Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 618 posts

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#441

Post by mcv »

brightball wrote: post #339
mcv wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps to give power to people who care about doing the right thing, instead of to people who don't care. Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.

In this situation I don’t think you can attribute it to capitalism because Boeing is a defacto monopoly. Capitalism should lead to competition. Competition should lead to alternatives when one of the market participants has quality control issues.

> Capitalism should lead to competition

Only in a free market. Very few markets are truly free. And large concentrations of capital tends to make markets unfree.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#442

Post by Der_Einzige »

dang wrote: post #144
hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be surprised if dang wants to quietly get rid of this kind of topics. It is risky. It is a lot safer to criticize a president TBH.

Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes. Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass. "Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with ju…

[flagged]

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#443

Post by Der_Einzige »

richrichie wrote: post #210

Avowed Bayesian's usually leave the room the moment they sense a conspiracy tag coming. It is a very narrow, domain specific tool for analysis.

Notably, statistics has again and again shown that Bayesian statistics is archaic and not useful in actual production systems.

Slightly better probability calculations aren’t worth losing most of the stats tools we utilize all the time. This is why Bayesian techniques has precisely zero influence in Generative AI/LLMs

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#444

Post by rootusrootus »

leetrout wrote: post #170
yifanl wrote: post #61

I'm just going to take this story at face value, there's an infinite number of alternate explanations that I'd be powerless to talk about. I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing. Mr Barnett worked for the same company for over three decades and physically watched…

> from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing. How did you overcome this?

> How did you overcome this?

Not OP, but for me it was recognition that this perception is my own problem to solve, that the vast majority of the entire world is trying to do the right thing by their own perception, and that I lack enough context to be the judge. Which isn't to say there are no bad actors, but right about the time you think everybody but you is wrong, it's worth taking a step back and reevaluating.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#445

Post by rootusrootus »

cptaj wrote: post #383
yifanl wrote: post #61

I'm just going to take this story at face value, there's an infinite number of alternate explanations that I'd be powerless to talk about. I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing. Mr Barnett worked for the same company for over three decades and physically watched…

The thing about being a very rational person like this, is that you're very easy to manipulate.

Said every conspiracy theorist ever.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#446

Post by rootusrootus »

gorbachev wrote: post #311

Regardless of whether there was foul play or not, it's looking pretty bad for Boeing. They, or someone else with a stake of protecting the company, killed someone, or they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.

> they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.

Give the man some agency. If he chose to end his own life, that was his decision alone. And it may be entirely unrelated to Boeing. Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#447

Post by rmbyrro »

hef19898 wrote: post #371
rmbyrro wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's an infinite number of alternate explanations I see only one reasonably acceptable alternate explanation. He either committed suicide or was suicided by someone at Boeing terrified about what would happen to them in jail.

Somehow, most people fail to see the obvious: The ongoing FAA audits at both, Spirit Aerospace and Boeing (so far it looks horrible based on initial reporting) will identify each and every single verifiable whistleblower claim anyways. So no, despite the general retaliation against whistleblowers out of princial (for the record, that alone is illegal and should be punished a lot harder and more often), Boeing as a co…

> Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.

I found it even funnier that this can be said about your post.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#448

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

bilekas wrote: post #322
aydyn wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

suicide due to mental health makes zero sense. sorry you just have to introduce way too many elements. The real explanation is simple.

> suicide due to mental health makes zero sense. I hope this is just bad phrasing and will assume you mean just for this whistleblowers case. We don't know though. Assassination AFTER the whistleblower information has been released and is now out in the open really doesn't make any sense to me though. As conspiracies go, its not even humorous.

I’ve seen enough vindictive behavior in corporate structures that if assassination is on the table at all, so is assassination after the cat has been let out of the bag.

That said suicide due to extreme demoralization is also a plausible explanation.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#449

Post by 7thaccount »

rmbyrro wrote: post #409
taf2 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or killed by a nation state that thrives on creating conflict by amplifying two sided situations that lead to increased polarization and more instability… the problem with speculation is it’s just that speculation… I’m going to wait and see

How would a nation state "thrive" on assassinating this person? May I ask if you live in the U.S.? I have the impression that a lot of people there think that other nations revolve around destroying the U.S.

I'm definitely not saying that's what happened here (I find it highly unlikely), but if a nation state did do that, there could be a desire to sow additional mistrust of a major US company.

Edit: this is just because someone asked what a hypothetical motive could be

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#450

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

throwanem wrote: post #227
mef wrote: post #23

Anyone know why this isn’t on the front page with 96 pts one hour after submission?

High comment rates on a recently posted story will weigh the story down. This is by design, and the quality of comments presently on this story does much to demonstrate the reasoning behind that choice. Most likely the story will be reposted or "second chance" resurrected in the morning, when all the grownups are awake and not just those of us having a touch of insomnia.

are we reading through the same set of comments?

I see nothing wrong with people speculating over something like this.

Post reply on HN