Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 618 posts

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#521

Post by pessimizer »

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.

This is ahistorical. These are institutions that largely exist to settle disputes between the rich and to punish the poor, and came into existence to balance the interests of debtor royals with those of the rich commoners who held that debt.

Corporations were a way to formalize public-private partnerships in which the sovereign would be able to shed the risks of beneficial ventures in its interest, by in exchange shielding private groups taking on those ventures from the normal legal consequences of their actions.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#522

Post by kube-system »

lawn wrote: post #509
kube-system wrote: post #506

A piece of information in this article which is not in that article: > The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. > "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

Driving someone to suicide is also a direct cause of death, and should be treated as such.

It is certainly a bad thing, but I think it is an important note given the conspiratorial tone on some of the comments in that other thread.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#523

Post by [deleted] »

jjk166 wrote: post #475
pclmulqdq wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[deleted]

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#524

Post by kube-system »

indoclay wrote: post #518
kube-system wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow... His family doesn't believe so: > The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. > "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

I think we could agree generally that "the hostile work environment at Boeing ... led to his death." It is appalling that they could apply this kind of pressure to one of their own . I'm not familiar with the process here, but does anyone know if the officer makes the determination that this is a "self-inflicted gunshot wound"? I thought that kind of assessment was for the coroner to determine over the course of the…

The coroner did say it appears to be self-inflicted, but that is not the final and formal judgement.

> The office of Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O'Neal said that Barnett, who had been living in Louisiana after retiring from Boeing, died "from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

> Charleston police say detectives are actively investigating the case and are awaiting a formal cause of death as they try to determine the circumstances surrounding Barnett's death.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#525

Post by danielmarkbruce »

userabchn wrote: post #507
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.

Or someone with an interest in making Boeing look bad, such as Comac or a foreign government that wants to tarnish the reputation of one of America's largest exporters.

Why would someone do that? Boeing are plenty competent and making themselves look bad. Just fly a couple planes into the ground, forget a few nuts and bolts here and there, they are doing fine.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#526

Post by vinay_ys »

shadowgovt wrote: post #517
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.

Sometimes anonymous is sufficient. But if the regulator is building a legal case in the US against a company and the only evidence they have is what the whistleblower provides, right to face one's accuser (a right we do not give up lightly) demands that the whistleblower be named.

Yeah, for case against human individuals that standard is absolutely essential. But for case against corporate entities that are already under periodic regulatory audits, that shouldn't be required. Then, within that non-compliant corporate, if there are individuals who committed the crime (criminal negligence, intentional malpractice etc) that lead to non-compliance, then to prosecute such individuals, they would need further evidence etc. But at least, the bad airplanes won't make it to airlines, just with anonymous tips.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#527

Post by walleeee »

fullshark wrote: post #462
S_A_P wrote: post #384

What I don’t understand is how does Boeing expect to make the issues go away? Covering up the problems just kicks the can down the road. They still have shoddy planes out in the world. Is quarterly performance now more important than not having planes fall out of the sky somewhere later on? I guess I’m naive here.

Boeing isn't a person, it's a collection of individuals all trying to further their career. That's another executive's problem, their job is just to maximize their career earnings / potential while at boeing and then jump ship when the timing makes sense to.

The pathological incentives pressuring people to behave in this way must be distinguished from the (perhaps idealized) job itself, as well as from actual people's actual behavior, which is not homogenous. When we describe things as you do, we risk reinforcing the diffusion of responsibility and slash and burn careerism that leads to this sort of mess.

People can maintain integrity and agency in environments which discourage such. It takes some sacrifice, but the more people tend to agree with and embody the previous sentence, the less it takes from each individual, and the more social inertia kicks in to aid the resistance.

The belief that some outcome is inevitable is often the primary obstacle to its evitability.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#528

Post by paulmd »

rmbyrro wrote: post #349
defrost wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.kayak.com.au/flights Might need an account to access the filter, but that was the one shown.

Thanks a lot! I hope Boeing goes bankrupt and a more careful competitor buys out their assets.

the USG will never allow that to happen. boeing itself is both a significant hard-power (military contractor) and soft-power (export authorizations provide a national bargaining chip, impact on domestic economy, etc) asset for the united states.

it is like intel in a lot of ways: sure, they're massive fuckups but there simply is not any chance that the US allows one of only three leading-edge fab companies to go under. As much as things are going to suck for a while, and especially as much as things could suck for individual employees... at the end of the day the fab side is not going to go under and the USG will shovel cash into the furnace to make sure of it. It is like Boeing - think of it as "buying at a discount, for an indeterminate future time", because the value cannot ever go to zero.

And even on the IP side the ownership of x86 and the x86 license is a significant soft-power asset for the US. Having everyone on the planet able to implement their own ARM cores is not really a great thing, when you could instead use it as leverage (like we do with ASML's machines).

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#529

Post by HanClinto »

kube-system wrote: post #506

A piece of information in this article which is not in that article: > The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. > "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

Great callout, thank you!

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#530

Post by shadowgovt »

vinay_ys wrote: post #526
shadowgovt wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes anonymous is sufficient. But if the regulator is building a legal case in the US against a company and the only evidence they have is what the whistleblower provides, right to face one's accuser (a right we do not give up lightly) demands that the whistleblower be named.

Yeah, for case against human individuals that standard is absolutely essential. But for case against corporate entities that are already under periodic regulatory audits, that shouldn't be required. Then, within that non-compliant corporate, if there are individuals who committed the crime (criminal negligence, intentional malpractice etc) that lead to non-compliance, then to prosecute such individuals, they would ne…

Corporations are made up of humans and are, fundamentally, owned by people.

It should still be necessary that the State let people face their accuser before the State uses its monopoly on violence to deprive people of their property via the judicial process. Otherwise, I can think of all kinds of methods that a corrupt executive or judiciary could leverage against poeple ("we're shutting your company down." "Wait, why?" "Anonymous whistleblower. Definitely not because you're contributing legally to a PAC that's making it harder for the President to get reelected.")

Note that here I'm assuming that the whistleblower's participation is necessary. I think you are assuming a more happy path where the whistleblower can nudge the State in a direction to put more scrutiny on a company that they don't realize is a problem. That already happens and sometimes works, but we also have whistleblowers because only they have access to internal documents that the company has chosen not to divulge (legally or illegally). When the case hinges on those, it's still quite just that if the State says "We're shutting you down because you replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum," the accused has the right to say "What? Who the hell is telling you we replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum, and what evidence do they have?" Because without that back-stop, it's just the government presenting evidence that they got... somewhere... and that's open to even more abuse than the status quo.

Post reply on HN