Boeing whistleblower found dead in US • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#491

Post by dvdkon » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:33 PM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #485

browningstreet wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of reports of Putin actively interfering to destabilize the west, and also reports in places like the NYTs about the US expanding bases in Ukraine to provoke Russia into the war. These aren’t Twitter rants, they’re in our mainstream “big” media outlets.

World leaders have way too much on their plate to be personally involved in assassinating random foreign citizens for high-degree political effects . If you see this headline, and story, and immediately think of Putin, that is an unhealthy level of conspiratorial thinking. There is literally no evidence to support this line.

I don't think anyone actually believes Putin personally organises many individual operations in foreign countries. You're just getting hung up on a common shortcut: "Putin" means "someone under Putin's (not even direct) command" here.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#492

Post by geysersam » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #472

dfxm12 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#493

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

ratg13 wrote: post #459

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he not only watched the company fail spectacularly, in several of those cases those failures were connected to deaths, which I imagine he could feel personally responsible for not preventing, even if the corporate machine is really where the responsibility lies.

So the guy goes on for years being an outspoken whistleblower telling his story to anyone that would listen, and decides while in his hotel waiting for his deposition that now would be the best time to end it and not move forward with holding Boeing accountable. Occam's razor isn't pointed in the direction you think it is.

I mean, you are welcome to believe that, but if I was a betting man (or had money to bet), I doubt the company had him killed.

Corporate malfeasance, even that kills people, is rarely likely to put people in jail and executives are still likely to end up wealthy. Conducting the most obvious corporate assassination possible under extreme public scrutiny would lead to criminal prosecution of individuals that would definitely result in prison time.

Meanwhile, suicide is extremely rarely logical, and people who end there often were anywhere from having their entire future ahead of them to being amidst some of their most profound success.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#494

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

vinay_ys wrote: post #457

Why does a whistleblower need to be identified? Why can't it be an anonymous tip to the regulator, who then uses the tip during audits to dig deeper and get to the truth? If they can't get to the truth even after being provided a tip, then their audit process is too broken? This whole business of non-anonymous whistleblower has too much power-imbalance and always seems to end badly for the individual.

The universal answer as to why (there is no fair, working system implemented) is, as usual, 'cui bono?' Any strategy to make whistleblowing power-balanced is by proxy heavily undermined by all forces that do not want it. Those forces, big corporations and their third-party henchmen, have heavy financial interests to bring down any just way of whistleblowing. They have a lot more money, time, manpower, influence and corrupt people who execute the dirty work.

To have incorruptible lawmakers lay the ground work is only the first step. Then the laws have to pass in their original intention, ie. waterproof wording without loopholes. Any unintentional loopholes have to be identified and fixed. Then the law has to uphold to "accidental" mistakes, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, official or secret changes, additional laws that reverse them, ....

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#495

Post by lainga » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

geysersam wrote: post #492

mrguyorama wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

But not to give you health insurance.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#496

Post by cpburns2009 » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #471

wycy wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Do you have more information about Gerber and Beech-Nut Nutrition contamination? My baby eats Beech-Nut baby food.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#497

Post by abeppu » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

geysersam wrote: post #492

mrguyorama wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

... except the rich can hire enough lawyers to use the courts as a weapon, and in the US, campaign contributions or other rewards for compliant politicians can mean that legislatures are often on the side of corporate interests.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#498

Post by godlark » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 5:54 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…

Even if it was self-motivated, he could with the thought that this is an only solution to make public opinion aware of the Boeing problems.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#499

Post by dang » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 6:08 PM UTC

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #452

dang wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry—I'm tired and expressed that carelessly, and you're quite right. I wasn't talking about the article and am glad that it is as good as you say. In fact I merged the other thread into this one precisely because the BBC article was better. What I mean is that the story itself, i.e. the significant new information, is a lurid apparent suicide, and there aren't any details about that , other than it happened. Not be…

alleged is too strong. There's speculation which seems reasonable given the circumstances.

Good point. 'alleged' isn't the word I was looking for. I've changed it to 'apparent' above.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#500

Post by dang » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 6:08 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #442

dang wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes. Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass. "Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with ju…

[flagged]

People assume all kinds of things—whatever they want. Trying to stop that is a madhouse ticket. One eventually learns these things although in my case it seems to take years.

Another slow learning is that it's a bad idea to undertake impossible tasks like "showing clear evidence that astroturfing is not the norm"; especially before breakfast.

Btw, though - no one is denying "front page manipulation", though manipulation is an emotionally loaded word. HN is a curated site, always has been. I've posted, let's see, 70,000 comments as an HN moderator and thousands of those are precisely about this. How "posting thousands of comments of explanation" turns into "denying the idea of" is a good example of the first sentence of my comment here.