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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

#591

Post by banish-m4 »

nullindividual wrote: post #277
justinclift wrote: post #31

Seems an extremely soft ball approach: • Under the deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and for an third-party monitor to be installed to monitor the company’s compliance. ~$240M seems pretty low for an industry where billions are commonly thrown about. • The deal spares Boeing from a trial just as the planemaker is trying to turn a corner in its safety and manufacturing crises. Sparing them from a trial…

There must be some standard calculation going into that number. US law forbids proportional fines (i.e., scaling with income).

The medical industry uses QALY.

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

#592

Post by banish-m4 »

underseacables wrote: post #183
justinclift wrote: post #31

Seems an extremely soft ball approach: • Under the deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and for an third-party monitor to be installed to monitor the company’s compliance. ~$240M seems pretty low for an industry where billions are commonly thrown about. • The deal spares Boeing from a trial just as the planemaker is trying to turn a corner in its safety and manufacturing crises. Sparing them from a trial…

For the wealthy, it's always just pay a fine. The financial crisis is a great example. Wealthy CEOs rarely go to jail.

Too big to jail. In Boeing's case, they're also a "strategic defense contractor" making bombs, missile, fighters, bombers, and such besides airliners the flying public uses. They are a big chunk of the military-industrial complex phenomenon Truman warned about.

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

#593

Post by maeil »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #502
maeil wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garnish valuation increase and dividends for X years, just like wage garnishing. At the end of every quarter, if the market cap of the company has increased by $X b/million, $X b/million has to be paid as a fine to the government. This means that effectively the share price cannot increase during the period, only go down. Of course, this needs to be done retroactively, starting from the time the illegal act is believ…

This idea would kill all capital investment in the country. A country without capital investment is a country in which you will not enjoy the standard of living.

I really don't think it would, because investment follows the money. After the first couple of cases, businesses will adjust their practices. Again, see DMA and Apple for an example of how it's very possible to make businesses do things they wouldn't do on their own.

Let's say the US instates this. Will everyone suddenly stop investing in Apple? No, because the chance that they run foul of this would be so tiny as not to impact the RoI. For most companies like Boeing who commit this kind of gross negligence, the act in question only provides a small boost to their market value, if any.

If this still somehow shows to greatly reduce investment, there's an obvious way to alleviate this. All proceeds of the stock sales and fines, the government immediately reinvests in a basket representing the market of the country.

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

#594

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #588
bumby wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you still advocating designing a whole new airframe instead? That would be the ideal solution for that hazard. But I can’t say if it’s the best risk profile overall. I would settle for a properly implemented engineered mitigation of MCAS. >* It’s an inherently simple solution* The fact that the engineers who built the thing mischaracterized it would seemingly be evidence to the contrary. I have experienced this…

I admit to being arrogant, perhaps that's an inevitable side effect of being confident. When proven wrong, however, which has happened on HN (!) I try to admit it. I don't like making mistakes. I'm not offended, as that's to be expected when I write things that are unpopular. But I still accept your apology, and no worries. Perhaps we can engage again in the future! P.S. I know about the simulator issues, but the inf…

[deleted]

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

#595

Post by P_I_Staker »

quasse wrote: post #392
tsunamifury wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really want the engineer who was last on the line of decisions to go to jail? Because that’s how this will go.

Yes. This might be unfamiliar to software engineers, but there's a reason mechanical engineering and architecture (there might be more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) schools put students through at least a semester of ethics classes. We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics: > Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welf…

This is an absolute joke in almost all fields of engineering. Milage may vary, but it's basically the wild west. I can't speak for PE's, but obviously there's at least a little more regulation there.

However a huge number of engineers critical to safety would not have one.

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

#596

Post by P_I_Staker »

lolinder wrote: post #439

Criminal charges against the company aside, aren't there licensed engineers inside of Boeing who signed off on all of this? Where are they in this discussion? Isn't the whole premise of having a licensed engineering discipline that the buck stops with you and you lose your license if you let something like this happen? If we don't revoke licenses and permanently end careers over something like the MAX crashes, the in…

> the incentives of engineers require them to say yes to the company at all costs, because it's not worth their job to say no. The consequences of saying yes to a bad plan have to be worse than being fired.

This is true, and from what I understand can be partially true in medicine.

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

#597

Post by anticensor »

llamaimperative wrote: post #239
adwn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ultimately responsible are the shareholders who demand ever higher profits, and the top management has to deliver that That's not how this works. The shareholders don't have direct authority over the decisions made by the company's chief officers. They can demand "higher profits" all day long, but that doesn't absolve the board of directors or management from their responsibility, and it doesn't give them a blank c…

A problem doesn’t need to be specific to capitalism in order to be caused by it. Of course this is all a result (a predictable one) of a certain type of capitalist theory, namely extreme shareholder primacy.

Then those shareholders should bear the risk and start a share-bound commandite, a form of partially limited liability company without a board of directors, but rather directly controlled by shareholders, but that requires at least one unlimited liability member apart from the limited liability members.

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

#598

Post by anticensor »

oersted wrote: post #229
robertlagrant wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, again I don't understand why this matters.

I think the point of OP was that in many ways companies have many of the same rights and privileges as individuals, but cannot be punished in the same ways.

Companies have fewer rights and less responsibility overall actually.

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

#599

Post by anticensor »

immibis wrote: post #67
MangoCoffee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. is not going to shut down Boeing. How many jobs would be lost if that happened, especially in this economy? The fine is quite low.

The US has propped up Boeing, because it's primarily a military contractor.

It's not like the law doesn't have a way to ban a contractor from government contracts. In fact, the law has multiple offences that are punishable by a ban from government procurement contracts.

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

#600

Post by salawat »

WalterBright wrote: post #482
cjbgkagh wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the first person I've head of this idea from; it's from the NTSB charter The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties … and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person” But there was plenty o…

> That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying. Feel free to ask the flight crew next time you're on a 757. The service record of the 757 speaks for itself. I fly Iceland Air because their fleet consists of 757s. I literally bet my life on my work. > Boeing tried to blame the pilots The pilots were partially responsible. 1. First incident - the LA crew followed emergency procedures and continued the…

>3. Third incident - Boeing sent an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots. The EA crew did not follow the simple 2 step procedure. A contributing factor is the crew was flying at full throttle, and ignored the overspeed warning horn you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder.

Walter, ffs, they were taking off hot & high from Adis Ababa with airspeed unreliable because of the screwed AoA sensor; a sensor unjustifiably classified too low in terms of consequence for failure, and deliberately wired non-redundantly and kept from being cross-checked in most configurations in order to avoid training burden to avoid cert work to compete with the NEO. Without that AoA sensor, overspeed had no basis; garbage in, garbage out.

Let it go. Boeing f*cked up. Period. Their (the pilot's) instruments and alarms were completely untrustworthy. You (Boeing) don't get to blame pilots for not doing memory items when your (again, Boeing's) technical design is screwed from the first. Your 757 work was fine. The MAX as it was was not. Nothing will ever make it so.

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