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Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

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Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#121

Post by steve76 »

morsmodr wrote: post #98

Not to stoke a fire, but I just wondered how the same failure would be viewed if it was done by a Chinese or Indian Manufacturer. Immediately it would have reinforced a stereotype of outsourcing being cheap and that being the issue. When in reality the truth is that there are frauds, lazy and useless people everywhere on the planet.

How do you know India and China are exempt? It's the only place in the world that does smelting. Everything in the USA is second gen.

There's a lot of gamesmanship out there. Every part has different numbers for certs. Vendors go out of business because of some scheme with cold unit testing.

Imagine if people were straight with each other. Wow work would be really nice.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#122

Post by godzillabrennus »

nerdponx wrote: post #116
abakker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because it isn't a human. This is especially interesting in the context of corporate personhood[1]. You can't send a corporation to jail, but you can disband it entirely, or prevent it from operating. A lot of the practical solutions try to leave badly behaving company operating, though, since if we shut them down there is a lot of collateral damage in the form of lost productivity in the economy and lost jobs. IANA…

Frankly I don't see why being a member of a corporation should protect an individual from criminal charges. If you do or authorize something illegal on behalf of your company, you should be personally responsible. I know it's a long-standing doctrine in law and there is probably a good reason for it, but it just seems too easy to abuse.

What if you don’t know that your actions are illegal? Who could reasonably do a job as an employee if they didn’t have that liability shield?

The justice system is broken enough in the USA (unless you are rich) that I can’t imagine introducing more issues.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#123

Post by shkkmo »

nerdponx wrote: post #117
shkkmo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can send the executives who designed or oversaw a reward and evaluation schema that incentived this kind of behavior. Instead, we seem pretty comfortable with passing off the responsibility to rank and file employees / middle managers while the majority of the benefits from the bad behavior accrue to the executives and shareholders. Edit: I get that the criminal intent needed under our current laws means that…

I fully support this. If you, a manager, are aware of illegal activity within your organization and do not take steps to stop it, you are as responsible as the individuals doing the illegal activity.

I think more than that is required. I think that they should be held liable even if they do not know. I think it should be their responsibility to to find out and to design corporate structures that don't incentive and conceal illegal activity by their subordinates.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#124

Post by CharlesColeman »

gnode wrote: post #92
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rationale for not pursuing the company for the full $700 million dollars lost escapes me Satellites are usually insured. (Not sure about NASA protocol, though.) If that’s the case, the insurer will sue. Shareholder lawsuits will also, naturally, follow, as will suits from all the other customers. Agree, though, that it’s shocking nobody is going to jail in relation to a fraud guilty plea.

> it’s shocking nobody is going to jail in relation to a fraud guilty plea. They are though. From the justice.gov article: "Dennis Balius, the SPI testing lab supervisor, led a scheme to alter tests within SPI’s computerized systems and provide false certifications with the altered results to customers. Balius also instructed employees to violate other testing standards, such as increasing the speed of the testing ma…

>> it’s shocking nobody is going to jail in relation to a fraud guilty plea.

> They are though. From the justice.gov article:

> "Dennis Balius, the SPI testing lab supervisor, led a scheme to alter tests within SPI’s computerized systems and provide false certifications with the altered results to customers...Balius pleaded guilty in July 2017 and was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay over $170,000 in restitution."

Was he the instigator of this scheme, or were his superiors aware?

I'm not seeing the incentive for someone in testing to fake results on their own. I would imagine the motivation would either come from sales (to close a deal to sell product they couldn't actually produce) or manufacturing (to cover up costly quality problems). Balius seems like a fall guy.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#125

Post by honkycat »

rayiner wrote: post #84
dctoedt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the self-determination of communities is a more fundamental right than the right to consume whatever substances you want. Pretty sweeping statement there. What if a majority of a "community" decides its residents shouldn't eat meat?

I think California could ban eating and selling meat, both under its power to regulate health and the power to regulate public morality.

What if a community is begging you to stop murdering their sons in the street and harassing them for low-level drug crimes and sucking them into the criminal justice vortex?

You don't have a leg to stand on here. Woefully ignorant.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#126

Post by elliekelly »

abakker wrote: post #99
gnode wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s shocking nobody is going to jail in relation to a fraud guilty plea. They are though. From the justice.gov article: "Dennis Balius, the SPI testing lab supervisor, led a scheme to alter tests within SPI’s computerized systems and provide false certifications with the altered results to customers. Balius also instructed employees to violate other testing standards, such as increasing the speed of the testing ma…

>because it isn't a human. This is especially interesting in the context of corporate personhood[1]. You can't send a corporation to jail, but you can disband it entirely, or prevent it from operating. A lot of the practical solutions try to leave badly behaving company operating, though, since if we shut them down there is a lot of collateral damage in the form of lost productivity in the economy and lost jobs. IANA…

> As I understand it, if a company actually goes to trial and is convicted, they are not allowed to operate anymore, hence the plea deals and fines.

You know, I am a lawyer (a corporate one who freelances as a white collar crime journalist at that!) and I don't even know how this would work. I can't even think of a single criminal case against a corporation that I've reported on that went to trial. It just doesn't really come up. I suspect because it's much easier to charge the directors of the corporation with racketeering or fraud.

That being said, I can't imagine a criminal conviction of a corporation would dissolve the entity. We don't execute people for committing fraud so I'd be surprised if a judge would execute an entity. I'm also not sure what would stop a corporation from quickly winding up if it seemed criminal charges were on the horizon. After all, you can't charge a "person" with a crime if that "person" isn't there to defend themselves.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#127

Post by CharlesColeman »

jahabrewer wrote: post #75
tyingq wrote: post #41

Interesting. Extruded aluminum profile is one of the items that is under anti-dumping tariffs to discourage Chinese imports. There's a lot of rhetoric from US suppliers like this one about why we need high quality US aluminum.

We need to build with high-quality American fakes, not high-quality Chinese fakes!

> We need to build with high-quality American fakes, not high-quality Chinese fakes!

It's entirely possible that American manufacturers are forced to compromise quality like that due to the competitive pressure of low-cost Chinese fakes.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#129

Post by erikpukinskis »

imtringued wrote: post #90
anentropic wrote: post #73

Lucky it was only a $700million satellite in another application people could have died

If you value human time by $1 million per year then that is a waste of 700 man years or 8 people's worth. Of course they got paid and received "free" training for their job so it wasn't a complete waste but there certainly are better things to use those man years on, like a functioning satellite.

You can't extrapolate from the price of a human spending 8 hours following limited corporate instructions to the value of their other 16 hours.

First of all, value and price diverge for many reasons all the time. Secondly, most people on Earth produce more value after work than during, but that value is not fully priced or marketed yet (try as captains of industry may).

That used to be more true in the colonial powers as well (most value was not marketed, and stayed on homestead).

Humans do exist now whose labor is fully marketed but they are rare, mostly men, mostly rich. And even them, they still produce a lot of extra-economic value in most cases.

Many humans labor is entirely unpriced, like full-time parents or schoolteachers, social workers, artists, and other "passion professions.

Humans are invaluable.

Re: Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure

#130

Post by abakker »

nerdponx wrote: post #116
abakker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because it isn't a human. This is especially interesting in the context of corporate personhood[1]. You can't send a corporation to jail, but you can disband it entirely, or prevent it from operating. A lot of the practical solutions try to leave badly behaving company operating, though, since if we shut them down there is a lot of collateral damage in the form of lost productivity in the economy and lost jobs. IANA…

Frankly I don't see why being a member of a corporation should protect an individual from criminal charges. If you do or authorize something illegal on behalf of your company, you should be personally responsible. I know it's a long-standing doctrine in law and there is probably a good reason for it, but it just seems too easy to abuse.

Well...it doesn't. Members of corporations absolutely can be and are convicted of crimes.

The issue is really whether corporation itself, as a legal "person" can be convicted, and if so, what does that actually mean, legally?

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