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

It's more that congress has zero incentive to fix what benefits them, regardless of support.

For instance, the COVID relief bill was a handout to the very folks that bribe them. Obviously they will pass that quickly.

You're confusing correlation (support) with causation (benefits them).

That's not how FAA submitted documentation works. Just don't sign it if you have any questions. I never signed anything until I had personally verified the data and/or the code for myself.

If there are young engineers out there reading this, please disregard these people telling you that you are indemnified. Talk to a lawyer yourself if you don't believe me, but please don't follow the advice these people are laying out.

Signing off on something you know to be untrue and submitting that to the FDA or FAA as part of an approval process is a federal crime. Not only that, but the way our lawyers explained it to us, each time we sign off on something that turns out to be false, it counts as one count of lying to the federal government. And, no, you being an employee who was directed to sign does not absolve you from culpability.

Any 1L knows that you cannot, under any circumstances, contract away criminal liability. You are always liable for the actions you take that turn out to be criminal.

Again, don't believe me telling you that you will be committing a crime if you sign off on a fix or design that turns out to be bunk. Definitely don't believe these guys telling you will be protected if you sign off. Go talk to an attorney for yourself. You'll find what I'm saying is true. You want to find that out before you sign off on a fix or a design. Not after. Believe me.

Just some fatherly advice from an older engineer to younger ones. Please protect yourselves.

I'm talking about both, but here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html

> It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).

From the above source, within state prisons (which is the majority of incarcerated Americans), 163,000 are serving sentences for murder, 168,000 for rape, 128,000 for robbery and 154,000 for assault. So technically I should have led off with rape instead of murder; my bad.

You are technically correct that assault doesn't require the victim and perpetrator to make contact. For instance, pointing a loaded gun at somebody (outside of self defense) is considered aggravated assault. On the other hand, many states do not actually have separate assault and battery statutes, and the two seem to be classified together under "assault".

Conversely, robbery and burglary are separated (burglary is categorized as a property crime rather than a violent crime). In addition to the 128,000 prisoners convicted of robbery, there are another 79,000 who were convicted of burglary.

> All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.

The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019, neither of which took place inside US jurisdiction but let's set that aside for the sake of argument. Chicago alone had 592 homicides in 2018, 521 in 2019, 798 in 2020, 856 in 2021, 738 in 2022, 648 in 2023, and 312 year-to-date, (source: heyjackass.com) nearly all of which were committed by the sort of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells who sometimes end up getting mass-incarcerated. You tell me which is the bigger problem. Personally I wouldn't mind a legal system in which someone at Boeing could be held criminally liable for manslaughter (which accounts for another 20,000 state-level inmates in the United States), but I don't think Boeing's planes are a statistically significant cause of wrongful death.

A CEO who builds a culture encouraging technicians to skip a maintenance entry (no signing off on something that isn't there), is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.

A CEO who builds a culture which attacks whistleblowers and people who would report the above incident, is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.