Boeing whistleblower found dead in US • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#471

Post by autoexec » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

wycy wrote: post #378

autoexec wrote: post #82

I'm not saying that Boeing had him assassinated, but I sure wouldn't put it past them. They've already shown themselves to be perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives for increased profits.

There's a fairly short list of companies I could see doing something like this, and Boeing is on that list. I could see Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey, ...

Corporate serial killers are everywhere really. The tobacco industry knew their product was giving people cancer and tried to hide that from the people they were poisoning. Philips knew their CPAP machines were filling people's lungs with poison and killing them but hid that as long as they could so they could sell more machines. Baby food companies like Gerber and Beech-Nut Nutrition knew/know that their baby food contains dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals but continued to sell them to parents who unknowingly spooned that poison right into the mouths of their babies. DuPont and 3M knew that the PFOA and PFOS they produced were highly toxic and causing everything from cancer to deformed babies but they lied to cover that up so that they could keep profiting and now every single one of us has that shit in our blood and there is literally no place or creature on earth that isn't contaminated with it. It's in the rainwater. Johnson & Johnson knew for decades about the asbestos in their baby powder. The Sackler Family knew they were pushing dangerous levels of opioids, but they lied and even bribed doctors to overprescribe their products leading to millions of deaths and countless addictions. Car manufacturers have killed people for higher profits too.

Every single one of these companies were already pulling in a massive amount of wealth but they knowingly killed people just so that they could make even more money. They all put additional profits over human lives. There is no reason to think they wouldn't put a bullet into someone's head if they thought it would make them more money. In many cases it would have been much more humane if they had.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#472

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:13 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #405

ListeningPie wrote: post #98

The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with. Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.

The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy This is a problem. Would you really see a whistleblower as your enemy? Is your identity so intertwined with your job that you take legal action against your employers so personally? Do you think your employer has that much loyalty to you? Boeing just had layoffs in December. I'm sure the issues this guy was uncovering pl…

>We should all hold our bosses accountable

And how are we supposed to do that? The entire point of a corporation's structure is that power flows exclusively down.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#473

Post by mistermann » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #438

mistermann wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe poss…

Yes. And they do. The functioning ones, at least. Corrupt democracies obviously don't, but that's the nature of corruption. But I'm pretty sure the best education systems are generally found in democracies.

Do "democracy", "functioning", "obviously", "don't", "is/am/are", have precise, useful and non-misinformative meanings in this context?

In other important fields (anything involving money for example, or programming), do we sometimes discuss things accurately, and consider things with respect to what is or may be possible, and (actually, objectively) true (basically: pursue optimality)? Might it be at least plausibly beneficial to consider applying that rigour to evaluating and designing our democracy?

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#474

Post by throwway120385 » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

Bengalilol wrote: post #412

cptaj wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

? I don't get your remark

I think he's saying that you're too willing to believe the reasonable, plausible explanation that falls out of Occam's Razor, as opposed to accepting whatever embattled fringe theory of the day also fits the available evidence.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#475

Post by jjk166 » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #241

jjk166 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self inflicted wound in the middle of several days of scheduled depositions. Just about as suspicious as could be.

Have you ever been deposed? It's an incredibly stressful process, and he's already going through the hell of being a whistleblower. I'm sure Boeing was ready to depose him more and more in order to try to get him to shift his story.

Have you ever shot yourself?

Certainly people have committed suicide in stressful situations, but there is no situation where it makes sense that someone would kill themselves, and countless people get deposed who don't.

Continuing to depose someone to get them to shift their story is a reasonable strategy if their story can't be backed up by evidence and you aren't worried about anything coming out in the testimony. It's a terrible strategy if the witness is about to reveal where the skeletons are buried.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#476

Post by mistermann » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

fader wrote: post #419

mistermann wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe poss…

Only if all the political parties benefit from people being able to make good judgements. If you have a party that benefits from an uninformed or misinformed public then it's significantly easier to lead them around through fear and lies than it is to govern well. Once they gain power they can reduce education spending, meaning they have more people they can direct more easily. Meaning they can get more power, and re…

If this is true in a two party system, would it not be logical to expect that the party that does not want to exploit an ignorant population would be directing significant attention and resources to educate the public while they hold power (and engaging in non-stop rhetoric on the matter at all times), which if all goes well could gain the support of the educated, permanently?

I sometimes wonder if people have somehow been conditioned to not think about this topic with the seriousness it deserves. I wonder, if we were to search through various academic literature about the nature of humans, might we find some theories about how it may be possible to pull something like this off?

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#477

Post by RIMR » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #446

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.

Yeah, best to not try to attribute any meaning to this, as it would be bad for Boeing shareholders.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#478

Post by throwanem » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #450

throwanem wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lack of information renders such speculation necessarily vacuous, and it quickly degrades into dueling assertions of worldviews. There are lots of websites where that sort of thing runs unchecked. To the extent this isn't one, that's one of the reasons I prefer this one.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#479

Post by callalex » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

mdekkers wrote: post #343

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…

> 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. Please share how you managed with this. I’ve been here for a few years - since I lost my wife - and some days I can barely hang on.

This is the worst advice but it worked for me: I just stopped caring and let go. I no longer believe that there is any justice in the world, and I accept that I cannot change that so I just look out for myself. It’s a bleak outlook but everything is so much easier now, and I’m still alive.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#480

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:55 PM UTC

alluro2 wrote: post #356

Even if it was a suicide, that still doesn't mean it was self-motivated. People who care enough to be whistleblowers, would likely care enough about wellbeing of their family or other people - enough to sacrifice themselves once again under sufficient threats and pressure. Or, even more likely, end things not because directly being requested to, but because of having no other way to NOT be forced to back out and cowe…

Granted, a movie, but something that portrays this well is The Insider (about big tobacco).

Choice quotes:

> Mike Wallace: Who are these people?

> Lowell Bergman: Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure, Mike. What the hell do you expect? Grace and consistency?

And:

> Lowell Bergman: I fought for you and I still fight for you!

> Jeffrey Wigand: You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now - staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it's all dark except for the tenth floor. That's the legal department, that's where they fuck with my life!

> Lowell Bergman: Jeffrey, where are you going with this? Where are you going? (Pause) You are important to a lot of people, Jeffrey. You think about that, and you think about them.