Hard to disagree
The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything.
I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants are accountable, but wealthy individuals and corporations are not.
:(
So the Boeing trial being on plea deal would be on paar with that standard…
Because that’s how this will go.
The appropriate venue for the victims is a civil jury trial (lawsuit), where recovery of losses is possible because the victims then become party to the case (plaintiff).
The reason this lawyer is requesting this is so that the government will be forced to lay its cards on the table during trial, which provide much stronger proof/evidence of Boeing's wrongdoing (which otherwise would likely be much harder to discover), and make it far more likely for a jury to award a huge award to the plaintiffs.
So this is completely rational on the part of the lawyer, but the judge doesn't have to go along with it at all, and might not.
The desires of the victim in making formal accusations (“pressing charges”) are certainly considered by the prosecutors even if the victim is not a party to the trial. I’d image the prosecutor takes it into account in other situations too, like the terms of accepting a guilty plea. Do you have a link to something that suggests otherwise?
But hard to agree too. How exactly can you prevent someone from pleading guilty?
Unlikely relevant to this case, but judges are legally required to reject guilty pleas if they conclude that the defendant is being coerced, doesn’t understand what they are pleading to and the likely consequences of their plea, lacks competence to plea (due to severe mental illness/etc), or that the plea lacks a “factual basis” (e.g. if the conduct alleged by the prosecution and admitted by the defendant fails to legally constitute the elements of the crime; or if the judge has good reason to believe that the conduct in question never actually happened despite both prosecution and defence agreeing that it did)
On the last point-the prosecution is allowed to offer the defendant a plea deal for a lesser included offense, but not an unrelated crime that doesn’t correspond with what they are accused of doing-e.g. you can plead drug charges down to lesser drug charges, but you can’t plead drug charges down to possession of stolen goods if there is no evidence anything was actually stolen-in such a scenario the judge is supposed to reject the guilty plea
Boeing isn’t pleading guilty in a vacuum - there’s a deal in place. Judge can reject that now, wait until after guilty plea and impose whatever sentence he wants (within law), or accept the deal as-is.
Practically, their career would be affected by it too.
• 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 means no further discovery/uncovering of other illegal shit they've been up to meanwhile?
> third-party monitor
For just three years. Lawyers for the victims said yesterday Boeing would select the monitor the DOJ would appoint. I hope this is no longer the case but can't find confirmation. If so, it's insane. Self-certification was a major source of corruption and rot in Boring.
https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-pleads-guilty-fraud-sweethea...
When you or I commit a crime during probation that was the same type of crime that lead to probation in the first place, we get a much much harsher sentence the second time around. For boeing, it seems this plea deal would just be "probation a second time"
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
Unless you're talking about a different case the actual amount was way less than that.
>The trial judge reduced the punitive damages to three times the amount of the compensatory damages, totalling $640,000. The parties settled for a confidential amount before an appeal was decided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
More to the point, it's the difference between a jury trial where jurors are likely to award high amounts from a unsympathetic defendant (a big faceless multinational) to a sympathetic plaintiff (79 year old women), and a settlement (presumably the government didn't think they had a strong case so they didn't take to trial).
What's the context here?
Dude it literally melted her labia together. She deserved that 2.7 million and only got a small portion of it.
It’ll be uncovered. Just via they “fk it we’ll do it live” in air method
It seems Boeing is getting another sweetheart deal because they have lobbyists and powerful allies in DC who can make the deaths of hundreds of people not matter.
The system views individual lives as less important than the confidence / stability / illusion of power of the holy market and those it is meant to benefit.
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act:
> The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. [0]
Now, would it work? The linked article details reasons that make it challenging in the SOX context.
2. It's highly unlikely they'll ever get anywhere near the maximum[2].
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130208124604/https://www.popeh...
As to securities fraud, if a publicly traded company lies facts material to criminal acts, then yes it should securities fraud -- particularly if it hurt the stock holders (and in this case it did!). This would be different than say a CEO cheating on his wife and lying about it.
"Willful" means that you knew that you were doing something that the law forbids. If you knew the reports was false but did not know that the law forbids doing that then it would not be willful.
Here's a more detailed explanation from the DoJ [1]. That's in general rather than specifically about Sarbanes-Oxley but a quick grep in SOX didn't turn up any SOX-specific definitions for those terms.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Unless the president/CEO can prove they enforced policy to mitigate the issues, than the board may still be in real trouble internationally.
Their best bet is to delay long enough that the general public loses interest in the case.
Have a great day, and remember free parachutes is not a real solution... =3
This isn't true as written. CEOs aren't automatically liable for crimes of the company or employees.
If a CEO intentionally facilitates or participates in those crimes: Yes, open to liability.
If an employee or department commits crimes without the knowledge of the CEO: Very different situation.
The cynical take is that CEOs are always aware of crimes or that they're encouraging the crimes to happen. I've personally seen several cases of people committing fraud and even a federal crime on the job, and in every case it was done secretly with the belief that it was going to be an undiscovered way of advancing the person's career. People try to game the advancement system at every level, including executive levels.
It is beyond criminal negligence, because Boeing was charging extra to make the MCAS system redundant, which it should have been in the first place.
> technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job.
Seems to me to me more legal inside baseball than an indication execs are getting away with more fraud than before. Seems prosecutors are just choosing to charge other crimes when they know they have a good case.
My understanding is that getting security clearance involves a bunch of checks and statements about your character, and having a federal felony conviction on one's record would be a hard blocker.
Absolutely, I think that the real punishment, beyond the $245M fine, ought to be losing its many many billions of DoD contracts. After all, once a firm has demonstrated this kind of behavior, how on earth should we trust it with not only taxpayer dollars but the lives of servicemen/women and critical military resources?
Of course, this needs to be done retroactively, starting from the time the illegal act is believed to have been committed. Now it wouldn't be sensible to just "destroy" market cap, but there's an obvious solution here. Looks like the 737 MAX was announced in Aug 2011, when Boeing's market cap was around $50B. Currently it's $114B. You issue new shares, roughly 1.28x as many as the current number of outstanding shares. The government gets all of them and by law is made to sell 20% of them per year. It's only after 5 years, when all of the shares have been sold, that the X years of market cap garnishing starts.
I'm sure there's a loophole or two that I missed, but this can all be accounted for. A simple, DMA-like "spirit of the law"-clause works well enough, as we're seeing with Apple suddenly being very quick to accept the Epic store in Europe.
Suddenly a whole lot of people will start caring. Sure, it would be great to jail those responsible too, but with that alone you will eventually end up with boards full of fall guys. You need the above to long-term successfully prevent this kind of socially destructive behavior.
The only way to guarantee that Boeing becomes worse at making planes, is to ask them to stop doing it for 18 months and then start up again.
This “punishment” is a joke, these people are mass killers they should be in jail.
Makes me think a lot of Taleb's "Skin in the Game", which emphasizes that a healthy system cannot have leaders who accept rewards without risks. This deal means Boeing leadership can continue to behave without skin in the game.
What does it take? You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues? Or can a government penalty call for that? That is hard to achieve. Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year? That seems to me as important as who is CEO.
None of the penalties courts mete out (short of dissolution/fined into bankruptcy) seem to be able to achieve this level of change needed.
Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs.
What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.
I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.
> What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture
Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??
Disagree. I think most people can see how lucky it is for them that they can avoid an expensive and protracted court case, just say "oh yeah, we're guilty of a serious fraud" and the only consequence is some fines that amount to about 1% of their annual revenue. With consequences like that, it seems like the government is actively encouraging them to commit fraud...
It also avoids sacking the "innocent people" and it sets an example for other companies. The greedy corporate culture really needs a bit of check-and-balance.
And as it stands they've already been losing money for the past 5 years. They could be losing a lot more money.
Granted a lot of those losses are due to their own mismanagement of projects like KC-46, Starliner, AF1, etc.
There are no layoffs of you apply the punishment into the shareholders. Confiscate enough of the company proportionally to the fine value.
Shareholders are, of course, free to sue the actual decision makers afterwards to pin down any non-mandated illegal behavior and recover their losses.
Then people will start asking questions about what they are told to do, because they know that if they do something wrong they're going to jail or have to pay the fines themselves, not a bank account of the company. And they won't have much else to go to get shielded from responsibility, because all jobs will be like that. Even our own jobs.
Serious question: why not? Why couldn't we require Boeing to change its culture, and then verify and enforce that change? Verification might involve periodically interviewing employees across all levels of the organization, performing spot checks and audits to make sure that procedures are being followed (no more failing to enter a work item into the system), and so forth.
(I don't mean to imply that this would be feasible under current regulatory law – I have no idea whether that is the case or not. I'm just saying that you could imagine a world where this could be done.)
It's funny... when some people get paid A LOT of money, it's because they have "a lot of responsibilities", but when something goes wrong, those responsibilities suddenly vanish.
Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.
Great risk should come with great reward. We no longer assign risk to most executives at publicly-traded, multinational corporations, but the reward is still great.
I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.
In today's culture, I often hear C-suiters talking about how much "risk" they are taking, to justify their outrageous salaries and stock holdings, but I almost never see them pay much, in the way of penalties, except for the very smallest, most "raw" companies, where they have, literally, sunk their entire net worth into the endeavor.
It seems that, once a company has reached a certain threshold, the only real "risk" that executives experience, is that they'll only get a 5% bonus, instead of 30%. So, only $5M, as opposed to $30M.
AUTHORITEH: "Put out your hand!"
GUILTEH: "OK"
AUTHORITEH: <SLAP> "Bad Executive! Bad, bad, Executive! Don't let it happen again! See you at the party on Saturday?"
I agree with that statement, but want so add: I believe that whatever you propose will have significant problems and is likely worse than the status quo in some major way. Sometimes I'll only be able to tell you what those problems are in hindsight. Sometimes those problems are fixable sometimes not.
Don't let this dissuade you from thinking about the problem - it needs to be thought about. However do think about is in more than a shallow way, look at it from all viewpoints (including ones of people who disagree with) try to see what the downsides are and how to mitigate them. Good luck, if enough people do this maybe someone will come up with a good enough answer, (as opposed to perfect!) and you will understand the problem well enough to help debate why the downsides are worth it.
Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue. That ensures that even activist shareholders take note and do not pressure the CEO to cut corners.
It is completely ridiculous to criminally prosecute leadership for crimes which happened without their knowing/consent/acknowledgment. It would be a perversion of justice to jail someone because many levels down someone else committed a crime. The best corporate culture does not prevent criminality.
That will also keep the costs at the company and not with society and after the fact.
10% ?
What? if you or I were found negligent that resulted in hundreds of deaths we would be in jail for the rest of our lives, effectively fining us 100% of ALL revenue FOREVER.
At a minimum they should have a massive fine (like 100% of revenue for a year) and do whatever it takes to halve the stock price, thus punishing the stockholders too - after all, they invested in a business that killed people, they should be punished too.
They cannot die. They cannot go to prison.
This concept of a moral person is a totally unfair advantage that they exploit again and again.
It's an interesting thought that I keep coming across, I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with it.
In a sense, companies are super-human intelligent autonomous beings, with much more power to act on the world than any individual. We are able to partially control them within a complex incentive and enforcement structure, but it is difficult to fully align them with what society needs.
It's good news in a sense, we can control AGIs with similar systems, they have the same resource constraints as any other entity if they want to have an impact in the real world.
I do not think that a corporation is considered to be a person beyond that. It‘s merely a way to establish limited liability for shareholders which requires a mechanism for the corporation to sign contracts without an owner signing on it‘s behalf.
Money. Control.
Either the fine should be high enough to alert investors and ensure that they make the company change its ways..
Or
The govt. should provisionally or in a timebound manner take a seat or two on the board.
Let the govt. Do this for a few companies, and every otger company will fall in line.
Corporations must be treated as children of the country they are born in. Sure, they become big, earn money for the govt. and are essentially independent. But if the kid goes naughty, a watchful eye and a rap on the knuckles is how you teach manners.
You can't teach a corporation manners. If you are going to talk about corporations as if they are people (and legally they want us to treat them as people) then you have to face that they are, technically speaking, artificial psychopaths (incapacity to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms and respect the law, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness in pursuit of profit, etc). Very powerful, immortal, artificial psychopaths.
A blind focus on the concentration of wealth will only improve tech if it helps profit, will only improve lifes if it helps profit, will only protect the environment if it helps profit, will only influence politics to increase profits. It will try to create poverty because that eases exploitation. As you already hinted, the motivation has to change.
Regulating decision making in companies, however, as to make sure people have to look at their own personal risk when bad things are on the line is going to get a lot of pushback, precisely because that's very inconvenient. But without something like this, the Wells Fargo situation is the natural outcome that will keep repeating.
When it comes to justifying the compensation packages, they are first to claim that they are responsible for the company achievements.
If they would actually face jail-time for non-disputable wrongdoing, then it would actually balance it out.
So I don't think they're a great example of having excellent QA everywhere. And kind of helps with your point of if the ORG and the division of that org is really thinking about quality and what they ship then it carries through. But that might not be the case for every part of the company (I.E. Boeing)
Turned out to be extremely bad code and some potential mechanical issues from what I understand[1]
[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
We used to have a law that two different types of banking institutions could not be owned and housed inside the same entity. So, effectively, and based on history, yes. You absolutely do need to do that.
> That is hard to achieve.
Not particularly. Congress has broad and sweeping powers. They just don't use them.
> Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year?
These are publicly traded companies. In the case of Boeing, more than half is owned by institutions and not individuals, and these institutions are known to have questionable practices in all sorts of industries. Again, the solution seems annoyingly simple.
The agencies that oversee this need to have the will and the power to act. Regarding the former, our elected officials are mostly divided into two camps 1) the ones who work to minimize the will of agencies and the ones who are sort of inept and feckless about safeguarding agencies' ability to act.
Regarding the latter, the recent scotus Chevron decision monkey-wrenches agency power (seemingly by design). Bad actors will inject judges into the oversight process, in an attempt to sabotage regulators ability to regulate; Chevron hugely amps up the effectiveness of that attack.
Otherwise it is a decision where the manager who decides to stretch the limits will get praise and cash if it works out, without carrying much or any personal risk — even if they are fined or fired, chances are they already got their share.
If we want such things from happening the people taking these gambles need to be painfully aware that it might land them in prison for a long time, and fines need to be proportional to the money earned — that means higher by a magnitude or more so there is not even a doubt that it won't pay off.
I like to live in a society where people building critical infrastructure go to prison if they are willingly taking shortcuts.
Currently the overall culture for selecting business leaders is suboptimal in the western sphere and beyond. It incentivizes behavior that can lead to such problems. Nobody could sell a 10% growth in reliability to investors if it doesn't come with a similar revenue increase as well.
One of the problems here is that a lot of the time, the worst thing that happens to an individual from the company is just that they get fired. That's just not a very strong deterrent when the upside if you don't get caught is potentially huge raises/promotions/bonuses.
Imagine if the worst thing that could happen to you when robbing banks if you get caught is just that you can't rob banks in that area anymore. That's kind of how this works for individuals in corporations.
The supply chain of software in aerospace is extremely long and finding out who exactly was acting negligent is near impossible.
When you dismantle a company, people lose jobs, that does not look good on TV for politicians.
The fine is quite low.
It's a monopoly. Just break it up.
> How many jobs would be lost if that happened
"We don't negotiate with [economic] terrorists."
> especially in this economy?
$77b annual revenue. Positive quarterly growth rate the last 8 out of 12 quarters. Two global wars we refuse to negotiate peace in and Boeing is a major weapons supplier.
Then again, if you kill and scare enough people with faulty planes, the state of the economy will be immaterial to what will happen to your interests.
CEO on odd numbered days: We're systemically important and need to be shielded from liability.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
To quote wikipedia:
> In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. [...] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
""" Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17] """
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...
Well that's a fun little fact
There is no world - none - literally no possible universe - that Boeing cannot sell to the government, or that it fails, or that its planes get grounded indefinitely, or anything even remotely close to this outcome.
There are 2 plane makers of appreciable size on earth, Boeing and Airbus. They are essentially government owned enterprises.
Boeing has made a strategic decision and nothing of consequence whatsoever will come of this. Maybe a few people go to jail for a few months. That’s literally it
Just pass a law and nationalize and/or break it up. Here's someone more knowledgeable than me discussing this idea: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a....
Boeing and the US government have a long and intimate relationship but it is mutual. Boeing was fully vertically integrated until it was favorable to encourage competition in the aviation industry and the US government broke the company up. Boeing is not untouchable.
And as written by others banks do fail, and literally end their existence or are sold for peanuts to competition (Credit Suisse just recently). Using few cases from 2008 and making claims like whole universe always runs like that ain't very close to reality and doesn't help the discussion.
They probably should fail, except it might be more than shareholders that get ruined by that happening.
I have zero doubt that had the door-plug came off the plane on a non-US airline, that excuses would have been made, the usual insinuations about poor quality maintenance, and issues would still be brushed under the carpet.
Likewise, had the first crash been a US airline, I'm sure there would have been an immediate grounding.
Instead, after the second crash on March 10:
> On March 11, the FAA defended the MAX against groundings by issuing a Continued Airworthiness Notice to operators.
How much do you care if plane with 150 civilians falls down in remote russia or china and everybody burns to charcoal? Now compare it to same number of your neighbors or even just unknown people from your own town meeting the same fate.
Airlines very frequently get banned from US airspace because their procedures do not meet the strict safety bar set by the FAA. So it’s very reasonable to assume that what was identified as a training gap on the MCAS operations was due to sloppy regional airline training procedures.
So it’s true that it would have been taken more seriously in the US, but it’s because the FAA and NTSB set the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation rigor world wide.
They probably made more money by not being so strict on safety. These fines are too low. Company should go close to bankruptcy if they do something serious.
"In 2022, Calhoun (Boeing CEO) received $22.5 million from Boeing. Most of his 2022 compensation was in the form of estimated value of stock and option awards. He received the same $1.4 million salary as in 2021. Boeing announced in March 2023 that Calhoun would not receive a $7 million performance-based bonus, which had been tied to getting the new widebody 777X into service by the end of 2023. In February 2023, Boeing awarded Calhoun an incentive of about $5.29 million in restricted stock units to 'induce him to stay throughout the company's recovery.' In March 2023, Boeing announced Calhoun was being given shares worth $15 million that will vest in installments over three years."
Wanting a harsh sentence is fine, but lets limit it something we can likely see done before the end of our civilization in its current form.
Does it mean that there is evidence to establish a crime beyond reasonable doubt, but there is insufficient evidence to implicate any employees in particular?
Same thing as for any other felon.
If they hadn't taken the plea, far worse things could have come to light that were even more egregious offenses.
Slapping a 5th layer on top of the current crud for a new version is simply not realistic. Removing layers to allow for a new version is also not realistic, as the certification requirements would be pretty close to those of a clean-sheet aircraft.
So in conclusion, Boeing got away with certifying an aircraft that should never have been certified in the first place, and will reap the financial benefits of it. Minus some minor compensation to airlines and victims.
Boeing's actions resulted in the deaths of people on two planes.
Who will be personally accountable?
For example…
Is Boeing really at fault for the MCAS related crashes? Both happened at airlines from the developing world, where the pilot requirements (for hours of experience) is a lot lower than for airlines from the developed world. I recall reading that pilots from airlines in the US had also encountered MCAS in real flights but knew how to deal with the condition just using their basic piloting knowledge, by lowering flaps or turning the stabilizer trim off. MCAS activation is obvious because the trim wheels in the cockpit spin with its activation - so a pilot who doesn’t want trim can just flip the switch for them.
Another possibility: is regulation at fault? Recertification is expensive, and the associated training costs are expensive. I believe it caused Boeing to not seek to classify the 737 Max as a new aircraft and downplay changes like MCAS. Could an easier certification process have caused Boeing to be more transparent about changes with this plane?
MCAS itself activates only at high angles of attack and was put in to meet some of the standards of certification, not because there was a “real” problem, by my understanding. It had to do with the new engines’ cover, which does help with fuel efficiency, but changes the plane’s aerodynamics and so Boeing compensated using this system to automatically trim. Could different standards have caused Boeing to not create this system?
Are unions at fault? Boeing has immense cost pressures from all sides, and I’ve heard many stories of inefficiency, avoidable costs, and painful politics at their plants due to union rules. These pressures indirectly may cause the company to cut corners elsewhere.
I would be curious what HN thinks of these possibilities. There are probably other such theories as well. I’m not saying Boeing did nothing wrong, but that the public and media rarely gets complex stories right. It’s easier to latch onto simpler or more emotional explanations. But what’s actually true and how do you hand out blame?
How so? For example if staying competitive (and therefore surviving) forces you to squeeze through without recertification, isn’t that a sign that maybe there is a better version of the regulations that should be considered that doesn’t have bad incentives?
What about the well-documented reality that numerous pilots from airlines with higher requirements have had their planes experience MCAS trim but knew what was happening (since a wheel starts spinning in front of them) and were able to flip it off trivially? I’m not saying Boeing doesn’t share SOME of the blame, but it feels weird to me to ignore the fact that many pilots (literally hundreds) have had no serious issue with MCAS over hundreds of thousands of hours.
> The idea about unions sharing some blame is especially absurd and the suggestion of it makes your post very difficult to take seriously. Even if unions caused Boeing to become unprofitable, they are blameless in the decisions that led to the crashes.
Can you explain your view point more? To me it feels dismissive but I am trying to keep an open mind. In my view and the view of many Boeing friends, the unions have been abusive and created a big amount of avoidable expense and inefficiency to protect their own interests. I’m not making a claim as to whether that self-interest is ethical or not. But I’ve heard many stories of people not being allowed to do some trivial task because they have to wait until the person in a specific job shows up to do that task because of union rules that artificially protect unnecessary jobs. Those situations are difficult for management to overcome, since they have other things to spend time on, but they are real and do add to costs and time delays. That has to come from somewhere else in the company. I agree with you that the unions are not directly responsible for any decisions, but their effect is still real and can push the company into a corner.
These situations tend to be complex - it’s not as simple as pointing at someone who is evil and does bad things - which is why I think we cannot ignore these potential causes that are many degrees away or shared blame between multiple groups (including Boeing executives).
If we don't revoke licenses and permanently end careers over something like the MAX crashes, 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.
Unfortunately, You can't just blanket make CEOw responsible for every action of their employees. That would be insane.
Think of it like charging the top brass in the mafia, RICOs are hard to prove because getting the guy at the top is difficult.
I wonder if a plea deal like this would have ever reached if american lives were lost in two crashes as a direct cause of a company's negligence.
https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-...
So long as you make a plane where the door doesn't fly off midair, it seems like a good way to print money and bring some manufacturing jobs back to the USA!
Cool. Cool cool cool.
So, what does this mean exactly?
Is this a normal thing? Seems odd.
Who will resign in shame and vow to never take a leadership position again?
Oh? Nobody? Um, ok. Justice is served, I guess?
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
June 6, 2019
Thoughts and prayers, an inconsequential fine and back to business as usual.
Instead we could be like China and actually punish people responsible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre...
> The Intermediate People's Court in Shijiazhuang sentenced Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping to death, and Tian Wenhua to life in prison, on 22 January 2009.
> Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed on 24 November 2009.
A much more vile crime but accountability nonetheless. (you can argue about the morality of capital punishment.. but these guys poisoned babies)
https://swz.it/europes-failure-to-deal-with-failure/
And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does. Of course, that has limits and people can still be individually charged for crimes, but the point here is that this is not a by-default thing. This problem is magnified by a thousand with a company like Boeing that is so intertwined with the government and not easily replaceable.
It seems to me that the solution to this kind of issue might come from studying successful occupations done by the US - post-WW2 Japan is the one that comes to mind. The Allies (mainly the Americans) managed to defeat an enemy state, punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong, and then set up systems which turned out to be largely effective at putting the country on a good path. Fixing an entity like Boeing seems similar in nature, if much smaller than an actual country.
It's OK to kill people, just let the company go bankrupt afterward... Better luck next time!
What an immensely unsatisfying bunch of intellectually corrupt market-speak regurgitation.
There are laws. Those laws should apply the same to service workers as they do to service operators and CEO's. That is: If you believe in the integrity of your own society.
Flouting the law to do influential people a favor, under the guise of not-torpedoing-your-economy, is just another way to have favoritism appear justified.
A societies' law already decided on - and struck a balance on the question of -'not-torpedoing'. Ignoring that later on is inherently political and smacks of corruption and sweetheart-dealing.
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For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
In fact, I suggested that Boeing ought to be treated like Occupied Japan, which to me seems like it ought to be treated pretty harshly.
When economists are left alone too long, their results do not differ very much from those of serial killers.
As I said in the original comment, the difficulty is in punishing the people responsible while maintaining/rebuilding systems that have better outcomes. Blowing everything up doesn’t do that.
I think you're conflating criminality with civil liability here (covering legal risk taking and mere incompetence). The former is what's under discussion here. The latter is what allows entrepreneurs to take risk for economic benefit.
I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does. Again the key word phrase here is “by default” and that obviously excludes executives knowingly committing crimes. But this distinction doesn’t seem to be understood by many commenters on this Boeing topic.
In other words it punished those that couldn't add something to the US -like engineers that could build rockets for example. Basically what you are saying is crime has no upper limit of evil if the criminal is seen as better unpunished for the state than not. That's how a lot of Nazis and Japanese that did mass murder and human experiments became US citizen in good standing. To me giving them this out was more evil than the deeds they did.