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

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

#281

Post by lupusreal »

krisoft wrote: post #116
lupusreal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

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.

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

#282

Post by fwip »

mihaic wrote: post #269
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.

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.

Doctors are definitely not liable for misdiagnoses.

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

#283

Post by aitchnyu »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #216
chakintosh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. What's the context here?

Adding to the sibling comments: There was also a lot of public mockery and political grandstanding, at the time, based on a mischaracterization of the suit .

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.

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

#284

Post by burkaman »

monero-xmr wrote: post #26
buildbot wrote: post #2

"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." Well that's a fun little fact

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 s…

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.

Just pass a law and nationalize and/or break it up. Here's someone more knowledgeable than me discussing this idea: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a....

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

#285

Post by celdon25 »

gruez wrote: post #230
immibis wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to Boeing.

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

#286

Post by raxxorraxor »

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 --…

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.

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

#287

Post by wasmitnetzen »

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…

Boeing killed 200 people, but now Europe needs to change its failure culture? No thanks.

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

#288

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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 --…

> 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.

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

#289

Post by Hikikomori »

kortilla wrote: post #57
jajko wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Why was this famous safety bar not looking at Boeing anymore?

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

#290

Post by fwip »

ryandrake wrote: post #187
davedx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

If the new CEO doesn't want to go to jail, then they'll make the changes.
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