear and lies than it is to govern well. Once they gain power they can reduce education spending, meaning they have more people they can direct more easily. Meaning they can get more power, and repeat the cycle.
If this is true in a two party system, would it not be logical to expect that the party that does not want to exploit an ignorant population would be directing significant attention and resources to educate the public while they hold power (and engaging in non-stop rhetoric on the matter at all times), which if all goes well could gain the support of the educated, permanently?
I sometimes wonder if people have somehow been conditioned to not think about this topic with the seriousness it deserves. I wonder, if we were to search through various academic literature about the nature of humans, might we find some theories about how it may be possible to pull something like this off?
Most democratic countires have capitalist style manufacturing industries so I'm not sure that holds. Non capitalist attemots to make planes haven't gone that well.
Though you can regulate capitalism better. Encourage founders to run the things rather than buy out guys, have better trade unions and so on.
> Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? The earliest versions of democracy used sortition for selection and thus couldn't account for doing the right thing. And of course we all know about the "tyranny of the majority" so I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".
Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing (although of course they can be misled and manipulated). Capitalism tends towards maximising profit, which often comes at the cost of doing the right thing.
> I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".
Because people are. Why would something be considered "the right thing" if there weren't people believing it?
I realise that Trump campaigning explicitly on doing the wrong thing and still being popular, would seem to contradict this, but he's an outlier, and apparently many of his supporters still somehow believe that whatever he's doing is somehow right. Of course they've been misled and manipulated, but that's the big vulnerability of democracy (although it's also possible in every other system).
> Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing
This isn't a given. History has lots of examples where a majority of people do not care about morality or doing the right thing, and in fact use their voting power to elect similar-minded leaders. Your post even contains a perfect example, but he is not an outlier.
There is capitalism proper and there is absurdly leveraged subsidized speculative financial managerial capitalism.
There is always nuance on the real world. Things can’t be explained anymore in the terms of XIX century Marxism. If Marx were alive today probably he would completely rewrite Das Kapital.
In this situation I don’t think you can attribute it to capitalism because Boeing is a defacto monopoly. Capitalism should lead to competition. Competition should lead to alternatives when one of the market participants has quality control issues.
Unfortunately, "should" is doing some heavy lifting here...In reality, the constant requirement for MORE profit makes it so that every aspect of business or production, including quality control, is a slider conflicted with profit, and sacrificed until it needs to be corrected, as little as possible.
Quality control is only conflicted with profit when profit isn't dependent on quality. Boeing has clearly taken a huge financial hit over this, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to say that they were too obsessed with profit.
You could argue that they were too lazily profit motivated, that they were moving sliders to reduce costs without considering consequences. But capitalism doesn't incentivize laziness and it did not reward them for it here.
But doesn't that either disprove capitalism as an realistic working system or make an argument that the state have an obligation to protect the market by destroying large corporations before they become dominant.
A lot of the traditional critiques of capitalism have been that it will inevitable degrade back into mercantilism if the capitalist are not challenged by an democratic state and functional trade unions, but alowed to merge into large powerfull entities like google, Boeing, microsoft and Facebook.
1. If another player(s) are able to start and freely operate as a competitor then talented engineers will have more options for employment and each entity will have to compete on both price AND quality in order to win business. This requires continued investments.
2. If the original player is able to use regulatory frameworks, lobbying and other tactics to enforce a monopoly, then the state has a duty to break them up to ensure competition.
Option 1 is more free market where the problem solves itself. Option 2 involves use of the government to both create and resolve the problem.
I don’t personally take issue with either because the solution is still competition. Whether Lockheed, SpaceX, a Boeing breakup or some company we haven’t heard of gives it to us isn’t a big concern. We just need competition.
We all know that the Boeing mess will end up with everyone involved in creating the mess walking away richer as the state goes in an cover whatever bill to keep boeing from collapsing as the alternative will be for non-american companies to take over the entire commercial airoplane manufacturing sector.
The problem with the just more competition argument is that it never actually works once a market reach a broken state it never self correct as too many people is going to be affected for that to be allowed to happen, which is exactly how mercantilism keeps creeping back, as the nation state behind it falls into the trap that protecting whats working is preferable to allowing the chaos of creative destruction to take down an entire sector of the nations economy.
It can work as long as we're willing to let companies fail. Typically, a huge company shouldn't fail quickly, it should slowly downsize as it loses revenues to a competitor while it has time to react.
The government stepping in to just hand out money will preserve the broken status quo because the failure incentive has been removed.
Potential sudden failures due to outside factors like the collapse of the banking system are certainly different situations though.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
If you want to change the company from within then you are almost certainly dedicated to the goals of the organization and they are falling short, but it is loyalty to the organization itself that gets you clout. So in order to change the company, you first have to do the thing that you want to change, like cutting corners to meet a deadline. Only after you've kissed the ring will you be given power. This means that unless you are able to perform a revolution or coup within the company (maybe by unionizing), you will always be subordinate to its rotting fish head. If you want to change the company, the best way you can do that is by joining a competitor with better leadership and out-competing or being that leadership at a competitor.
Being a subordinate to people you don't respect is going to demoralize you, demotivate you, disempower you, and make you lose respect for yourself until you cannot function as a person.
If you want to make a change, your only option is to get into a position of power, be subject to the same corruptive forces as the incumbent, and choose to be responsible instead of selfish, which is fundamentally an act of self sacrifice. His discussion of the video is way more thought provoking than the original video itself, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo
Attempting to do so is almost always a fools errand. Unless you have an outsized voice for your position then you will never actually turn a company around and attempting to do so will only add to your burden and worsen your situation.
It depends on your position and on the company. There are situations where you can have impact, in which case you should definitely use that. There have been plenty of cases where employees did seriously change corporate policies, but that's usually either in small companies or in companies where employees band together. And often the only impact you can have is to quit and take your skills to a more responsible company.
I've found (in <200~ employee companies) well structured exit interviews to be the best way to change a company from within. What better way to express your disapproval than by severing ties?
I mean, you kinda glossed over 1/3 of the issue... how do you quit “the entire world”? I think the person asking for advice wanted a real answer for “how can one deal with this difficulty”, especially because in the work situation, a new job won’t necessarily make any difference in terms of the internal struggles.
The short answer: you can’t, but you can change which parts of the world you actively engage with.
As someone on a long journey that seems highly relevant to this thread, getting help via therapy is one of the most important things I’ve done for myself.
A job that has sufficient problems and insane levels of stress can make the rest of the world look…different. Quitting my job gave me the mental capacity to find and see aspects of the world around me that are not worth quitting.
It has given me the space to recenter my life on things that support me, and to regain some optimism about what I can do with my life more broadly.
Quitting a toxic environment is an important first step. There are good places left. Good people to work for. Different ways to live life.
Choosing suicide is often related to a deep belief that there are no options left. This is often a result of compromised thinking based on intensely difficult situations/experiences that make it extremely hard to see beyond the current situation. I’ve had periods of dark thinking that I’ve since learned how to manage, and one of the most important things for me was getting a broader perspective on what was happening (and thus possible) outside of my own sphere.
You don't need to quit entire world, just the part that is toxic to you and poisons your life. You owe it to yourself and your family much much more than those sweet dollars that will kill ya (and nobody will see them anyway) or make you an old sour toxic fart.
If you are obsessed about quality, don't work at QA at big MBA-run corporations, just don't, thats a place for career-chasing folks. Find a place that appreciates and values your, or change your job altogether.
I know it sounds harsh but just look at this topic where it can and very often leads to (as long as the story checks, and nobody here actually knows).
> I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.
Please share how you managed with this. I’ve been here for a few years - since I lost my wife - and some days I can barely hang on.
I have some experience with this. My advice is that these episodes come in waves and thus a simple yet vital rule has literally kept me alive: don't do it; this will pass. That plus therapy and a brief stint on antidepressants swung me from suicidal ideation to optimism.
I do think you have to watch your environment too. Just like alcoholics don't typically hang out in bars, we shouldn't hang out in places/jobs that depress us.
All of this is easier to say than do. I wish you the best.
Thank you. I am unable to find a therapist, and I was unable to manage with antidepressants. My mechanism right now is "see if you still feel this way a week from now" which - so far - helps. It isn't so much that I changed my mind, but more that I understand that there are people that depend on me being around.
Job is indeed a major factor. I don't currently work in a great place - it is generally a rather toxic place - and age-discrimination is, like most of the industry, rife. Pushing 54 it is hard to find a new gig, especially in this market, which doesn't help at all. After 30 years working at the forefront of this industry solving some of the hardest problems around, my skills, experience, and insights are just no longer required.
Life circumstances have left me without any kind of options for retirement, early or otherwise, so this is me for the rest of my life; I'm likely to die behind my keyboard. I'd rather go out on my own terms, watching the sun set behind the sea.
Well what i can say is that there's always the possibility that you find true happiness somewhere you don't expect. It's gotta be somewhere you don't expect cause otherwise we'd have it by now! And since you can't expect it, you can't forsee it. But it's there, waiting for its moment.
I came close a couple times but I held on and eventually found things. One thing that keeps me on is wanting to fix things. It can be difficult to witness the ugliness of the world in perfect detail through the internet, but i believe it's actually better than it ever has been, and it's only improved because people like me decided to make it that way. You're just past 50 and you've worked some incredibly important jobs, corporate culture feels dime a dozen these days but that doesn't mean anything about your actual self worth. I can't even imagine all the knowledge and experience you have now! Learning one thing isn't just one thing, it's learning about the world, learning how to learn, and about all the things connected to it. Your knowledge is much more general than the words on your resume.
I can't tell you how to fix money, i know that's an extremely difficult problem for a lot of people and I've seen it hurt. But i can say that you must be an incredibly capable and knowledgeable person, who has true potential. The kind of thing that doesn't happen in a job, but in a spark. The kind of spark that you don't even know exists until it does. I hope you're doing okay friend
Not sure what to say, I always had family to catch me, intentionally or not, when I came even remotely close to what you are going through. All I can think of is this: nothing is worth sacrificing your life for. That, and most likely you are not alone, even if you din't know it. I am no religious person, so no prayers, but I sincerly hope you get through this!
This is the worst advice but it worked for me: I just stopped caring and let go. I no longer believe that there is any justice in the world, and I accept that I cannot change that so I just look out for myself. It’s a bleak outlook but everything is so much easier now, and I’m still alive.
I endure the feature creeps of computer languages with their compiler implementations (ISO and gcc extensions are the worse). Sneaky and vicious planned obsolescence scheme on a 5-10 years cycle.
It is very accute too. Just a bunch of scammers with an army of brain washed dudes or worse. We have a name for them: Big Tech.
Everybody has limits.
But in this very case, this is extremely unfortunate timing... or even more fishy than expected. Whatever, something is off in Boeing. Some screws need tightening ...
I think he's saying that you're too willing to believe the reasonable, plausible explanation that falls out of Occam's Razor, as opposed to accepting whatever embattled fringe theory of the day also fits the available evidence.
It is almost like Occam's Razor proposes some type of probability distribution, not discounting the fringe completely but suggesting as a heuristic that the most simple is most likely.
Some people though seem to like this Anti-Occam's Razor that the most complex and interesting explanation is most likely even though they have to know from everyday experience that is simply not true and not how the world works.
Just to chime in on the 'alternate explanations', I think it's important for anyone with conspiracy ideas to remember that the case he was being questioned in was not an investigation into Boeings liability as an airplane manufacturer, but rather a civil suit he made against Boeing for defamation of character.
In which any evidence admitted or discovered in his case would become potential admissable evidence that could be leveraged in the Fed's criminal probe as a matter of public record. And since it was a defamation suit, his entire history was discovery fodder with a much lower bar to cross for subpoena's or discovery than the criminal probe would be. Then there's potential leaksge to the media and public (and thereby regulators) of exactly what to look for.
Don't stop thinking at the first order consequence/event. There is generally much more to it.
Barnett was involved in a whistleblower lawsuit against Boeing, alleging serious safety concerns at the North Charleston plant, where he managed quality for the 787 Dreamliner production. He claimed the push for speed compromised safety, with sub-standard parts being used and a significant failure rate in emergency oxygen systems.
Despite raising these issues, he felt his concerns were disregarded, leading to legal action against Boeing, alleging career damage due to his whistleblowing.
From my point of view Occam's razor here wouldn't be assassination. It's would be as mentioned above, mental health and overwhelmed by the sheer impact of your whistleblowing.
Maybe there is no Occam's razor here if there's no obvious answer.
I hope this is just bad phrasing and will assume you mean just for this whistleblowers case. We don't know though.
Assassination AFTER the whistleblower information has been released and is now out in the open really doesn't make any sense to me though. As conspiracies go, its not even humorous.
I’ve seen enough vindictive behavior in corporate structures that if assassination is on the table at all, so is assassination after the cat has been let out of the bag.
That said suicide due to extreme demoralization is also a plausible explanation.
You don't have to assassinate the whistleblower, but merely extra-judicially harass them as much as physically possible and let whatever happens happen.
Boeing may not have needed/wanted him dead, but managers have done plenty of petty bullshit retaliation before, for far far less.
If the people investigating Hunter Biden suddenly turned up dead, or the people investigating Trump, and if that happened over and over across several years, then I'd say yes. Oh, and if you could be arrested for a protest.
You can be arrested for a protest. You can also be shot and killed without consequences for protesting in some scenarios. Whether either of these survive a SCOTUS challenge, not sure, but in the meantime it sure fucking happens. We’re less free in 2024 than we were in 2001.
But at least you’re still right about the political assassinations, which is not yet a thing that happens here on an organized basis.
I always check whether my flight is on a Boeing and tend to avoid them—better safe than sorry! Fortunately, in Europe, most carriers primarily use Airbus, which simplifies things. Essentially, it boils down to avoiding Ryanair, and there are plenty of other good reasons for avoiding Ryanair.
My favorite thing to avoid Ryanair is, despit being most used in Europe, they never had a single deadly crash. not even once. So it's great reason to avoid actually. too safe? I prefer less safe airlines like germanwings? or maybe any other with actual crash history. Also some leg room is more important than my safety. you know?
cod develops over time, from an enforcement perspective, a rapid assesment of the situation may lead to a level of response based on perceived threat.
an experienced or well trained LEO may see a subtle detail indicating involvement, or not of other person, setting the tone for investigation or threat response.
an autopsy may turn that around if it ends up that a weapon was held in a position quite unlikely for decedent to achieve.
the overarching consideration is a planned murder is not in any way beneficial to boeings situation
It's probably worth remembering that there is a tremendous amount of political pressure on the coroner and prosecutors dealing with this to not leave behind an unsolved murder finding that could sully the reputation of the entire system for giving congress a chance of hearing testimony from whistleblowers.
So anything short off enough evidence to secure an quick conviction of some disposable culprit will we bend into whatever shape is needed to support an "suicide" or "accidental death" finding by the prosecutor/coroner in charge regardless of what the investigating detective think is the most likely explanation.
Well, I flew once on a 787 Dreamliner and we had to wait around 2 hours, because restarting a system, waiting for experts to arrive, took that much time. At least that was what the pilot told us.
I'm not saying that Boeing had him assassinated, but I sure wouldn't put it past them. They've already shown themselves to be perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives for increased profits.
It doesn't even have to be Boeing. It's possible that a government agency could do it as well. For example, suppose Boeing is seen by the government as a national entity, it's possible for a government agency such as CIA to do the assignation if they think he puts the country in an unfavorable position.
But I think it's more likely that a shareholder/high stakes person connected to Boeing might want to do it.
There is no way Boeing, the company, would do it in my opinion. That would be nuts.
> There is no way Boeing, the company, would do it in my opinion. That would be nuts.
What does it mean for Boeing, the company, to have done it or not?
Boeing is a large corporation comprised of individuals and assets. If foul play was involved, how many of these individuals would it take to be considered that Boeing carried out the murder? Would they need to have used company assets? Would it need to have come down the chain of command?
Doesn't even have to be someone important or with a lot of money on the line, just anyone with a lot on the line for them, and that doesn't require anything but a feeling.
A janitor who thinks they will lose their job which might be no money but critical (or feel critical) to them because of retirement or health care, maybe for a relative etc, or any rando that some nobody middle manager lizard pressured or even merely manipulated by just talking.
It wouldn't be as direct as if the order came from the boardroom. There are thousands of "stakeholders" bound to lose their gravy train, lobbyists, suppliers, "consultants", military industrial complex. It's easy to for one of these to send a "contractor" to stalk, hold the person's arm and "shoot himself" dead. I am not an investigator but this is very very suspicious. He delivered 2 days of testimony and is about to third one. If someone is suicidal they wouldn't be this motivated to go through the testimony of 2 days and skip the third. Also suspicious is BBC becoming "the owner of the stories" instead of local news outlets.The PR machine is in full swing.
No, he's saying that there's an army of lobbyists that see Boeing's financial health as necessary for their (clients') own. The lobbyists don't work for Boeing.
Imagine you had a highly lucrative SMB selling Microsoft services to some government/institutional customers, and some big court case threatened to cause MS serious harm, affecting your ability to sell those MS services. If you're a sociopath, you might want to shoot the star witness.
If I were a large Boeing shareholder I could protect my stock value and give Boeing cover at the same time since they would be legitimately innocent of his "suicide".
There's a fairly short list of companies I could see doing something like this, and Boeing is on that list. I could see Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey, ...
Corporate serial killers are everywhere really. The tobacco industry knew their product was giving people cancer and tried to hide that from the people they were poisoning. Philips knew their CPAP machines were filling people's lungs with poison and killing them but hid that as long as they could so they could sell more machines. Baby food companies like Gerber and Beech-Nut Nutrition knew/know that their baby food contains dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals but continued to sell them to parents who unknowingly spooned that poison right into the mouths of their babies. DuPont and 3M knew that the PFOA and PFOS they produced were highly toxic and causing everything from cancer to deformed babies but they lied to cover that up so that they could keep profiting and now every single one of us has that shit in our blood and there is literally no place or creature on earth that isn't contaminated with it. It's in the rainwater. Johnson & Johnson knew for decades about the asbestos in their baby powder. The Sackler Family knew they were pushing dangerous levels of opioids, but they lied and even bribed doctors to overprescribe their products leading to millions of deaths and countless addictions. Car manufacturers have killed people for higher profits too.
Every single one of these companies were already pulling in a massive amount of wealth but they knowingly killed people just so that they could make even more money. They all put additional profits over human lives. There is no reason to think they wouldn't put a bullet into someone's head if they thought it would make them more money. In many cases it would have been much more humane if they had.
I'm really sorry to hear that.
There were a few internet articles and even two congressional reports on the problem showing that both the baby food companies and the FDA knew about unsafe levels of heavy metals, but did not address it.
In light of the scandal the FDA started a "Closer to Zero" program (https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/clo...) because I guess zero poison in baby food is asking too much. The website shows that the FDA hasn't continued to outright ignore the problem at least, but you can see that they haven't come close to doing anything meaningful in terms of action levels and don't expect to until Dec 2024.
Some foods are worse than others (rice is a common culprit) so if you're stuck using any kind of baby food off the shelf you might be able to reduce exposure if you're careful about what you buy, but I wouldn't have much confidence in any of it. Once a company has proven that they're willing to poison babies for profit trust shouldn't come easy.
I'm sorry that I was the one to tell you about this, but I'm really glad that you now know and if beech-nut has been hurting your kid I hope the damage done is small and that you're able to get some kind of compensation for the harm they've caused your family. Until companies know that they'll face significant and meaningful consequences if they knowingly hurt us for profit they'll never stop hurting us.
It sounds like the journalist thinks it was murder but can’t write it cause it’s illegal somehow. The result is a piece that almost reads like a satyrical piece from the Onion.
Sorry, you're right, I didn't convey what I felt properly. It feels that the journalist is trying way too hard not to make it sound like it was suspicious. So he scatters the facts around the article as if people wouldn't connect the dots.
> It sounds like the journalist thinks it was murder but can’t write it
It sounds like a basic and uncontroversial recitation of the facts. People here project their own psychology (and cultural imprints courtesy of Hollywood) onto it, with high cynicism and distrust that extends not just to Boeing but to authority figures in general (police, courts).
Otherwise this thread would be about HNers' experience with whistleblowing and suicidal thoughts, which is all the story actually mentions.
I wish there were an aggressively anti-clickbait news outlet that writes headlines explicitly designed to preempt and neutralize potential misunderstandings. Imagine editors try to anticipate all kinds of ways a candidate headline might mislead the reader, and rewrite the headline to discourage those inferences — succinctly if possible, verbosely if necessary. For this particular piece such a outlet might opt for something like:
"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide"
or even:
"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility — Distinct from the 737 Max Whistleblower! — Dies by Apparent Suicide"
To be clear, I don't find the headline by The Hill ("Key Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead from Apparent Suicide") to be especially misleading or clickbaity. It's perfectly defensible against charges of intentional misleadingness. But I suspect for many readers it is part of the experience of reading this article to have a moment of realization halfway through to the effect of "Ah, so this is not about the 737 Max whistleblower I've recently read about". What a breath of fresh air it'd be to have a news outlet that immediately gives off an impression of honorableness by trying actively and aggressively to avoid misleading its reader by its headlines (rather than focus on how its headlines can be defended from charges of misleadingness)!
I have it on my phone too, but its app is just horribly frustrating. I'm back to reading Google News. If you could give me a news feed chstomized for me, with LLM neutered titles and summaries, I might just pay money for that: but that feed would have to be octaves above what Google News has. Think TikTok-level of recommendation quality.
How about "Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide in the middle of formal deposition which started last week"
Right, it sounds like they were in the court room since a week and the guy couldn't take it anymore.
"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide just before his court appearance on Saturday"
Whether it was actually a suicide or murder, this (suing a large organization) is not the kind of thing an individual should take on alone. We are fragile. We can hurt ourselves, and others can hurt us. Without a companion keeping him company and supporting him, either path to harm is too easy.
No, not necessarily. At least according to Wikipedia, suicide is the act of _intentionally_ taking one’s own life. [1] It seems that the legal definition, at least in some jurisdictions, aligns. [2] If you find someone has died from self-inflicted wounds, it may be ruled suicide or accident. The colloquial use of suicide may also include accidental suicide, which could introduce confusion.
The amount of conspiracie flying around in this thread are shocking. Someone committed, as it seems, suicide after years, if not decades, of emotional work related stress. They came forward, publicly, with their concerns. So publicly, that everyone knows who they are, from co-workers over friends and family to the media. That alone adds another ton of stress and pressure. And on top of all of that, they went through a full day of deposition, aka interrogation, and looked at yet, at bare minimum, another day of those.
Each single factor mention above can, and did, cause people to commit suicide. And instead of focusing on this, and the fact that a very courageous person with high ethnical standards, is dead (I know that I would not have the courage to come forward the way they did in all likelyhood, and if I did, or didn't, I would be in serious emotional and psychological trouble), the self-proclaimed smart HN crowd is thrwong stuff around like "that's what corporate securits is there for" or "it could have been a government agency".
Two things:
First, for fucks sake, start showing some compassion, not just here but also on other subjects were someone weaker or more vulnerable suffers. The lack of emotional intelligence is the world into a colder place that already is and has to be.
Second, stop this jumping to conclusion behaviour, whether it is concerning on-going investigation or stories like, it onpy leads to very wrong conclussions or out right conspiracy theories. Both are embarrassing and expose a lack of curiosity. And no, just because some of the BS theories being thrown around stick sometines, doesn't mean all do, or that this way of thinking is working. It just measn that if enough theories are thrown to the wall, by sheer volume, some will stick. Just luck. And we should hold ourselves to higher standards around here, especially in cases of human tragedies.
The man was just about to testify. The timing is what makes this suspicious, not the suicide itself.
Let's not be so naive as to imply that these companies and their vested interests would not murder someone to protect a multi-billion dollar business. Shit like this happens all the time.
All the time, huh? Not the usual lawyer intimidation, pressure and PI surveillenace, but actual murder?
Ok, can you link to cases then? In the US or Europe or some place like this, not Africa or some developing country where western companies run amok at times. And also some recent ones, in the last 20 years or so?
- Jeffrey Epstein (2019, US): no explanation needed.
- Michael Hastings (2013, USA): Journalist known for his critical reporting on the US military, died in a car crash consistent with a car cyberattack (maximum speed/brake tampering, body charred beyond recognition) amidst national security investigations he was involved in. Expressed concerns his car had been tampered with and that he was being targeted hours before his death.
- Alexander Perepilichnyy (2012, UK): Exposed a Kremlin-linked fraud scheme, died under mysterious circumstances while jogging in England shortly after.
- David Kelly (2003, UK): A British weapons expert embroiled in controversy over the UK government's Iraq war intelligence. Suicided two days after testifying in a forest outside his home.
- Gary Webb (2004, USA): Investigative journalist who exposed the CIA's connections to drug trafficking, died from two gunshot wounds to the head in what was ruled a suicide.
- Deborah Jeane Palfrey (2008, USA): aka the "DC Madam," operated an escort service, threatened to expose high-profile clients, was found hanged right before she could testify in court. Notably, she said publicly multiple times that she would never commit suicide. One of the girls under her employ was also suicided by hanging.
On a related note, Alexander Litvenenko's death from polonium poisoning. If the Kremlin agents had handled the polonium with more care and not left a radiation trail a blind man could follow, it would have been a case of mysterious deterioration and a tragedy but not a murder.
Eisenhower warned the American public about the military-industrial complex before he left office. We are reaping the consequences of private/public partnerships and crony capitalism.
I don't buy the foul play theories. What could this person possibly reveal that is worse that has already come out? They crashed two 737 Max's full of passengers for crying out loud.
Names. Criminal charges require heads to fall on to pierce the corporate veil. He had names. Likely dates too. He had evidence of them committing acts that carry prison terms which would not by any stretch be short.
He was the number one threat to everyone at that company at that time, that was complicit in cutting corners.
Hm, this thread once again slid down the top page at an alarming rate, even though the safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Hacker News is surprisingly dismissive of user interests and votes.
Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.
- Little of HN's moderation is done directly by moderators. Rather it's user actions (flags on stories, downvotes and flags on comments), and some automated mechanisms, most especially the "flamewar detector".
- HN detects flames where a story has > 40 comments and the ratio of comments to votes is greater than one. As I write this comment, the story has a ratio of 2.24:1, which is quite high. The average front-page story floats far closer to 0.55 to 0.60 (2021 & 2022, respectively, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926236>, based on my own analysis of all HN front-page archives).
(At some point I'd looked at all the "spiciest" HN stories in the front-page archive, and though I don't have that handy, a 2.24 ratio is remarkably high by comparison.)
The flamewar detector isn't perfect, but it's often appropriate, and can take what seems to be an otherwise interesting story off HN's front page quite quickly. I've seen this happen to a number of my own submissions, and until I understood the mechansism and cause (and inquired to the mods via email) it could be quite discouraging. Note that mods do occasionally override the metric (as they have in this case, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676385>).
Ironically, your best defence against the flamewar detector is to upvote the story and not comment on it.
- The story is of course possibly significant, but we've got very little information to go on presently. HN, as with other online discussion sites, has a tendency to go off half-cocked in such cases, often with regrettable results in terms of discussion accuracy or relevance. My suggestion is to absorb the report, keep it in mind, suspend judgement as to what you think may have happened, and look for further investigations or reports.
It's standard moderation practice on HN to downweight offtopic comments. If we didn't do that, most HN threads would have something generic or offtopic at the top of the page, choking out more interesting discussion. There's nothing secretive here—I've posted about this lots of times over lots of years.
I know it's fun internet time to play sinister speculation, but if anyone wants to know what's actually happening, all they have to do is ask.
Edit: I mean about anything happening on HN. Suspicious deaths, I can't help with.
The previous comment was deleted as expected. You will surely say that you have nothing to do with it.
> This comment was, even though it has 8 points, moved from the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674829 to the lowest level here below 0 points. The order of comments in the original thread has also been reversed. It has to be said that this is a m...dishonest cover-up. Probably the most importantly for HN users, it proves that the order of comments can be changed by the moderators, not by the order of points. For example, the same operation could be performed in the same thread to produce the same result. This neatly matches the strange behavior often seen on HN. Oh, this comment may be deleted for going too deep.
> Also, with this move, the shadowban to this thread has been lifted and this thread is now back on the top page. The previous ranking was page 3.
You don't need to re-quote yourself. Even though your comment was flagged (I flagged it, and I'm sure others did too), it has not been deleted.
You can verify this for yourself by enabling showdead in your profile which will let you see the full text of all comments from all posters even if they are flagged or dead.
Nothing was deleted. We never delete a comment, except when the author asks us to.
As hayst4ck pointed out, your parent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676467 was flagged by users. When enough users flag a comment, it gets killed—but not deleted. Anyone with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can see all the killed comments.
We can only guess why users flag things, but most likely it's because you're posting dramatic off-topic claims that experienced HN readers find tedious, because they've seen so many and know there's no substance to them.
> Nothing was deleted. We never delete a comment, except when the author asks us to.
I have confirmed that the text of the comment has been replaced by [flagged] and is no longer readable. It's just sophistry to say that the text was only deleted and the comment was not deleted.
I'm sure plenty of users will be happy to confirm to you that they can still read your comment and that it is therefore not deleted.
I wonder if you're using a third-party app to read HN, because if you're using a web browser, you should not be seeing just [flagged]. I unkilled your comment when I posted my last reply.
When I logged out, last time it was replaced by flagged on Chrome and I couldn't read the text, but now I can, even though it's still flagged. Now there is a strange thing. Why are the other flagged comments still replaced with flagged? Your moderation is too variable.
> I unkilled your comment when I posted my last reply.
When a comment gets a certain number of flags, the [flagged] marker appears on the comment. When it gets an additional number of flags, the comment becomes killed and the [dead] marker also appears.
If a reader does not have 'showdead' turned on in their profile, or is logged out, then the text of [dead] comments is not displayed. Instead it will show as either [flagged] or [dead]. This is what happened with your comment when it was in the [flagged][dead] state. Had you viewed it with 'showdead' turned on in your profile, you would have seen that the comment was still readable and not deleted.
Once I unkilled it, it went back from [flagged][dead] to just [flagged], and it went back to being visible to everyone whether they are logged in or not, or have 'showdead' turned on or not.
If you're logged in and seeing some comments that just say [flagged] instead of text, this is because you haven't yet turned on 'showdead' in your profile.
> Once I unkilled it, it went back from [flagged][dead] to just [flagged], and it went back to being visible to everyone whether they are logged in or not, or have 'showdead' turned on or not.
In other words, you resurrected the deleted text. I just hope this conversation will not be deleted/flagged again and become unreadable.
I don't want to argue definitions. If you prefer to call a comment 'deleted' which anyone with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can read, that's fine. On HN, we've always used the word 'dead' for that class of comments.
I don't want to argue about what to call it. I just confirmed the fact that the text that was deleted and made unreadable is back to readable. Still, I'm surprised that comments are sometimes hidden from even being present here.
Wrong, your original comment is still viewable with showdead on. Dang is not trying to mislead you here, it seems you just legitimately aren't very familiar with this site.
A comment with +40/-32 and a comment with +8/-0 are moderated differently despite both being +8. That's a good faith policy that makes sense if you don't want to promote highly divisive "fight provoking" content.
I think it's also worth pointing out that this is done algorithmically and not randomly or arbitrarily by moderators based on their prejudices.
Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case? When many here are within 2 degrees of the people involved. Most within 3 degrees. It's a small world
> Number of comments and upvotes doesn't suggest lack of curiosity
Yes, I agree with you. I was doing double speak. Many things of public interest are nudged "off the front page". Promoting Political Bread & Circuses instead. I think the networks of the Managerial Class are tight. Due to shared interests, values, & upbringing. So I'm not surprised to see the circling of wagons. I'm more surprised that this post was not flagged yet.
> Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case?
I don't think it's a matter of curiosity. If most of the comments in this thread were things like the history of corporate violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...) then I think there would be less downvotes. Few people are aware of corporate oppression of the past which robs people of context for the present.
Unfortunately rather than provoking curiosity by introducing people to information they didn't know they didn't know, most of the comments here are some form of "in the back of the head twice..." which just isn't interesting or thought provoking.
Honestly you're probably better off reading threads on reddit about it. The system may not be as elite as HN but it does allow for more attention and free speech IF you're willing to dig through the detritus.
Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes.
Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass.
"Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with just enough randomness to be confusing.
People assume all kinds of things—whatever they want. Trying to stop that is a madhouse ticket. One eventually learns these things although in my case it seems to take years.
Another slow learning is that it's a bad idea to undertake impossible tasks like "showing clear evidence that astroturfing is not the norm"; especially before breakfast.
Btw, though - no one is denying "front page manipulation", though manipulation is an emotionally loaded word. HN is a curated site, always has been. I've posted, let's see, 70,000 comments as an HN moderator and thousands of those are precisely about this. How "posting thousands of comments of explanation" turns into "denying the idea of" is a good example of the first sentence of my comment here.
I don't believe in conspiracies, but killing himself in the hotel parking lot halfway into his disposition is quite noteworthy regardless of the circumstance.
It's known that whistleblowers disproportionately suffer from stress and depression [0], for what it's worth.
Ahem. The base rate for a healthy person dying in the week or so leading up to their important testimony is tiny. It's reasonably likely (20%+) that this was foul play.
Like the report that he killed himself due to pressures of the case or the fact that he gave 32 years of his life to a company that's calling him a traitor isn't compelling enough.
Same, which is why I'm disinclined to believe shadowy cabals ordering assassinations when it's more likely he was just under some of the highest pressure and scrutiny of his life.
I think thats part of the conspiracy: you don't directly murder one guy, you show him skeletons you know about him and tell him you will put them out in the public.
It’s not about intimidating or sending a message, it’s about undermining the credibility of a witness. This happens every day in $10,000 slip fall cases across the country. If someone is making accusations against your client, and they cheat on their wife / don’t pay their taxes / whatever, and you don’t bring that to light so the jury can evaluate their credibility, you’re committing malpractice.
You do know that professional hitmen actually exist, right? You can straight up pay a guy to kill someone for you.
It would be utter insanity to ask someone who legally works for you to kill someone. Which is why that doesn't happen. What actually happens is someone tells someone to deal with the guy and a paper bag full of cash appears in front of Joe's Killin Place in the middle of the night.
No, professional corporate hitmen do not exist in contemporary America. Again, movies and video games are not real life. The only "hitmen" in real life are idiot junkies who get hired by their idiot cousin to kill their estranged wife in exchange for drug money and then immediately get caught because violent criminals are morons and not criminal masterminds.
Irrespective of this specific case, do you honestly believe it is inconceivable one of the largest defense contractors in the world with deep connections to the military and intelligence apparatus would be capable of having an individual murdered if it were sufficiently important to their interests?
No, not they are not. The military and intelligence apparatus does not care if Boeing has to pay a fine. They will not carry out an execution at Boeing’s behest just to save them from a lawsuit.
Conspiracy theorists love conspiracy theories because they allow them to feel smarter than the “sheeple” that believe the official story. They don’t care if the actual conspiracy theory is wildly implausible and stupid, it’s just too psychological seductive for them.
Sorry but couldn’t be me, I am not dumb enough to fall for that cognitive hazard.
The military and intelligence apparatus does not care
You don't need the whole apparatus, just someone who has been trained by it and is morally flexible. Well, you don't even need that, but obviously people with professional experience tend to do a better job.
We do not have evidence yet of this being a murder-for-hire or similar, but you're insisting on the impossibility of such when in reality it's not all that unusual. Excluding it as a possibility is just as much cognitive bias as assuming it to be true.
An S&P 500 corporation hiring a hitman to murder a witness is beyond "unusual", it has literally never happened in contemporary America. You can't even give me an example of it happening because it hasn't.
> An S&P 500 corporation hiring a hitman to murder a witness is beyond "unusual"
It doesn't have to be the corporation itself, it could be an ambitious sociopathic underling of a security officer who was himself known and hired for his edgy/dirty attitude and "fix anything" reputation. This is essentially what happened in the eBay case; death threats in the mail aren't that far removed from actual murder, and got people sent to prison (proving the 'legal deterrent' to agents of corporations doing irrational and illegal things isn't perfectly reliable) You keep setting up strawmen to make the thing sound implausible.
That's fair. That said it's also not unreasonable to consider it a real possibility assuming it isn't immediately ruled out by evidence.
>Surely he’s more powerful than boeings CEO.
Stuff like this doesn't necessarily originate from the top. It can be people lower on the food chain feeling the heat on the other end of the blame steamroller.
---
“They brought them in from other areas of the company. The new leadership team – from my director down – they all came from St. Louis, Missouri. They said they were all buddies there.” [0]
“That entire team came down. They were from the military side. My impression was their mindset was – we are going to do it the way we want to do it. Their motto at the time was – we are in Charleston and we can do anything we want.” [0]
---
It's most likely he took his own life, although in my opinion it's blood on their hands regardless given the way he was treated.
In France/Lybia, the last two witnesses of khadafi personnal finances died within a week of each other, in two different countries (one Irak, one Netherlands if I remember correctly) once revelations from journalists about ex-president Sarkozy financing of his 2007 campaign hit. They also raised questions about the reason Khadafi was the first foreign leader invited in France, and why France took the lead in starting the Lybia war (representatives of the rebel groups were present in the Elysée two days before the start of the lybian Civil War).
Murder-for-hire happens regularly. Corporate involvement is very unusual, but that might be colored by a greater ability to throw resources at the problem. Most murder-for hire prosecutions that make the news seem to have something in common - the protagonists were amateurish, typically motivated by personal grudges, and spent relatively small sums of money (<$10k), and hired relatively inept killers who did a sloppy job and were caught. In contrast, organized crime killings often go unsolved for long periods.
Why wouldn’t POTUS have journalists killed then?
One current candidate for that office has lawyers who argue a POTUS would be immune from prosecution for such acts.
Corporations get caught doing crime all of the time. The fact that no large corporation in contemporary America has ever been caught hiring a hitman to assassinate a former employee is a very good sign that unlike all the other crimes they DO get caught doing, this one has never actually happened.
Virtually all journalists work for the same system POTUS is headlining, why would he kill his own henchmen? Those rare cases where some don't are handled much better by censorship and deplatforming. Why kill someone if you can make it so virtually nobody would listen to him anyway and all "respectable" news outlets would declare he is insane and likely is working for the enemy, whatever that is today? Killing the story is much easier and much more efficient, and has been done many times.
I wouldn't write that off if a certain candidate wins in 2025 to be honest. It's not like they haven't laid hints that such things are on the options list.
You vastly overestimate how hard it is to have someone killed.
It doesn't take nation-state resources to kill a random civilian. It's a few tens of thousands of dollars. Even a few million is basically nothing to a corporation like this.
It’s not the money that’s the issue, it’s the risk of getting caught with multiple life sentences. They got money to spare but it’s useless when you serve 50 behind bars.
And that's why no murders are ever committed, because the possibility of jail time or capital punishment dissuades anyone who would consider committing murder.
Admittedly, we're speculating in conspiracy-land right now, but...
Yeah, going to jail for years is a pretty decent deterrent for committing murder. But a criminal investigation was officially opened into Boeing. Maybe some powerful individuals realized they could be looking at jail time anyway if certain information comes to court, so they ran a risk analysis and decided it was worth it.
> Conspiracy theorists love conspiracy theories because they allow them to feel smarter than the “sheeple” that believe the official story. [...] Sorry but couldn’t be me, I am not dumb enough to fall for that cognitive hazard.
You're right, you'd have to be a total idiot to structure your worldview around the assertion that you're smarter than everyone else.
I'm not claiming to be smarter than everyone else, but I am claiming to be smarter than the people who believe that Boeing hired Michael Fassbender from The Killer to assassinate a former employee after but only after years of whistleblowing and after all the allegedly incriminating information was already out in the open.
The worst example you could find of corporate harassment and no one even got physically harmed, thanks for proving my point that corporations do not hire hitmen to carry out assassinations.
As a Quality Manager; this would be him going to Church and receiving absolution. They may have ripped him a new one at depo, but we're generally a bunch of stubborn mofos as a rule. This one strikes as smelling very, very, wrong. The company is certainly large enough where I could see somebody playing dirty. Especially since a conviction in the U.S. would be grounds for getting absolutely shredded in other jurisdictions.
People like you are why there is severe distrust of media.
A corporate drone doesn't have to order this. A high-up executive with connections with the underworld will do it, because they have enough at stake.
And of course, you are going to laugh at 'connection with the underworld'. Then go check up wirecard. Their CEO ran off to Russia.
You are utterly ignorant yet utterly arrogant. If you knew more, you wouldn't make these claims. If you knew far less, you also would just arrive at the natural conclusion that this is a cover-up killing.
Some things need to be said. Some people need to do a better job. I hate saying it because I want America & it's founding principles to succeed. Boeing's performance & response to accountability is bad.
China's methods are effective at stopping corruption dead. Their managerial class seems to understand the stakes of public safety. They don't mess around. They had to deal with corruption & it's destabilizing effects on many levels throughout their system.
In the American system, it's worse if nobody talks about corruption. It's clear that the western managerial class has become powerful. Some in the managerial class has no interest in self-regulation. Nor will these people work to benefit the public. What happens when these people harm the public? Like what has happened over & over the past century.
As long as there are no real consequences, this behavior will only be more bold & egregious. Like how a spoiled child takes advantage of parents. I would love to be proven wrong & am completely open to good faith efforts to correct these problems.
>But a country like China would punish the corruption by Boeing management with death. That's a great incentive to not be corrupt.
I've long since come to the conclusion that the reason today's politicians, executives, and others in position of power are so flagrantly corrupt is because they don't risk paying with their lives for their troubles anymore.
The feudal age wasn't a great time to live in as a peasant, but you can bet the nobles above you were greatly incentivized to act generally in your (and/or the kingdom's) interests because to do otherwise would have meant their (very vicious) deaths.
The nobles of the feudal age are the C-level suite of today. They move around the map conquering lands, and lands come with employees/peasants. Their goal? Squeeze as much value out of the workforce as possible. Except in the medieval version moving wasn't possible, so I think I'll take the modern version :-)
Notably, statistics has again and again shown that Bayesian statistics is archaic and not useful in actual production systems.
Slightly better probability calculations aren’t worth losing most of the stats tools we utilize all the time. This is why Bayesian techniques has precisely zero influence in Generative AI/LLMs
I hope the company had no involvement in this. It would be bit futile given such a large audience has seen their employees state they won't fly in the aircraft they build. [1] 3,716,935 views 4 days ago and Blancolirio's assorted incident reports [2]
Yeah, doing something so drastic in this situation doesn’t make sense. It’s possible that reality is somewhere in the middle. I have a very difficult time believing they would actually off the guy, but it’s not so difficult to believe they might hire some investigators to look for skeletons in his closet. Perhaps they found some. Obviously this is wild speculation and not intended to be a theory—just an example of something short of full-on Tom Clancy.
some people kill others because they run out of nutella, some kill others to rob $10 from their pockets, some kill them for fun, but its difficult to believe a giant corporation with A LOT to hide would kill a whistleblower?
Those are examples of irrational people doing things without regard to consequences. That’s not particularly relevant to what conditions would likely need to exist for a giant corporation to decide to do something like that. It would not be difficult to believe if this person had unique knowledge that likely would not come to light otherwise. Then I could see a rational (and terrible) person deciding that the benefit is worth the risk. It just wouldn’t make sense in this case. It’s not like this one guy was going to break Boeing substantially more than they’re already broken.
Billions of dollars at stake. There are countless interests that would absolutely kill someone over a fraction of that. I would never whistleblow. Losing my life isn't worth it
Or, even more likely, end things not because directly being requested to, but because of having no other way to NOT be forced to back out and cower at the very end, and betray themselves and other people.
All of which is unfortunately making it almost trivial for the adversary to steer things into that direction.