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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

#291

Post by bombcar »

constantcrying wrote: post #75
davedx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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??

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.

Why not? It happens all the time, to various degrees of "punish", especially in civil cases.

You are responsible for your property (land) and can be sued quite successfully for issues you had no knowledge of and no way of knowing.

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

#292

Post by rlpb »

mxkopy wrote: post #164
keiferski wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of source do you expect me to give you? A study that interviews random people and asks them if they know the difference between civil and criminal law? I’d be very surprised if that has ever been done. It’s merely my opinion that the difference between civil and criminal law is largely unclear to the average person. In defense of that I’d say my own anecdotal experience, the behavior of people during the re…

My experience is way different, I think most people understand criminal and civil cases as “the cops arrest you” vs “you need to go to a hearing”, which in most cases is the practical difference. Either way I think your overall point of not disincentivizing entrepreneurship is correct, unless people are dying or otherwise being hurt as a result of it.

> which in most cases is the practical difference

I would argue that the main difference is that a civil judgement usually results in "only" some combination of a damages award and (when damages cannot remedy) an injunction, but only a criminal case can result in sanctions such as imprisonment.

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

#293

Post by celdon25 »

maxsilver wrote: post #263
roenxi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the level of risk the CEO/C Suite would have to take on would be insane. Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company? There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce th…

> Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company? You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound. There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsib…

> it's not as tricky as you make it sound.

Citation needed + dubious analogy

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

#294

Post by bluGill »

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.

There should be a second/third in command on duty when the captain is drinking or sleeping. (and the captain should be off duty long enough for whatever he was drinking to wear off - my understanding in ships often run 4 hour shifts so there may not be enough time but sometimes the second will take a longer shift to allow the captain time to celebrate.)

Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.

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

#295

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #200
keiferski wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real world isn’t that simple. If you just dismantled Boeing and sent everyone to jail, thousands of people would lose their jobs. America would lose a competitive edge compared to foreign adversaries. As I said in the original comment, the difficulty is in punishing the people responsible while maintaining/rebuilding systems that have better outcomes. Blowing everything up doesn’t do that.

“But people are going to lose jobs” is always the excuse used when arguing to treat a criminally fraudulent company with kid gloves. Do we really think ~100k people temporarily losing their job (at a criminal enterprise) is going to make America lose its edge? EDIT: Also: if America’s “edge” largely comes from its business leaders’ immunity from their company’s wrongdoing, then I’m not sure that’s an edge worth keepi…

[deleted]

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

#296

Post by scotty79 »

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 --…

There should be capital punishment for legal persons.

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

#297

Post by bombcar »

doctor_eval wrote: post #145
robertlagrant wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 d…

What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.

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

#298

Post by deeth_starr_v »

From the article: Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, said he plans to ask the federal judge on the case to reject the deal and “simply set the matter for a public trial, so that all the facts surrounding the case will be aired in a fair and open forum before a jury.”

Hard to disagree

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

#299

Post by hobs »

bilbo0s wrote: post #224
jltsiren wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the legal culture I'm familiar with, the CEO and the board of directors can be held liable for everything the company does. If they are not aware of the crime but they should have been, it can be seen as gross negligence. As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal prot…

You are all arguing irrelevant points. Because the premise is false. You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, an…

There's a very simple legal phrase which is "knew or should have known" - the CEO knew or should have known. It's that simple.

If you are the CEO and you did not, you should have, and you are responsible. It doesn't really need to be more complicated to incentivize rooting out evil - if we hold people responsible authorities (those with power) who should have known, they will figure out a way to increase integrity of their organizations instead of spreading accountability through infinity vendors.

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

#300

Post by actionfromafar »

robertlagrant wrote: post #278
actionfromafar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if they are sentient or not, does it? Maybe in the future they will be or act as if they were, but the result will be the same.

Of course it matters. What does it meant to punish something that isn't sentient? It's like bemoaning the fact that you can't punish the car that was driven into someone.

Depends on if you care about outcome or morality. Already now we use terms like punishment, reward and adverserial competition between neural networks.
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