Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#121

Post by elsjaako » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:06 AM UTC

BartjeD wrote: post #118

supernova87a wrote: post #25

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 --…

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.

They didn't actually get those damages.

To quote wikipedia:

> 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.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#122

Post by keiferski » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:06 AM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #114

keiferski wrote: post #99

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 en…

> 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.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#123

Post by abenga » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:07 AM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #108

abenga wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company? The person committing that crime. >If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)? Companies can not be put to jail.

The people committing the crime include those who make the decisions. Hiring an assassin makes me guilty of murder.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#124

Post by BartjeD » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:07 AM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #31

Seems an extremely soft ball approach: • Under the deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and for an third-party monitor to be installed to monitor the company’s compliance. ~$240M seems pretty low for an industry where billions are commonly thrown about. • The deal spares Boeing from a trial just as the planemaker is trying to turn a corner in its safety and manufacturing crises. Sparing them from a trial…

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.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#125

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:08 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #88

constantcrying wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

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.

> 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?

No. But also, this is not the situation.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#126

Post by zarzavat » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:09 AM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #91

constantcrying wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

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.

Exactly this. The first crash was negligent design of a technical system. The second crash was murder.

The regulators are also culpable since the design of the system was in the public domain before the second crash and they did nothing about it.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#127

Post by keiferski » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:09 AM UTC

computerex wrote: post #106

keiferski wrote: post #99

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 en…

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.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#128

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:09 AM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #92

constantcrying wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#129

Post by rob74 » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:11 AM UTC

davedx wrote: post #59

constantcrying wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> 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??

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.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#130

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #120

quonn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They can make investments, sue, go bankrupt, have bank accounts, like a person, in their own name instead of the owner.

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?