From the article: Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, said he plans to ask the federal judge on the case to reject the deal and “simply set the matter for a public trial, so that all the facts surrounding the case will be aired in a fair and open forum before a jury.”
If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well.
The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything.
I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants are accountable, but wealthy individuals and corporations are not.
The case is brought by the federal government in federal court. The recent Supreme Court ruling is applicable only to the enforcement of the federal gratuities law against state and local officials, federal officials are still prosecutable under the federal gratuities law. So, bribing these particular folks after the fact is still illegal.
How long do you think it will take for Congress to fix the law?
Until then, the ancestor poster's interpretation of "Don't worry, it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards!" is more or less correct AFAICT (though I'd appreciate more educated opinions).
I intentionally made my previous comments as factual as possible.
To editorialize a but, I don't believe Congress will fix this law in the near future, because enough congresscritters and their donors benefit from congresscritters being able to take "gratuities". The present state of American democracy is not healthy enough to keep them accountable for such self-serving decisions.
Until recently, rightly or wrongly, the court system was one of the few remaining checks on such corruption. The Supreme Court just decided the federal courts (at least, it might affect state courts too) will no longer care about much of it.
> Laws that have broad support are passed quickly. Laws that lack broad support are passed slowly or not at all
Not really. COVID relief got passed because of incredible urgency to people’s everyday lives. Reform to stop a corporation from effectively bribing a judge would have plenty of broad support. It just wouldn’t have the urgency. There are a ton of popular ideas that get zero traction in congress.
And still none of this engages with the OP’s broader point which is that it’s sub optimal for courts to substantially change the interpretation of law and then punt to a slow moving congress to follow up. The power in congress is not directly connected to broad popularity, a representative of a tiny fraction of the population is able to halt any and all progress. That’s not efficient lawmaking.
> Laws that have broad support are passed quickly. Laws that lack broad support are passed slowly or not at all.
> That how lawmaking should work!
Yes, agreed!
However, there is another category of laws, those which have very broad support from The People, but don't benefit the politicians (such as, a law restricting bribes).
Ehhhh it’s not always the case. Lots of laws have low levels of support (from constituents) but high levels of inertia that prevents them from being repealed. Subsidies are a prime examples. Alpaca subsidies for the Korean War were not repealed until the 1990s. (There’s probably also an important distinction between general support and support from the smaller population of monied classes that skews this further).
1) state laws can be unfair, slanted, and make voting difficult, meaning that voters may not be adequately able to collectively vote in their best interests
2) courts generally have continued to limit any laws on the books to counter this, saying that congress can clarify and strengthen if this is the case
So it looks to me like the ability to actually vote to hold congress accountable is being forever eroded with no accountability for anyone?
So what you’re saying is “it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards!”
95% of US inmates are on plea deal, which means the prosecutor never had to prove the charges before the (potentially) criminal admitted it. It is unfair for those who admitted the charges because they believed they couldn’t defend themselves further.
So the Boeing trial being on plea deal would be on paar with that standard…
Can you explain your line of thinking for saying this?
Because to me, the standard for such a big company, getting so many public dollars, that is responsible for the safety of a ton of Americans (and more) should obviously be more strict (for at least those reasons) compared to an individual who can't afford a good lawyer who had just a little too much weed on them.
The largest share of convicted inmates in the US were convicted of violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or assault. Simple marijuana possession makes up a tiny share. And less than half of the violent crimes committed in the US lead to a conviction.
1) Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both.
2) It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).
All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.
To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rather than for sexual violence. A whopping 4.6% is in federal prison for immigrating (which isn’t even a crime; unless this category includes human trafficking, which I would call a violent crime).
EDIT: As for all US prisoners, here is the data I found (see table 16 on page 29):
62% are there for violent crimes and 12.5% for drug charges. Note that many large states—such as California—don’t imprison for drug possession any more, and this table does not include sentences shorter than 1 year. This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing, as most crimes have shorter sentencing but serious and especially violent crimes have longer sentencing and thus are over-represented among the current prison population at any one point in time.
> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates
Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails.
> This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing
This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
> This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts.
This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context.
Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.
> Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost
This is false.
This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705
And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.
I'd say the Sackler's committed premeditated violent crime, "at scale". One could even argue that they would be eligible for the death penalty and yet they keep half the winnings.
> It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).
From the above source, within state prisons (which is the majority of incarcerated Americans), 163,000 are serving sentences for murder, 168,000 for rape, 128,000 for robbery and 154,000 for assault. So technically I should have led off with rape instead of murder; my bad.
You are technically correct that assault doesn't require the victim and perpetrator to make contact. For instance, pointing a loaded gun at somebody (outside of self defense) is considered aggravated assault. On the other hand, many states do not actually have separate assault and battery statutes, and the two seem to be classified together under "assault".
Conversely, robbery and burglary are separated (burglary is categorized as a property crime rather than a violent crime). In addition to the 128,000 prisoners convicted of robbery, there are another 79,000 who were convicted of burglary.
> All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.
The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019, neither of which took place inside US jurisdiction but let's set that aside for the sake of argument. Chicago alone had 592 homicides in 2018, 521 in 2019, 798 in 2020, 856 in 2021, 738 in 2022, 648 in 2023, and 312 year-to-date, (source: heyjackass.com) nearly all of which were committed by the sort of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells who sometimes end up getting mass-incarcerated. You tell me which is the bigger problem. Personally I wouldn't mind a legal system in which someone at Boeing could be held criminally liable for manslaughter (which accounts for another 20,000 state-level inmates in the United States), but I don't think Boeing's planes are a statistically significant cause of wrongful death.
You're conflating inmate population with convictions, the latter being more salient in a discussion of plea deals. As another poster mentioned, these statistics are methodologically biased towards more serious crimes with longer sentences. That is, a convicted murderer or rapist goes through the trial process once (barring appeals) for a "spot" in prison that lasts 10-20 or more years. Multiple convicted robbers with short sentences would take an equivalent "spot" during the same time. They would account for a larger percentage of pleas/plea deals over time than a snapshot of carceral representation would suggest. That the figures are within a few thousand of each other, category-by-category, probably means that there are way more robbers and assaulters passing through prison than rapists and murderers. Which makes sense, if you put any stake in FBI arrest statistics.
>The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019 [...]
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Another is that a few hundred people committed murder in Chicago, usually with single-digit victims, and a good many of them are seeing prison time for their heinous actions. Meanwhile, a handful of high-powered executives and managers signed off on a small number of decisions that also lead to hundreds of death, along with multiple accidents that could have resulted in even more. Per alleged offender, these people have done far worse; dozens or hundreds dead each, depending on how you measure culpability. None of these people are so much as seeing the inside of a court room, let alone convictions or prison time. Boeing is not alone; officials from companies that have participated in much more destructive and heinous behavior stand with them in getting off scot-free.
It's a question of what we value our prison system(s) for. I would hope for efficient deterrence and rehabilitation. That is, sentences likely to dissuade people from committing crimes, and best efforts to prevent offenders from offending again. You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
On the other hand, the deaths that Boeing has caused happened because of a purposeful decision-making process. It was hyper-rational. The failing was corruption. These types of moral (if not criminal) offenses stand to be deterred effectively with harshly punitive consequences; if the decision to put so many lives at risk is a cost-benefit analysis, simply make the costs outweigh the benefits. And, ideally, we wouldn't shield the perpetrators from indictment overseas, if the charges were similar to what we'd bring. What's happening is already a stain on our system - in fact, its lack of effectiveness calls into question its legitimacy - and you can add damage to international relations, that our carceral state is so out-of-wack and incapable of doing right by past and potential victims.
> You're conflating inmate population with convictions, the latter being more salient in a discussion of plea deals. As another poster mentioned, these statistics are methodologically biased towards more serious crimes with longer sentences.
While it's true that people serving longer sentences represent a higher proportion of inmates than they do convictions, it also doesn't seem obvious to me which base denominator is more important. If anything, weighing convictions according to how serious they are seems more sensible than treating a small misdemeanor conviction equivalently with a murder conviction.
Furthermore, plea bargaining cuts both ways: the net effect of a plea bargain is often a conviction on a lesser charge, with less or sometimes no prison time.
> It's a question of what we value our prison system(s) for. I would hope for efficient deterrence and rehabilitation. That is, sentences likely to dissuade people from committing crimes, and best efforts to prevent offenders from offending again. You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
I don't necessarily think the threat of incarceration deters common criminals very much, but it does separate them from the population, which is preferable to simply leaving them on the street.
>You seem to think that the street-level homicide rate is too high, and I'd agree. I would say that, as such murders are generally crimes of passion or disordered thinking - instinct or illness (psychological, social) rather than reason - harsh punishments are not necessarily useful in deterring them.
I think this entirely depends on the circumstances around the murder. Was it committed by someone without a significant criminal record because they got angry about something? Or was it committed by a gang member as part of their criminal enterprise (in which case, it was not a "crime of passion" or a result of "disordered thinking", but rather sociopathic thinking)?
For the former, I agree that harsh punishments probably aren't that useful for deterrence, though they do tend to make victims (or their families) feel better. For the latter, however, I'd argue that long prison sentences, while they may not rehabilitate these hardened criminals, at least serve to keep them out of society.
To relate back to Boeing, I think their actions are similar in a way to those of people in violent organized crime gangs. They were done without conscience, and purely for material gain, so they probably should be treated similarly.
I agree with you on principle, if the stat you shared is true.
With regards to Boeing, I'm not sure that's relevant, given the numerous reports of poor maintenance and outright mid-flight failures and flaws caused as a result is sufficient evidence for some kind of wrongdoing on Boeing's part. For this case, given that plea deals are used to expedite the court process and result in a less harsh penalty as an incentive, it's the most advantageous thing for Boeing to do because there was probably no hope in defending a guiltless verdict.
I know. Not sure whats worse, the rules or assuming I needed your explanation without being asked. Downvote away, its all a social experiment anyways...
People can't un-read a comment and get their time back. So for a normal-length comment, the only way to blame the reader is to suggest they shouldn't be on the site at all. If someone is causing a site to be bad on purpose, they are wasting other people's time and they need a better hobby.
Sure. You ok? You have now "wasted" a ton of time coming back here and arguing over my original comment which took less than 1 second to read. You and other people waste their own time. Take responsibility for one's self and stop blaming others. Or shall I keep coming back to check and waste my time?
I'm not complaining about the time it took me to reply. I'm explaining the original issue. The people that saw your waste of space calling out "delusional capital apologists" didn't ask to see your comment. When you make a bad comment on purpose, you're the only one at fault.
Ignore my commentary for a second. What "responsibility" could anyone else take? The only reasonable option I see here is "don't visit HN". But if you're the person making it bad to visit HN, then the problem is you, in a way that cannot be deflected.
? I don't think you're basing that on anything except the fact that I criticized you.
...unless you misunderstood really badly when I said other people were the victims (as much as bad posting can have 'victims'). That's very far from calling them the problem.
Is this projection? You've been the one saying everyone that disliked your comments is causing their own problems and needs to "take responsibility". You're blaming everyone else and I'm not.
Or is arguing in increasingly blatant bad faith your game here? Well done I guess.
Yes! Even as an engineer. I've quit jobs over ethics / safety concerns and I want that pushback to be the norm. When I need to convince other engineers I want to be able to point to such consequences as to why we shouldn't be dangerously cutting corners. And even if you only punish engineers it will decrease the pool of talent / cost effectiveness of workers available to the unscrupulous managers such that cutting corners could very well not be worth the cost. Money saved on cutting corners would be lost in trying to find competent engineers that were willing to cut those corners.
Of course I want the entire chain of those involved criminally punished but punishing people anywhere on that chain, even those at the bottom is a start.
When you start criminally charging people for mistakes in critical systems, what you're going to get is coverups.
With a no-fault system, mistakes are not covered up, but fixed.
With a fault system:
1. if a mistake is discovered, it will not be fixed because that would be an admission of criminal liability.
2. Quality will not be improved, because that is (again) an implicit admission that the previous design was faulty.
3. You won't get new airplane designs, because (again) any new design is an inherent risk.
I understand the desire for revenge, but there are heavy negative consequences for a revenge/punishment/fear based system.
P.S. I worked at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. At one point, I knew everything there was to know about it. It was a safety critical system. I did a lot of the double checking of other peoples' work on it.
I did not work in an atmosphere of fear.
The 757 in service proved an extremely reliable airplane. I've flown commercial on many 757s, and often would chat a bit with the flight crew. They were unanimous in their admiration for the airplane. Made me feel pretty good.
You're not the first person I've head of this idea from; it's from the NTSB charter
The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties … and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person”
But there was plenty of blaming / faulting going around outside of the NTSB. Hence the fraud we're currently talking about where Boeing tried to blame the pilots who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves.
I'm glad you feel personally assured though your enthusiastic personal connections but that does not work for me. That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying.
> That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying.
Feel free to ask the flight crew next time you're on a 757. The service record of the 757 speaks for itself. I fly Iceland Air because their fleet consists of 757s. I literally bet my life on my work.
> Boeing tried to blame the pilots
The pilots were partially responsible.
1. First incident - the LA crew followed emergency procedures and continued the flight safely.
2. Second incident - the LA crew restored normal trim 25 times, but never turned off the stab trim system, which is supposed to be a memory item.
3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder.
> who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves.
The flight voice and data recorders spoke for them. We know what they did.
If you want to know the truth, read the official government reports on the crashes. Ignore what the mass media says.
Weird to see such a strongly held belief of not blaming people abandoned so quickly.
It's pretty standard to blame the pilots, as we know there is a Swiss cheese model for statistical analysis of risk and from my vantage point opening such large holes in the MCAS layer with the expectation that events are caught at the pilot layer is inadequate. That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected.
Edit: I should add that the pilots already got a death sentence for their involvement.
Finding the source of the error is not the same thing as meting out punishment. I am not aware of any pilot being criminally charged for making a terrible mistake.
Though their careers are usually ended by it. That seems fair to me. An engineer at Boeing who could not be relied on will also find his career shunted to working on non-critical stuff. That's fair as well.
> That not all events are caught at the pilot layer is to be expected.
Of course.
But consider that piloting can all be automated today. Why isn't it done? Because pilots are the backup system for unexpected failures. A great deal (most?) of pilot training is training on what to do in an emergency. One aspect of that training is turning off the stab trim system if the system runs away. It's a switch on the console in easy reach, and it's there for a reason.
Remember that Boeing also sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots after the LA crash. The EA pilots did not follow it.
Do you want to fly with pilots who don't read/understand/remember emergency procedures? I don't. I wouldn't put them in prison, though, I'd just revoke their license to fly. Pilots undergo regular checks for their competency. No pass => no fly.
Dying in plane crashes and having their license revoked are pretty severe punishments, perhaps if management could similarly have their license to practice management revoked we could consider that somehow equivalent. I'm sure many people would prefer prison time to dying in a plane crash or having their career destroyed.
I don't trust Boeing and haven't for several decades so while I agree in theory an automated system could fly aircraft with a great deal of reliability I do not trust Boeing to be able to deliver that reliability. I like the idea that someone educated in the safety of the aircraft is up in the airplane with me sharing in the risk of flying even if all they are doing is babysitting a computerized system.
Most of my knowledge of Boeing is from engineers that used to work there and complained bitterly about the degradation of engineering safety culture. And sure, perhaps flying is safer than it has ever been, I think that's more down to improvements in technology than the culture of safety. Unfortunately while technology generally improves it's hard to say the same thing about culture. In general I'm upset that flying is less safe than it could have been.
> Dying in plane crashes and having their license revoked are pretty severe punishments
Neither are punishments. If you stab yourself that's your own doing, not punishment. Removing someone from a position where they cannot be trusted is not a punishment.
Airbus has had problems with their automation systems, too, that the pilots were able to save. And crashes where the pilots forgot how to recover from a stall.
Nobody is saying safety cannot still be improved. Every accident gets thoroughly investigated, and all contributing causes to the accident get dealt with.
Not sure what you mean, but pilots are trained to deal with runaway stabilizer trim. The EA pilots were also sent an Emergency Airworthiness Bulletin reiterating instructions on dealing with runaway stabilizer trim.
They're also trained to reduce thrust when they hear the overspeed horn, rather than continue at full throttle. Overspeeding the aircraft is extremely dangerous, and also makes it almost impossible to manually turn the trim wheel.
As an example, you said they “ignored” the over-speed warning. I would bet it’s much more likely that there was too much going on in the cockpit, likely with confusing or conflicting information, that prevented them from making the correct assessment in a time critical environment. Expecting the humans to act perfectly when the system is working against them is as bad of a design assumption as assuming your airspeed sensor will always act perfectly.
In the LA crash, the pilots restored normal trim something like 25 times over 11 minutes (or maybe it was 11 times in 25 minutes, I forgot). That's plenty of time to realize that the stab trim system should be turned off. They never turned it off.
In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off. I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but they turned off the stab trim with the airplane sharply nose down, and tried to restore normal trim by turning the manual wheel. At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed.
The overspeed warning should never be ignored, as it means parts of the airplane can be torn off. Especially in a dive.
Even so, if they had followed the directions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive to use the electric trim thumb switches (which override MCAS) they could have restored normal trim.
It's not hard:
1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches
2. turn off the stab trim
That's it.
> Expecting the humans to act perfectly
Reading the EAD and do steps 1 and 2 is not some super complicated thing. Besides, pilots who get flustered in emergency situations should be washed out of flight school.
My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies, but kept a cool head and properly resolved each of them. In one, the engine on his F-86 conked out. The tower told him to bail out. But he knew exactly what the rate of descent of the F-86 was, his altitude, his speed, how far he was from the landing strip, the effect of the wind, etc., and calculated he could make the field. Which he did, saving the very expensive airplane. (However, he was reprimanded for not bailing out, as the pilots were more valuable than the jet.) But he was unrepentant, confident in his calculations.
BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.
>In the LA crash, the pilots restored normal trim something like 25 times over 11 minutes (or maybe it was 11 times in 25 minutes, I forgot). That's plenty of time to realize that the stab trim system should be turned off. They never turned it off.
Yes, and Boeing also changed the functionality of the Stab Trim cutout switches such that the Flight Computer with MCAS running on it was never able to be isolated from the electronic actuator switches on the yoke, and the use of said trim switches reset the undocumented MCAS system activation to 5s after release, which also ramped itself up far beyond the documented limits sent to the regulators, upward to a max of 2.5 degrees per activation triggered by a fubar'd, non-redundant, misclassified, intentionally non-cross checked, ultimately safety-critical sensor!
>In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off.
Airspeed unreliable checklist on takeoff/climbout: increase throttle. Maybe they went through a different CL?
>I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but they turned off the stab trim with the airplane sharply nose down, and tried to restore normal trim by turning the manual wheel.
Because of aforementioned screwing with the cutout switches which was not clearly communicated to pilots and only came out in retrospect.
>At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed.
...using a maneuver removed from documentation for several versions of 737 that only military trained pilots clued into cold on a simulator, and a civil aviation captain failed to arrive at, again, due to it's undocumented nature since about dino-737.
>Reading the EAD and do steps 1 and 2 is not some super complicated thing. Besides, pilots who get flustered in emergency situations should be washed out of flight school.
Aerospace Engineers who design airplanes and don't take into account human info processing limitations, human factors research, basic ethics, and an appreciation for the fact that "management can wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first, because I. Am. Not. Going. To. Kill. People." should likewise, also wash out. But lo and behold, we live in an inperfect world with fallible people. Which has generally meant we should be on our toes to be up front about what we're building instead of hiding implementation details from regulators for fear of all the money we might lose if we actually do our jobs to the professional standard we should.
>My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies,>>
>BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.
Walter, if it'd have been built the way it should have, and been documented as it should have been, and had the simulator training it damn well should have requirex it never would have happened.
Stop trying to justify it. This wasn't a bunch of "get 'er done" skunkworks engineers, working on mindbending, cutting edge, ill-understood designs.
This was a civil transport project, co-opted by a bunch of fiscal min-maxer's who pressured everyone, and continue to pressure everyone to cut every corner imaginable.
I genuinely feel bad for you. It'd rip at my soul to see something I worked so hard for to fall so damn hard. I'm going through a crisis of faith on that front at the moment. It ain't fun at all.
We cannot afford to be kind to these institutions once we've left them though. People like you were, and I certainly am are counterweights to people who think that all those corners we fastidiously upkeep and check are just so much waste, when they damn well aren't.
You can also read the Boeing documents. The hazard analysis listed MCAS as hazardous. By Boeing process controls, that should have mandated redundant sensors. Why were they optional? Because that could increase profits. (Seattle Times has done good reporting on this).
Boeing indeed has a failure here, and is responsible for it. But as the first LA incident confirms, the pilots, by following their training, were able to deal with it. It was the subsequent flight on the same airplane that crashed.
This remains omitted by the mass media, which contraindicates any of the reporting on it as "good".
There is also responsibility in the production of a faulty AOA sensor, and the failure of LA to fix the known faulty sensor, or inform the crew, before authorizing the next, fatal, flight.
I disagree. The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. It seems like you want to point to a singular cause. As with most mishaps with complex systems, it’s the result of a cascade of failures. Training is only one part of the problem. Fixing that is still only an administrative mitigation which is the least desirable form of mitigation when designing a safety system. Even if the pilots had additional training, it wouldn’t fix the root cause of the issue and is just asking for trouble because administrative fixes “only” require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time.
> The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively.
I've never seen it in the media. Not knowing what the stab trim cutoff switch does is a massive failure either on the part of the pilot or the training. Not reading the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is a failure of the pilot.
> It seems like you want to point to a singular cause
Au contraire. It seems that everyone but me wants to blame a singular cause - Boeing. There was a cascade of failure here:
1. A defective AOA sensor was manufactured and installed
2. After the first LA incident landed safely, LA failed to correct the problem before sending the airplane aloft again
3. Single path MCAS inputs could not detect failure
4. Pilots failed to apply known emergency procedures
> require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time.
Of course we try to design airplanes so they do not cause emergencies. But we still need pilots to train to react to emergencies. You don't put a person in the pilot seat who is not well-trained in emergency procedures.
Making airplane travel safe means identify and correct ALL causes in the cascade of failures. Most accidents are a combination of airplane failure and pilot failure.
Sometimes pilots make deadly mistakes. That's why we have copilots, they check each other. But in the MAX crashes, both pilot and copilot failed to follow known emergency procedures. Why they didn't, I have no idea.
"Boeing" is not a cause. Things like their safety culture can be a cause, or lack of good process control can be a cause. The reason why Boeing is catching a lot of flack is because they deviated substantially from best practices. This is related to your other comment so I'll just respond here.
There is a general hierarchy when it comes to controlling hazards (remember, Boeing already identified MCAS as hazardous): remove the hazard, engineering controls, administrative controls, and PPE. We can apply a little thought experiment to see the gaps in what you're advocating when it comes to the MCAS issue. (Admittedly, this is contrived to just illustrate the point within the confines of a forum reply).
1) Remove the hazard: They could have redesigned the airframe to adjust the center-of-gravity to remove the stall issue that MCAS was developed in the first place. Why didn't Boeing do this? Because of cost and schedule pressure to have a new plane ready, after threats that American Airlines would take their business elsewhere.
2) Engineering controls: MCAS was an engineering control, but an incomplete one. Because MCAS was listed as "hazardous" in the hazard analysis it required redundant sensors. Why didn't they put on redundant sensors as the default? I can only speculate, but considering they were sold as optional, profit motive seems likely. (This also ignores the fact that MCAS should have been categorized as 'catastrophic' meaning they didn't fully understand the impacts of their system)
3) Administative controls: this was the training piece that you're hanging your hat on. This has multiple problems. For one, even though MCAS changed the handling dynamics of the airframe, Boeing pushed hard to reuse the same certification to avoid additional pilot training. Again, this was a business decision to make the airframe more competitive. Secondly, administrative controls are an inherently weak because of human factors. There's a lot that can go wrong if your plan is to have humans follow an administatrive procedure. You claim "it's not hard". Sorry, this is just a bad mindset. Usually when I hear people say things like "it's not hard" or "all you've gotta do" when they're talking about complex systems, it indicates they take an overly simplified mental model. In this case, you may be ignoring the chaos in the cockpit, the fact that the plane has handling characteristics different from what the pilots were trained on, human factors related to stab trim force at speed, conflicting or confusing information (like why the MCAS comes on at changing timeframes, time criticality, etc. Having adminstrative controls as your main mitigation is bad practice, and setting the system up for failure.
4) PPE: this isn't particularly relevant to this case, but a silly example of PPE control is giving everyone parachutes and helmets in case things went south.
You can obviously see PPE is an absurd control. But your main point is that the main control should be administrative, which is the next worst option. Boeing ignored good safety practice to pursue profit. So they probably deserve some of the heat they are getting.
"redesigned the airframe" means designing an Entirely New Airplane. Boeing didn't do this because designing an entirely new airplane would have been:
1. an absolutely enormous cost, like a couple orders of magnitude more
2. several years of delay
3. pilots would have to be completely retrained
4. the airlines liked the 737 very much
5. mechanics would have to be retrained
6. the inherent risk of a new, untried airframe
There was nothing at all inherently wrong with the concept of the MCAS system, despite what ignorant journalists wrote. What was wrong with it was it was not dual path, had too much authority, and would not back off when the pilot countermanded it. These problems have been corrected.
Pilot training - there have been many, many airplane crashes because pilots trained to fly X and Y did the Y thing when flying X. The aviation industry is very well aware of this. Boeing has been working at least since 1980 (and likely much earlier) to make diverse airplane types fly the same way from the pilot's point of view. This is because it is safer. And yes, it does make pilot training cheaper. Win-win.
> You claim "it's not hard". Sorry, this is just a bad mindset.
Yet it's true. Read about the first MCAS incident, the one that didn't crash. There were 3 pilots in the cockpit, one of which was deadheading. The airplane did some porpoising while the pilot/copilot would bring the trim back to normal, then the MCAS would turn on, putting it into a dive. Then, the deadheading pilot simply reached forward and turned off the stab trim.
And the day was saved.
I've seen your points many times. They are all congruent with what journalists write about the MAX. Next time you read one of those articles, I recommend you google the author to see what their background is. I have done so, and each time the journalist has no engineering degree, no aeronautical training, no pilot training, no experience with airline operations, and no business experience.
You can also google my experience. I have a degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in aeronautics from Caltech. I worked for Boeing for 3 years on the 757 stabilizer trim design. (It is not identical to the 737 stab trim design, but is close enough for me to understand it.) At one point I knew everything there was to know about the 757 trim system. A couple dozen feet away was the cockpit design group, and we had many very interesting discussions about cockpit user interface design.
I'm not a pilot myself, but other engineers at Boeing were, and they'd take me up flying for fun. Naturally, airplanes were all we talked about. My brother and cousin are pilots, my cousin was a lifer engineer at Boeing, my dad flew for the AF for decades in all kinds of aircraft, with an engineering degree from MIT. I inherited his aviation library of about a thousand books :-/ Naturally, airplanes were a constant topic in our family.
I've talked with two working 737 pilots about the MAX crashes.
I've read the official government documents on the MAX crashes, and the Emergency Airworthiness Directive.
That's what I "hang my hat" on. So go ahead, tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. But before you do, please look up the credentials of the journalists you're getting your information from.
P.S. "Aviation Week" magazine has done some decent reporting.
P.P.S. Amazingly, the "Aviation Disasters" TV documentary is fairly decent in its analysis of various accidents, lacking the histrionics of other treatments. But it's rather shallow, considering it's a 40 minute show.
>designing an entirely new airplane would have been:
1. an absolutely enormous cost, like a couple orders of magnitude more
2. several years of delay
3. pilots would have to be completely retrained
Yes, this is the same case I was making. They took a higher (or unknown) risk for business (profit) motives. That's why they deserve a large chunk (but certainly not all) of the blame.
There was nothing at all inherently wrong with the concept of the MCAS system
My claim isn't that the concept was inherently wrong, it's that the execution was wrong. Their own process documents say so and they also belie the fact that they didn't understand their airframe. The damning part of it is that they were likely wrong for the reason of increasing profit. (Still, even if MCAS isn't inherently bad, we still have to acknowledge it's not the best solution...see the discussion above about hierarchies of controls).
>You claim "it's not hard"...Yet it's true.
This is exactly the wrong way to think about this. Just because a mitigation works some of the time doesn't mean it's the best mitigation. Can I still design a car with a coal-fired steam engine and cat-gut brake lines and drive it safely? Sure. But by modern standards, it's still a sub-par design and the likelihood of safe operation is lower because of it. That likelihood is the entire reason there is a hierarchy of controls. You are advocating against well-established best practices in safety and reliability.
>You can also google my experience. I have a degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in aeronautics from Caltech. I worked for Boeing for 3 years
Please don't do this next time and argue the points rather than appealing to (relatively weak) authority. I'm familiar with your points and can usually set a clock by the time it takes you to either bring up your experience at Boeing or some story about your daddy in these discussions. But you aren't the only one with aerospace experience. I've been an airframe mechanic. I also have an ME and additional engineering degrees to include a PhD and published aerospace-related research. I've worked in NASA for many more years than you worked for Boeing. I filled roles in aerospace, quality/safety, reliability, and software engineering related to both software and hardware design. I've worked alongside Boeing on crew-rated space systems. I've also piloted aircraft (although my ratings are no longer current). I've had dinners and discussed similar issues with pilots and astronauts with thousands and thousands of hours of flight time. But parading out your credentials doesn't make your points any stronger and tends to be the bastion of those without much else to rely upon. This isn't a pissing contest, so please make an argument based on its own merits rather than relying on credentials.
> The damning part of it is that they were likely wrong for the reason of increasing profit.
Are you still advocating designing a whole new airframe instead?
> we still have to acknowledge it's not the best solution
We don't have to agree on that at all. It's an inherently simple solution, although Boeing made mistakes in its implementation.
> Just because a mitigation works some of the time
It's turning off a switch. The purpose of that switch is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning the crew should not need to consult a checklist. The switch is for dealing with runaway stab trim. Reading the step-by-step of the crisis, it is impossible for me to believe that the pilots did not know they had a runaway trim problem. There are two wheels on the side of the console, painted black and white, that spin when the trim runs, making a loud clack-clack sound. They are physically connected to the stab trim jackscrew with a cable. If the trim motor fails, the crew can manually turn the jackscrew via those wheels.
> You are advocating against well-established best practices in safety and reliability
Turning off a system that is adversely working is well-established in aviation. It's quite effective.
> and argue the points rather than appealing to (relatively weak) authority
Appeal to authority is not a fallacy when one has some authority :-) And so it is fair to list what makes one an authority.
> This isn't a pissing contest
You might want to review the condescending and quite rude post you wrote that I replied to. Your reply here is also rather rude. I don't think I've been rude to you.
>Are you still advocating designing a whole new airframe instead?
That would be the ideal solution for that hazard. But I can’t say if it’s the best risk profile overall. I would settle for a properly implemented engineered mitigation of MCAS.
>* It’s an inherently simple solution*
The fact that the engineers who built the thing mischaracterized it would seemingly be evidence to the contrary. I have experienced this flawed thinking often, where software is treated as a quick simple solution without considering the effects on the overall system.
>Appeal to authority is not a fallacy when one has some authority
It actually is. As Carl Sagan said, “mistrust arguments from authority.” But regardless, we seem to have different ideas on what makes someone an “authority”. You may be an aerospace authority when you’re in a room of CRUD software developers, but this forum has a much wider net than that. “Technical authority” is an actual assigned title at NASA, and you probably wouldn’t get it with 3 years of experience from decades prior.
“Turning off a switch” is the easy solution when you’re dealing with the benefit of hindsight. The pilots were operating in a completely different different environment. That’s why administrative mitigations are not a favored approach. Boeing simulator results demonstrate that it was a confusing scenario to identify the correct root cause in a time-critical situation.
As to the tone of the post, I’ve witnessed you in many aero circumstances state your credentials as a “I know what what I’m talking about so that’s the end of it” puffery tone. It in itself comes across as condescending and, worse, adds little to the conversation. I generally try to be respectful on these forums until someone shows they aren’t reciprocating. Normally I just roll my eyes and move on. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t even realize the condescending tone some of your posts take. I debated even responding but thought it might make you realize how off-putting you’re style can be. In your case, it comes across as very arrogant rather than curious which is contrary to the HN guidelines. If it offended you, I apologize.
I admit to being arrogant, perhaps that's an inevitable side effect of being confident. When proven wrong, however, which has happened on HN (!) I try to admit it. I don't like making mistakes.
I'm not offended, as that's to be expected when I write things that are unpopular.
But I still accept your apology, and no worries. Perhaps we can engage again in the future!
P.S. I know about the simulator issues, but the information came filtered through a journalist and I am skeptical. What I cannot reconcile is the first incident where the deadhead pilot simply turned off the switch, compared with the simulator pilot. It didn't matter whether the runaway trim was the root cause. It did matter that runaway trim will kill you and it must be stopped. All three crews knew that, which is why they fought it.
In my work on the stab trim system, it was accepted that the first resort for trim failure was turning the thing off. Overhead in the 757 is a matrix of circuit breakers, the purpose of each is to turn off a malfunctioning system. The stab trim one, being critical, isn't located overhead but right there on the console.
I work with machinery all the time. When it fails, my first reflex is to always turn it off. For example, one day I smelled smoke. Looking around, smoke was coming out of my computer box. I could see fire through the grille. The very first thing I did was yank the plug out of the wall, the second was to take the box outside. The flames went out when the current was removed.
I simply do not understand failing to turn off a runaway trim system. Especially when it kept coming back on after normal trim was restored.
For another example, an engine fire. I don't know what the fire checklist says, but I bet right at the top it says to activate the fire extinguishers and cut off the fuel and electric power to the engine. I've done the same for an engine fire in my car :-)
>3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder.
Walter, ffs, they were taking off hot & high from Adis Ababa with airspeed unreliable because of the screwed AoA sensor; a sensor unjustifiably classified too low in terms of consequence for failure, and deliberately wired non-redundantly and kept from being cross-checked in most configurations in order to avoid training burden to avoid cert work to compete with the NEO. Without that AoA sensor, overspeed had no basis; garbage in, garbage out.
Let it go. Boeing f*cked up. Period. Their (the pilot's) instruments and alarms were completely untrustworthy. You (Boeing) don't get to blame pilots for not doing memory items when your (again, Boeing's) technical design is screwed from the first. Your 757 work was fine. The MAX as it was was not. Nothing will ever make it so.
You had the privilege of being able to quit the job over ethics / concerns. I'm assuming you didn't wind up homeless with starving children. I have definitely not always had that in my career and many people don't.
I have ME/CFS which means for most of my life I've barely been able to make enough in the good times to cover the extended bad times. Running out of money for me is basically a death sentence as it would become increasingly impossible to dig my way out of such a hole. Normal people at their worst could probably stack shelves or wash dishes for a living but that option is not available to me. I'm better at managing my condition now but at the time I quit jobs for ethical reasons I did so knowing that if I didn't find something else quickly then I would eh. end up taking a long walk on a short pier. To make matters worse I'm highly noise intolerant and have to spend more money to live in quieter places otherwise my already precarious health would rapidly deteriorate.
As engineers we are often responsible for the creation of assets more valuable than ourselves and I think it's an essential part of the job to put our lives on the line in much the same way an airplane passenger does. And as engineers we are often also airplane passengers ourselves and must trust that other engineers that they too have put our safety ahead of their personal wellbeing.
As the middle class is crushed then sure, such ethical boundaries will fade out of necessity, and I see this as part of a descent into a low trust society and why I expect more planes to fall out of the sky, both metaphorically and literally. Once a culture tolerates such flexible ethics the boundaries will continue being pushed - there isn't a lower bound. This corruption inhibits the creation of valuable assets and will result in a massive erosion of our standard of living.
An often touted solution is Universal basic income (UBI) that would create a safety-net for engineers and those with my type of disability - but having experienced constant gaslighting on ME/CFS from doctors informed by state funded research and given the expansion of Canadian MAID style solutions to people like myself I'm very fortunate that the capitalists opportunities existed such that I did not have to rely on state 'care'.
I was homeless at 17 in high school before going into the Marines in 2002. I know what having negative money is like, health problems or not.
That doesn't change the fact that it comes from absolute privilege to tell someone that they should just quit their job because you don't agree with the ethics or morality of work they're doing.
If you HAVE the privilege, the savings, the good health not needing COBRA, etc, then by all means walk away. You also don't mention having children, I know a LOT of parents and they absolutely don't have the money to be able to just walk away and keep their kids lifestyles, healthcare, etc until finding something new.
But judging someone potentially desperate and on already on the edge for where they work in most cases is pretty off. You have your own story someone wouldn't be aware of without telling them that as you say may make it impossible to dig yourself out of a hole. Who knows what situation someones in?
I disagree again, and I would much rather be homeless than have ME/CFS, I'd still make that trade today. You clearly don't know what it means to have ME/CFS and I don't begrudge that, hardly anyone does.
I would rather you be homeless than have you be part of making an airplane unsafe and I will judge you for that. I don't care how hard life is for you and I don't expect others to care how life has been for me - if you are part of making other people unnecessarily unsafe I hope you burn in hell for eternity. It's not a matter of privilege and just because you have found your way of being ok with it does not mean I still will not judge such decisions as unethical, immoral, improper and unbecoming of human in general and an engineer specifically.
"I recognize that my life experience is not the life experience of everyone else. Some have it better, some have it worse, regardless of how good or bad MY OWN life is.
I recognize that Jane with 4 starving kids, one with cancer, making $7.15/hr with an empty fridge and a broken down car potentially can't just quit her job at the factory today even though they switched from building cars to bombs.
My life is not a comparison against other peoples lives."
Thanks. Just because you have problems doesn't mean they're better or worse than others. This isn't about you. I'm sure your response is "I'd rather be jane than have CFS," or something about how you're morally superior and would be homeless before making a bomb/whatever.
Absolutely weird thought process, especially from someone who has never been homeless but would prefer to be homeless than xyz. Very im14andedgy vibe.
Well, I've also been homeless... before my ME/CFS was bad so it was much easier to deal with. Anyway, that's irrelevant.
You can recognize that such people will make such decisions, and I agree that they will, but where I don't agree is that making such decisions is in anyway morally ok. If Jane chooses to keep her job where she is knowingly cutting corners on making lifesaving widgets I will judge her harshly for that regardless of her personal circumstances. If Janes work is unimportant then I couldn't care less.
You tried to invalidate their position by making this about personal experiences. When they counter with personal experiences, you don't get to cry foul and claim they made it a "competition".
And your first paragraph is just making shit up. Come on.
Honestly, meh, especially for white collar professes like ours or this one. First of all, generally we are not talking about people who have no other choice but do something unethical. We are talking about people who have choices and are choosing either somewhat higher salary or inertia.
And second, I do know multiple people who made the choice of not getting employment somewhere unethical. It is not some kind of rare decision making. These people have children and parents that depends on them.
It is not some great unusual privilege to walk away from job like this you want to frame this as. It is where quite a lot of technicians are. You could make that argument about factory near some trailer park or poor area, but not really about us.
> you could make that argument about factory near some trailer park or poor area, but not really about us.
That's the entire point. We're privileged. My god. My example was literally a mom in a factory with starving children who began building bombs instead of cars.
Yes. This might be unfamiliar to software engineers, but there's a reason mechanical engineering and architecture (there might be more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) schools put students through at least a semester of ethics classes.
We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics:
> Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties.
If you can't do that, you should be in another field. Maybe software engineering at Meta would be a better fit.
This is an absolute joke in almost all fields of engineering. Milage may vary, but it's basically the wild west. I can't speak for PE's, but obviously there's at least a little more regulation there.
However a huge number of engineers critical to safety would not have one.
This is a noble goal but unrealistic and unfair at scale. Also it belays just a wildly unrealistic understanding of how risk distribution works in corporations. It’s as if in your mind one engineer makes the singular call and sees the entire picture of the project and its risks. Where as more likely a downstream worker who very likely had an incomplete picture will be blamed.
Also the personal insult is not needed. It just makes you out to be an ass rather than someone making a point.
Consider your romantic notions might not be realistic.
>It’s as if in your mind one engineer makes the singular call and sees the entire picture of the project and its risks.
To a certain extent this is true. To extend the OP's example, a mechanical or civil engineer who stamps a building design takes responsibility for that design being safe enough for public use. The same could apply to the MCAS design, or the quality engineer who signs off on how the plane was put together. These are not "romatic notions"; the latter is already common practice in aerospace. Do you think if a QE stamped that the door bolts were installed should not bear responsibility for the bolts being missing?
In those cases where the engineer is supposed to be aware of the risks, there should be processes in place to account for, and mitigate, those risks. For the example of MCAS, the software was categorized as hazardous in the hazard analysis document. As such, Boeing processes required it to have redundant inputs as a default. It did not (the redundant sensor was sold an optional equipment); as such, I think the engineer who signed off on the hazard analysis may bear some responsibility. If, on the other hand, there were no business processes in place to require redundancy, that seems like a CEO responsibility.
It's true that most software engineers never work on safety-critical systems. The nature of the products they work on, or the nature of their contributions to those products, limits the possible impact of flaws and mistakes.
Once you work on a product with safety-critical features and/or become responsible for one, there really is a marked psychological change that takes place. I've lived through that change in my own career, and many comments (including some I've written, I'm sure) now strike me as callous and trivializing important matters to an extent that grates.
It's important to hold engineers accountable for their work in proportion to their impact, which is typically very significant. If you build machines that can kill, stakes should exist for you as well.
I don't see a personal insult, but maybe SWEs should take the ethics of their work more personally. Maybe the shape of our epidemic of social and psychological dysfunction would be different (if not smaller).
When I worked at a retailer, we were told to push buy-now-pay-later schemes on our customers (on top of the corporate credit card, and insurance plans, and service plans). Most of my coworkers simply decided that they weren't going to - in part, because such schemes are nakedly predatory, but also because it was yet another dumb metric we knew we'd be held to if it were successful. I don't know of anyone who was fired or docked pay or denied a promotion because of it, and it's not worth luring someone into financial ruin over a TV and an entry-level sales position. Which leads me to another thought: if you're so low in the chain that you have no say in how and what you work on, is it a job that's worth sacrificing your morals for? Maybe take advantage of that increased earnings potential from job-hopping and get out of dodge.
To the contrary, there is usually _several_ engineers who see the ethical/safety problems and talk about them with colleagues. They just don't report it to the right authorities.
Nobody asks the engineer to see the entire picture. (Very few, senior, engineers see the entire picture - to the shock of many newbies. But that's for another discussion). The problem is when the engineer DOES see the problem and doesn't question the project, and stays on, and doesn't figure out a way to get it questioned, and in the end doesn't report anything. THAT is an ethics problem. And yes, in some companies it will cost you your job. That's where the other jobs come in - because there ARE other jobs.
> This is a noble goal but unrealistic and unfair at scale.
It is in the current organisation of software development because it doesn't allow that.
In the building sector you can't build without your design being signed of by an engineering office and the engineer and its office take the responsability for it, both at the criminal and civil level.
If the same rule existed for the software industry, the organisation would adapt itself around it.
I'm sure they can try. But put yourself in the shoes of that engineer. Imagine what would go through your head. My entire MO would be CYA. Every 1on1 conversation, secretly recorded (thank you favorable NY state laws), and a paper trail a mile long. For just this reason.
I don't get what you are trying to say though. If companies can use 'a mile long paper trail', why can't the engineer do the same?. If it turns out they were forced to do X over their own objections (people do have mortgages and need medical coverage), then that manager gets the blame. Seems fair??
CYA emails are not exactly a new concept. Perfectly acceptable from rank and file engineers. And the more senior people you are sending that to - if they are not clueless which does happen - know exactly what this is about.
Project documentation also not a new concept. Also acceptable.
Professionally licensed engineers are required to take an oath to protect the public. What many don't realize is that manufacturers like Boeing operate under a licensing exemption, on the assumption that business and manufacturing processes are sufficient to protect the public. In cases like this, there is a case that is insufficient.
There has been a movement in some states to remove the manufacturing exemption, in which case the cognizant engineer would bear the responsibility. The optimistic view is that this will help balance the power between the engineer and the C-suite. The cynical view is that this will allow the C-suite to push responsibility down to the engineer.
Never forget Kareem Serageldin - the one person who went to jail for the 2007 financial crisis.
In fairness, he was an exec making $7M per year - so not a nobody, but he was only managing 70 people (Credit Suisse was a ~50k person company), and obviously not the only person who should've went to jail.
Everyone lied about the price of bonds, that's why our major investment banks still exist (though, I suppose CS doesn't at this point; that's another story).
What is your point? (1) That others should have gone to jail too, or that (2) Kareem was only doing what everyone else was doing?
For (1), were other people prosecuted? Maybe there was insufficient evidence or process issues that got in the way of additional convictions.
For (2), how does that excuse a crime?
Kareem's story is fascinating for many reasons and I don't find lying about bond prices to be a crime to hate someone over. But, a crime it is, nonetheless.
Whether to do something you know is morally wrong or refuse and quit is always your pay grade.
And don't give me the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense. "I was just following orders... because I've got a mortgage!" That doesn't fly when lives are on the line.
I think people seem to have a very romantic notion that there is some meeting where all the engineers get together and decide whether or not they are going to kill their users or not.
Not to "kill their users" but they realistically have meeting to vote on whether the system is "go/nogo". This is the basic structure of many aerospace designs. If you ever watch a rocket launch, they are literally checking in with every system owner for that decision. Prior to even getting to the launch date, there are meetings where they are checking with the designers for similar decisions. There are good documentaries/movies that show this dramatized in examples like the shuttle Challenger.
Yeah we both agree that the decision isn’t “kill/not kill”.
It’s much more ambiguous and murky, especially when dealing with low probability events. That’s why it takes expertise, but it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be accountability for those “expert” decisions. Other engineering domains already have this, there isnt anything that makes these decision inherently different.
When you criminalize the role either no one will take the role or an incompetent patsy will. I dont know when HN became a bunch of keyboard jockies white knighting what they'd do... but reality is a very different story.
When you avoid accountablilty, you pervert the risk/benefit. So people get incentivized to roll the dice on low-risk/high severity events because most of the time, it will come out in their favor and they can continue cashing their checks. But in the off-times when it doesn't, people just shake their heads and say "Who could've known!?" when in reality, there were people sounding the alarm the entire time. The outcome you're advocating hiding the risk into the shadows where nobody talks about it. I'm advocating a structure that isn't risk-adverse necessarily, but at least lays it all out for transparent risk-informed decision making.
You're talking to someone who spent years working in the aerospace industry. I'm not sure, but it seems like you have some hypothetical idea of what reality is, but it doesn't align with my actual experience. Not to sound disrespectful, but it sounds like one of us actually has experience and the other is going off a narrative they've created in their head.
I do hear people often talk about the "incompetent patsy" excuse. But I'm curious, where do you think that stops being relevant? Do you not hold medical doctors liable for decisions because a patient will just find another "incompetent patsy" to prescribe them whatever they want? Do you not expect civil engineers to be responsible for a structural design of a bridge because a company will find an "incompetent patsy" to sign off on a sub-standard design that is better for profit margins? We're used to holding all kinds of professionals liable, but there seems to be a cultural shift in the last 40-50 years where we've rationalized bad behavior as the norm rather than holding people accountable.
Wait, what? I'm sure here we can relate to the software side of things. How many times have you been in a position of saying "go/nogo" where saying "nogo" didn't imply it would also be your last day on the job? (or at least a severe Career Limiting Move)
For a relatively brief period, I worked as a software quality engineer related to aerospace research and development. Practically every test that used software required a “go/nogo” decision before they were allowed to run any safety critical test. The safety chief would give the overall “go-nogo” decision but the subsystems (like software safety) would require “go-nogo” decisions to be fed through the chief.
As I’ve said elsewhere, good organizations implement a distinct chain of command for those decisions so they can be made more impartially. Even then, it’s not without career risk, but IMO that’s part of the gig and why it takes a certain amount of professional integrity. As someone else said, if someone isn’t up to that task, maybe developing safety critical software isn’t the right gig for them.
I was able to formaly state a "nogo" when I worked in banks. The management could bypass it, but it was then a formalized decision of their part and it discharged me of any liability for the problem that lead to my "nogo".
They aren’t in these industries. Relatively low-level engineers have the capability (some would say duty) to stop work. Typically, they have a different chain of command for that very reason.
This is for a criminal case. The victims don't play a prosecutorial role here and are not actually parties to this case.
The appropriate venue for the victims is a civil jury trial (lawsuit), where recovery of losses is possible because the victims then become party to the case (plaintiff).
The reason this lawyer is requesting this is so that the government will be forced to lay its cards on the table during trial, which provide much stronger proof/evidence of Boeing's wrongdoing (which otherwise would likely be much harder to discover), and make it far more likely for a jury to award a huge award to the plaintiffs.
So this is completely rational on the part of the lawyer, but the judge doesn't have to go along with it at all, and might not.
> This is for a criminal case. The victims don't play a prosecutorial role here and are not actually parties to this case.
The desires of the victim in making formal accusations (“pressing charges”) are certainly considered by the prosecutors even if the victim is not a party to the trial. I’d image the prosecutor takes it into account in other situations too, like the terms of accepting a guilty plea. Do you have a link to something that suggests otherwise?
The judge is allowed to reject the plea deal. At which point the defendant can either withdraw their guilty plea and try their luck with a jury - or maintain it and accept whatever sentence the judge wants to impose-which could potentially be a lot harsher than what was agreed in the plea deal.
Unlikely relevant to this case, but judges are legally required to reject guilty pleas if they conclude that the defendant is being coerced, doesn’t understand what they are pleading to and the likely consequences of their plea, lacks competence to plea (due to severe mental illness/etc), or that the plea lacks a “factual basis” (e.g. if the conduct alleged by the prosecution and admitted by the defendant fails to legally constitute the elements of the crime; or if the judge has good reason to believe that the conduct in question never actually happened despite both prosecution and defence agreeing that it did)
On the last point-the prosecution is allowed to offer the defendant a plea deal for a lesser included offense, but not an unrelated crime that doesn’t correspond with what they are accused of doing-e.g. you can plead drug charges down to lesser drug charges, but you can’t plead drug charges down to possession of stolen goods if there is no evidence anything was actually stolen-in such a scenario the judge is supposed to reject the guilty plea
You don’t. But the judge can reject the plea deal that’s leading to the guilty plea.
Boeing isn’t pleading guilty in a vacuum - there’s a deal in place. Judge can reject that now, wait until after guilty plea and impose whatever sentence he wants (within law), or accept the deal as-is.
The prosecutors who would have been filing those charges were instead offering to grant immunity from prosecution for them in exchange for a sweetheart plea deal.
The punishment in the plea deal isn't even a wrist slap. $244 million is not even a half a percent of their annual revenue of $77.8 billion—it's literally a rounding error.
But who is to prosecute this? If the prosecution and the defendant have already cut a deal, and therefore neither party wants a trial, what is that trial going to look like? They might simply agree to not bring up certain facts or make certain arguments. What the families want is a different prosecutor, one that will do what they want them to do. But prosecutors work for and represent the government, not victims.
There are nuances between jurisdictions, but while a US judge can reject a plea deal they generally cannot reject a guilty plea. A judge cannot force a trial between parties that don't want one. And a trial isn't really possible where the parties agree the facts. The judge can certainly impose a sentence different than that which was agreed between the parties, but any such punishment would have to be based on the agreed facts/charges/pleadings. If the prosecution decides to only charge a lesser offense, the judge's power would be limited to the maximum penalty associated with those reduced charges.
Right. And prosecutions aren't between the victim and the offender. Prosecutions are between The People and the offender. Regardless of how the offender harmed the victim, it's The State that is seeking justice in the matter.
Now, criminal prosecutions take into account the thoughts and feelings of the complainant, but they're not usually bound by them.
People committed the crimes but Boeing is making the deal, which we haven't seen. I don't understand how "a company" can plead guilty to a crime but shield individuals?
Right. Plea deals are "I'll plead guilty and save you the trial in exchange for this sentence."
Depending on the court, plea deals can be a horrible gamble by a defendant. Generally you have to enter your guilty plea first, and then the judge decides if they want to let you have that sweet, sweet sentence the prosecution offered.
I know someone who went to court having been offered a plea deal for probation and got 80 years instead when the judge rejected it and sentenced them.
Yeah, this shocked me when I learned it. The actual "deal" is the defendant agrees to plea guilty in exchange for the prosecution giving a specific recommendation of sentence. (In most cases, there are some exceptions of course)
Boeing isn't pleading guilty on its own - it's also agreed to damages.
I agree that a defendant pleading guilty on their own (and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court) would be hard to reject. That isn't what's happened here - the prosecution has, presumably, agreed to the damages, so this is a plea deal, right?
Without turning this into a criminal procedures lecture, the practical difference surrounds who decides the punishment. When a judge rejects a deal they are asserting control over punishment. But a prosecutor can fight back by dropping charges, or reducing to lesser-but-included charges [insert lecture re elements] which would place a cap on the max punishment the judge could adopt. It is a back-and-forth fight between the prosecutor and the judge about who decides punishment, who represents the wishes of the people.
For just three years. Lawyers for the victims said yesterday Boeing would select the monitor the DOJ would appoint. I hope this is no longer the case but can't find confirmation. If so, it's insane. Self-certification was a major source of corruption and rot in Boring.
Weren't they already obligated to do this as part of a previous plea deal and it didn't do anything to prevent this case?
When you or I commit a crime during probation that was the same type of crime that lead to probation in the first place, we get a much much harsher sentence the second time around. For boeing, it seems this plea deal would just be "probation a second time"
It's performative BS tantamount to their "self-regulation". Regulatory capture and influence capture is so complete, they can and are getting away with murder.
Too big to jail. In Boeing's case, they're also a "strategic defense contractor" making bombs, missile, fighters, bombers, and such besides airliners the flying public uses. They are a big chunk of the military-industrial complex phenomenon Truman warned about.
For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
>For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages
Unless you're talking about a different case the actual amount was way less than that.
>The trial judge reduced the punitive damages to three times the amount of the compensatory damages, totalling $640,000. The parties settled for a confidential amount before an appeal was decided.
More to the point, it's the difference between a jury trial where jurors are likely to award high amounts from a unsympathetic defendant (a big faceless multinational) to a sympathetic plaintiff (79 year old women), and a settlement (presumably the government didn't think they had a strong case so they didn't take to trial).
> FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.
This doesn't even make sense—water that hot destroys the flavor of the coffee. Why do they not just make and serve the coffee at a temperature people actually expect? Is it so hard to not be an asshole to your customers?
I believe the general consensus is that if they served the coffee cooler, by the time take-out customers got around to drinking it, it would be cold. Erring on the side of too hot maximizes customer satisfaction because the number of customers who would be upset at cold coffee is greater than the number of customers, buying coffee at McDonalds, who have sophisticated coffee tastes.
Anyway, Starbucks also serves their coffee about as hot as McDonalds. Turns out, coffee hot enough to cause horrific injury is rather common.
Wonder whether the victim should have sued the bad PR machine and set precedent, since this year a woman suffered an injury of similar order of magnitude (I assume) and all the papers go "woman gets wedgie in water slide muhahaha" due to PR spin.
Nevermind that she only asked McDonalds to cover like five figures worth of medical bills, which they rejected. The JURY selected that figure, explicitly as a fuck you to the corporation that had a documented history of giving people coffee hotter than industry recommendations for safety, people getting really hurt from that coffee, and McDonalds sweeping those instances under the rug without making any changes to their coffee temperature.
Now, instead it is a definitive PR win, with an entire generation of entitled asshole business owners swearing up and down that we need "Tort reform" because "a lady spilled coffee on herself and got $2.7 million", which was explicitly caused by a megacorp going out of their way to be dangerous.
That is patently untrue. Even if you put aside that the law doesn't require a victim (see speeding tickets, DUIs, etc), the banks would have charged a higher interest for a riskier loan. Trump lied about his finances to make the loan risk seem lower and get a lower interest rate (or even the loan itself). The banks are a direct victim because they were cheated out of the interest rates they would have charged to reflect the higher risk they were taking on.
Obama was their pitchman for a while while POTUS. He even directed the DoJ to "announce" premature and incorrect conclusions, overstepping the NTSB's investigation in the Jamaican 737 non-MAX NG crash.
It seems Boeing is getting another sweetheart deal because they have lobbyists and powerful allies in DC who can make the deaths of hundreds of people not matter.
If you scam the powers that be out of some real money (or just slightly expose their financial incompetence) that's when they suddenly know how how to hold individuals responsible. Pharma bro, Elizabeth Holmes, Delvey, SBF, etc.
The system views individual lives as less important than the confidence / stability / illusion of power of the holy market and those it is meant to benefit.
Regarding the "Can/should a CEO or officer be held liable?" dialogue, there is already at least one precedent.
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act:
> The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. [0]
Now, would it work? The linked article details reasons that make it challenging in the SOX context.
1. sounds like a variant of "everything is securities fraud"[1], where you can't prosecute someone for [bad thing] so you prosecute them for lying about [bad thing], where [bad thing] could be anything between causing global warming to getting hacked.
2. It's highly unlikely they'll ever get anywhere near the maximum[2].
From history, Al Capone wasn't charge with murder, violence, assault, battery, embezzlement, theft, etc. He was charged with ... Tax Evasion (!) and it stuck. As far as I can tell, Al Capone just needed to incorporate his criminal enterprise, and then his corporation would penalized, but he wouldn't go to prison.
As to securities fraud, if a publicly traded company lies facts material to criminal acts, then yes it should securities fraud -- particularly if it hurt the stock holders (and in this case it did!). This would be different than say a CEO cheating on his wife and lying about it.
"Knowing" and "willful" can be a bit confusing. Generally in statutes you do something "knowingly" if you have knowledge of it. If you know the report is false when you sign it you have "knowingly" signed off on a false report.
"Willful" means that you knew that you were doing something that the law forbids. If you knew the reports was false but did not know that the law forbids doing that then it would not be willful.
Here's a more detailed explanation from the DoJ [1]. That's in general rather than specifically about Sarbanes-Oxley but a quick grep in SOX didn't turn up any SOX-specific definitions for those terms.
I've always found those distinctions in legal code to have the (possibly deliberate) side effect of encouraging deliberate ignorance. It is not wilful or knowing if they make no effort to know or understand what the implications of their decisions were. I strongly believe this to be a wrong approach that does nothing to change MBA approach to decision making: It is all about a buck now and the less they know about consequences later the better (for them personally, not for the rest of us)
The law tries to address this. If a defendant is aware that there is a significant risk of [X], but deliberately avoided information that might confirm [X], then knowledge that [X] can often be imported to them under the "willful blindness" doctrine. Though, as you can imagine, it can be difficult to apply this in practice since it is difficult to articulate the level of suspicion a defendant must have had in order to have been "willfully blind" rather than just ignorant.
Actually in most places, technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job. The corporate lawyers should have clearly warned them about this already. Additionally, any criminal lawyer should have warned Boeing people it is often around a 10 year jail term for criminal negligence.
Unless the president/CEO can prove they enforced policy to mitigate the issues, than the board may still be in real trouble internationally.
Their best bet is to delay long enough that the general public loses interest in the case.
Have a great day, and remember free parachutes is not a real solution... =3
> Actually in most places, technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job.
This isn't true as written. CEOs aren't automatically liable for crimes of the company or employees.
If a CEO intentionally facilitates or participates in those crimes: Yes, open to liability.
If an employee or department commits crimes without the knowledge of the CEO: Very different situation.
The cynical take is that CEOs are always aware of crimes or that they're encouraging the crimes to happen. I've personally seen several cases of people committing fraud and even a federal crime on the job, and in every case it was done secretly with the belief that it was going to be an undiscovered way of advancing the person's career. People try to game the advancement system at every level, including executive levels.
In the US, sometimes the court may “pierce the corporate veil” when actions are particularly egregious or unlawful and hold the shareholders or directors personally liable.
Rather than go into all the specifics of law (since I'm not
a lawyer), I'll cite some examples where corporate executives were charged personally:
Limited liability only protects the shareholders. It exists because shareholders have no control over the corporation. It does not protect agents of the corporation, such as management, because they do have control of the corporation.
It is right on the incorporation forms prior to entity approval, and in my jurisdiction the Lawyer made this very clear as I make choices hiring ex-servicemen contractors/staff (numerous PTSD issues can limit roles... like "dealing" with aggressive/rude customers can be a bad idea etc.) Additionally, blindly using Lexis Nexis forms can cause issues too, as the same clauses have different legal definitions in different regions.
While a C firm does _often_ protect board member personal assets from civil cases, it also does not guarantee protection.
Also, international investors do not usually create a US LLC given it usually trips 2 tax codes. Talking with awesome AMCHAM reps about this area is probably in your best interest, but most international firms create a Type C corporation on US soil.
Ask your local corporate tax lawyer about liabilities to confirm whether your jurisdiction has harmonized corporate laws.
Being a president/CEO is not what most assume, and even a shareholder can get messy too. Despite pop-culture urban legends, it is not a role for clowns or cons. =3
Agreed, the key phrase here is _limited_ liability not immunity.
I am still trying to figure out how Boeing got around their commercial insurance companies? There is a bag of vipers also waiting for their turn with the CEO for sure... =3
Isn’t LL about protecting your assets not you from jail time? I can’t start a LLC, have the LLC pay someone to kill you, and be scott free. “Sorry you can’t go after me, go after this shell company and try to put it in jail ha ha”
Yep, people should talk with a real local corporate lawyer or AMCHAM if unsure.
The hubris on YC from those that assume the rules don't apply to them is hilarious. But, I guess someone has to pay for the lawyers kids to get though university.
So the TL;DR is a) SOX forced companies to improve internal controls, which we can all agree is a good thing, and b) when things still go wrong, the execs are usually committing other crimes that make it more feasible to prosecute those instead.
Seems to me to me more legal inside baseball than an indication execs are getting away with more fraud than before. Seems prosecutors are just choosing to charge other crimes when they know they have a good case.
> If the deal is accepted, it could complicate Boeing’s ability to sell products to the U.S. government as a felon, though the company could seek waivers. About 32% of Boeing’s nearly $78 billion in revenue last year came from its defense, space and security unit.
My understanding is that getting security clearance involves a bunch of checks and statements about your character, and having a federal felony conviction on one's record would be a hard blocker.
Absolutely, I think that the real punishment, beyond the $245M fine, ought to be losing its many many billions of DoD contracts. After all, once a firm has demonstrated this kind of behavior, how on earth should we trust it with not only taxpayer dollars but the lives of servicemen/women and critical military resources?
Also in the "corporations as people" x "criminal justice system" vein, I would be in favor of moving towards a standard where, if a person convicted of the same crime would receive a prison sentence, a company should be forced to cease operations for an equivalent period, and put all its assets into frozen fund which can only be used to pay out debts/obligations, and which earns no interest.
Garnish valuation increase and dividends for X years, just like wage garnishing. At the end of every quarter, if the market cap of the company has increased by $X b/million, $X b/million has to be paid as a fine to the government. This means that effectively the share price cannot increase during the period, only go down.
Of course, this needs to be done retroactively, starting from the time the illegal act is believed to have been committed. Now it wouldn't be sensible to just "destroy" market cap, but there's an obvious solution here. Looks like the 737 MAX was announced in Aug 2011, when Boeing's market cap was around $50B. Currently it's $114B. You issue new shares, roughly 1.28x as many as the current number of outstanding shares. The government gets all of them and by law is made to sell 20% of them per year. It's only after 5 years, when all of the shares have been sold, that the X years of market cap garnishing starts.
I'm sure there's a loophole or two that I missed, but this can all be accounted for. A simple, DMA-like "spirit of the law"-clause works well enough, as we're seeing with Apple suddenly being very quick to accept the Epic store in Europe.
Suddenly a whole lot of people will start caring. Sure, it would be great to jail those responsible too, but with that alone you will eventually end up with boards full of fall guys. You need the above to long-term successfully prevent this kind of socially destructive behavior.
This idea would kill all capital investment in the country. A country without capital investment is a country in which you will not enjoy the standard of living.
I really don't think it would, because investment follows the money. After the first couple of cases, businesses will adjust their practices. Again, see DMA and Apple for an example of how it's very possible to make businesses do things they wouldn't do on their own.
Let's say the US instates this. Will everyone suddenly stop investing in Apple? No, because the chance that they run foul of this would be so tiny as not to impact the RoI. For most companies like Boeing who commit this kind of gross negligence, the act in question only provides a small boost to their market value, if any.
If this still somehow shows to greatly reduce investment, there's an obvious way to alleviate this. All proceeds of the stock sales and fines, the government immediately reinvests in a basket representing the market of the country.
I think the DoD should make clear that the funds previously marked for Boeing would be open for new firms even if staffed by former Boeing employees -- provided diligence checks find no involvement by those parties in the current fraud case. Boeing, if it had no prospects of continued DoD contracts, would naturally want to offload teams and facilities dedicated to that work. If this situation was handled right, it could spark the creation of multiple new American firms with the means and know-how to deliver the various products and services that Boeing formerly provided, while simultaneously delivering a very clear message to shareholders and C-suite officers that this sort of conduct will not make them rich.
> the funds previously marked for Boeing would be open for new firms even if staffed by former Boeing employees
> delivering a very clear message to shareholders and C-suite officers that this sort of conduct will not make them rich
And the best way to make that point is to create new investment opportunities that will make some former employees of the same company and many of the same investors rich?
1. Boeing investors should take a substantial haircut. If those investors subsequently in on new firms, good for them (though initially these new firms may be private). I see no reason they should expect to "get rich" from the investment. The top institutional shareholder is Vanguard whose involvement will have been minimal and whose future behavior is unlikely to change. But Boeing execs whose compensation is largely in stock packages should take a really large hit, and any shareholders who are more apt to be more activist will be more likely to express concern about this kind of conduct sooner.
2. I have to expect that plenty of employees who did not become dead whistle-blowers were not involved in fraud, or poor engineering practices. Certainly a great many long-time Boeing employees expressed concerns about the deterioration of engineering-first culture.
The investors who got rich through Boeing have cashed in a long time ago. What you're suggesting would be much more interesting to them than Boeing is today. You're basically saying 'this handful of companies is virtually guaranteed to share contracts worth billions per year among them'.
> The investors who got rich through Boeing have cashed in a long time ago.
I don't know which investors you mean, and what you mean by "a long time", but I think people that cashed in a long time ago should be able to invest in new firms. Many people say the culture and safety issues at Boeing stems from the McDonnell Douglas merger which was admittedly a generation ago now. But if the estates of Frank Shrontz or Thorton Wilson or the great great grand kids of William Boeing want to invest in a new firm -- good for them? None of them were involved in the period when this fraud occurred, and if they had actually cashed out long ago then they weren't even shareholders in a position to pressure Boeing officers to do anything different.
But there's also no reason they would have any kind of leg up over anyone else in making such an investment today.
Fairness and equality before the law benefits everyone.
But we live in a broken society where corporations have the rights of people (including political donations as free speech), but don't have the ability to be punished in a way that is at all aligned with what we inflict on actual people. This also means that punishment is largely not an effective deterrent for large companies, where the penalties when they're caught are smaller than the revenue when they're not caught (see cases of tech giants laughing off penalties in the 7-9 figures).
If the cost of being able to actually punish companies is that you sometimes have to actually punish companies with the side effect that we can't spend the whole $900B/yr on war machines to pass on to wars on the other side of the planet ... then sigh, I guess we'll have to settle for only buying $880B of death this year.
I mean I would have said that about Roe v Wade but apparently it just took a few decades of complaining and making abortion an engine for a political apparatus, and they got it rolled back. If I don't complain about citizens united for at least another 30 years, I'm not trying hard enough.
All the good things in this country came from people who were willing to keep pushing when everyone else didn't have the patience. We might not agree about which those things are, but if you think continuing to carp about injustice is out of place here ... maybe you're the one who missed a memo. This country started b/c rich colonists didn't want to pay taxes and they escalated to fighting a war of attrition. These were businessmen, and they picked a fight that started by disrupting all their existing trade relationships and continued rolling production disruptions as a multi year war ran all over the country. So you can take your quiet, lazy acquiesce and go find some other country to be snide about it in.
DoD will continue to do business with Boeing because there aren’t enough options because we consolidated everything into a handful of mega corps and gutted competition in defense like we have across the entire economy.
This “punishment” is a joke, these people are mass killers they should be in jail.
Making the corporate itself a felon is almost a joke. Zero chance this ends their defense contracts- they'll find a workaround. Assigning the felony to the corporation is just a sweet chance for the individuals responsible to offload responsibility.
Makes me think a lot of Taleb's "Skin in the Game", which emphasizes that a healthy system cannot have leaders who accept rewards without risks. This deal means Boeing leadership can continue to behave without skin in the game.
Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking. This seems similar to Wells Fargo, where ok, the company was fined, sued, made to pay restitution (somewhat) to victims. But underlying it all, the culture and incentives at the company that produced the situation didn't get fundamentally changed. Which often perpetuates across specific leaders, boards, and is a part of what a company is -- and doesn't just get replaced by removing one or two people.
What does it take? You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues? Or can a government penalty call for that? That is hard to achieve. Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year? That seems to me as important as who is CEO.
None of the penalties courts mete out (short of dissolution/fined into bankruptcy) seem to be able to achieve this level of change needed.
The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself.
Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs.
What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.
I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.
> The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard
> What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture
Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??
In the legal culture I'm familiar with, the CEO and the board of directors can be held liable for everything the company does. If they are not aware of the crime but they should have been, it can be seen as gross negligence.
As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal protections do not apply. Assigning liability like that is an inherent part of the social trade-off that allows limited liability companies to exist.
You are all arguing irrelevant points. Because the premise is false.
You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, and which workers assembled that landing gear on each and every MAX out there. I can tell you which executives signed off on it, and if you subpoena the documents I could even tell you what they were all emailing back and forth. More importantly, I can tell you which QA engineers and executives were involved in the QA and testing process for that landing gear and give you the results of the tests they ran. So on and so forth, all the way up to the CEO.
We can identify people. We've simply decided that we won't. You guys are arguing an orthogonal point as to whether or not to hold C level executives accountable. I can tell you right now you're going to effect much better change if you target key executives at the director-VP level than if you target C level people.
We do need to get rid of the rats. And a lot of those are C level executives, but it's important right now to get rid of all the rats. And right now, many of those rats are being promoted.
There's a very simple legal phrase which is "knew or should have known" - the CEO knew or should have known. It's that simple.
If you are the CEO and you did not, you should have, and you are responsible. It doesn't really need to be more complicated to incentivize rooting out evil - if we hold people responsible authorities (those with power) who should have known, they will figure out a way to increase integrity of their organizations instead of spreading accountability through infinity vendors.
The CEO is accountable for culture and hiring, good or bad. If someone below them hired poorly, the CEO failed by hiring a poor hiring manager. As the poster above said, the buck stops at the top.
If some random person on the floor didn't properly log a maintenance activity, that is the CEO's fault for not creating a culture in which proper documentation is properly stressed. Again, the buck stops at the top.
That person on the floor must be, and usually is, indemnified, because it's more important to get open and honest feedback from them on what happened. That way we know the changes the CEO failed to implement to prevent it from happening, and should now implement to prevent it from happening again. This is because the buck stops at the top.
That person on the floor must be, and usually is, indemnified
That's not how FAA submitted documentation works. Just don't sign it if you have any questions. I never signed anything until I had personally verified the data and/or the code for myself.
If there are young engineers out there reading this, please disregard these people telling you that you are indemnified. Talk to a lawyer yourself if you don't believe me, but please don't follow the advice these people are laying out.
Signing off on something you know to be untrue and submitting that to the FDA or FAA as part of an approval process is a federal crime. Not only that, but the way our lawyers explained it to us, each time we sign off on something that turns out to be false, it counts as one count of lying to the federal government. And, no, you being an employee who was directed to sign does not absolve you from culpability.
Any 1L knows that you cannot, under any circumstances, contract away criminal liability. You are always liable for the actions you take that turn out to be criminal.
Again, don't believe me telling you that you will be committing a crime if you sign off on a fix or design that turns out to be bunk. Definitely don't believe these guys telling you will be protected if you sign off. Go talk to an attorney for yourself. You'll find what I'm saying is true. You want to find that out before you sign off on a fix or a design. Not after. Believe me.
Just some fatherly advice from an older engineer to younger ones. Please protect yourselves.
It's important to note the NTSB has a famously blameless postmortem process, because they have found that that, rather than naming technician names, is how to best get information from the technicians about the culture built by the CEO.
A CEO who builds a culture encouraging technicians to skip a maintenance entry (no signing off on something that isn't there), is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.
A CEO who builds a culture which attacks whistleblowers and people who would report the above incident, is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.
Part of the reason the C suite makes outrageous salaries is that they have much more responsibility than the rest of us. They didn't have the intention to harm people but it's nonetheless their fault if they didn't put in place proper and reasonable procedures to prevent the problems.
There were two crashes. After the first crash Boeing were quite happy to pin the blame on the Lion Air pilots. At that point the C suite were definitely involved in every decision.
There are different degrees of murder. First degree requires you to plan in advance kill someone (either particular person or a specific group). Second degree murder doesn't require the plan to kill, and so negligence for financial gain COULD be second degree murder depending on the details. (Boeing knew or should have known that their mistakes could lead to death and so mitigated this)
Note that US states are not consistent on what is second degree murder. I cannot find a federal definition (I'm not a lawyer - this should be seen as me not knowing the right search terms). There are many other countries with their own definitions of murder which are all slightly different.
> The felony murder rule is a rule that allows a defendant to be charged with first-degree murder for a killing that occurs during a dangerous felony, even if the defendant is not the killer.
Is whatever Boeing did a "dangerous felony"? Wikipedia suggests not every crime qualifies:
>To avoid the need for reliance upon common law interpretations of what felony conduct merges with murder, and what offenses do and do not qualify for felony murder, many U.S. jurisdictions explicitly list what offenses qualify in a felony murder statute. Federal law specifies additional crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and carjacking.
Knowingly placing thousands of lives at risk, including possible state actors - risking international relationships, whilst also risking damages to critical infrastructure, such as airports, certainly would seem to qualify as a dangerous felony.
No, but anybody commenting on legalities outside the court room should be using "seem", as what they're saying is not definitive. Especially if they've got any legal background.
Trump wasn't prosecuted for felony murder, he was prosecuted for a misdemeanor which was upgraded to a felony because it was used to violate campaign finance laws.
...which was done on a novel legal theory (like people are alluding to in this thread). I realize the analogy triggers some of you but it's not a bad one.
We should certainly do something about CEOs being in charge of large multi-billion dollar companies, rarely having direct consequences, and still being rich. It is currently reasonable that a CEO might not know everything when something happens the first time in a huge company. We shouldn't have only one person responsible, but likely a group. This is more important in safety critical industries, but less so for something like a luxury goods company, so you wouldn't want to force every company to this structure.
This is currently an advantageous single point-of-failure for companies and CEOs, and the advantage grows the more safety critical the industry that they're in. The company structure prevents any real responsibility except when the crime is blatant (like the CEO was recorded or wrote down something).
If you are such a bad CEO that over 200 People die because of your bad management, then that should definitely be illegal.
For what do they get the millions if not for taking responsibility?
LOL To these guys, “taking responsibility” means simply making a sad face and issuing a press release saying “we’re sorry.”[1]. Not actually taking responsibility and going to prison.
So you want to argue that it was not criminal fraud but blatant incompetence? Interesting angle of defense, but I wouldn't give it a high chance of success.
They did commit it by accepting their role, their responsibility for their team, the higher salary for the higher responsibility and the dereliction of their duties.
You are the one person on the planet (I hope) who believes a leader is not responsible for those under his leadership.
Before you take offence understand this is just a difference of opinion of what a leader is, nothing against you personally.
If the ship's captain was asleep in a drunken stupor while the 17 year old helmsman crashed the ship into an iceberg, should the captain go unpunished?
I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.
A vessel's master will always leave standing orders to be followed while they're asleep. Typically these orders solve only some routine choices that were anticipated, and for anything extraordinary the master should be awoken at once and consulted.
The junior watch officer should have summoned the master long before the ship hit an iceberg, if they are inattentive (e.g. they fall asleep in the warm dark of a bridge at night) the BNWAS will alarm to try to wake them, then eventually summon senior officers (typically the master, but maybe also a chief engineer and others) to the bridge. The master is responsible for ensuring the BNWAS is operable.
It would be extremely unusual for a commercial vessel (not to mention military vessel) to allow officers to drink booze, especially enough booze to fall "asleep in a drunken stupor". Of course just because something is prohibited doesn't mean it won't happen, but now we're talking about culpability and of course you're culpable if as a foreseeable consequence of your prohibited actions bad things happen, that's negligence at best.
There should be a second/third in command on duty when the captain is drinking or sleeping. (and the captain should be off duty long enough for whatever he was drinking to wear off - my understanding in ships often run 4 hour shifts so there may not be enough time but sometimes the second will take a longer shift to allow the captain time to celebrate.)
Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.
> If the ship's captain was asleep in a drunken stupor while the 17 year old helmsman crashed the ship into an iceberg, should the captain go unpunished?
Plenty of people have to respect a much higher standard of accountability: did the CEO take actions to ensure that proper adherence to industry standard was respected? Which processes were put in place to ascertain the continued respect of these standards?
In many jobs, incompetence will get you in jail. Sure, sometimes your reports go out of their way to conceal issues, but aside from extreme cases, a CEO should have to show what they did to prevent issues, and merely "believing" should land them in jail.
Analogies don't have to be perfect unless you don't want see inconvenient arguments. Boeing CEO(s) shot hundreds of people in the head and then claimed they had no idea the gun was loaded and the safety was off. "My assistants said it's fine to point and shoot".
It's not about the result or what the CEO "believes", it's about what they reasonably did to avoid bad outcomes. Did the CEO do anything to be certain his people are competent, or that an incompetent person cannot tank the quality of the product? Did they take any reasonable measures, implemented checks, ordered audits, spent more to prioritized safety and quality?
The CEO has the highest executive authority and the highest pay. This means the highest level of accountability. Until the shit hits the fan, or the ground, and then the employees were incompetent, the processes were weak, the consultants that weren't picked by the CEO said it's all good.
The reason they get away with this isn't that the law protects them, it's that they fill pockets and buy laws to protect them. Random "Empty Pockets" Joe won't get a pass for building something that kills people because they didn't bother to verify anything.
IIUC the decisions that led to the 737 Max happened under the prior CEO Muilenburg. Calhoun is just the fall guy. He wasn’t even CEO when the crashes happened.
He should bear responsibility for the door plugs, though.
Parents can absolutely be responsible (at least financially) for crimes that a minor child under their care did. Doesn't matter if they weren't around at the time and told them not to do it.
Besides, Understaffed/Poorly staffed orgs tend to have more issues like this anyway... which tends to be the result of executive decisions, right?
Being too insulated from day to day ops is a symptom, not an excuse.
Prime counterexample: Sarbanes-Oxley. Yes, you can punish people for failing to comply with legal obligations, even if they had no specific knowledge of the obligation not being met.
The law being so wide ranging, complicated, and subject to interpretation based on previous decisions (in may jurisdictions) it's practically impossible to know definitively every law that applies to you, even for an expert.
Now, knowing what the law is in specific, narrow areas that you're operating in, or with sufficient budget to hire experts, that's something different, and might be closer to knowable.
I fully agree with you, but that doesn't change anything about my statement. Even if you don't know what the law is you are still responsible for following it correctly.
A the time honored excuse of "sorry mister officer I did not know the car I was driving was stolen, I just found it on the road a few days ago and had no idea I swear".
If you incentivize ignorance, then that’s what you get more of. If all I have to do to avoid responsibility is to cover my eyes and plug my ears after I chuck the figurative grenade into the operation, then then expect me to develop an enthusiastic case of “la la la I can’t hear you!” even in reaction to normal decisions, just in case.
It feels like maybe the financial industry made some reforms along these lines, right? Where they established that somebody specific in an executive position was required to sign personally guaranteeing that various financial filings were not fraudulent?
Presumably that personal risk incentivized said executive staff to want to know more rather than less, and the residual risk (of having to stand by your word) became priced into the pay packages.
What about a crime that was in their job description to have knowledge of? Would a doctor not be liable if he didn't properly diagnose a patient? There is an assumption of minimal professional competency when you assume the responsibility of that role.
I'm pretty sure that you can sue for malpractice should the misdiagnosis fall below a minimum standard of conduct. In practice, misdiagnosis is not easy to prove, but we're talking Boeing executive level of incompetence here.
Yes you can, it's called Strict Liability. That's the risk they're getting payed billions of dollars to make sure they get right. It's their job to have the knowledge and make sure it doesn't get committed.
No its called a healthy society. The reason - There is usually surprisingly little actual skill gap between good seasoned (higher) middle managers and c-suite. What gets you up there is politics, clever sociopathic games, tenacity, connections, and often a bit of luck. If you look for words like additional competence among that list, you wouldn't find it.
The only reasons some folks push up there to the top are 2 - power, and money. They receive extra money because they are holding massive responsibility for their part or whole corporation. Lets stop finding reasons why there is actually 0 real responsibility on them. Its literally part of the deal they sign up for, and they know it very well.
Yes, it may sometimes mean that they get the heat for something caused by their predecessors, its part of the risk they take on themselves by pushing into such role. Its still firmly their failure, ie to a) identify it; b) act upon it. But as we see this wasn't a priority in Boeing, and I presume it still isn't.
And the level of risk the CEO/C Suite would have to take on would be insane. Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company?
There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce the quality of the leadership and bias it further towards people who are delusional about safety.
To fullfill their role? Management and making decisions? Taking on personal risk has never been a part of the C suite beyond the tradition of giving them shares as part of their compensation.
Shareholders use positive incentives, not negative ones. Because positive incentives generally lead to better results in this case.
You seem to be arguing that the C-suite can do anything it wants to. As long as it does it in an official capacity, it can cause whatever harm it wants.
That seems like a very strange argument. Do you believe corporations and corporate officers have no moral obligation to act ethically?
Because if so, I'm finding it hard to understand the difference between a corporation and a crime family.
Seems like the US has some really weird rules in this regard then. For the C-suite to take on personal risk is literally a part of the role where I live. the central business registry register those holding these roles for that exact reason.
> Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company?
You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound.
There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsibility and accountability.
If what Boeing management has to offer means "quality" then I'll gladly take less of it, thank you. Same with VW and all those managers which went away unscathed enjoying their golden parachutes, for basically leading schemes for killing people.
Sounds good to me. We'd end up with aerospace companies run by engineers who understand the technical decisions in detail, instead of MBAs and accountants.
Boards run corporations on behalf of investors through vague and soft guidance so as not to directly be considered officers
CEOs are appointed based on their ability to do what the board wants while shielding the board - this is why they get paid the most
Until investors and the board significantly hurt, to the point where their investment is either a total loss, or they are liable for additional financial inputs then nothing will change
Boards want the media to focus on the CEO because they are literally there to shield the board from accountability while “taking the brunt” of the bad PR - and also being a show piece for the company in good times
So, the real answer IMO is to change the law to implicate board members and investors directly as though they are officers equivalent with the CEO is setting corporate direction and incentives
Of course they have intentionally made the law such that any actions taken by the corporation, limit the liability of the board legally, while not taking the power away from the board to drive the direction and priorities and incentives of the corporation
The whole thing is an accountability shell game - Wherein a CEO is the whipping boy for whatever the board needs them to be the whipping boy for - and there’s a balance and ownership
The simplest way to put it is that the CEO is there to ensure that everything, the company does benefits investors primarily.
Until it is legally the case that corporate leadership must prioritize the benefits to labor above investors, nothing functionally is going to change.
Well, ultimately responsible are the shareholders who demand ever higher profits, and the top management has to deliver that, even if it hurts the company long term; or, to generalize even more, capitalism.
> ultimately responsible are the shareholders who demand ever higher profits, and the top management has to deliver that
That's not how this works. The shareholders don't have direct authority over the decisions made by the company's chief officers. They can demand "higher profits" all day long, but that doesn't absolve the board of directors or management from their responsibility, and it doesn't give them a blank check to behave unethically or even criminally.
> or, to generalize even more, capitalism.
Ugh, that is such a knee-jerk, fallacious take. Short-sightedness and misalignment of incentives are traits that are hardly specific to capitalism.
A problem doesn’t need to be specific to capitalism in order to be caused by it. Of course this is all a result (a predictable one) of a certain type of capitalist theory, namely extreme shareholder primacy.
Then those shareholders should bear the risk and start a share-bound commandite, a form of partially limited liability company without a board of directors, but rather directly controlled by shareholders, but that requires at least one unlimited liability member apart from the limited liability members.
Make the CEO responsible, want those big rewards (high ceo pay) get ready to deal with big responsibility. I’m sure if CEOs were criminally liable things would change very quickly.
So the CEO says in court: «I am now aware that some of the issues on your jira backlog caused damage to our customers. The very-well-compensated programming team leader and the highly paid programmers reported to me that there were no such issues in the backlog, and based on their written assessment I decided to release the new version. It would be impossible for me to check every detail, and therefore unreasonable for the jury to expect that.» And the jury agrees, and someone goes to prison but it isn't the CEO.
Eh, my current project manager does not even seem to check every detail and we appear to be moving by pretty dashboards, so I expect CEO will have even smaller, simpler dashboard. Fwiw, if CEO got in front of the jury, I would expect things to look bleak for the CEO ( it is not exactly a favored class now ). There is a reason it does not happen often ( for example outright fraud ala Bankman ).
The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.
There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.
It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.
Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.
> The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.
He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.
The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.
After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 despite other jurisdictions grounding the aircraft.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.
There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.
Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.
For me the real kicker was that Boeing convinced the FAA that the aircraft did not need redundant Angle of Attack sensors, even though they knew that this meant that there was a single point of failure in a system which had control authority (ie, MCAS).
Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.
IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.
In cases like this it should be even harsher than a prison or monetary punishment, I like what China is doing by executing White collar criminals such as CEO's for negligence, fraud, causing death etc:
The CEO has the responsibility to make the company work well. If a company build products that injure or kill people, the CEO should be in trouble too. Instead of looking the other way and still get big paychecks and bonuses, improve design, testing, all company processes and make the company build products that work.
Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company? If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)? Fines are just a price we set on breaking the law.
But that's not the situation here anyway. Is an architect guilty of murder if a building he designs collapses? Flaws in his design may have contributed. What about the construction company that built it? Perhaps they were incompetent and sloppy in their construction. The suppliers might be at fault as well; they could have sold inferior steel or concrete. What about the politicians that passed faulty legislation for building codes? Does some of the blame not fall on them too? Or the maintenance company that skimped on their maintenance checks and could possibly have seen the cracks forming?
There is very rarely, despite the assurances of five-whys and other incident response practices, a clear-cut and obvious point of failure when complex systems break. The Boeing situation was a failure of culture, people say. Maybe. They justify criminal charges on the C-suite as a result. Maybe even that is just, for a certain definition of justice. But the buck doesn't have to stop there. Where are the criminal charges for the shareholders, who chose to keep these criminals at the head of the company? Where are the charges against the FAA, who continued to do leave Boeing to be its own regulator? Why not cast blame on the previous CEOs as well? After all, culture takes a long time to change, and the current CEO has only been in the role since 2020 - the MAX's first flight was in 2016!
The people in charge have to ensure that the right measures are in place to prevent illegal behavior. If they do not do that, then they are liable. At Boeing, effective measures are obviously not in place.
1) It's the CEOs job to know. Carelessness, recklessness, wilful ignorance, malice, these are all terms of art and can lead to different liabilities; as a non-lawyer I don't trust my own understanding as to the exact boundaries between them.
2) If the CEO knows, then the word "conspiracy" comes to mind, does not require them to perform the criminal act, only their agreement to act.
> I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is.
Disagree. I think most people can see how lucky it is for them that they can avoid an expensive and protracted court case, just say "oh yeah, we're guilty of a serious fraud" and the only consequence is some fines that amount to about 1% of their annual revenue. With consequences like that, it seems like the government is actively encouraging them to commit fraud...
This is such a "this looks tough, I don't feel like doing it" take. Who is responsible? As others have said, the structure of a corporation defines that. If person A has to do what person B says, then B is responsible. If B "didn't know", then B has been lacking.
It also avoids sacking the "innocent people" and it sets an example for other companies. The greedy corporate culture really needs a bit of check-and-balance.
We do however have to allow for person A intentionally hiding from person B what they are doing. Person A should check, but it is impossible to see everything so we do have to allow for person B committing fraud to hide from audits.
Sure. But then B should prove that A did so. And even then, if B had threatened A, even implicitly, B can still be considered responsible for the fact that A didn't inform.
The CEO. America does not put CEOs in prison anymore. Yes, the occasional CEO will go to jail for fraud, but when people actually die, like this, the CEO and the executive suite goes unpunished. When the justice system starts putting CEOs in jail, is when we will see their behavior change. Until then, all of this with Boeing is nothing more than lawyers and legal fees.
Why can't the government mandate a board replacement? The board can figure out for themselves who is responsible, I would guess the finger would typically point at the CEO.
Boards are often toothless though, just look at Tesla's.
Replace the C-suite. This is done frequently in M&A's and other corporate strategies in extremis. Fire the guys at the top and replace them with people with good track records.
You can rotate people in and out of the C-suite, but incentives and culture aren’t going to change. These people are largely figureheads that get paid a lot of money because they are Ivy Leaguers whose friends on company boards who set their salaries are all Ivy Leaguers, too.
It’s not like Boeing is going to get a new CEO and then suddenly middle management is going to start prioritizing safety, engineering rigor, and risk management over profit.
This conversation is so weird to me, I don't get what people are arguing: is the argument that it's better to replace middle management than top level management? That we shouldn't do anything? What?
You would keep the status quo.
The problem with Boeing is the replacement of a strong engineering-first culture with a profit-first culture over decades.
It's a classic playbook: acquire company, erode product quality and culture for profit, pay out shareholders, discard hollowed-out husk.
>I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.
And as it stands they've already been losing money for the past 5 years. They could be losing a lot more money.
Granted a lot of those losses are due to their own mismanagement of projects like KC-46, Starliner, AF1, etc.
How do you even "change management culture" without punishing people who are innocent of any crime other than being a manager who embodies the sort of management culture you're trying to stamp out? If you limit yourself to firing/prosecuting the specific managers that committed fraud/etc this time nothing will change because those guys only existed in the org and operated that way because of the broader management context. Sweeping layoffs are probably a necessarily prerequisite for fixing Boeing.
"How do you eliminate fraud from a company without punishing managers who are innocent of any crime other than being a manager who embodies a management culture that promotes fraud?"
This is simplistic, but it's a start for a discussion: you look at the organizational chart, start from the bottom where the people working on the product are, punish all the line from there up to the board (all the C*).
Then people will start asking questions about what they are told to do, because they know that if they do something wrong they're going to jail or have to pay the fines themselves, not a bank account of the company. And they won't have much else to go to get shielded from responsibility, because all jobs will be like that. Even our own jobs.
> What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.
Serious question: why not? Why couldn't we require Boeing to change its culture, and then verify and enforce that change? Verification might involve periodically interviewing employees across all levels of the organization, performing spot checks and audits to make sure that procedures are being followed (no more failing to enter a work item into the system), and so forth.
(I don't mean to imply that this would be feasible under current regulatory law – I have no idea whether that is the case or not. I'm just saying that you could imagine a world where this could be done.)
> The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself.
It's funny... when some people get paid A LOT of money, it's because they have "a lot of responsibilities", but when something goes wrong, those responsibilities suddenly vanish.
What Boeing needs is competition. There is Airbus, which apparently doesn’t scare them enough, but there used to be a lot more in Boeing’s earlier years.
Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.
You put in place an incentive to not do these things. Corporate executives and boards do these things because they're incentivized to do so through stock price-based compensation.
Great risk should come with great reward. We no longer assign risk to most executives at publicly-traded, multinational corporations, but the reward is still great.
I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.
In today's culture, I often hear C-suiters talking about how much "risk" they are taking, to justify their outrageous salaries and stock holdings, but I almost never see them pay much, in the way of penalties, except for the very smallest, most "raw" companies, where they have, literally, sunk their entire net worth into the endeavor.
It seems that, once a company has reached a certain threshold, the only real "risk" that executives experience, is that they'll only get a 5% bonus, instead of 30%. So, only $5M, as opposed to $30M.
AUTHORITEH: "Put out your hand!"
GUILTEH: "OK"
AUTHORITEH: <SLAP> "Bad Executive! Bad, bad, Executive! Don't let it happen again! See you at the party on Saturday?"
Boeing employs millions (mostly indirectly via downstream cottage industries) of people and I think is the leading net exporter by revenue of the US. Politicians don’t want to hurt them too badly because all those employees vote.
That's why you limit the liability of the company as a whole, but create great risk for the actual executives who decided that safety came second to the profit margin. Again, you can imagine what that would be, but when you compensation is in the tens of millions and there are hundreds dead, well... the risk has overcome the reward and the punishment should match.
Boeing's problem is its management. If you tell the rank-and-file worker to use the company's billions of dollars worth of production capital to build a quality airplane and hold them to it, they've shown they have the ability to do so in the past.
> I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.
I agree with that statement, but want so add: I believe that whatever you propose will have significant problems and is likely worse than the status quo in some major way. Sometimes I'll only be able to tell you what those problems are in hindsight. Sometimes those problems are fixable sometimes not.
Don't let this dissuade you from thinking about the problem - it needs to be thought about. However do think about is in more than a shallow way, look at it from all viewpoints (including ones of people who disagree with) try to see what the downsides are and how to mitigate them. Good luck, if enough people do this maybe someone will come up with a good enough answer, (as opposed to perfect!) and you will understand the problem well enough to help debate why the downsides are worth it.
You have to get the leadership by the balls. The CEO isn't going to change a company's culture alone, but she has leverage and connections. If they know they face prison if the company plays foul in a major way, they will put pressure on their deputies to change culture.
Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue. That ensures that even activist shareholders take note and do not pressure the CEO to cut corners.
The C-level people have already failed catastrophically, they need replacing wholesale. This is done frequently as other corporate actions like M&A's or bankruptcies. There are specialists whose entire career is dedicated to being temporary CEO's. They are out there. They should be used at Boeing.
>If they know they face prison if the company plays foul in a major way, they will put pressure on their deputies to change culture.
It is completely ridiculous to criminally prosecute leadership for crimes which happened without their knowing/consent/acknowledgment. It would be a perversion of justice to jail someone because many levels down someone else committed a crime. The best corporate culture does not prevent criminality.
Well what are the ridiculously high salaries for if they don't even take responsibility. I mean parents are liable for their children, so why should a CEO not be made responsible for the culture of the corporation underneath them?
Because that would be a perversion of justice. You can not pay someone to take on criminal liability for crimes they didn't commit and could not have any knowledge of. Just imagine what precedent this would set if it was allowed. If courts would accept that criminal liability can be transferred in exchange of cash, how would the justice system look like?
"Culture" is completely ephemeral and having a court of law determine that the CEO "caused" some change in culture which then caused criminal behavior is ridiculous. This obviously can not be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt".
>I mean parents are liable for their children
Parents do not take on the crimes of their children. They are criminally liable for not overseeing their children's action and/or for not preventing their actions, which is something totally different.
The responsibility doesn't come from the money, it comes from being the Chief Executive, with nearly unlimited operational authority. The money would be compensation for liability that would be inherent to their position.
Criminal liability can not be transferred. The idea would be rejected by every sane court as it is a perversion of justice and sets unimaginably bad precedent.
Criminal liability cannot be transferred, but additional liability based on having the authority to oversee and direct a crime where one should have been aware is something that already exists: see RICO. No one is saying that the employees who committed a crime should be absolved, people are saying the chief executive should be additionally liable as they are responsible and, if they didn't know, should have known by this point.
So you are saying that in a case like Boeing's the CEO was completely unaware of the shitshow at their company and couldn't have taken appropriate actions?
A dysfunctional company with bad management is not a crime. Putting a CEO in jail because he is bad, not because any crime had been committed, is an even worse idea.
The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO. If there is evidence otherwise and the CEO was aware of the problem and decided that the risks were acceptable then he obviously should go to jail. This was not the case here as far as I am aware.
Knowing of the issue is the important thing here. If you want another case you can look at the Diesel Gate Scandal at VW, it is German law, but the single most important question is always "who knew", because if the person did not know and had no reason to want to know he HAS to be innocent, regardless whether it is the CEO or anyone else.
> The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO.
He or she is responsible for the culture and governing within the company. So either way they are involved either by knowing and ignoring or by setting the precedent for this to go ahead without their knowledge. The punishment for those might differ but it's not a free pass.
> The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO.
It’s the CEO’s job to make sure these things “come up” to him. If he didn’t know about an engineering problem that got people killed then he is negligent and still should go to prison.
I don’t get all this simping for CEOs. CEOs don’t need us to defend them on HN. Trust me, they are doing fine without passioned arguments in support of them.
> Parents do not take on the crimes of their children. They are criminally liable for not overseeing their children's action and/or for not preventing their actions, which is something totally different.
It is not completely different. The CEOs should be liable for not properly overseeing their company and for not preventing the illegal actions of the company they're in charge of.
Parents are generally not criminally liable for the crimes their kids commit. They might catch some related negligence charges or something, but if little Jimmy decides to rob a 7-11 his mom doesn't get sent to prison for armed robbery.
The way i see it (and here I describe how I think the law should work, not how it works):
If a Boeing engineer has a breakdown and robs a 7-11, the C suite of Boeing is not responsible for that.
If the Boeing engineer murders people in their course of duty because of the incentive structure set up by the C suite then they are responsible for that. How do you prove that? The same way how you prove anything. Lots of discovery which reveals concrete evidence of the C suite setting up and maintaining said incentive structure and then the prosecutorial team describing the connection to a jurry of their peers.
It is the difference between little Jimmy deciding to rob a 7-11 because they are dumb as a rock, vs doing the same because they grown up in an organised crime family.
Under this theory I think maybe you could get the C suite for negligent homicide, but murder seems like a huge stretch for anything but a kangaroo court.
And as if precedent doesn't already exist - check https://treeandneighborlawblog.com for tons of (smaller) examples and also the concepts of "attractive nuisance" and such.
Juries are unlikely to criminally convict in a true case of "didn't know and couldn't know" but they also are likely to award large civil settlements even in those cases.
> Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue.
10% ?
What? if you or I were found negligent that resulted in hundreds of deaths we would be in jail for the rest of our lives, effectively fining us 100% of ALL revenue FOREVER.
At a minimum they should have a massive fine (like 100% of revenue for a year) and do whatever it takes to halve the stock price, thus punishing the stockholders too - after all, they invested in a business that killed people, they should be punished too.
Modern companies are a lot like we expect AGIs to be.
It's an interesting thought that I keep coming across, I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with it.
In a sense, companies are super-human intelligent autonomous beings, with much more power to act on the world than any individual. We are able to partially control them within a complex incentive and enforcement structure, but it is difficult to fully align them with what society needs.
It's good news in a sense, we can control AGIs with similar systems, they have the same resource constraints as any other entity if they want to have an impact in the real world.
I hear this claim a lot but is it really true? Corporations in most countries are „legal persons“ in the sense that they can act like a person. This is what limited liability is all about. In fact the very name „incorporation“ comes from giving a sort of „body“ to an entity that otherwise doesn‘t have one in order to shield the owners from liability as it should be.
I do not think that a corporation is considered to be a person beyond that. It‘s merely a way to establish limited liability for shareholders which requires a mechanism for the corporation to sign contracts without an owner signing on it‘s behalf.
Can you explain why that matters? Yes a company can have a bank account. A company also has a name, like a person. An age, like a person. But what does that matter?
We moved the power from the human to something we said is "human enough" to have them. But this thing is a concept, it doesn't exist. It can't die. It can change forms until it doesn't pay taxes. It can't experience pain or go to prison.
Basically, we gave the power to the company without the responsibilities to the humans behind it because there is less consequences, less skin in the game.
The power of having a bank account, of moving funds around, of signing contracts, etc.
Before that, companies had to have everything attached to a human, not the company. So the human was responsible.
You are so used to it that you think it's normal, but it's not.
It's a concept we have created: that companies can act in their own name, like they are actually something concrete.
But when we did that, we failed to give companies expiration date, something like inheritance tax, the equivalent of prison and so forth.
Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences.
In fact, it's sometimes in the title: limited liability company. It's by design.
And of course, it allowed humans to do a lot of things without risking to lose all their life if they failed. But we went to far and now, we have companies that can enjoy all those benefits but with much less limitations than the humans counterpart.
> The power of having a bank account, of moving funds around, of signing contracts, etc.
I don't think companies can sign contracts. What is the power of having a bank account and moving funds around? It's still people deciding to do this, and doing it, just under a group name. What power?
> Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences
People are still doing it. You seem to have totally mis-framed this. If you say "people can get away with doing things inside a company" you'd have a point, perhaps, but you're talking as though companies are sentient.
Of course it matters. What does it meant to punish something that isn't sentient? It's like bemoaning the fact that you can't punish the car that was driven into someone.
Depends on if you care about outcome or morality. Already now we use terms like punishment, reward and adverserial competition between neural networks.
If the entity (be it a corporation or AGI-driven corporation) learns from the punishment (or its peers learn by observation) it doesn't matter if the entity is sentient, the outcome is less of the unwanted behaviour. I didn't mean anything more complicated than that.
The corporation cannot learn. Why anthropomorphise when you can actually think about the real problem: how to incentivise the people who own and direct companies to behave well.
Certain laws apply to any person, which includes companies. A company can own things like you own things, and has similar protections. A company is accountable to its promises (contracts, fraud...), like you would be, although punishments might be different.
It's like a union type: `type Person = Human | Company`. Or like inheritance: `class Human(Person)`, `class Company(Person)`. Or a typeclass/trait/interface...
It allows you to reuse many laws for both humans and companies, without having to specify them or define special cases every time it is mentioned.
I think the point of OP was that in many ways companies have many of the same rights and privileges as individuals, but cannot be punished in the same ways.
I don't really understand that as a point, though. What would punishing a company look like? Why wouldn't we want to figure out how to punish (or hold accountable) individuals, instead of focusing on the fact that we can't punish legal entities?
We can't punish countries either, even though they can also do these things. We can only punish people. So what?
You can definitely punish countries as an independent entity: with trading sanctions, refusal to give in on certain diplomatic compromises, or different degrees of military retaliation.
Same with companies: mostly fines, but also limits on how they can operate, additional oversight...
Of course, the consequences trickle down to people, but these punishments are not meant to target any given individual, and if the individuals in charge change, the ones that leave don't necessarily carry the punishment with them.
This makes sense, legal entities like companies are guided by incentives. And it sometimes makes more sense to punish the legal entity to change its behaviour, by imposing disincentives, rather than punishing whichever people are running it at the time.
For example, people within a company might pressure an individual to commit a crime, because even if that individual might get punished, the company may benefit as a whole. But if the company's (financial) survival is at stake, everyone is more likely to collaborate to prevent that situation, including the shareholders, if the punishments are big enough.
The point here is, that for issues like negligence and fraud, the current punishments are not significant enough to act as a real deterrent. The punishment on the companies is too lenient (they can absorb the fines, they are rarely an existential threat), and the punishment on the individuals responsible is too lenient (difficult to attribute culpability, limited liability...).
We do want to figure out how to hold individuals more accountable, as you said, we are just having a conversation about why it works like that right now and what could be changed to improve it.
We are currently trying to punish entities (with fines), and it's ineffective.
We should move back to punishing people more, and moving back the responsibility to people, instead of pretending companies are people, and therefore responsible.
Quite the opposite, since they have bank accounts, let's:
- Make them more liable.
- Make the people behind them more liable.
- Give companies limitations. What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?
Right now there is way too much power and shielding at the same time.
> What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?
If they can't sell then they don't have money, and everyone is fired. Is that what you mean? Why are you trying to make companies into physical people who can be punished separately to their employees/shareholders, instead of thinking of the actual outcome you want and coming up with something to achieve that?
> Why wouldn't we want to figure out how to punish (or hold accountable) individuals, instead of focusing on the fact that we can't punish legal entities?
Because limited liability means exactly that the owners are shielded to a degree. That‘s my point. That‘s why corporations were created as a concept.
This concept is necessary because the company represents collective decisions and if each and every one of those would be individually accountable then less business would be done.
As someone else pointed out it‘s a union type. Instead of person you could call it „entity“ and rewrite all the laws. Happy now?
Either the fine should be high enough to alert investors and ensure that they make the company change its ways..
Or
The govt. should provisionally or in a timebound manner take a seat or two on the board.
Let the govt. Do this for a few companies, and every otger company will fall in line.
Corporations must be treated as children of the country they are born in. Sure, they become big, earn money for the govt. and are essentially independent. But if the kid goes naughty, a watchful eye and a rap on the knuckles is how you teach manners.
You can't teach a corporation manners. If you are going to talk about corporations as if they are people (and legally they want us to treat them as people) then you have to face that they are, technically speaking, artificial psychopaths (incapacity to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms and respect the law, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness in pursuit of profit, etc). Very powerful, immortal, artificial psychopaths.
A blind focus on the concentration of wealth will only improve tech if it helps profit, will only improve lifes if it helps profit, will only protect the environment if it helps profit, will only influence politics to increase profits. It will try to create poverty because that eases exploitation. As you already hinted, the motivation has to change.
Most corporations end up building systems that spread responsibility and make it very difficult for anyone to believe they can say no to things they disagree with. How many decisions are supposed to be made by groups where nobody can claim actual responsibility? Commitments that are supposedly made by a team, but where it's clear to the team they have to say yes? People get very nervous, and reviews tend to suffer, when you just ask for dodgy work orders in writing. Remembered the whole idea of the Toyota model, where everyone can theoretically stop the line? We often build systems that guarantee the opposite.
Regulating decision making in companies, however, as to make sure people have to look at their own personal risk when bad things are on the line is going to get a lot of pushback, precisely because that's very inconvenient. But without something like this, the Wells Fargo situation is the natural outcome that will keep repeating.
Toyota also failed miserably with the unintended accelerator pedals. And basically pulled some of the same stunts with denial and cover ups and blaming everyone but themselves (legally you have to do this I suppose).
So I don't think they're a great example of having excellent QA everywhere. And kind of helps with your point of if the ORG and the division of that org is really thinking about quality and what they ship then it carries through. But that might not be the case for every part of the company (I.E. Boeing)
Turned out to be extremely bad code and some potential mechanical issues from what I understand[1]
> You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues?
We used to have a law that two different types of banking institutions could not be owned and housed inside the same entity. So, effectively, and based on history, yes. You absolutely do need to do that.
> That is hard to achieve.
Not particularly. Congress has broad and sweeping powers. They just don't use them.
> Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year?
These are publicly traded companies. In the case of Boeing, more than half is owned by institutions and not individuals, and these institutions are known to have questionable practices in all sorts of industries. Again, the solution seems annoyingly simple.
> Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking.
The agencies that oversee this need to have the will and the power to act. Regarding the former, our elected officials are mostly divided into two camps 1) the ones who work to minimize the will of agencies and the ones who are sort of inept and feckless about safeguarding agencies' ability to act.
Regarding the latter, the recent scotus Chevron decision monkey-wrenches agency power (seemingly by design). Bad actors will inject judges into the oversight process, in an attempt to sabotage regulators ability to regulate; Chevron hugely amps up the effectiveness of that attack.
This won't change if the buck can stop with a non-human legal entity. The people who are incentivized to make actively harmful decisions like these need to also carry personal risk for endangering human life.
Otherwise it is a decision where the manager who decides to stretch the limits will get praise and cash if it works out, without carrying much or any personal risk — even if they are fined or fired, chances are they already got their share.
If we want such things from happening the people taking these gambles need to be painfully aware that it might land them in prison for a long time, and fines need to be proportional to the money earned — that means higher by a magnitude or more so there is not even a doubt that it won't pay off.
I like to live in a society where people building critical infrastructure go to prison if they are willingly taking shortcuts.
Problem is that no nation is really keen on punishing their own industry.
Currently the overall culture for selecting business leaders is suboptimal in the western sphere and beyond. It incentivizes behavior that can lead to such problems. Nobody could sell a 10% growth in reliability to investors if it doesn't come with a similar revenue increase as well.
One of the problems here is that a lot of the time, the worst thing that happens to an individual from the company is just that they get fired. That's just not a very strong deterrent when the upside if you don't get caught is potentially huge raises/promotions/bonuses.
Imagine if the worst thing that could happen to you when robbing banks if you get caught is just that you can't rob banks in that area anymore. That's kind of how this works for individuals in corporations.
The supply chain is long but it's supposed to have exceptionally detailed documentation. Follow that document trail and start prosecuting people when those documents start turning sour, because not documenting the work properly is a crime in itself.
This won't be sufficient to fix Boeing, but it would be a start.
Change the law so that design flaws arising from a culture/system that deprioritizes safety are considered criminally negligent for upper management (at least for safety critical domains like aircraft or cars).
Then you just have to prove that they intentionally deprioritized safety/engineering in their systems and culture.
Stonecipher was CEO nearly 20 years ago. Are you proposing to put someone in jail for crimes which happened over a decade after he left the company. Someone which has certainly ZERO knowledge of anything related to the MAX?
Absolutely. If he made systemic changes to the company (and those are proveable) that focused on profit over security he belongs in jail, no matter how long it took for the murder to take effect.
He lead an airplane maker, not a coffee shop. Focusing on profit the way Boeing did was planning a murder and trying to reap the profit in the meantime. All the participating management belongs in a court room.
Who will buy those fresh shares, knowing that they could be "wiped out" by the discretion of ? the government? at any time? for actions that people they don't know committed?
$77b annual revenue. Positive quarterly growth rate the last 8 out of 12 quarters. Two global wars we refuse to negotiate peace in and Boeing is a major weapons supplier.
Then again, if you kill and scare enough people with faulty planes, the state of the economy will be immaterial to what will happen to your interests.
> Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs. No terrorists involved.
I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".
Making asbestos essentially illegal resulted in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs and shutting down coal plants will do the same.
It makes no sense to protect jobs at all costs, and doing so can have very bad outcomes.
If a company is doing something illegal or dangerous or that does not serve society anymore, we shouldn't bend over backwards just because people will lose their jobs.
> I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".
I wasn't invoking any unholy protection of jobs. It's very clear the context I was replying to: that "job loss" isn't "economic terrorism".
Can we not treat the comment section as that party game where people only read the previous sentence of the story and write a follow-on sentence? You have the whole thread available to you.
There is two aspects to a company :
- one that benefits a few private people, mainly the share holders and high level manager/executives
- one that benefits the society as a whole, mainly through the company production/services and the salaries of its employes
There is an option to punish the first aspect while limiting the damage on the second one : the nationalisation of the company, with limited compasation to its shareholder.
Strangely it seems to only be done or considered to save "to big to fail" business, such as bank, in time of crisis, not as a tool of law enforcement.
> Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs.
And ending murder and child victims results in people (investigators, litigators, counselors) losing their jobs. Should we stop trying to solve these problems too?
When the people who run those business factor this exact thing into their decision making, then yes, it's precisely that. You're acting as if the company is somehow entirely detached from these circumstances or that this all happened to them by accident.
Spirit Aerosystem will soon no longer exist. but the assets and almost all the jobs will be divided between Boeing and Airbus. If Boeing were split up the result would be similar.
People keep saying this but it borders on conspiracy talk. The Air Force leadership has been pissed off at Boeing for well over a decade. Every project they've been given has turned into a clusterfuck even moreso than average. They fortunately had the foresight to not give them any cost-plus contracts, so at least it's Boeing eating most of the cost overruns rather than the Air Force, but the point remains that Boeing mismanagement has been a headache for the military.
Politicians care about getting elected, which means they don't want layoffs on their watch. Politicians don't care what the military thinks or else they'd stop funding a lot of dumb projects that the military doesn't give a shit about - of which there are many.
There are so many examples of congress putting their hand on the scale that I really don't understand the popular insistence that the military is the problem here.
> The Air Force leadership has been pissed off at Boeing for well over a decade.
Military brass don't control procurement. That would be Congress. In fact the military often frequently has systems it doesn't want/need precisely because Congress. See the Zumwalt destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship.
Boeing hasn't won any major military aircraft deals in recent decades.
The latest big bomber purchase, B-21, went to Northrop Grumman, as did the not so recent B-2. Fighters have been going to Lockheed (F-22 and F-35).
The biggest recent win for Boeing was KC-46 tanker airplane, which is just modified 767. I suppose there is also the handful of F-15EXes that are vestige from their McDonnell Douglas merger.
It's not like the law doesn't have a way to ban a contractor from government contracts. In fact, the law has multiple offences that are punishable by a ban from government procurement contracts.
For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
> In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. [...] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
While I understand the spirit of what you're saying it does the woman a disservice to talk about it as being only spilling a cup of hot coffee. She was severely burned and required substantial medical treatment:
"""
Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17]
"""
"The guilty plea would brand the planemaker a felon and could complicate its ability to sell products to the U.S. government. About 32% of Boeing’s nearly $78 billion in revenue last year came from its defense, space and security unit."
Banks are declared “too big to fail”. Banks! How can a bank be so important, and ostensibly private, that it can’t fail and let its shareholders take their licks?
There is no world - none - literally no possible universe - that Boeing cannot sell to the government, or that it fails, or that its planes get grounded indefinitely, or anything even remotely close to this outcome.
There are 2 plane makers of appreciable size on earth, Boeing and Airbus. They are essentially government owned enterprises.
Boeing has made a strategic decision and nothing of consequence whatsoever will come of this. Maybe a few people go to jail for a few months. That’s literally it
When a company fails, its employees and factories don't all explode or something. It's just a financial issue, everything still exists. So one possible universe is that Boeing the corporation fails, and the government rescues it and makes it an actual government owned enterprise. Investors and executives lose some money but we still get our planes.
Banks are not declared too big to fail. They are sometimes described that way. But banks fail all the time. It’s why the FDIC exists.
Boeing and the US government have a long and intimate relationship but it is mutual. Boeing was fully vertically integrated until it was favorable to encourage competition in the aviation industry and the US government broke the company up. Boeing is not untouchable.
8 (1). And I think that, in this context, those 8 plus the 22 US D-SIBs (2) means that there's 30.
FWIW, I _think_ I'm not just pedantically correcting a particular number. I think I'm asserting that keeping track of n organizations is roughly O(n^2), so it's not 4 times as much work to keep track of them all, but more like 56 times as much work. I think that's a real difference that requires a different approach.
I get that _you're_ not saying anything re: approach, just terminology. But I think the number matters to this subthread.
You know whose money those failing banks have/had? Its hardly its own, nor investor's as much as you would like, its mostly regular joes. The same regular joes that screams 'eat the rich' and 'let them fail'. I wonder what would the same joe say if government listened and next day same joe would be without his pension or savings.
And as written by others banks do fail, and literally end their existence or are sold for peanuts to competition (Credit Suisse just recently). Using few cases from 2008 and making claims like whole universe always runs like that ain't very close to reality and doesn't help the discussion.
The president has the power to pardon; he does not have the power to overturn a conviction. That would require a constitutional amendment.
The British parliament has recently done exactly that in the wake of the Horizon scandal - the convictions have been deleted and considered to have never happened.
they will appeal based on the insanely broad immunity ruling and get the conviction overturned on procedural loophole created by the ruling - no evidence from his presidency even for unofficial acts and justice department will not retry a sitting president.
He is likely to get the convictions even in the caroll defamation case for the same reason.
Only the fraudulent valuation case is likely survive this Supreme Court ruling.
He was convicted for falsifying business records nothing else. All the records that were fraudulently submitted were starting Jan 2017.
The hush money payment wasn't illegal, hiding it was.
It rose to a felony instead of misdemeanor because it was done in service another crime which is campaign finance violation, the other crime need not be proven and he was not charged with that.
All they got him for paying cohen illegally.
Also there was some evidence introduced from his time as president , he would argue that evidence is now inadmissible and in a favourable court they will declare mistrial and ask the lower court to do it again.
If he wins again the prosecution will have to pause and he gets the delay he wants.
Look at how the story had all but disappeared until there was a non-fatal incident that happened to a US airline. Everyone across the media and anyone from regulators to legislators sprung into action focusing their attention and making demands of accountability.
I have zero doubt that had the door-plug came off the plane on a non-US airline, that excuses would have been made, the usual insinuations about poor quality maintenance, and issues would still be brushed under the carpet.
Likewise, had the first crash been a US airline, I'm sure there would have been an immediate grounding.
Instead, after the second crash on March 10:
> On March 11, the FAA defended the MAX against groundings by issuing a Continued Airworthiness Notice to operators.
Absolutely 0 doubt about that. Just look how at the beginning they tried to blame it all on incompetent african pilots. Human lives have wildly different values to us based on race, ethnicity, religion, remoteness etc., I don't like it but this is still very much part of human nature.
How much do you care if plane with 150 civilians falls down in remote russia or china and everybody burns to charcoal? Now compare it to same number of your neighbors or even just unknown people from your own town meeting the same fate.
It had nothing to do with racism against the victims. It’s quite literally that the level of rigor to be a pilot in Africa is not the same as what the FAA requires.
Airlines very frequently get banned from US airspace because their procedures do not meet the strict safety bar set by the FAA. So it’s very reasonable to assume that what was identified as a training gap on the MCAS operations was due to sloppy regional airline training procedures.
So it’s true that it would have been taken more seriously in the US, but it’s because the FAA and NTSB set the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation rigor world wide.
The NTSB and FAA were both sent to help with the investigation (as they would for any US airplane manufacturer), so I’m not sure how them “[setting] the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation” comes into play here.
It would not have been possible on any pilot (not up just US) trained on the auto stab trim. The mistake people made earlier was assuming that Boeing made this new critical piece a critically called out training area.
Plea deals rob victims from the truth they need for closure and recovery.
On top of that, plea deals also undermine public trust in the rule of law.
I wonder how "happy" the Judge is for being forced to give it credibility...
That depends on how you look at it, it would be pretty straightforward to take the philosophical stance that that's all that it exists for. Mostly it's just a matter of framing.
Law/legal philosophy indeed is different everywhere...
Where i'm at, I was always told that the primary purpose of the process is to deter and prevent the crime from ever happening again.
In this particular Boeing case, I bet my ass that the corporate world is taking notes as the plea deal is a sweet deal; thus a incentive is provided to do the crime.
It would be funny if the victims of the next Boeing sue over inciting the crime they will be a victim of.
It exist to prevent crimes happening. Looking at that $240M fine, seems like it will change nothing.
They probably made more money by not being so strict on safety. These fines are too low. Company should go close to bankruptcy if they do something serious.
"In 2022, Calhoun (Boeing CEO) received $22.5 million from Boeing. Most of his 2022 compensation was in the form of estimated value of stock and option awards. He received the same $1.4 million salary as in 2021. Boeing announced in March 2023 that Calhoun would not receive a $7 million performance-based bonus, which had been tied to getting the new widebody 777X into service by the end of 2023. In February 2023, Boeing awarded Calhoun an incentive of about $5.29 million in restricted stock units to 'induce him to stay throughout the company's recovery.' In March 2023, Boeing announced Calhoun was being given shares worth $15 million that will vest in installments over three years."
Was Calhoun really the problem? This company is one of those massive, glacial companies that have enormous inertia. Whatever changes in process led to all these disasters, it was something that started long before Calhoun's reign, I personally blame Jim McNerney.
One of the reasons we generally excuse extremely high levels of executive compensation is that when things go well, the executives take full credit for it. Does it not seem reasonable that they should also take full credit, in ways beyond words, when things do not go well? I'm very much opposed to the increasing trend of socializing costs and privatizing profits which I feel this is a sort of a spin on. 'Privatize success, socialize failure.'
Fair enough. But I think that former executives should also be looked at, too. Otherwise, the incentive becomes to trash the company for short term profits and GTFO before shit hits the fan.
Maybe there should be some similar effect for corporations. Maybe ban then from giving out dividends of performing stock buy backs until sentence is served. Here I think something reasonably light like 10 to 50 year per victim non concurrent would do the trick.
Don't be ridiculous. Yeah, we truly need consequences for corporations (and arguably their leaders) that isn't just cost of doing business, but the upper end of your suggested sentence is a span longer than written history.
Wanting a harsh sentence is fine, but lets limit it something we can likely see done before the end of our civilization in its current form.
It's to provide limited financial liability for the shareholders; the actual employees don't get any. And it has nothing to do with criminal liability.
Management evolved language of avoiding responsibility. For example, instead of saying "use cheaper parts" they'll say "we need to focus on better use of our financial resources for increasing shareholder value". No court can pin them down for telling designers to use cheap parts, but the designers get the message. And if the designers don't get it, lower management will tell them in plain language. That shift the blame onto lower ranks while the top management is laughing all the way to the bank and move on to another high-paying job.
What does it mean for a corporation to plead guilty?
Does it mean that there is evidence to establish a crime beyond reasonable doubt, but there is insufficient evidence to implicate any employees in particular?
I tend to think that a more just system would transfer ownership of criminal organizations to victims, which would also supersede all outstanding financial liabilities. Especially this last point would destroy credit options for companies suspected of criminal activity as the larger creditors will hire private investigators.
But then the shareholders wouldn't own the company anymore, so they'd be victims of the crime too, and get ownership transferred straight back to them.
I think you pretty much have to make that argument work for all cases of restitution (you can't), because at the base of the claim is that the previous owners are minimally negligent, thus should not own the property.
Not really, unfortunately. It's the 4th generation of 737, with 4 layers of control systems coexisting (and sometimes working against each other).
Slapping a 5th layer on top of the current crud for a new version is simply not realistic. Removing layers to allow for a new version is also not realistic, as the certification requirements would be pretty close to those of a clean-sheet aircraft.
So in conclusion, Boeing got away with certifying an aircraft that should never have been certified in the first place, and will reap the financial benefits of it. Minus some minor compensation to airlines and victims.
For cheating on car engine emissions, managers of VW had to go to jail. Oliver Schmidt received 4 years. James Liang got 40 months. Rupert Stadler served a couple of months. They went to jail for cheating on engine emissions.
Boeing's actions resulted in the deaths of people on two planes.
Public sentiment is very much against Boeing right now, especially their current executives, oddly enough (since the previous ones were overseeing things when MCAS was created). But are there arguments for the other side on any of these incidents, and have they been explored completely?
For example…
Is Boeing really at fault for the MCAS related crashes? Both happened at airlines from the developing world, where the pilot requirements (for hours of experience) is a lot lower than for airlines from the developed world. I recall reading that pilots from airlines in the US had also encountered MCAS in real flights but knew how to deal with the condition just using their basic piloting knowledge, by lowering flaps or turning the stabilizer trim off. MCAS activation is obvious because the trim wheels in the cockpit spin with its activation - so a pilot who doesn’t want trim can just flip the switch for them.
Another possibility: is regulation at fault? Recertification is expensive, and the associated training costs are expensive. I believe it caused Boeing to not seek to classify the 737 Max as a new aircraft and downplay changes like MCAS. Could an easier certification process have caused Boeing to be more transparent about changes with this plane?
MCAS itself activates only at high angles of attack and was put in to meet some of the standards of certification, not because there was a “real” problem, by my understanding. It had to do with the new engines’ cover, which does help with fuel efficiency, but changes the plane’s aerodynamics and so Boeing compensated using this system to automatically trim. Could different standards have caused Boeing to not create this system?
Are unions at fault? Boeing has immense cost pressures from all sides, and I’ve heard many stories of inefficiency, avoidable costs, and painful politics at their plants due to union rules. These pressures indirectly may cause the company to cut corners elsewhere.
I would be curious what HN thinks of these possibilities. There are probably other such theories as well. I’m not saying Boeing did nothing wrong, but that the public and media rarely gets complex stories right. It’s easier to latch onto simpler or more emotional explanations. But what’s actually true and how do you hand out blame?
I don't think any of your arguments are left unexplored. They are inadequate to absolve Boeing of wrongdoing. The idea about unions sharing some blame is especially absurd and the suggestion of it makes your post very difficult to take seriously. Even if unions caused Boeing to become unprofitable, they are blameless in the decisions that led to the crashes.
> They are inadequate to absolve Boeing of wrongdoing.
How so? For example if staying competitive (and therefore surviving) forces you to squeeze through without recertification, isn’t that a sign that maybe there is a better version of the regulations that should be considered that doesn’t have bad incentives?
What about the well-documented reality that numerous pilots from airlines with higher requirements have had their planes experience MCAS trim but knew what was happening (since a wheel starts spinning in front of them) and were able to flip it off trivially? I’m not saying Boeing doesn’t share SOME of the blame, but it feels weird to me to ignore the fact that many pilots (literally hundreds) have had no serious issue with MCAS over hundreds of thousands of hours.
> The idea about unions sharing some blame is especially absurd and the suggestion of it makes your post very difficult to take seriously. Even if unions caused Boeing to become unprofitable, they are blameless in the decisions that led to the crashes.
Can you explain your view point more? To me it feels dismissive but I am trying to keep an open mind. In my view and the view of many Boeing friends, the unions have been abusive and created a big amount of avoidable expense and inefficiency to protect their own interests. I’m not making a claim as to whether that self-interest is ethical or not. But I’ve heard many stories of people not being allowed to do some trivial task because they have to wait until the person in a specific job shows up to do that task because of union rules that artificially protect unnecessary jobs. Those situations are difficult for management to overcome, since they have other things to spend time on, but they are real and do add to costs and time delays. That has to come from somewhere else in the company. I agree with you that the unions are not directly responsible for any decisions, but their effect is still real and can push the company into a corner.
These situations tend to be complex - it’s not as simple as pointing at someone who is evil and does bad things - which is why I think we cannot ignore these potential causes that are many degrees away or shared blame between multiple groups (including Boeing executives).
Criminal charges against the company aside, aren't there licensed engineers inside of Boeing who signed off on all of this? Where are they in this discussion? Isn't the whole premise of having a licensed engineering discipline that the buck stops with you and you lose your license if you let something like this happen?
If we don't revoke licenses and permanently end careers over something like the MAX crashes, the incentives of engineers require them to say yes to the company at all costs, because it's not worth their job to say no. The consequences of saying yes to a bad plan have to be worse than being fired.
> the incentives of engineers require them to say yes to the company at all costs, because it's not worth their job to say no. The consequences of saying yes to a bad plan have to be worse than being fired.
This is true, and from what I understand can be partially true in medicine.
You need to actually prove the board and directors contributed to the criminal act to go after them or created the environment that enabled the lower level employees to act. Which I think they would attest to.
Unfortunately, You can't just blanket make CEOw responsible for every action of their employees. That would be insane.
Think of it like charging the top brass in the mafia, RICOs are hard to prove because getting the guy at the top is difficult.
It's a slap on the wrist. No one goes to jail. Just pay money and move on. Boeing knows that if this goes to trial, the discovery material will be extremely incriminating to their brand. Instead, just pay money and move on.
I wonder if a plea deal like this would have ever reached if american lives were lost in two crashes as a direct cause of a company's negligence.
So, they plead guilty to criminal fraud that got people killed, and nobody goes to jail ever? And they pay the fine of 0.4% of their annual revenue? That's not even a slap on the wrist, that's more like hand-kissing. "Soft" doesn't even begin to describe it.
The criminal liability should be directly on the persons responsible who ignored safety warnings knowingly. If someone responsible for this doesn't go to jail, it's just a matter of time that a similar thing will happen again, given the company culture.
Boeing made planes, and then later got into rockets... SpaceX makes rockets, I wonder if they should get into planes?
So long as you make a plane where the door doesn't fly off midair, it seems like a good way to print money and bring some manufacturing jobs back to the USA!
It wasn’t the company that did fraud, individuals employed by Boeing did. Is it normal for the company to take the charge? How can “Boeing” plead guilty to anything?
Not enough. Boeing getting off easy once again, not enough sting to produce a change in behavior. Why executives are not held accountable is confusing to me.
"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped avert a crash? What analysis procedures failed to prevent the second fatal Boeing 737 Max flight?"
Racism. If the first fatal flight had happened to an US or European airline somewhere over US or European territory, the fleet would have been grounded for an investigation.
Individuals need to be held accountable. Having the company plead guilty helps literally no one. Who were the relevant board members? The CEO? The COO. These people need to be charged.
> The Intermediate People's Court in Shijiazhuang sentenced Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping to death, and Tian Wenhua to life in prison, on 22 January 2009.
> Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed on 24 November 2009.
A much more vile crime but accountability nonetheless. (you can argue about the morality of capital punishment.. but these guys poisoned babies)
It's more than test coverage though. Their spec had the same glaring error. It's a design, management agreement, spec, review failure. The tester could have said something because they realized the design is bullshit, but by that time no competent testers hired by Boeing any more, it was all outsourced to the cheapest bidder.
The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the entrepreneur is not personally responsible. This is not the case in many other developed countries, with one consequence being that the entrepreneurial culture there is nowhere near as developed as in the US.
And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does. Of course, that has limits and people can still be individually charged for crimes, but the point here is that this is not a by-default thing. This problem is magnified by a thousand with a company like Boeing that is so intertwined with the government and not easily replaceable.
It seems to me that the solution to this kind of issue might come from studying successful occupations done by the US - post-WW2 Japan is the one that comes to mind. The Allies (mainly the Americans) managed to defeat an enemy state, punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong, and then set up systems which turned out to be largely effective at putting the country on a good path. Fixing an entity like Boeing seems similar in nature, if much smaller than an actual country.
It's OK to kill people, just let the company go bankrupt afterward... Better luck next time!
What an immensely unsatisfying bunch of intellectually corrupt market-speak regurgitation.
There are laws. Those laws should apply the same to service workers as they do to service operators and CEO's. That is: If you believe in the integrity of your own society.
Flouting the law to do influential people a favor, under the guise of not-torpedoing-your-economy, is just another way to have favoritism appear justified.
A societies' law already decided on - and struck a balance on the question of -'not-torpedoing'. Ignoring that later on is inherently political and smacks of corruption and sweetheart-dealing.
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For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
Nowhere did I write that Boeing shouldn’t be punished or that killing people is absolved by bankruptcy. I said that making company operators by default liable would have bad economic consequences.
In fact, I suggested that Boeing ought to be treated like Occupied Japan, which to me seems like it ought to be treated pretty harshly.
Maybe something needs to change because America's "strong business culture" seems to only benefit the presently wealthy get wealthier at the expense of the working class.
I don’t think that is contradictory with what I wrote. It is possible (and I think the actual case) that all American classes benefit from the strong American economy compared to say, Europe, while intra-economically inequality grows.
I do not care about the economy bottom line. I want deaths of people caused by the arguably same motivation of penny-pinching and ever-growing profits translate into at the very least jail times of people that represented and concurred with these horrendously dangerous decisions.
When economists are left alone too long, their results do not differ very much from those of serial killers.
The real world isn’t that simple. If you just dismantled Boeing and sent everyone to jail, thousands of people would lose their jobs. America would lose a competitive edge compared to foreign adversaries.
As I said in the original comment, the difficulty is in punishing the people responsible while maintaining/rebuilding systems that have better outcomes. Blowing everything up doesn’t do that.
“But people are going to lose jobs” is always the excuse used when arguing to treat a criminally fraudulent company with kid gloves. Do we really think ~100k people temporarily losing their job (at a criminal enterprise) is going to make America lose its edge?
EDIT: Also: if America’s “edge” largely comes from its business leaders’ immunity from their company’s wrongdoing, then I’m not sure that’s an edge worth keeping.
> And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does.
I think you're conflating criminality with civil liability here (covering legal risk taking and mere incompetence). The former is what's under discussion here. The latter is what allows entrepreneurs to take risk for economic benefit.
Sure they are different things, but culturally I do think they are treated interchangeably. The average person on the street probably couldn’t tell you if X celebrity was embroiled in a civil or criminal trial, merely that they’re in a trial.
I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does. Again the key word phrase here is “by default” and that obviously excludes executives knowingly committing crimes. But this distinction doesn’t seem to be understood by many commenters on this Boeing topic.
> I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does.
Again, by missing out the distinction in this sentence, you're using the implied (valid) case to limit civil liability to make it sound like the same should apply for criminal liability. You're failing to explain why arguments for this in the civil liability case should also apply in the criminal case.
Because I think it would still result in a culture that is hostile to entrepreneurship not dissimilar to how bankruptcy is treated in other countries.
And just to be clear here, I’m arguing against the idea that company operators should be by-default guilty if the company they operate commits a crime. Because that is what a lot of commenters here are arguing for. Not that they should be not be liable for crimes they personally, knowingly, commit.
> The average person on the street probably couldn’t tell you if X celebrity was embroiled in a civil or criminal trial, merely that they’re in a trial.
Source?
I think the difference between criminal and civil cases is great enough that a precedent for one need not apply to the other. If you’re investigating dead bodies it’s a vastly different situation than a he-said-she-said whatever case and should be persecuted differently.
What kind of source do you expect me to give you? A study that interviews random people and asks them if they know the difference between civil and criminal law? I’d be very surprised if that has ever been done.
It’s merely my opinion that the difference between civil and criminal law is largely unclear to the average person. In defense of that I’d say my own anecdotal experience, the behavior of people during the recent ex-president’s trials, and the plethora of questions asking about it online. I think most people put “law” and “court” into one big bucket and don’t make too many sub divisions.
I’m not sure what else I could give as evidence here.
My experience is way different, I think most people understand criminal and civil cases as “the cops arrest you” vs “you need to go to a hearing”, which in most cases is the practical difference. Either way I think your overall point of not disincentivizing entrepreneurship is correct, unless people are dying or otherwise being hurt as a result of it.
I would argue that the main difference is that a civil judgement usually results in "only" some combination of a damages award and (when damages cannot remedy) an injunction, but only a criminal case can result in sanctions such as imprisonment.
>punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong,
In other words it punished those that couldn't add something to the US -like engineers that could build rockets for example. Basically what you are saying is crime has no upper limit of evil if the criminal is seen as better unpunished for the state than not. That's how a lot of Nazis and Japanese that did mass murder and human experiments became US citizen in good standing. To me giving them this out was more evil than the deeds they did.
Hard to disagree