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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

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Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... The Free Press

The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be bla…

You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy" which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything can be expected, including a suicide at any arbitrary time - is nonsense. It's completely legit to ask how comes the person who wasn't suicidal, and actually told people that he's not - suddenly turns to commit suicide in the middle of court testimony, without any warning signs or explanation. Saying "oh, he was anxious and stressed about work" is not a good explanation to this. Maybe there was an explanation, maybe there wasn't, but pretending "anxiety" explains it is nonsense.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a courthouse. NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said. Or you know this The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at…

It's not like we know or will ever know the details of and the extend of the investigation, the note was actually reported as a "white piece of paper that closely resembled a note,", what was on the note? Were his fingerprints on the note? Was handwriting analysis done? Did the gun belong to him? That wasn't reported either. Was it registered to him/ when/where did he buy it? Was there gunpowder residue on his hand?…

Sure:

What we do know: this was an AR21 case. It was him suing boeing for forcing him to retire early and not promoting him because he was "whistle blowing". This is a case that had already been dismissed once.

On the matter of that, the FAA already got his reports and agreed with him. The harm to Boeing from his wistle blowing was finished. They were probably paying more for lawyers to fight this than it was going to cost to settle. So this wasnt about Boeing loosing anything other than cash at this point. If we're going to speculate we should be asking if Boeing was fighting this out of spite rather than making a good business decision.

The family themselves have spoken up: that he was troubled, and they firmly blame Boeing for his death. The way they are going about it says "we know he killed himself" ... they just think Boeing drove him to do it. They are coy with the conspiracy theory angle cause it just make boeing look bad...

There is a really interesting narrative here about stress, mental heath, and suicide for gun owners. Topics that the press wants to touch less than the ones your suggesting they ignore....

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#195
> The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations

That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.

> the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.

I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents? With billions on the line, what's a few millions in crypto found in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a "job well done". There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an assassination to send a clear message to others: "you don't want to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so and so, now do you?"

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways this concept produces antisocial results. (See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling…

> the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator yet > See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt. Ummmm. State hospitals and schools are not traded on our stock exchanges. If there's a failure here, it's not with equities markets. There's an obvious common denominator…

Because state hospitals aren’t publicly listened they aren’t broken by this?

Yes I forgot every aspect of state run hospitals are the same…

But except wait.. almost every aspect of what makes that hospital is on the stock market.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#197
post #5

> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and need…

> however with software nobody dies

Unless that software is running a life-critical or potentially life-threatening piece of equipment. People have died from software bugs in such things.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#198

If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. Th…

Norminalization of Deviance: https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.

That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much. Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life. Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that ki…

This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising:

1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies.

2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.

3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years.

The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#200

The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.

> It just took 25 years to finally happen. "Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff. It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to c…

https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
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