Expropriate the company, at least 51%, take control and let public officials (knowing the US way, it will be some army general) set up checks and controls where necessary, then sell the shares (maybe keep an 'oversight' part, like 10% to keep a state official on the board).
Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight), the state will have access to privileged company information which will allow the prosecution of human responsibles, top executives will be sacked (and their comp reduced by half since their comp is in stocks) and maybe the company will start on good base again.
> Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight)
I'm not opposed to this. But I think our corporations should be regulated by the government, not by shareholder oversight.
After all, shareholders are essentially powerless in the current system. Each individual shareholder's power is far too dilute, many people owning shares through pension funds don't even know they're shareholders, the minority shareholders have no way to contact each other to coordinate, and it's completely normal for the likes of Apple to spend billions on secret projects and the shareholders to only find out after the fact.
Hell, Google even has three classes of shares - one with no voting rights, one with 1x voting rights, and a special class with 10x voting rights for Larry and Sergei ensuring they have a majority of the votes even without majority ownership.
If we think shareholders are supposed to be providing oversight to companies, they need vastly more power to do so.
> After all, shareholders are essentially powerless in the current system...
Not exactly true. And both the institutional shareholders and ultra-rich shareholders have the experience, resources, and connections to police corporate behavior far more tightly than they usually do...
But why should they bother policing behavior, when the maximum penalty for malfeasance has been wrist-slaps? (And similar for the banks and bond markets which large corporations rely upon.)
Vs. if the major investors knew that major corporate malfeasance could and likely would cost them $billions - they might very quickly grow more active and assertive, the Boards which they elected would not be passive rubber-stampers, and corporate executives would face regular hard scrutiny.
But all that would be real work. Vs. hiring lobbyists and schmoozing politicians, to make sure the maximum penalty is "wrist slap", is far easier.
> And both the institutional shareholders and ultra-rich shareholders have the experience, resources, and connections to police corporate behavior far more tightly than they usually do...
They really don't, at least not in the case of index fund investors like Vanguard and BlackRock. Have you ever read about their operations? They run a very lean ship. The only reason you're able to invest in index funds with 0.005% fees is because they have essentially nobody on staff, at least compared with the number of companies they invest in. They definitely can't do the kind of investigation and policing you're talking about without radically changing their pricing
(and if they did do that, a competitor would come in offering to skip the inspections and go back to 0.005% fees, the money would flow there in droves, and we'd be right back where we started. The fundamental issue here is that passive investors don't care and you can't make them care.)
>> They really don't, at least not in the case of index fund investors like Vanguard and BlackRock. Have you ever read about their operations? They run a very lean ship.
> The only reason you're able to invest in index funds with 0.005% fees is because they have essentially nobody on staff, at least compared with the number of companies they invest in. They definitely can't do the kind of investigation and policing you're talking about without radically changing their pricing
I think this is exactly what needs to happen. Why should passive
investing pay off? The vast amount of 401k money that has poured into the
stocks behind the S&P 500 with no strings attached has incentivized a lot
of bad behavior and made just about every US citizen with a retierment
account complicit. Bad corporate behavior _should_ hurt the bottom line
of the owners; it _should_ cost more to invest; investors (all of us)
_should_ worry about whether a mutual fund is protecting their investment
by divesting from companies that engage in criminal recklessness; our
government _should_ disincorporate companies that put lives at risk,
especially when those companies are major defense contractors.
Sure, that's how it should work. But how do you intend to make that happen? A double-digit percentage of households has a double-digit percentage of their net worth in index funds. If you say to them, "we're suddenly going to increase your fund fees by a couple orders of magnitude so we can have better corporate governance", you're going to be torn apart by an angry mob (or at least, voted out and replaced with someone who will not do this).
We are, unfortunately, in violent agreement. What's to be done? Tell the
world about it, hope people wake up? It's better than nothing. I'm
starting with people I see face to face, and the tiny corner of the
internet I occupy.
What about dismantling the stock market? These are systemic problems. Free market economy works just fine without stocks. I can't prove it, but I feel there would be plenty of funding organizations to fuel your tech unicorns if the collective wealth of the America wasn't being spent and stored in this house of cards.
You are basically saying there should be stock market but only for ultra wealthy folks. And others have no right investing or expecting higher returns.
And you are defending the people's retirements be able to be gambled and speculated by the ultra wealthy folks that are the major shareholders.
On a tangent, I also think monarchy results in better management of the asset that is the country than democracy. The leader is there for life, the country is his sole property and thus incentivized to improve it and views the country as his life's work. (Obviously there are plenty of exceptions.) On the other hand, democratical leaders more often than not tend to view presidency as a means to acquire wealth, lifetime immunity, power and reputation in a short amount of time. Once elected for a term, they can engage in however much legal corruption they want, they'll be gone in a few years anyways. The POTUS poses an exception in that the country itself is a monarch and a hegemon over the rest of the world. Meanwhile especially third world countries, but even developed countries like Canada and many in the Europe have presidents promising the heaven in the election season and keep being as corrupt as last president once they are elected.
Draw the parallels with Venture Capital, board directors and whatever else you want.
> monarchy results in better management of the asset that is the country
> than democracy. The leader is there for life, the country is his sole
> property and thus incentivized to improve it and views the country as
> his life's work. (Obviously there are plenty of exceptions.)
Obviously. The history of monarchy is full of bad heirs, succession
crises and aristocratic disputes over legitimacy. Under monarchy,
you don't get a say in the fact that your king is AEthelred Unraed,
Tarquinus Superbus, George III, Ivan Grozny, or Leopold II. Say what you
will about republican systems, they have their own issues. But monarchy,
as a system, is just an absolutely miserable form of government.
I wouldn't dream of trading the flawed republic that aspires to respect
my rights for the caprice of a monarch. I don't know where you got your
romantic ideas about monarchy from, but, my friend, read some history!
Oh, I do read history. Obviously, the worldview, ideology and character of the monarch makes a big difference. Back in the day they understood these three to be all influenced by a man's religion. There have been many merciful, goodwilled monarchs too, admittedly less of them in the European continent. Not to mention that your administration had far less power over you in the pre-IR (Industrial Revolution) era. I imagine there had been many settlements throughout history who had no idea in which country's borders they currently are living in.
Nah, the stock market is a good idea. Nothing about the idea of a stock market precludes holding owners responsible for the behavior of the company they own. Appropriate regulatory action against large, misbehaving corporations would make irresponsible investment a bad idea, and index funds less of a safe bet as a result.
Neither Index funds nor ETF's are likely to do the research & oversight stuff themselves, true.
But that is quite different that saying that the Indexes & ETF's would for-sure sit on the sidelines if some more-active large shareholders were pushing a credible plan to force better behavior down the throats of a major corporation's C-suite. And the Indexes & EFT's backing such a measure - which effectively costs them 0.00000% to do - would likely prove the critical thumb sign from the Imperial Box.
Sure, but that is the consequence of no consequences. It would be silly to be a quality fund when not voting or selling on risk analysis can't possibly cost an index fund more than they save.
The way I read GP's argument, the (yes, very diluted, but real) "oversight" would come from the fact that every shareholder would have to base their bidding price for e.g. Boeing shares on, among other things, the probability of this company being devalued by 51% following a scandal like this.
If (and I understand this is a huge "if") this kind of action was more common, you might think twice before investing into any companies that run a serious risk of direct government interaction to protect the public.
Imagine there are two planemakers, each has a computer system to record when they removed the door bolts. One company uses it 95% of the time while the other uses it 100% of the time.
For the market to assign a different price to those companies, shareholders have to be able to tell which is which.
Investors cannot tell. The official reports don't include anything that wasn't officially reported. People who know first-hand have insider information, and are forbidden from trading on it. Shareholders have no power to enter the assembly floor and carry out spot checks. And "independent" auditors like Accenture are even bigger clowns than Boeing themselves.
If you step back a bit, and look at the problem more broadly, it becomes clear that a major cause is the current level of consolidation, across the board.
In particular, just in your comment, you name the planemakers—Airbus and Boeing—and the "independent" auditors.
If there were two dozen different companies manufacturing planes, all of which were required to comply with the same regulations, and two dozen different major auditing companies, the chances of any given manufacturer getting away with this level of illegal corner-cutting for any length of time drop precipitously. At the same time, the costs of doing so rise, as it becomes much, much easier for the US government and various airlines to cut a manufacturer out of their contracts the next time they come up.
I think that however flawed, capitalism might prevail here. If enough money was on the line, institutional investors might get actual permission to [hire experts to] enter the assembly floor and do spot checks. Not welcoming such a thing would cause a huge stock hit. etc.
I’m not sure what we should be waiting for. The time for the free market to fix Boeing and “capitalism” (read: don’t regulate us please) to save the day would have been before Boeing killed 400 people in plane crashes.
I get that the idea of self-correcting markets are very appealing. But there are a ton of situations where they don’t work or don’t fix all of the problems they cause. Those situations are under the general umbrella of market failures. This particular market failure would probably be classified as adverse selection or more general information asymmetry.
I'm not advocating for less regulation in the slightest.
I'm saying that when a corpo breaks laws (don't follow regulations and lie about it), the fines need to substantially hit their shareholders, so that shareholders are generally aligned with following regulations and will demand additional diligence. Otherwise the game will be as it is - commercial aviation is highly regulated, but Boeing is so big that the fines don't matter to them or their owners (i.e. shareholders).
To summarize my objections, it seems like a “punish the shareholders” strategy has at least three problems:
1. Punishing shareholders doesn’t sufficiently discourage corporate management. They are usually fine even if the stock price takes a hit. The fact that corporate management may not act in the best interests of shareholders is a known example of the Principal-Agent Problem.
2. Shareholders might not know that bad behavior is happening, and even if they do, we want to discourage bad behavior that regulators might not find out about, and before it happens.
3. Many investors are not actively investing, but using robo investing services like Vanguard for their 401k. That means that even if you’re technically an “investor” you’re not actively investigating companies for fraud.
What you are suggesting will instead lead to a downward spiral of investor confidence in investing in American companies, and letting other world powers dominate in key tech areas of strategic interest where investors have more confidence and dont have to worry about gov punishing shareholders with no voting rights by taking away their shares
These kinda ideas often seem to originate from a place of revenge or vengeance on someone folks feel is responsible (here its ‘shareholders’)
Better to just install more government oversight (instead of more regulation) improve transparency, amend whistleblower laws to prevent retaliations that boeing did, etc.
Those are much more important and useful for this country.
> Expropriate the company, at least 51%, take control and let public officials (knowing the US way, it will be some army general) set up checks and controls where necessary
Why? Just criminally charge and fine them into bankruptcy. This wipes out shareholders and lets the creditors—the government would be a big one, on account of the fine—reorganise the company and review all the books and records in a legally precedents venue.
Everyone keeps trying to invent new mechanisms for what fines and bankruptcy already do.
Fifth Amendment says no. I'm not even an American and I know that will never fly. The US is not China, which very much can and does do this.
It's not actually necessary either! There's plenty of scope for fines and compliance orders. Heck, the US government could even ban them as a supplier, putting them out of business .. if there was another plane company in the US.
The whole fiasco is the fault of wrongly approving the creation of a US plane monopoly in the merger with McDonnell-Douglas.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Final clause.
(this is why unrelated sub-clauses should be numbered, not just appended with semicolons)
Would it not be a possible resolution via court order as a punishment for conviction of crimes? I mean, they killed hundreds, that's a capital crime in most places for individuals, I think collectively killing half the company, or even literally in case of executives and board members might be appropriate.
They can be fined into bankruptcy and effective non-existence, the executives can go to jail, but no, Boeing can't be seized because we have rule of law.
> Boeing can't be seized because we have rule of law.
That only follows to the extent that there isn't currently a law saying that a corporation can be seized due to massive malfeasance. If we passed a law providing for that as a punishment (or if there's already one on the books that fits, that you and I just aren't aware of) in clearly defined circumstances (or as clearly defined as such things ever are), then there would be no problem; it's not like there's a Constitutional right to never lose your corporation.
There's a Constitutional right against undue property seizure. Prosecutors can liquidate assets used in a crime after a conviction, but there is no law that would permit the operation of Boeing, as a corporation, by the government, and any such law, would, thankfully, be unconstitutional.
Powers of expropriation are the stuff of Communist dictatorships. "We don't do that here."
> there is no law that would permit the operation of Boeing, as a corporation, by the government,
...as we have both just been saying...
> and any such law, would, thankfully, be unconstitutional.
[Citation needed]
If the government can liquidate assets used in a crime, then if "Boeing" commits crimes, it follows that the government should be able to liquidate Boeing, because the entire company is an asset, and the ones committing the crimes are, in any meaningful sense, the people in charge of Boeing. Using that asset. To commit the crimes.
Given that, it seems to be a pretty huge stretch to claim that seizing such a company, and operating it (especially temporarily) for the public benefit, in order to both deny access to the fruits of the crime to its perpetrators, and prevent further such crimes, would be unconstitutional. It would also be massively less wasteful and destructive to the economy and the lives of the many innocent people working there to simply change out the criminal leadership for government-appointed caretakers rather than sell it all off.
Again: I'm not saying there are any laws on the books that would permit this. I just think the idea that it is prohibited by the Constitution is utterly unsupported and, at best, an extraordinary claim.
The combination of the Fifth Amendment takings clause and the Eighth Amendment excessive fines clause. The government can fine Boeing what we would consider a lot of money (perhaps even into the billions), but expropriation isn't permitted in the United States. If they want the rest of the company they can eminent domain it but that involves paying the shareholders market value (after decades of litigation).
I'm still not sure how a company cannot be seized... A person can be seized and imprisoned... property can be seized... why is a company so dramatically different than property in general? Could all the property a company owns be seized as part of a penalty? And why couldn't a company be fined to a point it would effectively bankrupt said company?
Edit: I'm pretty sure if a company started selling cocaine in the US, something would happen to seize and stop that company.
This and criminal proceedings is really the only way corruption and malicious behavior can be stopped.
Even though it will harm shareholders, they still have a responsibility in attempting to limit the behavior. (Although from the boards perspective they'll claim they can do anything as long as they're there)
> Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight)
Generally speaking, I don't think it is. If you own a significant stake, you should be worried about jailtime. It's no different than if your dog bites someone.
Why not both? Punish those making the decisions with prison time, and those turning a blind eye because it was profitable with at least some of that profit.
It's not crazy, but many company divisions are set up in such a way to dilute guilt, and make people feel helpless about fixing issues near them. It will often be difficult to follow a paper trail and find that yes, X Y and Z were the people that decided on a criminally negligent tradeoff.
Just like the unread targets in Wells Fargo, nobody asks for the fraudulent behavior by name, but the incentives often make it inevitable.
In olden times, the monarch's wealth was the state's wealth, and vice-versa.
CEOs being shareholders has a similar problem, in that the only monetary punishment possible against the collective necessarily also harms those with no power to prevent the actions which were punished because it's not a democracy.
(One dollar one vote != one person one vote; also the workforce generally, not sure about Boeing in particular, have minimal to zero shares/votes).
For this reason, I favour a degree of personal responsibility for management all the way from line managers to the board… and for government officials all the way from parking inspectors to presidents.
The details of such a system to make it fair and balanced are an entire constitution, not something I'd be qualified to write, and definitely to big to fit into this comment.
The problem for Boeing is that this wasn't a one time thing. Two weeks ago it came out that they were using counterfeit titanium, then a few days later the CEO testifies that they had in fact retaliated against whistleblowers, then a few days later it comes out that they actually hid faulty parts from FAA regulators and then lost them. Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
"counterfeit" in this instance doesn't seem to mean that it wasn't titanium, or that it was the wrong kind of titanium, but that the origin of the titanium was falsified.
Can you read the author's mind? How do you know what they know?
It seems to me that perhaps all those things considered, they still think Boeing is at fault. It's not like you told us what the industry standard is, or any of that stuff.
The idea that an operation of Boeing’s size would not have the resources or wherewithal to spot check their suppliers on this sort of thing is just silly. The folks squeezing Boeing’s margins should know their suppliers are doing the same thing, and be suspicious of them. Either those folks were in on it with the suppliers or they just didn’t care about their own product’s quality. I’m not sure which I think is more likely. But either explanation is criminal negligence for this type of product.
Companies like Boeing generally can trace every material they get back to the mine or recycling center it came from. They won't buy if a slave was in the mine. Sure there are 7 layers of company between the mine and the company, but you still trace all those layers. This ensures not only do they not use things like slave labor, but also that the correct environmental controls are in place all down the line, and other such things.
If Boeing isn't doing the above they are at fault for the mistakes. No pushing this off on a supplier the buck stops at Boeing who could have solved this. There are other companies that do this correctly for the things they care about.
Of course you will not that many things use slave labor or don't have environmental control. The key is what companies care about.
I don't think anyone's contending that Boeing didn't have the resources. Like tons of once respectable titans of their given industry, they have had a rash of a new management structure that was of the "corporate pirate" variety, that shows up, acquires control, slashes costs across the board, does stock buybacks and bonuses regularly, makes products worse but continues trading on the name of the business for as long as possible, preferably for good but they're also quite happy to run a business firmly into the ground then sail away with their ill-gotten gains. And people contend that most of these issues, in one way or another, were down to that cost cutting. And I absolutely think it's criminal negligence but I also have severe doubts they will see any meaningful consequences. More line-item fines and firm finger wagging from the judiciary that they better not do it again, and I mean it this time.
Criminal negligence on the behalf of Boeing sounds like a stretch. If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource then everything would have to be done in house, and there would be no benefit to it. Are you criminally liable if your supplier commits fraud ?
> If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource
Yes, they have to verify. Verification is necessary whether or not the component is sourced through a supplier or in-house. Verification happens after the sourcing step. And yes, you are criminally liable in the supplier case if your supplier commits fraud and you knew about it, as is the implication here.
Are they legally bound to do the verification themselves ? Seems like it would be more cost efficient to outsource that as well, which would just be prone to fraud.
I did not see it mentioned where they were aware that their suppliers were committing fraud. At these large companies the executives only look at the spreadsheets and take the contracts as fact, regardless if a third party can deliver.
It would only make sense that they would do it. We test materials randomly at one place I went to randomly. It wasn’t every piece or every batch, but we definitely sent off materials to labs to get tested. We weren’t under the eye of anything like the FAA either, we were doing it to just ensure QA that out gearing was made with quality materials and not junk. It’s not cheap but it’s not outrageously expensive either to get metallurgy checked to make sure it’s meeting your requirements as per the mechanical design.
You are (or should be) if you took no effort to avoid the fraud for something this important. In IT, if you hire a company to handle your SSO, but don’t check that they have the required certifications verified by independent auditors for their own security you may well be on the hook when they expose your customers’ data.
I agree you should be. I don’t think our economic system enforces those checks. In practice auditing and pen testing are just farmed to the lowest cost place that says they will do everything. The system has no proper checks or balances against fraud.
You can’t outsource liability to a random Chinese supplier with no significant presence in US. Small Chinese company will sign whatever agreement you want and promise to do whatever checks you need - and then do absolutely nothing. What are you gonna do if something goes wrong? Sue them in Chinese court? Good luck.
If you want actual compliance, you have to send actual person (that you trust - it’s another big problem as that person can get bribed) in flesh and blood to verify everything and essentially be part of supplier team. That’s the only way.
I don’t believe you can do that outsourcing in good faith. However, assuming they did and were lied to, does that constitute liability I would see them arguing they are the victim.
Identifying material on receipt is trivial. There is a handheld scanner that you point at a piece of metal and it will tell you what the metal is, which spec it falls into, and the specific chemical makeup of the material when you pull the trigger. Using this equipment (it's called Positive Material Identification) for verifying material on receipt is part of every quality manual I have ever seen.
In other words, if Boeing was using counterfeit material, it was either deliberately ignored or deliberately hidden by falsifying records. It is not uncommon to get material that has a Material Test Record that is within spec (because not all suppliers are scrupulous), but a PMI result that is out of spec. If that was what was happening here (which is what I suspect), then those PMI results were thrown out and whatever was written on the MTR were transferred to the receipt report or accepted as-is.
"counterfeit" can mean many things, and in this instance it doesn't necessarily mean "the material was wrong" so much as "they lied about where they got it on the provenance paperwork"
In an industry where you are supposed to use QA and one of the most basic things is your material then it’s only common sense that you would randomly batch test the metallurgy on a supposed titanium shipment when it takes minutes to hours to check and “trust but verify” should be the basic SOP. I’m sure the details will come out. It’s a batch of 10 versus 10000 “widgets”. I’m not saying that’s what happened but if it becomes clear they skip critical QA tests like this then they are criminally negligent.
"So depending on the incentives and short term nature of the person deciding, there are a lot of incentives to not look too hard."
This gets at what has been reported as the fundamental problem at Boeing: It used to have a safety culture, when it was run by engineers. Now it's run by finance people, and it has a short-term profit culture. Instead of asking "will this plane be safe to operate for the next 30 years" it becomes "will this plane be slightly more profitable to sell next quarter". This is a major problem where safety is paramount.
Though in this case it was discovered because of corrosion problems on the parts that should not have been possible if they were made correctly. And they probably looked okay enough to not trigger any obvious ‘someone bought this off alibaba’ gut check.
To your point though, the material itself was correct to a rough level at least chemically. So most likely it was a problem with the forgings being contaminated or the forging process itself being slightly wrong (assuming it was a forged part, which it seems to be).
There is an old saw in manufacturing that “the only way to guarantee quality is to do it from the very start”.
The challenge is if you do that it is usually expensive.
Aerospace does all that paperwork nominally to try to guarantee that, and point the finger at anyone who tries to game the system.
But it is also eventually impossible to actually optimize cost without compromising the quality. So it has actual (usually visible) limitations in scale from a cost perspective. And if someone knows that what they are doing is wrong, of course they are going to try to stop a finger from pointing back to them.
so it’s inevitable when there is a lot of competition that suppliers run out of room to legitimately optimize, and they try to cut corners.
Shitty suppliers will try to cut corners right off the bat of course. Chinese manufacturers are notorious for almost immediately starting to put fake or out of spec components into things they make for folks once the initial ‘proof’ run is done and people stop paying as much attention. That is why Apple watches their manufacturers like hawks, including folks who work for them being onsite.
And there are a nearly infinite number of non-obvious ways to screw up the quality of something if someone is trying to cut corners, and from personal experience - Chinese manufacturers are uncommonly clever at it.
Same with wholesalers, subcontractors, and any other middlemen.
If the buyer is under similar pressure, they try to make up for it with ‘QA’. After all, even if the bag might be fake Gucci, if no one can tell, does it matter? Especially if it is half the cost?
Really lazy post-facto inspections or performatively checking paperwork are also a part of it, instead of actually verifying everything was done correctly from the start of course. Because having others believe it too is important for everyone.
That is inevitable in a ‘race to the bottom’, enshittification, etc. type scenario. As actually verifying quality is expensive.
As things get crazier, inevitably that QA gets looser and looser, and more and more corners get cut - until something breaks.
This is all due to the excessive low interest rate environment going on for so long, and the rising rates combined with a need to keep increasing stock prices causing a huge squeeze. Plus corporate idiocy and incompetence.
It’s no surprise the larger corporations are more visibly being screwed here, due to scale.
They aren’t allowed to be smart in the same way that small companies can, because they have to comply with all the other rules too even when they’re dumb.
In many cases a smaller company can actually produce a higher quality product for less, because they can hire people who are very competent but couldn’t pass a corporate hiring filter, or that hates the corp world, or that wants/needs something that the corp world can’t handle (like a competent boss, or flexible vacation).
They can also have folks like anal retentive asshole supervisors that would never make it in a Corp world, but could produce a better product. Or a chill supervisor that can enable creativity that the Corp world is currently squashing with anal retentive asshole supervisors.
Made worse by massive BS being normalized (political + advertising situation right) emboldening predators and scammers, and post COVID burnout.
Not that small companies are panaceas, they suffer from their own problems. But they do tend to be different - like capitalization issues.
It’s quite the perfect storm of factors. It’s actually pretty amazing Boeing is going through this - though this is a repeated pattern for them frankly - because they already have such a well protected and near monopoly position. Near as I can tell, they don’t really need to be shaving pennies.
And to answer the prior post - I doubt Boeing ‘knew’ (as documented) about the counterfeit parts, because that would require exceptional corporate stupidity. So definitely not impossible.
But there were definitely folks in key positions that knew it was a risk and was likely going on at some level, and chose to ignore the risk due to other pressures/concerns. Good luck nailing them on it, however, as I’m sure some scapegoats are being found as we speak. That’s why they’re going after whistleblowers too.
Personally, I imagine it’s even worse elsewhere, it just isn’t getting the press because it is at a smaller scale.
This is all part of so many folks doing the wil-e-coyote run off the cliff but don’t look down maneuver. Boeing is being forced to look down.
Others will too, sooner or later. No one wants to.
>> Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
This is part of a larger degradation of rules-based order. Companies do not fear regulators and certainly have no moral or ethical qualms about violating established rules. Ignoring rules is now an expected part of business. It is rewarded. We champion "disrupter" leaders who openly defy authorities and tear apart established norms of behavior. That needs to change. Shareholders need to stop rewarding such activity.
> Shareholders need to stop rewarding such activity.
And how, exactly, do you expect that to work? Shareholders are going to pay attention to what's profitable, and basically nothing else.
No; the government needs to stop turning a blind eye to such activity. We need the relevant enforcement departments to be better funded, the policies to be in favor of cracking down on violations of all types, and a mandate from the highest levels not to be shy about seeking the heaviest penalties even from the biggest, most lobbyist-endowed offenders.
There was never a rules-based order on the whole. Something like that has existed for various brief moments in time in various industries throughout the 20th century, but it has never been the norm. We as human society are fighting the same fight that we have been fighting since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Progress is measured on the scale of decades at best.
I agree with what you think needs to change, but I don't think anyone should be confused about corporations in the past somehow being more ethical than they are today.
> Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
Yes, that's what happens. If you leave a couple of bad apples in a barrel they off gas ethylene and spoil every apple in the barrel. You have to regularly get rid of bad apples before they spoil the bunch.
It's such a great metaphor, it's too bad it's so widely misused and misunderstood.
And importantly, when viewed with this understanding of "organizational ethylene", it's obvious that anyone who resists, obstruct, or disagrees with routine removal of bad apples is probably themselves a bad apple.
Ok, but usually, as we've seen, *gestures around*, the problem with the American justice system is if _theres a lot of crooks_, it absolutely just tries to normalize what the crooks are doing.
There's obviously no scape goat in Boeing. IT's systemically corrupt, which means Americans will happily try to make it look like that's normal and reasonable and "the best we can do". If not outright find the most dull, corrupt white guy and hold him up as a paragon of the perfect saint.
Right, but everyone from the individual prosecutor to the bureaucrats at the DOJ to the regulators at the FAA to members of Congress HAVE to be thinking "what if the next fuckup involves a plane falling out of the air and 200+ deaths, then it's my ass on the line" at this point.
FAA is probably thinking that since they're the ideal scapegoat in such a situation, but I don't think any member of Congress gives a shit about how many Boeing kills, as long as Boeing continues to pay them off.
Congress cares about votes more than payoff from Boeing. So long as voters don't care about how many Boeing kills congress wants the Boeing payoff. As soon as congress thinks voters care about Boeing congress will turn on Boeing.
Do you care about "Elevance Health" - they larger than Boeing according to the fortune 500 list (20 vs 52 in 2024) - but I hadn't even heard of them until I looked up the list just now. I have no clue what the company is up to (health informs my guess, but it is a guess). Companies like them can continue to do whatever and voters won't care.
Congress will do the usual: accept Boeing's money and overlook the issue on one hand, and pretend to the public that they're doing otherwise on the other.
Unfortunately, Americans and the peoples of many democratic countries have given up on verifying if their elected officials are actually doing what they say they are, so taking a ~~bribe~~ campaign contribution and lying about it is a medium-high gain and low risk activity.
As a bonus, you can then use those contributions to market yourself and your lies to the same voters even harder!
But voters care about a multitude of issues. People care much more about things like abortion, immigration, healthcare, gun rights (or control), and yet none of those are seeing any movement or chance of causing meaningful threat to their voter base.
It'll take much much worse than a couple more crashes for the Boeing issue to eclipse all those things to become an issue people actually change their voting over.
If a plane full of Americans falls out of the sky and kills everyone on board, and it turns out to be because of negligence at Boeing, and it happens close to an election, that will definitely be used against any incumbent politician who could be portrayed as responsible.
Politicians want to avoid a scenario like that. But it does require several things to line up for that scenario to unfold, so they have no incentive to care beyond what is necessary to prevent it.
How many of those leaders are steeped in the old ways of airlines, back in the 70s/80s/90s when 1000+ deaths a year was the norm? I wonder how many of them believe air travel has become too safe, that there is profit to be made by backing off the recent improvements.
Well, these "plane falling out of the sky" fuckups have already happened[1] and the culture there still has obviously not changed. Maybe it's going to take a "plane full of Americans falling out of the sky" fuckup event.
I don't think the problem is crooks in the justice system, but crooks throughout the system, which is a monster that feeds itself - with money you buy power with power you can make more money.
This is what you get in a society in which money is the only thing that matters. This is a stupid idea to even write here let alone build a society upon.
This is why people love to hate Elon Musk. Having a despicable character at the head of Tesla is the only thing that makes it possible for people to care about anything that Tesla or his other companies does.
Boeing would be huge news, and would be in much worse trouble, if there was a flamboyant bad guy to hold people's attention. Being dull is an important quality for corporate leadership for exactly this reason.
Good but I have a feeling this is yet one more of those maneuvers where everyone says their line in the movie but in the end nothing is actually done other than some slap on the wrist for show. Too many powerful people and interests for Justice to work.
And no, unfortunately this is not a tinfoil hat view. There is a long history of Boeing getting away with murder already.
Of course not. That "massive responsibility" is just baloney. Short of very obvious and egregious fraud (and even then, only if you piss off the wrong prosecutor or Congressperson), there's no penalty for being a criminally negligent CEO beyond losing the job (which usually comes with some sort of buy-out, so boo-fucking-hoo).
And there are a lot of them to charge. Start with the last two CEOs, add in the CEOs/COOs for Boeing Commercial aircraft, the test pilots, the program director(s) for the 737 Max, the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy, and then move all the way down to the Spirit and Boeing employees cutting deadly corners on the production line.
Let out the engineers and workers. The management always justifies its salaries with their responsibility, then at least when it comes to that, they've got to stand for it. Also it's important that the penalty is no cash fine in any way. They usually got an insurance for the case.
Yes, this might be driven from a punishment thought of justice but it is important that there is an educational correction in the business to no longer calculate human life in terms of money which one may balance against.
"Just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Your manager being a piece of shit forcing you to skip on safety does not invalidate your guilt in skipping on safety.
A whole team circumventing the official process and forgetting to put back bolts they took out isn't something that can be brushed aside as "they were just pressured by management". They made a very serious mistake and all of them deserve at least a suspended sentence for it - it literally could have killed 100+ people.
A whole team of engineers designing a critical system that can crash a plane with optional redundant inputs on inputs that are known to get blocked/fail are irresponsible.
In my experience, large corporations that want to get away with breaking the law have a structure something like this:
* An "everyone was doing it, and everyone knew" layer of junior employees aged 20 or so.
* An obfuscation layer, comprised of several levels of middle manager who regularly shift roles, companies and countries.
* An "I had no idea this was going on, and would have stopped it if I'd known" layer. This is the CEO and suchlike.
If the criminal behaviour comes to light, the top-layer employees pretend not to have known about it; the bottom-layer employees say (accurately) that everyone was doing it and they thought it was normal; and the middle layers split themselves between the two, relying on forgotten e-mails, miscommunications, and placing the blame on people who aren't around any more.
This works for some things, but not for everything
If it was your job to tighten the bolts and you didn't, that's one easy slam dunk coming your way. And they're right.
Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
> Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
Hell, I'm not anywhere close to aviation, just have an interest in it, and even I know that AoA sensors are prone to failure (relatively, for an aeronautics component), can easily get blocked by external stuff, and multiple crashes and accidents have happened due to that. It's nothing short of criminal negligence to design a system using only one.
That's why aviation has very strict reporting and documentation requirements, everything should be traceable. Of course Boeing failed at that too, with them being unable to say e.g. who actually worked on the famous missing bolts. Send them all to prison for egregious negligence, and maybe the other workers will start refusing to do subpar and deadly work.
And this is how executives escape responsibility when they are being paid specifically to be responsible. The case against the test pilot goes through court, and the test pilot is convicted and goes to prison, and now fewer people are willing to be test pilots. Meanwhile, the CEO ends up settling with the justice department, maybe has to sell a mansion, maybe wears an ankle monitor for a while.
As a licenced professional engineer, I disagree. The whole value of my licence is that I have the power to take responsibility for my work. If you strip me of that power by making excuses for irresponsible engineers, it errodes the value of a responsible professional.
Test pilots have warned about this issue, we have emails proving it. Specific people have decided to release a dangerous plane, and those are people with decision making power higher up the food chain.
> They might have been under pressure (why else would they validate a failed test)? And you can't blame people for not being a whistleblower.
When your literal job is to test critical safety features, yes, you can be blamed for failing at it. Especially when people died because you knowingly failed at your job.
What's next, not blaming architects for designing an unstable building that crashes down? Not blaming a chemical factory's security inspector for OKing dumping of toxic waste into a river?
From experience with government contracts, aircraft certifications, and listening to directors speak, they will tell people whatever needs to be said to get the airplane to pass a final check to get a certification.
One exchange I overheard with some details changed:
>you will get a warning light here but this is the end of the fiscal and we need to ship airplanes. It will break on landing then take one week to get the replacement part and we have the maintenance contract anyways. By then we will do the work to fix the issue before anyone else actually flies this aircraft. You can retest it before final delivery and you will also get a bonus or we have more test pilots who hate being drone pilots.
Some Boeing test pilot was boasting about using "Jedi mind tricks" to mislead the FAA. He was one of people responsible for convincing the FAA to drop mandatory training requirements linked to the MCAS system.
Not really, it's just bad management, they took unjustified risks for cost-cutting, and the system, both government and market, is punishing them for it at the first sign of something bad happening.
You could argue that the punishment is not harsh enough for deterrence, or not fast enough, but that's an issue with the government, not the market. Furthermore, the main reason why they are not more afraid of market repercussions is because they know the government needs them, they created a monopoly.
The system is mostly working as it should. The malicious players were found relatively quickly, through a mix of whistleblowing and the first relatively minor accidents getting a lot of attention (fourth estate and all).
Don't get me wrong, we need to keep making things better, there's so much work to do. But if the system were not working we would just have not heard about any of this and accidents would keep happening routinely while robber barons get filthy rich (literal violent monopolists, not plain billionaires), like 100 - 150 years ago.
The market can't do much in this case, as within the US, Boeing has a monopoly, and internationally its only competitor is Airbus. And there is a very strong "lock-in" in regards to pilot type rating.
So while there is some competition, the airline industry is very much controlled and regulated by government.
And here in particular there was a lot of failures in particular with the FAA allowing Boeing to self-regulate (when has that ever worked?) and then the DOJ failing to prosecute after the two deadly crashes.
It really seems like a systematic problem, not an exception to an otherwise healthy situation. Time and time again we see a lack of consequences to corporate greed when those actions are literally killing people.
You're quite correct that things are not as bad as during the robber barons era, but that is a pretty low bar. We can do much better.
I agree with all your points. And there is indeed a fundamental systemic issue with how private companies that deliver critical social services interact with the government: healthcare, education, energy, banking, logistics, real-state...
In my anecdotal experience, the EU social-democratic model seems to be the most competent one right now specifically for this problem: more of these should be state-owned. Don't get me wrong, this is a crappy solution too, you are making a lot of sacrifices for it, but generally, these state-owned corporations do seem to be better at delivering critical services, and often (unintuitively) more efficiently than private ones.
My point was that this is not necessarily about "late-stage capitalism" (as I understand it), this was not a case of the open market harming society. Because indeed Boeing is a state-supported monopoly and that's the root of the issue, at least in theory capitalism abhors monopolies.
This happened because Boeing has both the duty to make the most money possible, and is protected by the government because they offer a critical service. There is something fundamentally broken in this incentive model. Either let them play in the open market and encourage competition, or make it non-profit and serve the state directly. A mix of both is a recipe for disaster.
Do you think that issues being discovered in 2018 with 2 planes and 346 people lost and systemic safety issues persisting since then qualifies as "relatively quickly"?
You are right, that is not remotely "relatively quickly", it should have been prevented.
My point was generally that the system (and specifically the current flavour of capitalism) is not fundamentally broken, it has the right shape of components and they are working roughly how they are supposed to, to balance each other. If it was broken, things would be way worse, as we have seen throughout history. But there's so much to improve.
I guess I am looking at it from a too wide lens. Sure things are working much better than they used to a century ago, such disasters were largely accepted as a normal cost of being productive, there was no system to correct them. But that's no excuse, I do agree with you, this Boeing mess was not acceptable, the system needs to do better.
I believe the argument being made is that in "early-stage" capitalism a company could not afford that type of management, as it would immediately loose the market due to "true" competition and other "quality" options being available.
I agree. Perhaps I don't have a good understanding of "late-stage" capitalism.
I think that the current version of capitalism is "working" (very relatively), exactly because there is substantial oversight from the government and the media, and there should be more.
An open and fair marketplace generally seems to be good at improving lives at scale. But I don't understand why so many people have this idea that it is a fundamental law of nature, that if you remove government intervention it will naturally become a more open and a more fair market.
An open and fair marketplace is quite artificial and needs so much enforcement to keep alive. Futhermore, even if it is good in general, there are a huge number of exceptional emergent behaviours that are bad and require intervention.
We clearly see from history that without oversight, the economy does not become an efficient market. It consolidates into rent-seeking monopolies, often defended and expanded by violence, controlled by an elite with a self-reinforcing long-lasting hold on power. In other words, different flavours of Feudalism, not always focused on land assets.
It is, and it was, it always decays down to a gilded age. The only golden phase, was when it- ironically was in systemic competition and feared for its life. You need facism/socialism behind a information curtain, to get great capitalism and golden generations. Standalone, its minimal effort and monopolies all the way, decaying to some "medieval aristocratic thats the natural order peasants" state.
Its not a capitalism thing its a.people under pressure from above thing. Look at the example of the Concord and the Tupolev TU144. The Concord was a great plane the Tupolev was a Soviet knockoff and deathtrap.
But capitalism is structured as a system where people above put lots of pressure on people below. There are other systems that are not so top heavy that may alleviate the people-under-pressure problem. Soviets were very top heavy too.
There have been no comparisons made, so it is not clear what you are trying to say. The idea that capitalism is compulsory is equally unclear.
Capitalism allows private ownership of capital, just as (to introduce a comparison) you are allowed to have a birthday party, but you in no way have to participate. You can choose to forgo capital ownership entirely, you can hold public ownership with other people who wish to share in the ownership (e.g. co-ops), you can do just about anything you want. Even within the USA, you can find people doing all of those things.
What you probably cannot avoid is trade. I expect that this is what you really have in mind – it is oft confused with capitalism for some reason. Indeed, a human surviving in complete isolation from other humans without being able to share is an incredibly challenging feat, and, frankly, isn't realistic for anything more than a short period of time. Trade is not a feature of capitalism, though. Trade is something else, and is much more fundamental.
I think you are focused too much on theory and hypotheticals and not reality, that’s where I’m at.
In reality, we all participate in capitalism. We all have to deal with this system, you can’t avoid it. It imposes its hierarchy on you from the day you are born, and getting out from under it is a lifelong endeavor. Nothing theoretical about the constant pressure coming from the top down. Maybe it’s not prescriptive of capitalism but you can’t deny it’s an emergent feature of the system, as if it’s an intended consequence. Cant really convince me at this point it’s not, sorry.
No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
It is an emergent feature of trade. Realistically, there is always going to be someone who has something you want more than what they want from you, creating an imbalance. Trade and capitalism are not synonymous, though.
Consider the most primitive type of trade humans engage in: Sex. There is little question that the most sexually attractive "at the top" have way more power than those "at the bottom". People will fall over themselves for a chance to please the "hot girl" all while the "homely guy" doesn't even get the time of day. This is the same type of hierarchy that is featured in the larger discussion taking place here...
...Yet is not capitalism. If you do think that kind of sexual hierarchy is capitalism or a product of capitalism, you are not using a definition that aligns with any common usage. Sex appeal is not traditionally considered capital. Capitalism wasn't even invented when these human sexual dynamics came into existence.
> No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
Your words are poorly chosen. I do my best to infer, but there is only so much to work with.
Yup, in theory, capitalism shouldn't even have hierarchies, but in practice people hate managing capital so hierarchies emerge anyway. We're reminded of that in another discussion that came up on HN[1]. Life is much, much, much easier and more enjoyable when capital is someone else's problem – when all you have to do is show up and give some time.
You'll notice that the capitalism detractors never advocate for greater capital management abilities. It is always to take away such ability so that they can feel less guilty about their choice in not wanting to manage capital. Can't really blame them. Managing capital truly does suck. But it is interesting nevertheless.
“Do better” with no extra object specified means the implied subject should improve with respect to itself. Grammar only requires an extra subject in instances such as “Do better than …”.
As a further example, someone talking to me might say “spend less time arguing with randoms on the Internet and performing other pointless pontification” and an listener/reader literate in the language being used would know not to need nor expect an extra subject to be specified.
You’re claiming that capitalism is “bad” because there’s a hypothetical you imagined where there could be better outcomes?
Everything is “bad” by that standard.
Eg, “Airplanes are bad because they don’t operate based on anti-gravity warp drives! If airplanes want to shake that reputation, they need to do better!”
…do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
Can you show the court, on the dolly, where dspillett said it was absolutely bad?
IIRC the closest I came to that was suggesting it had a reputation for doing some bad things.
Saying something can improve is not the same as saying it is absolutely bad in all imaginable ways, unless you live in a fantasy world where there is no “meh” only perfection and anti-perfection.
> do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
Not much, beyond a small and rapidly diminishing supply of hope!
Imagine a world where a company /can/ be put in jail.
Companies like to be treated like natural people when it suits them, but then when it comes to liability and accountability things conveniently don't apply.
Need to figure out how to do that without punishing the (presumably) innocent employees.
Putting a real person in jail prevents them from going to work, so jailing a company might be sanctioning it.
The thing is, companies are composed of people, and those people can just go to another company. Real people are composed of organs, but those organs can't just move to other bodies and commit the same crimes.
So, companies are just not people and the whole idea is stupid.
Corporate personhood is critical because how else can the company enter into any contracts or employ people.
Corporate misbehaviour can be punished by fines, jail time for execs, and revocation of their business license - probably the closest thing to jail time
We could....just define in law that corporations can do those specific things, without explicitly tying them to a notion of "personhood".
I agree that "corporate jail" doesn't make much sense, at least not in a direct analog to human jail. I think the closest you could come to "jailing" a corporation would be for the government to take temporary control of it, go through it with a fine-toothed comb to eliminate the corruption and malfeasance, and operate it for the benefit of the nation as a whole for a specified period of time, then re-privatize it in some manner as long as it wasn't some kind of a natural monopoly or necessity of modern life.
That's basically nationalization, and in many countries people are extremely allergic to a government that likes to just take things.
You need a bulletproof judiciary, that can rule fairly on which companies are taken over and which aren't, and all sorts of checks and balances to ensure that the government can't just abuse this ability to nationalize all the things.
Even though I proposed the idea of putting companies in jail, I was doing it tongue in cheek.
Ultimately fines are probably the only way to go. But the fines must be big enough in order to ensure it's an effective deterrent. It must hurt the company enough that it cannot just be considered the cost of doing business.
If a company is fined enough that it must actually close down/declare bankruptcy, then that's probably the few eggs you need to break in order to make the omelette I guess. A bunch of presumably innocent employees might be hurt by this decision, but overall it's for the greater good.
Are you really trying to claim that the only thing that lets corporations do their thing is a legal fiction that was dreamed up by Congress? And further, that Congress could not have just enumerated corporate rights separately?
I wish there were more details. Does anyone know of any reporting that gives more information? That is, the article says this:
> Under the 2021 deal, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute Boeing over allegations it defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration so long as the company overhauled its compliance practices and submitted regular reports.
So, if they want to prosecute, I'm assuming it's because Boeing didn't adequately overhaul its compliance practices or that it didn't submit regular (or truthful) reports. But what are the specifics of how they failed?
I also get frustrated reading these comments here, which are basically "Boeing bad, they only care about execs and shareholders, they ruined their engineering culture." I agree with all of that , but when the government wants to criminally charge someone or a company, they need some specifics (i.e. fraud). It's not enough to just say they had a lax culture or valued profits over safety. Again, to emphasize, not saying that's the case here, I just don't understand how folks can form an opinion on criminal prosecution without even knowing what specific charges are being proposed.
I’d feel better if they start by grounding everything with a Boeing logo first, and then went through whatever years-long legal process this will certainly be.
The problem is that a few crashed Boeings could lead to massive distrust of airline travel across the globe. Is that a larger long-term economic drain than grounding Boeings for a year? I'm not even sure how you'd begin to model that. Heck, I'm not sure we collectively know how to evaluate the risk of any given Boeing falling apart mid-air. It's probably still very, very low, but it might not take much to put people off flying completely.
I can certainly happen, but it’s highly unlikely with Boeing. They are “too big to fail”, government taking over for a while isn’t out of the question though if this gets much worse. A court appointed CEO whose primary goal is to get QA and QC back into the corporate structure rather than as being looked as only an unnecessary expense.
Okay, sure, prosecute the company. Better yet, zero out the investors and nationalize it. But more importantly, prosecute the executives who made these decisions.
Nationalizing Boeing will never happen in today’s federal courts. Temporary oversight like with the banking disaster? Probably. I think court will require a clean sweep of the board and new executives who “promise” put quality back as a goal for the company. Boeing was fine before it can happen again. I don’t know why this the end of western civilization for so many on HN.
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger
It used to be that companies existed to transfer value to shareholders by doing something. In the case of Boeing it was making airplanes. They build you an airplane, you pay them for it, they had a list of rules to play by in order to reduce the costs of making that plane in order to make a profit.
Boeing's incentives are to transfer as much value as humanly possible to its shareholders. They've made sure that large parts of their C-Suite, managers, executives, etc. are in on this by giving them shares.
Those people have decided they don't want to play by the rules anymore. There's little incentive for them not to. If the Biden administration gets voted out in November, most of these regulatory and law enforcement pushes you've seen here of late (Adobe, TicketMaster, etc.) are going to go away because the people in charge at companies like Boeing have participated in regulatory capture. Thus, there are no more rules.
You have to start throwing those people in prison (or worse) for the rest of their lives and make compensation in unrealized gains illegal if you want this to stop.
I agree, but I think we need to distinguish between the people and the corporation, and stop thinking that the way we treat people (such as the Boeing executives) will solve the system problem. We absolutely need to stop treating corporations like people -- and I'm not talking about taxation. I'm talking about the way we think and talk about corporations the same way we talk about people.
When we domesticated animals, we had to be very cognizant that they were not people. For example, bulls are extremely aggressive and extremely physically powerful. You can allow a person into a room with a baby in a crib. There are exceptions, and they are treated as exceptions. With bulls, you do not allow them into a room with a baby in a crib, by default or by exception. It would be considered criminally irresponsible for a person to say, this bull is an exception, I've had it for five years, it's a great friend, and based on its past behavior I'm going to keep it in the same room with my infant child. You just wouldn't do that.
We have enough experience with corporations to know that we need to start treating them less like humans and more like a species of partly domesticated but still extremely dangerous animal. Based on long experience with them, we should expect corporations to predictably lie, steal, and destroy whenever it is in their financial interest. We don't need to get rid of them (we don't have any good replacement for their role in the economy) but should structure the way we treat corporations around our knowledge of their destructive tendencies.
Our long experience with cattle has taught us ways to protect humans from their destructive tendencies while still extracting what we want from them. We keep cattle out of our residences, we castrate most of the males, and we manage intact bulls in a way that ensures human safety while allowing them to serve their necessary functions. We design fences and other management technology with their aggression and power in mind.
It is long past time to treat corporations the same way. In many small ways we have done this, but always held back by the human metaphor. Corporations are in a sense made of humans, and we feel a sense of respect towards fellow humans that we then unconsciously, and with horrible consequences, extend to the corporations they are part of. We need to consciously and decisively put that behind us. You don't have to be cynical about humans to accept that corporations are greedy and untrustworthy. That is their nature. How you square that with the nature of the humans who run them is irrelevant, as irrelevant as bovine neuroscience is to knowing that we should keep bulls out of our nurseries. We don't have to agree about humans to agree about corporations and stop giving them free reign to wreak havoc in society.
Watch the bond rating. They're at the very verge of junk right now, and if they slip into BB territory that might trigger a whole bunch of stuff to happen very quickly.
so much of US flight infrastructure is based around boeing and they're literally falling apart in the sky
nasa wanted competition with spacex so badly that they've pushed boeing to strand two of their astronauts in space
companies that fail due to inherent internal structural and corruption issues need to be broken down and sold off, but we can't even do that because the US is somehow reliant on it
why must we write out our own downfall through corruption with failing companies? i bet there's thousands of upstarts that would take 1/1000th the funding given to boeing for a lot of their important projects that would come up with genuinely innovative solutions to problems we never knew we had if there were actual competition in aerospace
This is what happens when you eliminate consequences for bad behaviour in any industry private or public You can only kick the can down the road for so long.
It’s only going to get worse and in 10yrs we’ll be wondering why it’s even worse than it is in 2024 while people will still defend how necessary it is to national security to prop up a half useless megacorporation, when it’s actually harming it
Let them face risk, let the good/important parts be sold to better leaders, there’s plenty of money floating around to dump into the market to let competition take over the second there’s an opportunity for a new lively major business sector.
Honestly, we should be at least considering nationalizing Boeing. There's a strategic need for us to build planes, and the corporate leadership continues to show they will not emphasize engineering and safety.
That sounds like a good idea until you realize that the military does is state owned anyway. The private sector supplies everything. But it's not like the military makes any of its own stuff. They buy all their trucks, guns, body armor, ammunition, radios, helicopters, boats, etc. etc. from private companies.
I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done. It's that we don't have anything like a state military manufacturing industry currently, so it would be a new and significant undertaking to nationalize a company like Boeing.
Owning the primary arms contractors would make it easier to shift production into shells, rather than negotiating long term deals before breaking ground to expand production capacity
"In May, officials determined the company breached a 2021 agreement that had shielded Boeing from a criminal charge of conspiracy to commit fraud arising from two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 involving the 737 MAX jet.
Under the 2021 deal, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute Boeing over allegations it defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration so long as the company overhauled its compliance practices and submitted regular reports. Boeing also agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the investigation"
The 2.5 billion sound like a bribe to me, to avoid criminal charges. And Boeing thought that was enough, but it seems they did not assume that the FAA was also serious, that they still need to "overhaul its compliance practices and submitted regular reports".
edit: we are talking about potential manslaughter in hundreds of cases here, because this is what a criminal investigation could lead to, not a fine for violating arbitary regulations
If the executives where smart they would have left after getting the deferred prosecution agreement. That way they could claim that it wasn't in their hands anymore and therefore they are not responsible.
Deferred prosecution should be eliminated and if a company is too big to fail then it should be nationalized and the execs should face prosecution.
> The 2.5 billion sound like a bribe to me, to avoid criminal charges. And Boeing thought that was enough, but it seems they did not assume that the FAA was also serious, that they still need to "overhaul its compliance practices and submitted regular reports".
To be honest it might have been just enough, since nothing was done. If they had been serious before, they would have planned some sort of check or control as a follow up to that 2021 decision, but they didn't.
But then doors started falling from the skies and people started to have questions about what kind of shoddy plane building they were allowing.
That happens all the time. You find a good lawyer, the lawyer goes to the prosecutor and says "this is going to end with a fine of about x, why don't we save ourselves work and my client just pays x straight away?" If the assessment is sound and the prosecutor would rather do something else...
That never happens after an indictment without a plea.
I'm not aware of it ever happening before an indictment, either. People don't always know that they're under investigation, and, even if you know that you're being investigated, many (if not most) investigations don't end with indictments -- they're quietly dropped -- so it can be quite dangerous to do what you suggest, as it makes an indictment far more likely.
It's not a bribe, or even like a bribe, unless the individuals on the government side of this deal were personally enriched from this settlement (they weren't.) That 2.5 billion was paid to the government, not to the justice department personnel.
We regularly use fines to punish businesses, usually in combination with conditions for regulatory or legal compliance. I don't recall people calling it a bribe in these cases. This happens in the EU a lot.
Fines for murder cases are not that common. Boring killed those passengers, a criminal investigation would have looked into that. Sure looks like a bribe.
Manslaughter != murder, thats a difference between 3 years and 15-to-life in prison (not in Norway though).
Also, don't fall under the spell of some absolute fairness of our current societies, of course ultra rich are treated differently than regular Joe (or ie former presidents, prime ministers, olympic gold medalists etc), at least until mass media gets in. And Boeing is a strategic military provider not only to US, more a typical 'too-big-to-fail' category.
But if it would be 3 years per manslaughter, it would add up to life in prison, since we are talking about hundreds of dead people. (but no idea if this is how it would work, I know it is like this with other cases).
And surely we know that society is not fair. That does not mean, we have to accept that.
In Germany, there was a murder case of someone driving a car with over 100km/h through a city and killing a pedestrian. Not manslaughter, murder. Who conspires to maximise profit when putting a new plane design in the air by circumventing safety rules, lying to regulators and pilots, shutting up whistle blowers and in general ignoring safety during construction, aims at killing people. That's premeditated. That's murder.
Probably not. _3u10 is right, this is only a fraud case. And Boeing is also providing military hardware, so under full government protection. Trump would pardon them directly, Biden just not foster a DOJ the investigation, while the three letter agencies will do their usual work to keep the civilians at bay. At least that's what I would suspect.
This is what happened in Canada when SNC Lavalin paid millions in bribes to Gadaffi in Libya. They fired the attorney general who wanted to prosecute them.
A certain nation has a lot of earthquakes. They also have a notoriously corrupt construction industry. Bad combination.
Whenever they have a temblor, buildings fall down, and people die.
There’s usually one or two high-profile prosecutions, with a lot of saber-rattling, but the hubbub dies down, pretty quickly, and it happens again, the next time there’s an earthquake.
A self-described “family friend” said that the Boeing whistleblower (1 of 60?) said that. Also, as anyone who works with mental patients can attest to, “if I die, I didn’t commit suicide” is not anywhere close to as ironclad as it sounds on the surface… (I.e. 99% of those claims were false)
I'd recommend doing cursory research before confidently claiming something as fact on the world wide web.
I learned about the dangers of spreading rumors from Veggie Tales when I was five. We all make mistakes, but there's really no excuse for peddling secondhand information when established facts are an internet search away at all times.
The Hacker News platform actually goes to great lengths to avoiding the reception of upvotes as a motivation for posting, and I'd recommend also de-prioritizing the importance of internet points and to instead rely on intrinsic motivation.
And yet, there are upvotes and they’re displayed to the poster. Also, I used the word ostensibly to imply I may personally have some other motivation. But in either cases, the broader point still stands: there are diminishing marginal returns to being more correct.
Such a point of view is depressingly self-centered, and I don't see any merit in discussing anything with someone who is more interested in the attention of everyone other than the person they're actually conversing with, especially when they value imaginary internet points above truth.
It’s not self centered at all. People act because there is some benefit to them in their action. You suggested I take an action without providing a convincing benefit. I was actually hoping to help you, by explaining why the types of suggestions you’re providing to people are likely to fall upon deaf ears.
"authorities will handle it" is a fallacy that is demonstrated to be wrong in practice. The theory of how societal functions operate is not at all how they're implemented - lack of evidence, corruption, and incompetence all contribute to there being little justice for anyone.
Not sure if you're trolling or just very naive. Knowing and having proof are two different things.
Does Russian journalists and political activists falling out of windows en masse tell you anything? Or would you say they were all experiencing mental health issues because there is otherwise no proof they were murdered?
I'm not trolling, and I'm sorry if it came off that way. As someone not living in the states, I simply had more faith in the US Justice system compared to say, Russia.
> Reporter Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post stated that Reagan's administration was well aware that the materials sold to Iraq would be used to manufacture chemical weapons for use in the war against Iran. He stated that Iraq's use of chemical weapons was "hardly a secret, with the Iraqi military issuing this warning in February 1984: 'The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it ... and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.'" According to Reagan's foreign policy, every attempt to save Iraq was necessary and legal.[4]
> According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories.[6]
> Declassified CIA documents show that the United States was providing reconnaissance intelligence to Iraq around 1987–88 which was then used to launch chemical weapon attacks on Iranian troops and that the CIA fully knew that chemical weapons would be deployed and sarin and cyclosarin attacks followed.[263]
Japan in.1935 and Germany in 1939 also seemed none of our business.
Our world is too small and interconnected, and the US is too big and interconnected to the world, for anything to be "not our business", whether we want it or not. Especially a major war in Europe next to our miliray allies' borders.
Regional land grabs are a constant throughout history, including in America’s history. How did we end up with California again?
The fact that there was a war worth fighting 80 years ago doesn’t mean that the US needs to police every border in the world in perpetuity. Your own example proves it. Imperial Japan, alone, wouldn’t have been any of our business had it not attacked us directly. China and Korea could be speaking Japanese today and it would be fine for Americans.
The problem is not even a land grab per se (even though it does cause problems). The problem is that the grabbing party, having succeeded, does not stop, and develops an approach to international affairs that ends up being problematic in the long term. Germany in 1939 did not limit itself to acquiring Alsace and Lorraine, and even to grabbing most of Poland (along with its then-ally USSR), and even to grabbing most of France. Same for any historical empire. (The US in this regard is slightly different, e.g. it did not directly grab Texas, and bought large parts of California. Having grabbed the entire width of the continent, there remained little desire to grab the inhospitable south or north.)
Your logic may work with e.g. Taiwan: I don't think China would go on an expansionist rampage once it grabs Taiwan (or "returns", some would say). Should the US be just okay with that?
I don’t think we have any indication that Russia is more like Nazi Germany than say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the US stealing territory from the Spanish. There are historical reasons why Russia would want to control Ukraine that don’t imply that they would want to keep expanding into Germany and France.
I think the notion that Russia seeks to take over the world is just Peddled by a bunch of Cold War holdovers who don’t have a job anymore. Whats shocking is that many people who should know better have bought into Dick Cheney-ism.
Germany and France, maybe not. But parts of Poland were also historically controlled by Russia, as was Finland, and the eastern Baltic coast, countries like Lithuania or Estonia. All these countries are NATO members.
I don't think that Russia is trying to take over the world, Genghis Khan-style. But I see a strong tendency in the current Russian regime to restore the area of control and influence that the USSR used to have, and it's not a small and inconsequential alteration of the world map.
Yes, because USA is a founding member of NATO, and, along with other NATO members, is obliged to protect any NATO members under attack with military force.
(As a homework, consider the consequences if the USA refused to follow on with this obligation.)
There are historical reasons why Russia would want to control Ukraine that don’t imply that they would want to keep expanding into Germany and France.
But they do imply they would want to start messing with Poland and the Baltics (and Russian leaders have stated as much openly).
I think the notion that Russia seeks to take over the world ...
No one is saying Russia seeks to "take over the whole world". But it is openly seeking to subjugate a country of 44 million people to whatever extent it can get away with, and has issued recent threats to other countries (see above) it has invaded previously, some multiple times.
Those countries weren’t part of nato when we signed the treaty. Whatever sense the original treaty made, countries have treated nato membership as a way to outsource their defense to the US, and the treaty makes no sense today.
Ukraine is our business as it’s a bulwark against invasion of the rest of Europe who are very much our allies. Not standing against wanna be conquerors gets you more would be conquerors. He has no intention of stopping at Ukraine and has stated he want the old USSR back and more as well as annihilation of NATO. We don’t need another Holocaust which he would be more than happy to set up for Ukrainian citizens.
Correct. International relations exist in anarchy [1].
> British media has attacked Indian companies for doing business with Russia, but no one has a problem with Apple doing the same
Uh, India has been given a free pass on Russia by the West. China makes no effort to contain its frustration at the double standard.
> last time a dictator wen gallivanting around Europe I can recall was when Putin invaded Georgia
If you recall, the crux of the debate was whether Georgia is geopolitically Europe. It seems we concluded, once and for all, with no uncertainty, “maybe.” (So we got Ukraine!)
(Side note: “Please don't comment about the voting on comments” [2].)
How? The Allies defeated Hitler and more or less said no more wars of conquest, especially in Europe. That precedent was cemented with MAD and the bipolar world order.
Putin is relitigating that line. If anyone has a say in that (and the firepower to back it) it’s the Allies. (Or at least the ones that survived.)
Hitler was a unique threat that doesn’t justify an overarching global military regime that interferes with regional conflicts. Nazi Germany was used as precedent to justify countless mistaken wars in the second half of the 20th century, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The US has spent trillions of dollars since 1945 intervening in border conflicts that weren’t in America’s interest.
> US has spent trillions of dollars since 1945 intervening in border conflicts that weren’t in America’s interest
I agree. Which is where Europe being different comes into play. Europe has a history of multilateral border agreements with external guarantors, from the Treaty of Westphalia (the actual one, concerning the Holy Roman Empire, not the meme) and Congress of Vienna to the Paris Peace Treaties and Maastricht/Lisbon. It’s also a clear American economic and security interest.
I’m not arguing for or against any specific action here. Just that if there is a group with a precedent of checking imperial dictators in Europe, it’s the Allies.
If Europe wants to check Russian expansion, they can do that. But it’s none of America's business. I don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow.
>But it’s none of America's business. I don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow.
It does affect someone in Ohio if any single government manages to get control the entire European Plain from France to Russia plus the current territory of Russia because a country with those natural resources and that population stands a decent chance of becoming stronger than the US -- maybe not right away, but after a few decades -- so it is good realist politics for the US to try to prevent that from happening. (Americans are significantly more secure than they would be if the US had only the second strongest economy and the second strongest military in the world.)
The reason the US shouldn't spend much money helping Ukraine is that the current Russian government does not want to expand that far (much too risky for its tastes) and that it almost certainly would fail if it tried. (It also should have stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan.)
> If Europe wants to check Russian expansion, they can do that. But it’s none of America's business.
Neither Russia nor China seems willing play by the rules of a rules-based international order. OK, fine, that puts us into power politics — which means we get to make it our business, for reasons we deem sufficient. We're not bad guys for preferring, and exerting our muscle to seek, a Eurasian continent that's not dominated by China and Russia (and Iran), whose governments think it's OK to imprison or defenestrate dissenters or to blow up insurrectionists' planes in mid-air. Does that touch off Russian- and Chinese cries of "unfair" American hegemony-seeking? Tough shit — FAFO.
It’s as much our business as Hitler was. We didn’t go into WWII to stop the Holocaust, we went into stop Hitler.
> don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow
Ohio is an industrial and agricultural export powerhouse. 17% of its exports go to Europe, $1.1bn of which to France [1]. Even if we reduce this to a pockebook issue, Paris falling into Moscow's sphere of infuence makes Ohio poorer.
More pointedly: we made a promise to Europe, through NATO and various agreements, to protect it from Moscow. If Putin's in Paris, we're treaty bound to fight him. (And if Ukraine is a borderline issue in America, you know Western Europe won't be. Dithering on Ukraine increases the chances we get sucked into a massive foreign war.)
> It’s as much our business as Hitler was. We didn’t go into WWII to stop the Holocaust, we went into stop Hitler.
Hitler plausibly threatened American security. I don’t see any indication that Russia could do the same. Realistically, Russia can’t even take over Western Europe.
Look, we know where playing world police—treating every border aggression like it’s literally Hitler—takes us. For the last 80 years we have pissed away trillions of dollars and countless American lives defending borders few Americans could find on a map. It’s not worth it, and most of the world (except Europe who gets to free-ride on the security we provide) hates us for it.
> Ohio is an industrial and agricultural export powerhouse. 17% of its exports go to Europe, $1.1bn of which to France
If we stopped dicking around being the world police, why would a Russian-controlled France stop buying stuff from Ohio?
> Hitler plausibly threatened American security. I don’t see any indication that Russia could do the same
How? Hitler wasn’t in Cuba [1]. Putin challenges America directly in a way Hitler never did prior to our entering the war.
> It’s not worth it
I agree in general. Not in Europe, and not with Putin.
> why would a Russian-controlled France stop buying stuff from Ohio?
Same reason Europe and our allies in the Middle East preferentially buy from us. Commercial ties follow spheres of influence. It’s not some random coincidence our trading partners in the Middle East, Africa, Caucasus and Southeast Asia track our military alliances.
> NATO—it’s obsolete
You’d prefer another European free for all? Because again, when that happens, it’s obvious we’d get involved. You may prefer we not. But we would, and then you’ve got a major foreign war on your hands.
As will this comment thread. We saw the same rhetoric on Holmes and Bankman-Fried. Once they were charged it was obvious they’d get off. Once convicted that they’d get a light sentence. Once sentenced that they’d have their sentences shortened, et cetera.
It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right because it feeds into a type of cynicism that has always been part of human nature in every culture since the beginning of history.
>We saw the same rhetoric on Holmes and Bankman-Fried. Once they were charged [...] It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right because it feeds into a type of cynicism
The gp's key argument for Boeing is based on the "Too Big To Fail" idea. I.e. Boeing's deep relationship with the government.
So far in this subthread, nobody has actually engaged with that specific part of his argument. Mentioning Theranos Holmes and FTX SBF who are _not_ deeply intertwined with the government like Boeing isn't really a counter to that.
The cynicism comes from previous "too big to fail" situations such as 2008 Financial Crisis and nobody from Goldman Sachs, etc going to prison for fraud. Fines and financial settlements as punishments -- yes. But jail time for those bank executives -- no.
It points to a subtle part of gp's comment I think replies are overlooking which is "corporation" vs "employees":
- Boeing Inc the corporate entity may be criminally charged and found guilty. The corporation then pays a punitive fine or settlement. (The proverbial "financial slap on the wrist.")
vs
- actual Boeing employees are found guilty and sent to jail. Gp's "this will go nowhere" frustration is based on this scenario which history has shown to be very unlikely to happen.
> Boeing is based on the "Too Big To Fail" idea. I.e. Boeing's deep relationship with government
These are two separate concepts and you’re right, nobody has directly addressed them. Let me try.
Too big to fail “is a theory in banking and finance that asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the greater economic system, and therefore should be supported by government when they face potential failure” [1]. A key part to it is financial institutions can’t meaningfully go bankrupt—they don’t materially have tangible assets, they just fail. (It’s why bad banks go into receivership.)
Boeing is not a bank. It’s not built almost solely on confidence. It, like the auto manufacturers, can go bankrupt without threatening its production. (GM and Chrysler went bankrupt [2]. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean we raze the factories.)
Put succinctly, Boeing is NOT too big to fail.
It does, however, have a deep and diverse relationship with government. Boeing has, by design, employees in every Congressional district. It’s strategically important to the U.S. and its allies and possesses an industrial-strength wheel greaser.
That broad base of employees protects the plants. But as we’ve already seen, financial failure and even prosecution of senior leadership doesn’t blow up the plants. The strategic importance, meanwhile, is a two-edged sword. Boeing has power because it’s useful. Not only is that usefulness preserved through reörganisation, but if someone can claim it’s increased through it, the usefulness becomes a source of weakness. (Nobody cares if Chik-fil-a is mismanaged. They do when Boeing creates a national embarrassment at the ISS.)
The only part that remains is the wheel greasing [3]. In this, Boeing is far from unique. It’s also unprotective against financial failure. Because, again, the wheels stay on if Boeing is reörganised. That may not be true if it continues on its current path.
Especially as we’re lining up for a potential war in the South China Sea, Boeing’s military-industrial ties may be what forces those who’d prefer to look the other way to stare down the problem. We can’t win that war, if we have to fight it, with Boeing a shitshow. And we’re more likely to have to fight it every time Beijing sees it’s a shitshow.
So yes, Boeing does have a deep relationship with government. But that doesn’t protect it from criminal prosecution or financial failure, and in some cases, may encourage the people pining for its reörganisation.
Dissecting the origin of "too big to fail" and the wikipedia cite isn't relevant to gp's argument because many journalists/observers in media already use "too big to fail" to characterize companies like Boeing:
>Your counterargument is there are memes that say Boeing is TBTF, Q.E.D.?
I wasn't making any counterargument.
I can 100% agree with you that TBTF was originally associated with the banking industry but simultaneously show that this isn't the meaning that others are using for Boeing. This seems like an obvious fact from a neutral viewpoint of seeing how language usage evolves (e.g. see the google examples) so not sure why stating it is controversial.
> this isn't the meaning that others are using for Boeing
But that’s why it’s wrong. TBTF only works because financial institutions are built on confidence. You can’t reboot them through bankruptcy.
Boeing can be put into bankruptcy to facilitate reörganisation without causing ripple effects. (Like GM and Chrysler were.) TBTF as a general-purpose meme fundamentally doesn’t work.
As someone who is starting to work on a defense product, I can tell you that defense products are also built on confidence a lot more than you think. You have to make a lot of claims that your users can't test, so they rely on things like being able to audit your code and testing processes and/or your reputation. You also have to be able to make promises that your products and support (or something compatible) are going to be around for 10+ years.
Boeing has already lost some of this trust with the issues in the consumer aviation sector, but the space and defense side of Boeing is still going strong. A bankruptcy could risk Boeing's space and defense lines.
One big fault here is with Boeing's board. Boards are supposed to control the short-term greed of executives and protect stock value. Boeing's board should do a prophylactic firing of the C-suite (replace the CEO with someone who will fire the rest), putting the engineers back in charge, but I doubt they will do that.
Yes, all commerce involves confidence. The difference with banks is both sides of their balance sheet are not only entirely confidence based, they’re leveraged to the hilt on it.
Boeing can lose and re-gain confidence. (Albeit, at great risk.) A bank can’t; if it ever loses it, even momentarily, it fails. That is a dynamic that has increased as our world grew more interconnected, a dynamic we failed to fully appreciate until ‘08.
> bankruptcy could risk Boeing's space and defense lines
How? Worst case, guarantee BDS’s obligations as part of the bankruptcy.
Put another way: does restructuring threaten their defence line more than the status quo? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a valid question. (I’m familiar with their space lone and am halfway to writing it off.)
> big fault here is with Boeing's board
Totally agree. They seem clueless, more afraid of the bark than the bite.
> Yes, all commerce involves confidence. The difference with banks is both sides of their balance sheet are not only entirely confidence based, they’re leveraged to the hilt on it.
I'll give you that defense is not in the same league as banking if you'll give me that defense is not in the same league as SaaS (even enterprise/F500 SaaS). By the way, defense companies do get a lot of leverage based on their federal contracting lines. It's 2024, a bank can get you leverage on a ham sandwich, and companies are usually pretty big users of it (they are encouraged to be).
> Put another way: does restructuring threaten their defence line more than the status quo? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a valid question. (I’m familiar with their space lone and am halfway to writing it off.)
Yes. Defense contracts in general cannot be awarded to firms in bankruptcy or that have been in bankruptcy in the last 5-10 years. That is because financial solvency threatens acquisition timelines, and in a bankruptcy, anything can happen.
That's a rule, not a law, and I am not sure about how exceptions are made. And existing contracts will be fine, but new contracts will just not be awarded.
>Boeing has already lost some of this trust with the issues in the consumer aviation sector, but the space and defense side of Boeing is still going strong.
Going so strong that:
* The USAF really hates Boeing for pulling some Serious Legal Assfuckery(tm) to drop Airbus for the tanker program, only to then fail to provide tankers that can pump gas.
* They've failed to secure all but one fighter program sale, and that was only because Lockheed Martin (F-35) succeeded so hard they couldn't succeed any harder.
* They were laughed out of the bomber program, especially after the tanker failures.
* They keep crashing V-21 Ospreys, their most recent episode resulting in nationwide groundings in the US and Japan that were only recently cleared.
* The Starliner is increasingly looking unfit for human occupation.
The only reason Boeing is relevant in space and defense anymore is sheer inertia.
I think the comment well addresses why this situation is different than the situation with banks - Boeing’s manufacturing and employees would not be harmed by a prosecution of its management.
Indeed, criminally charging upper management hardly counts as the business “failing” at all.
> Especially as we’re lining up for a potential war in the South China Sea, Boeing’s military-industrial ties may actually be what forces those who’d prefer to look the other way to stare down the problem. We can’t win that war, if we have to fight it, with Boeing a shitshow. And we’re more likely to have to fight it every time Beijing sees it’s a shitshow.
So this is a very interesting question, but it's not clear to me whether it can be resolved until the shooting actually starts. WW2 was a huge driver for fixing broken things (USN torpedoes didn't work reliably at the start, for example, in ways that only appeared under live conditions!). The Iraq war was on the other hand a huge opportunity for grift. Pallets of dollar bills vanished. Someone made a lot of money from non-functional mine detectors.
What's the difference? Well, the Iraq and Afghan wars were completely irrelevant and invisible to the Homeland, just a money and lives sink shown on TV, while WW2 kicked off with a bit of Actual America (Hawaii) being bombed.
The China war will probably have no real effects on the US until the GPUs stop arriving, at which point most of NVIDIA's $3tn market cap vanishes and Americans feel it in their retirement accounts. Then, and only then, will people take it seriously enough to overcome corruption.
> continuity of supply is why forcing them into real non-operating bankruptcy is inconceivable. Nothing more onerous than Chapter 11
Correct. But that’s still bankruptcy. It wipes out the shareholders and lets the creditors, which presumably includes the government, reörganise the company as it sees fit.
(I’d start with cleaving BDS from the rest of Boeing.)
> it's not clear to me whether it can be resolved until the shooting actually starts
Do you have a source on the torpedo story? Hadn’t heard that one before, and it sounds fun.
I recently read about how “the US went into [WWII] with fewer carriers than the Japanese, it was the US that was almost out of carriers in the Pacific in late 1942, and the US that had suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses—not the Japanese” [1]. We still won, as the author puts it, not with “the fleet that [we] started the war with,” but “the fleet that [we] ended it with.” How? Because “by December 8, 1941, the United States had already undergone 3 cycles of investment in only 8 years, with the last being one of the largest peace-time defense investments in US history.”
Put another way, it’s not clear we can wait until the shooting starts. What’s germane to this discussion is less whether that is true, but whether those in government with power over Boeing believe it is.
> China war will probably have no real effects on the US until the GPUs stop arriving
I’m not sure. Unless we try to fight it à la Ukraine, and it’s unclear that’s even an option, I expect the opening moves will involve the deaths of American soldiers. That brings it closer to “a bit of Actual America (Hawaii) being bombed.” (I assume a strike on a CVN would incur similar emotions, though that’s just a guess.)
> I recently read about how “the US went into [WWII] with fewer carriers than the Japanese, it was the US that was almost out of carriers in the Pacific in late 1942, and the US that had suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses—not the Japanese”
I don't dispute your overall point, but I don't think this is right.
I couldn't read your source without a signup, so I went looking around. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1353080/wwii-japan-us-ai... the Japanese lost 14 carriers in the war, and ended with 18 in service, so they lost 14 out of 32. The US lost 5 and ended with 34 in service, so it lost 5 out of 39. That's really hard to turn into "the US suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses".
As I said, I don't disagree with your overall point.
As to the torpedo story: IIRC, there were two problems. The torpedoes themselves had an issue. I don't recall exactly, but it may have been that they didn't run at the depth they were supposed to. The second problem was the detonators. They didn't trigger if they hit square on, but only if they hit at an angle. So the better the shot on a ship, the less likely the torpedo was to actually explode. They didn't get consistently working torpedoes until September 1943.
Honestly worth the sign-up, but here you go in the meantime [1]. (Never mind, Substack got smarter.)
The greater loss ratio claim is limited to aircraft carriers in 1942. America lost as carriers as Japan that year and wound up the year in worse shape, numerically, despite Midway. What got us through wasn’t a decisive naval battle in June of ‘42 but the production infrastructure laid down in the decade prior. We built our way out of the hole, because in attritional war, stocks are less important than flows.
Classic example of "anything inadqeuately tested turns out not to work": the torpedoes were "too expensive" to test in realistic scenarios. So they weren't. That meant a cascade of problems - wrong depth, early magnetic detonation, failed impact detonation - all of which showed up in live fire as "miss", which could be blamed on individual commanders until the problem became too big to ignore.
There's a very high chance that something which is a critical fancy weapons system that has not been used in anger will turn out not to work in actual combat.
Not sure if the last paragraph was sarcasm. One third of global shipping passes through the South China Sea. If war breaks out and it becomes unsafe to ship along those trade lanes, it will be absolutely cataclysmic for the global economy, and while the US will be more insulated from the worst shocks than many other countries, Americans will absolutely feel it hit their wallets on day one.
My comment isn't coming out of thin air. I'm trying my best to look at the big picture. What I see is that the military industrial complex is bigger than anyone (including myself), can comprehend. They are an immovable force. If they go down, so does our country. It's that simple. This isn't eBay or some couple billion dollar fraud, we are talking about. It's much much bigger. This is trillions bigger.
You're referring to compartmentalized departments. No one person or internal unit can truly understand the inner workings of this machine. This is by design.
Bankruptcy? There's indirectly trillions of dollars on the line if Boeing goes bankrupt. This is why I'm telling you, nothing significant will happen. Don't be an contrarian, just think about it. "Too Big to Fail", it's a real thing bud.
Bankruptcy means the shareholders and potentially some lenders are wiped out; it doesn't mean the company ceases to exist.
In a Boeing bankruptcy, roughly $100b of its paper money market cap may be "wiped out" (but for the company to go bankrupt that paper money would have to be worthless anyways), but the factories would keep producing. No "trillions" are on the line, even in that extreme case.
The company and its assets don't just evaporate when some executives go to prison.
> want to be pro-war, pro-profit, pro-death & destruction
Wat. I said Boeing is comprehensible and able to be held accountable. I also think they should, and will, be criminally charged, and that those charges carry material risk of bankruptcy. You, on the other hand, cast Boeing as a mythical beast unable to be comprehended much less checked.
We’re not discussing war and peace. But between those arguments, I’m not sure how you pull off this pivot.
isn’t doing nothing actually MORE harmful for this military industrial complex? who cares if boeing is part of the industrial complex if it’s manufacturing junk? garbage in garbage out…
It's not manufacturing junk. It's manufacturing weapons of mass destruction at a massive scale. A few of their planes malfunction, ok. The bombs they produce are a different story. They work, and they fuck up thousands of lives in a short amount of time.
@JumpCrissCross I can't reply to your sub comment, but yes, Boeing manufactures weapons systems. It's their bread and butter. You thought they only built airplanes and partially functional spacecrafts?
That doesn't include their innumerable contractors and suppliers, spread out across the country. In many cases these are the major employers in that region and their collapse would trigger the collapse of that whole local economy. The economic harm of the big MIC companies going kaput would be immense.
> their collapse would trigger the collapse of that whole local economy
Yes, but why would they collapse? General Motors also had a web of suppliers when it went bankrupt. Preserving the value of a struggling company while it reörganises is why we invented modern bankruptcy.
Not for nothing, but Bankman's exposure was 110 years. He got 25 and that is after a massive public outcry, due to glove treatment resulting in him[2] and his parents[3], apparently, trying to derail investigation. Normally, as I understand it, the system would clamp down on anyone trying to subvert it. So the guy did get a light sentence given the circumstances.
Holmes I had less exposure to so I don't want to rely on just search engine since I am not sure what I am looking for.
<< It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right
I would argue that it shows simple pattern recognition. Some of us are just tired and therefore cynical. Join my podcast to go over trending ww3 news.
I want white collar criminals to see justice, but sentencing in the USA is crazy extreme. 25 years plus a lifetime ban on securities trading is just fine.
Has it occurred to you that the sense of throw-your-hands-in-the-air, nothing-will-ever-change hopelessness you're evincing here is exactly what they want?
Could you please stop feeding flamewars by continually responding to things like this? I appreciate your more substantive contributions but you're doing too much of this.
Obviously you can't post like this here. Since you've done it repeatedly, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Think about it this way, yeah, Boeing is powerful and part of the MIC.
But if you're top dog, would you want your flunkies making bad guns (just an example) when your country is concerned about a potential war with a peer?
No, there was a downturn in both the defense and the aviation industry that hit Boeing like a double whammy. It laid off tens of thousands before the acquisition and tens of thousands afterwards, for a total of over 100k laid off in the 1990s (Boeing has 170k employees today). They used this opportunity to disproportionately target older and more expensive employees which led to many of their best engineers getting canned.
Everyone likes to point to the McDonnell Douglas acquisition as Boeing’s downfall but the truth is that Boeing executives had already gutted the company.
In fairness, everyone probably likes to point to that because it was one of the primary conclusions reached by investigative journalist Peter Robison in the book "Flying Blind."
eBay got away with it because some of the people involved were CIA officers working to collect data from eBay's customers. https://youtu.be/GnQMuS87gLw
Judaism is a religion. The people (at least the ones I interacted with) couldn't be more different both genetically and culturally. You are making it sound as there is some kind of conspiracy that the "Jewish people" are executing. Whereas in reality, it just happens that some Jewish people got a shit ton of power.
OP is simply stating a fact. US MIC and Israel have been in a deep embrace. Nothing was said by OP by "driving the ills of the world". Yours is a tactic to prevent even simple statements of facts if it is against your 'perceived' "collective interest" of a minority.
I am interested in learning more on why IDF has deep ties to Boeing. Such a small country, how is it that it has captured so many behemoths. Should we just ignore this rather strange structural phenomena in geopolitics and national interest (speaking as an American here ..)?
In fact the entire world is curious to know exactly who is the premier "ally" in this strange US-Israel alliance. Who is the boss, an inquiring American wants to learn.
I think it’s fascinating how political criticism of power and corrupt relationships between states has been tagged as “antisemitic”.
I would think that the label would be reserved for statements against the Semitic peoples, based on their heritage and culture? Not the overtly corrupt and often internationally illegal actions of their government?
It’s a very dangerous idea to put a nuclear capable nation above criticism.
Right? I have always thought it's unfair that you cannot criticize a country and the actions of its government because people will label you Nazi or antisemitic.
I couldn't give a damn about the religion or the culture. But Israel government apparatus scares the shit out of me
Unfair in ways including those which result in the death of thousands of women and children and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.
Gaza becoming a humanitarian tragedy on the scale it has is largely enabled by Israel being largely above criticism.
I don’t know what the best solution is to the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I doubt it includes dropping 2000 lb bombs on civilian infrastructure. I support the eradication of HAMAS because I believe they are not only inimical to Isreal but also to the Palestinian people they claim to “protect “.
It’s perfectly clear by now that Hamas is more than willing to sacrifice every Palestinian life to meet their political goals, which are not well aligned with the Palestinian people. However, Indiscriminate measures do nothing to abate the conflict, only to fuel it. Bombing civilians is the best recruiting tool that Hamas has. To bereaved Palestinian families, the war sells itself.
I shudder to think that indeed, the Israeli government knows this. It follows then that this recruitment effect is probably not an undesirable side effect, but rather an intentional goal.
I think this shares some commonality with the trickle-treatment of Ukrainian military support from the USA. We are best served by a slow, agonizing, expensive if not catastrophic defeat of Russian military capability. A quick win would not be a win for America, or for NATO. Unfortunately, this means that Ukrainian soil will be fortified with blood for decades.
I think for Isreal, the situation may be similar. Under the current playbook, “Winning” in Gaza means killing every person that can be induced to fight. This is distinct from breaking public support for HAMAS. It is a genocidal extermination of every person with a will to fight, through what amounts to a systematic process of provocation.
That said, while I don’t agree with the methodology, I do understand the reasoning and agree that the goals can be seen as worthwhile if not necessarily worth the cost of achievement.
>asserts nothing will happen while citing a case where execs went to jail as proof. It seems logically inconsistent.
The gp wasn't being logically inconsistent if you see the rhetorical structure of his comment: anticipate and pre-emptively state the counterpoint and then counter that counterpoint.
- predict other side's possible counterpoint : "But Ebay execs went to jail"
- counter that counterpoint : "Yes but Ebay is smaller company that's not deeply interconnected with the government"
- gp's conclusion: Ebay situation is different enough that it is not proof that Boeing execs will go to jail
Readers' can have 2 different interpretations:
- I disagree with gp that Ebay and Boeing are different situations --> therefore gp is logically inconsistent
- I agree with gp that Ebay and Boeing are different --> gp is logically coherent
>OP is the one who brought that up in the first place, but they are using it to show it won’t happen. Which makes no sense.
Because the OP's reasoning is Boeing's "deep ties to the government" -- is what keeps it from happening.
I don't agree with OP. I'm just explaining what he wrote.
The readers' different reactions to OP's comment basically depends on how whether one buy's into the idea that the government's dependency on Boeing (military, space launches, etc) gives it an unstated immunity. The judgement of "logic" to his argument hinges on that.
Yeah it’s not proof the Boing execs will go to jail, no one said it was. OP is the one who brought that up in the first place, but they are using it to show it won’t happen. Which makes no sense.
I dunno, if it were me making this argument, I’d cite a case where a company was criminally charged and nothing happened. That would be a much stronger argument than using rhetoric.
This is actually pretty dope. I didn't know something like this existed. Sounds like a tactic a natural psychopath or manipulator would use. I'm neither. Maybe I used a bad example out of ignorance. Let me try again.
Boeing will not face any consequences just like no one at Ford Motor Company has ever faced any consequences for dumping toxic waste in New Jersey in the 1960's. This has been a continuous issue for decades, and no one to date has been held to account.
Boeing will not face any consequences, just like no one in the Sackler family did any time for actively promoting opioids as a harmless pain killer. Please google the article, "NY Times 2023 - An Appeals Court Gave the Sacklers Legal Immunity. "
I can keep going. I'm not crazy or trying to trick anyone. There's messed up things companies do, and no one is held accountable. If I was a someone's handyman and hurt a client or a clients neighbor I would be held to the full extent of the law. There are families, companies, and institutions out there doing terrible things, with no consequences. Why? Because they hold all the power. That is a fact.
The real info in this thread is in the flagged and dead comments that were removed by moderation "for your safety". To see those you need to be both logged in and have showdead set to "yes" in your settings.
With the Boeing 737 MAX, it was actually the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration that first decided to ground the plane. The American FAA was reluctant to ground the plane, and only did so after most of the rest of the world had done so.
This is a case of American regulators putting an American company's business interests above safety. If it had been a foreign aircraft manufacturer, I doubt the FAA would have waited to ground the planes.
I regularly see this kind of logic, that in order to face off China we should let our leaders/corporations exploit workers, pollute, commit crimes and behave even worse than China.
I don’t know what is the name for this faulty programming but it is very disturbing. I guess this is some kind of default behaviour of nationalism?
It's called leveling the playing field. Done by either raising the low parts, or shaving the high parts. Not everybody agrees about the "fairness" of either approach, especially when the goal is to make the playing field "fair".
The playing field is level. With a level playing field, the multi-billion dollar corporation will obviously trample the individual. They are more powerful than you.
It's a manipulation technique. Not for US citizens, but citizens of other corrupt countries.
Imagine that you live in a country where everyone is corrupt and everyone lies. If you don't lie you're an idiot.
Then you read news about horrible US government failures. If the problems are so large that they cannot possibly keep lying and they openly admit to their failures, then what fucked up things still are there that they don't admit to doing? China at least manages to keep it shush. Therefore, whatever they do, shit at least doesn't hit the fan.
It's very difficult to imagine that a different society might have different standards regarding things such as transparency.
If the US does not get Boeing under control, trust in all US companies will go down further. It makes a ton of sense, just from a self interested financial point of view, for the US to fix Boeing with compulsion - even if it means breaking it up and putting executives in prison.
"On 22 January 2009, Tian was sentenced to life imprisonment, while other Sanlu executives received sentences of five to fifteen years. Two other men were sentenced to death"
Changsheng Biotech Vaccine Scandal (2018): The chairwoman of Changsheng Biotech, Gao Junfang, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Kanghui Pharmaceutical Case (2007): The general manager, Ni Chunlin, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical Case (2006): The factory director received a 7-year prison sentence.
Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Case (2007): Two executives were sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment).
They aren't death sentences due to messing up airplanes due to mismanagement or cost cutting, but actually poisoning people on a mass scale or knowingly making bad drugs.
It's not comparable. Those things are more like the Sackler opioid case.
It is comparable. Boeing intentionally and criminally withheld information from regulators. They knew that MCAS would not be approved by regulators, intentionally ignored safety and quality concerns, then released it to the public. It was a criminal act which caused the death of hundreds of people and destroyed the reputation of the largest exporter in the US. If the equivalent happened in China there would be severe consequences. The CCP would not tolerate losing the reputation of their largest export industry. China is run by the CCP, not company executives. The executives would be thrown under the bus without hesitation.
I suppose I shouldn't have said 'not comparable' because everything is comparable, but I still think what the Chinese nationals did to get life terms and executions was much more severe criminality.
A couple of hundreds dead due to bad engineering is better than outright poisoning people by substitutions or killing people on a mass scale with bad drugs.
> A couple of hundreds dead due to bad engineering
In the Chinese cases I mentioned, the executives did not personally kill people. They only committed fraud, which put millions at risk of death when using their inferior products, which is comparable to what Boeing did.
The executives intentionally and knowingly committed fraud, which put anyone at risk when they fly in a 737 Max (millions of people per year). It was not the engineers fault. The engineers and quality inspectors concerns were ignored by management. The executives prioritized stock price over safety. I am not exaggerating when I say the executives committed fraud. That is the view of federal prosecutors.
In total 346 people died, and there would have been more deaths if the entire global fleet were not grounded for several years by international regulators. It's not just the Max. Anyone who flies in any Boeing aircraft is at risk if the company is committing fraud at this scale.
Expropriate the company, at least 51%, take control and let public officials (knowing the US way, it will be some army general) set up checks and controls where necessary, then sell the shares (maybe keep an 'oversight' part, like 10% to keep a state official on the board).
Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight), the state will have access to privileged company information which will allow the prosecution of human responsibles, top executives will be sacked (and their comp reduced by half since their comp is in stocks) and maybe the company will start on good base again.
> Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight)
I'm not opposed to this. But I think our corporations should be regulated by the government, not by shareholder oversight.
After all, shareholders are essentially powerless in the current system. Each individual shareholder's power is far too dilute, many people owning shares through pension funds don't even know they're shareholders, the minority shareholders have no way to contact each other to coordinate, and it's completely normal for the likes of Apple to spend billions on secret projects and the shareholders to only find out after the fact.
Hell, Google even has three classes of shares - one with no voting rights, one with 1x voting rights, and a special class with 10x voting rights for Larry and Sergei ensuring they have a majority of the votes even without majority ownership.
If we think shareholders are supposed to be providing oversight to companies, they need vastly more power to do so.
> After all, shareholders are essentially powerless in the current system...
Not exactly true. And both the institutional shareholders and ultra-rich shareholders have the experience, resources, and connections to police corporate behavior far more tightly than they usually do...
But why should they bother policing behavior, when the maximum penalty for malfeasance has been wrist-slaps? (And similar for the banks and bond markets which large corporations rely upon.)
Vs. if the major investors knew that major corporate malfeasance could and likely would cost them $billions - they might very quickly grow more active and assertive, the Boards which they elected would not be passive rubber-stampers, and corporate executives would face regular hard scrutiny.
But all that would be real work. Vs. hiring lobbyists and schmoozing politicians, to make sure the maximum penalty is "wrist slap", is far easier.
> And both the institutional shareholders and ultra-rich shareholders have the experience, resources, and connections to police corporate behavior far more tightly than they usually do...
They really don't, at least not in the case of index fund investors like Vanguard and BlackRock. Have you ever read about their operations? They run a very lean ship. The only reason you're able to invest in index funds with 0.005% fees is because they have essentially nobody on staff, at least compared with the number of companies they invest in. They definitely can't do the kind of investigation and policing you're talking about without radically changing their pricing
(and if they did do that, a competitor would come in offering to skip the inspections and go back to 0.005% fees, the money would flow there in droves, and we'd be right back where we started. The fundamental issue here is that passive investors don't care and you can't make them care.)
>> They really don't, at least not in the case of index fund investors like Vanguard and BlackRock. Have you ever read about their operations? They run a very lean ship.
> The only reason you're able to invest in index funds with 0.005% fees is because they have essentially nobody on staff, at least compared with the number of companies they invest in. They definitely can't do the kind of investigation and policing you're talking about without radically changing their pricing
I think this is exactly what needs to happen. Why should passive investing pay off? The vast amount of 401k money that has poured into the stocks behind the S&P 500 with no strings attached has incentivized a lot of bad behavior and made just about every US citizen with a retierment account complicit. Bad corporate behavior _should_ hurt the bottom line of the owners; it _should_ cost more to invest; investors (all of us) _should_ worry about whether a mutual fund is protecting their investment by divesting from companies that engage in criminal recklessness; our government _should_ disincorporate companies that put lives at risk, especially when those companies are major defense contractors.
Sure, that's how it should work. But how do you intend to make that happen? A double-digit percentage of households has a double-digit percentage of their net worth in index funds. If you say to them, "we're suddenly going to increase your fund fees by a couple orders of magnitude so we can have better corporate governance", you're going to be torn apart by an angry mob (or at least, voted out and replaced with someone who will not do this).
We are, unfortunately, in violent agreement. What's to be done? Tell the world about it, hope people wake up? It's better than nothing. I'm starting with people I see face to face, and the tiny corner of the internet I occupy.
What about dismantling the stock market? These are systemic problems. Free market economy works just fine without stocks. I can't prove it, but I feel there would be plenty of funding organizations to fuel your tech unicorns if the collective wealth of the America wasn't being spent and stored in this house of cards.
You are basically saying there should be stock market but only for ultra wealthy folks. And others have no right investing or expecting higher returns.
And you are defending the people's retirements be able to be gambled and speculated by the ultra wealthy folks that are the major shareholders.
On a tangent, I also think monarchy results in better management of the asset that is the country than democracy. The leader is there for life, the country is his sole property and thus incentivized to improve it and views the country as his life's work. (Obviously there are plenty of exceptions.) On the other hand, democratical leaders more often than not tend to view presidency as a means to acquire wealth, lifetime immunity, power and reputation in a short amount of time. Once elected for a term, they can engage in however much legal corruption they want, they'll be gone in a few years anyways. The POTUS poses an exception in that the country itself is a monarch and a hegemon over the rest of the world. Meanwhile especially third world countries, but even developed countries like Canada and many in the Europe have presidents promising the heaven in the election season and keep being as corrupt as last president once they are elected.
Draw the parallels with Venture Capital, board directors and whatever else you want.
> monarchy results in better management of the asset that is the country > than democracy. The leader is there for life, the country is his sole > property and thus incentivized to improve it and views the country as > his life's work. (Obviously there are plenty of exceptions.)
Obviously. The history of monarchy is full of bad heirs, succession crises and aristocratic disputes over legitimacy. Under monarchy, you don't get a say in the fact that your king is AEthelred Unraed, Tarquinus Superbus, George III, Ivan Grozny, or Leopold II. Say what you will about republican systems, they have their own issues. But monarchy, as a system, is just an absolutely miserable form of government. I wouldn't dream of trading the flawed republic that aspires to respect my rights for the caprice of a monarch. I don't know where you got your romantic ideas about monarchy from, but, my friend, read some history!
Oh, I do read history. Obviously, the worldview, ideology and character of the monarch makes a big difference. Back in the day they understood these three to be all influenced by a man's religion. There have been many merciful, goodwilled monarchs too, admittedly less of them in the European continent. Not to mention that your administration had far less power over you in the pre-IR (Industrial Revolution) era. I imagine there had been many settlements throughout history who had no idea in which country's borders they currently are living in.
Nah, the stock market is a good idea. Nothing about the idea of a stock market precludes holding owners responsible for the behavior of the company they own. Appropriate regulatory action against large, misbehaving corporations would make irresponsible investment a bad idea, and index funds less of a safe bet as a result.
Neither Index funds nor ETF's are likely to do the research & oversight stuff themselves, true.
But that is quite different that saying that the Indexes & ETF's would for-sure sit on the sidelines if some more-active large shareholders were pushing a credible plan to force better behavior down the throats of a major corporation's C-suite. And the Indexes & EFT's backing such a measure - which effectively costs them 0.00000% to do - would likely prove the critical thumb sign from the Imperial Box.
Sure, but that is the consequence of no consequences. It would be silly to be a quality fund when not voting or selling on risk analysis can't possibly cost an index fund more than they save.
> not voting or selling on risk analysis
I would be grateful if you could elaborate on this. Is this a strategy for a fund to make money that I don’t understand?
The way I read GP's argument, the (yes, very diluted, but real) "oversight" would come from the fact that every shareholder would have to base their bidding price for e.g. Boeing shares on, among other things, the probability of this company being devalued by 51% following a scandal like this.
If (and I understand this is a huge "if") this kind of action was more common, you might think twice before investing into any companies that run a serious risk of direct government interaction to protect the public.
The thing is:
Imagine there are two planemakers, each has a computer system to record when they removed the door bolts. One company uses it 95% of the time while the other uses it 100% of the time.
For the market to assign a different price to those companies, shareholders have to be able to tell which is which.
Investors cannot tell. The official reports don't include anything that wasn't officially reported. People who know first-hand have insider information, and are forbidden from trading on it. Shareholders have no power to enter the assembly floor and carry out spot checks. And "independent" auditors like Accenture are even bigger clowns than Boeing themselves.
If you step back a bit, and look at the problem more broadly, it becomes clear that a major cause is the current level of consolidation, across the board.
In particular, just in your comment, you name the planemakers—Airbus and Boeing—and the "independent" auditors.
If there were two dozen different companies manufacturing planes, all of which were required to comply with the same regulations, and two dozen different major auditing companies, the chances of any given manufacturer getting away with this level of illegal corner-cutting for any length of time drop precipitously. At the same time, the costs of doing so rise, as it becomes much, much easier for the US government and various airlines to cut a manufacturer out of their contracts the next time they come up.
I think that however flawed, capitalism might prevail here. If enough money was on the line, institutional investors might get actual permission to [hire experts to] enter the assembly floor and do spot checks. Not welcoming such a thing would cause a huge stock hit. etc.
I’m not sure what we should be waiting for. The time for the free market to fix Boeing and “capitalism” (read: don’t regulate us please) to save the day would have been before Boeing killed 400 people in plane crashes.
I get that the idea of self-correcting markets are very appealing. But there are a ton of situations where they don’t work or don’t fix all of the problems they cause. Those situations are under the general umbrella of market failures. This particular market failure would probably be classified as adverse selection or more general information asymmetry.
I'm not advocating for less regulation in the slightest.
I'm saying that when a corpo breaks laws (don't follow regulations and lie about it), the fines need to substantially hit their shareholders, so that shareholders are generally aligned with following regulations and will demand additional diligence. Otherwise the game will be as it is - commercial aviation is highly regulated, but Boeing is so big that the fines don't matter to them or their owners (i.e. shareholders).
To summarize my objections, it seems like a “punish the shareholders” strategy has at least three problems:
1. Punishing shareholders doesn’t sufficiently discourage corporate management. They are usually fine even if the stock price takes a hit. The fact that corporate management may not act in the best interests of shareholders is a known example of the Principal-Agent Problem.
2. Shareholders might not know that bad behavior is happening, and even if they do, we want to discourage bad behavior that regulators might not find out about, and before it happens.
3. Many investors are not actively investing, but using robo investing services like Vanguard for their 401k. That means that even if you’re technically an “investor” you’re not actively investigating companies for fraud.
Might work in a world where only america exists.
What you are suggesting will instead lead to a downward spiral of investor confidence in investing in American companies, and letting other world powers dominate in key tech areas of strategic interest where investors have more confidence and dont have to worry about gov punishing shareholders with no voting rights by taking away their shares
These kinda ideas often seem to originate from a place of revenge or vengeance on someone folks feel is responsible (here its ‘shareholders’)
Better to just install more government oversight (instead of more regulation) improve transparency, amend whistleblower laws to prevent retaliations that boeing did, etc.
Those are much more important and useful for this country.
Shareholders have the power to not buy the stock.
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> Expropriate the company, at least 51%, take control and let public officials (knowing the US way, it will be some army general) set up checks and controls where necessary
Why? Just criminally charge and fine them into bankruptcy. This wipes out shareholders and lets the creditors—the government would be a big one, on account of the fine—reorganise the company and review all the books and records in a legally precedents venue.
Everyone keeps trying to invent new mechanisms for what fines and bankruptcy already do.
It looks like you misspelled the word fines. Its spelled the following way: "acceptable cost of operations"
See the tiny fine the government handed the cellular providers for selling user data
JumpCrissCross said "fine them into bankruptcy".
> Expropriate
Fifth Amendment says no. I'm not even an American and I know that will never fly. The US is not China, which very much can and does do this.
It's not actually necessary either! There's plenty of scope for fines and compliance orders. Heck, the US government could even ban them as a supplier, putting them out of business .. if there was another plane company in the US.
The whole fiasco is the fault of wrongly approving the creation of a US plane monopoly in the merger with McDonnell-Douglas.
...Fifth? (right to non-self-incrimination) Are you sure you don't mean Fourth? (right to security from unlawful search and seizure)
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/a...
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Final clause.
(this is why unrelated sub-clauses should be numbered, not just appended with semicolons)
Would it not be a possible resolution via court order as a punishment for conviction of crimes? I mean, they killed hundreds, that's a capital crime in most places for individuals, I think collectively killing half the company, or even literally in case of executives and board members might be appropriate.
No.
They can be fined into bankruptcy and effective non-existence, the executives can go to jail, but no, Boeing can't be seized because we have rule of law.
> Boeing can't be seized because we have rule of law.
That only follows to the extent that there isn't currently a law saying that a corporation can be seized due to massive malfeasance. If we passed a law providing for that as a punishment (or if there's already one on the books that fits, that you and I just aren't aware of) in clearly defined circumstances (or as clearly defined as such things ever are), then there would be no problem; it's not like there's a Constitutional right to never lose your corporation.
There's a Constitutional right against undue property seizure. Prosecutors can liquidate assets used in a crime after a conviction, but there is no law that would permit the operation of Boeing, as a corporation, by the government, and any such law, would, thankfully, be unconstitutional.
Powers of expropriation are the stuff of Communist dictatorships. "We don't do that here."
> there is no law that would permit the operation of Boeing, as a corporation, by the government,
...as we have both just been saying...
> and any such law, would, thankfully, be unconstitutional.
[Citation needed]
If the government can liquidate assets used in a crime, then if "Boeing" commits crimes, it follows that the government should be able to liquidate Boeing, because the entire company is an asset, and the ones committing the crimes are, in any meaningful sense, the people in charge of Boeing. Using that asset. To commit the crimes.
Given that, it seems to be a pretty huge stretch to claim that seizing such a company, and operating it (especially temporarily) for the public benefit, in order to both deny access to the fruits of the crime to its perpetrators, and prevent further such crimes, would be unconstitutional. It would also be massively less wasteful and destructive to the economy and the lives of the many innocent people working there to simply change out the criminal leadership for government-appointed caretakers rather than sell it all off.
Again: I'm not saying there are any laws on the books that would permit this. I just think the idea that it is prohibited by the Constitution is utterly unsupported and, at best, an extraordinary claim.
> [Citation needed]
The combination of the Fifth Amendment takings clause and the Eighth Amendment excessive fines clause. The government can fine Boeing what we would consider a lot of money (perhaps even into the billions), but expropriation isn't permitted in the United States. If they want the rest of the company they can eminent domain it but that involves paying the shareholders market value (after decades of litigation).
I'm still not sure how a company cannot be seized... A person can be seized and imprisoned... property can be seized... why is a company so dramatically different than property in general? Could all the property a company owns be seized as part of a penalty? And why couldn't a company be fined to a point it would effectively bankrupt said company?
Edit: I'm pretty sure if a company started selling cocaine in the US, something would happen to seize and stop that company.
> They can be fined into bankruptcy and effective non-existence
Not that either, for a company as large as Boeing, because of the Eighth Amendment excessive fines clause.
Hm, interesting. I probably knew about that sub-clause in the past, but had forgotten.
I 100% agree about numbering them.
This and criminal proceedings is really the only way corruption and malicious behavior can be stopped.
Even though it will harm shareholders, they still have a responsibility in attempting to limit the behavior. (Although from the boards perspective they'll claim they can do anything as long as they're there)
> Current stock owners will loose half their value (which is a good enough punishment for this lack of oversight)
Generally speaking, I don't think it is. If you own a significant stake, you should be worried about jailtime. It's no different than if your dog bites someone.
I don’t think millionaires losing some money is sufficient punishment for hundreds of lives lost. What’s so crazy about prosecuting individuals?
Why not both? Punish those making the decisions with prison time, and those turning a blind eye because it was profitable with at least some of that profit.
It's not crazy, but many company divisions are set up in such a way to dilute guilt, and make people feel helpless about fixing issues near them. It will often be difficult to follow a paper trail and find that yes, X Y and Z were the people that decided on a criminally negligent tradeoff.
Just like the unread targets in Wells Fargo, nobody asks for the fraudulent behavior by name, but the incentives often make it inevitable.
> many company divisions are set up in such a way to dilute guilt
not only the internal structure of the firm, but the legal framework in which firms operate, not to mention the cultural mythology situating it all
diffusion of responsibility as one of the defining characteristics of the modern era
Likewise.
In olden times, the monarch's wealth was the state's wealth, and vice-versa.
CEOs being shareholders has a similar problem, in that the only monetary punishment possible against the collective necessarily also harms those with no power to prevent the actions which were punished because it's not a democracy.
(One dollar one vote != one person one vote; also the workforce generally, not sure about Boeing in particular, have minimal to zero shares/votes).
For this reason, I favour a degree of personal responsibility for management all the way from line managers to the board… and for government officials all the way from parking inspectors to presidents.
The details of such a system to make it fair and balanced are an entire constitution, not something I'd be qualified to write, and definitely to big to fit into this comment.
> In olden times, the monarch's wealth was the state's wealth, and vice-versa
Most monarchies at least pretended to separate the state and privy purses, FYI.
Or like slap them on the wrist, fine them a few million and act as if nothing has happened, like every time before.
Considering how tight boeing is with the government, which scenario is more realistic? :)
That sounds like the right thing to do. And that's why it's never going to happen
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The problem for Boeing is that this wasn't a one time thing. Two weeks ago it came out that they were using counterfeit titanium, then a few days later the CEO testifies that they had in fact retaliated against whistleblowers, then a few days later it comes out that they actually hid faulty parts from FAA regulators and then lost them. Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
To be fair the titanium thing isn’t just Boeing. Airbus used the same supplier
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"counterfeit" in this instance doesn't seem to mean that it wasn't titanium, or that it was the wrong kind of titanium, but that the origin of the titanium was falsified.
> the author certainly doesn’t know
Can you read the author's mind? How do you know what they know?
It seems to me that perhaps all those things considered, they still think Boeing is at fault. It's not like you told us what the industry standard is, or any of that stuff.
The idea that an operation of Boeing’s size would not have the resources or wherewithal to spot check their suppliers on this sort of thing is just silly. The folks squeezing Boeing’s margins should know their suppliers are doing the same thing, and be suspicious of them. Either those folks were in on it with the suppliers or they just didn’t care about their own product’s quality. I’m not sure which I think is more likely. But either explanation is criminal negligence for this type of product.
Companies like Boeing generally can trace every material they get back to the mine or recycling center it came from. They won't buy if a slave was in the mine. Sure there are 7 layers of company between the mine and the company, but you still trace all those layers. This ensures not only do they not use things like slave labor, but also that the correct environmental controls are in place all down the line, and other such things.
If Boeing isn't doing the above they are at fault for the mistakes. No pushing this off on a supplier the buck stops at Boeing who could have solved this. There are other companies that do this correctly for the things they care about.
Of course you will not that many things use slave labor or don't have environmental control. The key is what companies care about.
I don't think anyone's contending that Boeing didn't have the resources. Like tons of once respectable titans of their given industry, they have had a rash of a new management structure that was of the "corporate pirate" variety, that shows up, acquires control, slashes costs across the board, does stock buybacks and bonuses regularly, makes products worse but continues trading on the name of the business for as long as possible, preferably for good but they're also quite happy to run a business firmly into the ground then sail away with their ill-gotten gains. And people contend that most of these issues, in one way or another, were down to that cost cutting. And I absolutely think it's criminal negligence but I also have severe doubts they will see any meaningful consequences. More line-item fines and firm finger wagging from the judiciary that they better not do it again, and I mean it this time.
Criminal negligence on the behalf of Boeing sounds like a stretch. If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource then everything would have to be done in house, and there would be no benefit to it. Are you criminally liable if your supplier commits fraud ?
> If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource
Yes, they have to verify. Verification is necessary whether or not the component is sourced through a supplier or in-house. Verification happens after the sourcing step. And yes, you are criminally liable in the supplier case if your supplier commits fraud and you knew about it, as is the implication here.
Two things:
Are they legally bound to do the verification themselves ? Seems like it would be more cost efficient to outsource that as well, which would just be prone to fraud.
I did not see it mentioned where they were aware that their suppliers were committing fraud. At these large companies the executives only look at the spreadsheets and take the contracts as fact, regardless if a third party can deliver.
It would only make sense that they would do it. We test materials randomly at one place I went to randomly. It wasn’t every piece or every batch, but we definitely sent off materials to labs to get tested. We weren’t under the eye of anything like the FAA either, we were doing it to just ensure QA that out gearing was made with quality materials and not junk. It’s not cheap but it’s not outrageously expensive either to get metallurgy checked to make sure it’s meeting your requirements as per the mechanical design.
Seems like outsourcing to a lab to verify would have equal chances of fraud as the supplier ?
You are (or should be) if you took no effort to avoid the fraud for something this important. In IT, if you hire a company to handle your SSO, but don’t check that they have the required certifications verified by independent auditors for their own security you may well be on the hook when they expose your customers’ data.
I agree you should be. I don’t think our economic system enforces those checks. In practice auditing and pen testing are just farmed to the lowest cost place that says they will do everything. The system has no proper checks or balances against fraud.
You can’t outsource liability to a random Chinese supplier with no significant presence in US. Small Chinese company will sign whatever agreement you want and promise to do whatever checks you need - and then do absolutely nothing. What are you gonna do if something goes wrong? Sue them in Chinese court? Good luck.
If you want actual compliance, you have to send actual person (that you trust - it’s another big problem as that person can get bribed) in flesh and blood to verify everything and essentially be part of supplier team. That’s the only way.
I don’t believe you can do that outsourcing in good faith. However, assuming they did and were lied to, does that constitute liability I would see them arguing they are the victim.
Identifying material on receipt is trivial. There is a handheld scanner that you point at a piece of metal and it will tell you what the metal is, which spec it falls into, and the specific chemical makeup of the material when you pull the trigger. Using this equipment (it's called Positive Material Identification) for verifying material on receipt is part of every quality manual I have ever seen.
In other words, if Boeing was using counterfeit material, it was either deliberately ignored or deliberately hidden by falsifying records. It is not uncommon to get material that has a Material Test Record that is within spec (because not all suppliers are scrupulous), but a PMI result that is out of spec. If that was what was happening here (which is what I suspect), then those PMI results were thrown out and whatever was written on the MTR were transferred to the receipt report or accepted as-is.
The supplier was intentionally falsifying records. And the parts were (near as anyone can tell) actual titanium, just with hidden defects.
The question is whether Boeing knew this, and used the parts anyway, knowing they were not up to spec.
"counterfeit" can mean many things, and in this instance it doesn't necessarily mean "the material was wrong" so much as "they lied about where they got it on the provenance paperwork"
In an industry where you are supposed to use QA and one of the most basic things is your material then it’s only common sense that you would randomly batch test the metallurgy on a supposed titanium shipment when it takes minutes to hours to check and “trust but verify” should be the basic SOP. I’m sure the details will come out. It’s a batch of 10 versus 10000 “widgets”. I’m not saying that’s what happened but if it becomes clear they skip critical QA tests like this then they are criminally negligent.
It's easy to say criminally negligent, but near as I can tell - good luck pinning any of that on Boeing or a subsidiaries executive somewhere.
Because yes, that would make sense. However, even if everything is perfect it’s expensive (and not just because you broke x percent of the product).
If the products have flaws they aren’t supposed to, it’s also even more expensive. At least in the short term. And often embarrassing.
So depending on the incentives and short term nature of the person deciding, there are a lot of incentives to not look too hard.
"So depending on the incentives and short term nature of the person deciding, there are a lot of incentives to not look too hard."
This gets at what has been reported as the fundamental problem at Boeing: It used to have a safety culture, when it was run by engineers. Now it's run by finance people, and it has a short-term profit culture. Instead of asking "will this plane be safe to operate for the next 30 years" it becomes "will this plane be slightly more profitable to sell next quarter". This is a major problem where safety is paramount.
Though in this case it was discovered because of corrosion problems on the parts that should not have been possible if they were made correctly. And they probably looked okay enough to not trigger any obvious ‘someone bought this off alibaba’ gut check.
To your point though, the material itself was correct to a rough level at least chemically. So most likely it was a problem with the forgings being contaminated or the forging process itself being slightly wrong (assuming it was a forged part, which it seems to be).
There is an old saw in manufacturing that “the only way to guarantee quality is to do it from the very start”.
The challenge is if you do that it is usually expensive.
Aerospace does all that paperwork nominally to try to guarantee that, and point the finger at anyone who tries to game the system.
But it is also eventually impossible to actually optimize cost without compromising the quality. So it has actual (usually visible) limitations in scale from a cost perspective. And if someone knows that what they are doing is wrong, of course they are going to try to stop a finger from pointing back to them.
so it’s inevitable when there is a lot of competition that suppliers run out of room to legitimately optimize, and they try to cut corners.
Shitty suppliers will try to cut corners right off the bat of course. Chinese manufacturers are notorious for almost immediately starting to put fake or out of spec components into things they make for folks once the initial ‘proof’ run is done and people stop paying as much attention. That is why Apple watches their manufacturers like hawks, including folks who work for them being onsite.
And there are a nearly infinite number of non-obvious ways to screw up the quality of something if someone is trying to cut corners, and from personal experience - Chinese manufacturers are uncommonly clever at it.
Same with wholesalers, subcontractors, and any other middlemen.
If the buyer is under similar pressure, they try to make up for it with ‘QA’. After all, even if the bag might be fake Gucci, if no one can tell, does it matter? Especially if it is half the cost?
Really lazy post-facto inspections or performatively checking paperwork are also a part of it, instead of actually verifying everything was done correctly from the start of course. Because having others believe it too is important for everyone.
That is inevitable in a ‘race to the bottom’, enshittification, etc. type scenario. As actually verifying quality is expensive.
As things get crazier, inevitably that QA gets looser and looser, and more and more corners get cut - until something breaks.
This is all due to the excessive low interest rate environment going on for so long, and the rising rates combined with a need to keep increasing stock prices causing a huge squeeze. Plus corporate idiocy and incompetence.
It’s no surprise the larger corporations are more visibly being screwed here, due to scale.
They aren’t allowed to be smart in the same way that small companies can, because they have to comply with all the other rules too even when they’re dumb.
In many cases a smaller company can actually produce a higher quality product for less, because they can hire people who are very competent but couldn’t pass a corporate hiring filter, or that hates the corp world, or that wants/needs something that the corp world can’t handle (like a competent boss, or flexible vacation).
They can also have folks like anal retentive asshole supervisors that would never make it in a Corp world, but could produce a better product. Or a chill supervisor that can enable creativity that the Corp world is currently squashing with anal retentive asshole supervisors.
Made worse by massive BS being normalized (political + advertising situation right) emboldening predators and scammers, and post COVID burnout.
Not that small companies are panaceas, they suffer from their own problems. But they do tend to be different - like capitalization issues.
It’s quite the perfect storm of factors. It’s actually pretty amazing Boeing is going through this - though this is a repeated pattern for them frankly - because they already have such a well protected and near monopoly position. Near as I can tell, they don’t really need to be shaving pennies.
And to answer the prior post - I doubt Boeing ‘knew’ (as documented) about the counterfeit parts, because that would require exceptional corporate stupidity. So definitely not impossible.
But there were definitely folks in key positions that knew it was a risk and was likely going on at some level, and chose to ignore the risk due to other pressures/concerns. Good luck nailing them on it, however, as I’m sure some scapegoats are being found as we speak. That’s why they’re going after whistleblowers too.
Personally, I imagine it’s even worse elsewhere, it just isn’t getting the press because it is at a smaller scale.
This is all part of so many folks doing the wil-e-coyote run off the cliff but don’t look down maneuver. Boeing is being forced to look down.
Others will too, sooner or later. No one wants to.
>> Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
This is part of a larger degradation of rules-based order. Companies do not fear regulators and certainly have no moral or ethical qualms about violating established rules. Ignoring rules is now an expected part of business. It is rewarded. We champion "disrupter" leaders who openly defy authorities and tear apart established norms of behavior. That needs to change. Shareholders need to stop rewarding such activity.
> Shareholders need to stop rewarding such activity.
And how, exactly, do you expect that to work? Shareholders are going to pay attention to what's profitable, and basically nothing else.
No; the government needs to stop turning a blind eye to such activity. We need the relevant enforcement departments to be better funded, the policies to be in favor of cracking down on violations of all types, and a mandate from the highest levels not to be shy about seeking the heaviest penalties even from the biggest, most lobbyist-endowed offenders.
There was never a rules-based order on the whole. Something like that has existed for various brief moments in time in various industries throughout the 20th century, but it has never been the norm. We as human society are fighting the same fight that we have been fighting since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Progress is measured on the scale of decades at best.
I agree with what you think needs to change, but I don't think anyone should be confused about corporations in the past somehow being more ethical than they are today.
> Every apple that gets pulled from the bushel is rotten and there are a lot of apples left.
Yes, that's what happens. If you leave a couple of bad apples in a barrel they off gas ethylene and spoil every apple in the barrel. You have to regularly get rid of bad apples before they spoil the bunch.
It's such a great metaphor, it's too bad it's so widely misused and misunderstood.
And importantly, when viewed with this understanding of "organizational ethylene", it's obvious that anyone who resists, obstruct, or disagrees with routine removal of bad apples is probably themselves a bad apple.
Ok, but usually, as we've seen, *gestures around*, the problem with the American justice system is if _theres a lot of crooks_, it absolutely just tries to normalize what the crooks are doing.
There's obviously no scape goat in Boeing. IT's systemically corrupt, which means Americans will happily try to make it look like that's normal and reasonable and "the best we can do". If not outright find the most dull, corrupt white guy and hold him up as a paragon of the perfect saint.
Right, but everyone from the individual prosecutor to the bureaucrats at the DOJ to the regulators at the FAA to members of Congress HAVE to be thinking "what if the next fuckup involves a plane falling out of the air and 200+ deaths, then it's my ass on the line" at this point.
FAA is probably thinking that since they're the ideal scapegoat in such a situation, but I don't think any member of Congress gives a shit about how many Boeing kills, as long as Boeing continues to pay them off.
Congress cares about votes more than payoff from Boeing. So long as voters don't care about how many Boeing kills congress wants the Boeing payoff. As soon as congress thinks voters care about Boeing congress will turn on Boeing.
Do you care about "Elevance Health" - they larger than Boeing according to the fortune 500 list (20 vs 52 in 2024) - but I hadn't even heard of them until I looked up the list just now. I have no clue what the company is up to (health informs my guess, but it is a guess). Companies like them can continue to do whatever and voters won't care.
Congress will do the usual: accept Boeing's money and overlook the issue on one hand, and pretend to the public that they're doing otherwise on the other.
Unfortunately, Americans and the peoples of many democratic countries have given up on verifying if their elected officials are actually doing what they say they are, so taking a ~~bribe~~ campaign contribution and lying about it is a medium-high gain and low risk activity.
As a bonus, you can then use those contributions to market yourself and your lies to the same voters even harder!
But voters care about a multitude of issues. People care much more about things like abortion, immigration, healthcare, gun rights (or control), and yet none of those are seeing any movement or chance of causing meaningful threat to their voter base.
It'll take much much worse than a couple more crashes for the Boeing issue to eclipse all those things to become an issue people actually change their voting over.
Acute current events affect people differently.
If a plane full of Americans falls out of the sky and kills everyone on board, and it turns out to be because of negligence at Boeing, and it happens close to an election, that will definitely be used against any incumbent politician who could be portrayed as responsible.
Politicians want to avoid a scenario like that. But it does require several things to line up for that scenario to unfold, so they have no incentive to care beyond what is necessary to prevent it.
Movement takes time. Those against abortion have been active for decades. Likewise those against gun control.
those may not be your side of the issue but it is clear a lot of voters care and are voting opposite of you.
>Those against abortion have been active for decades.
Like 240 decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
How many of those leaders are steeped in the old ways of airlines, back in the 70s/80s/90s when 1000+ deaths a year was the norm? I wonder how many of them believe air travel has become too safe, that there is profit to be made by backing off the recent improvements.
https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php
Well, these "plane falling out of the sky" fuckups have already happened[1] and the culture there still has obviously not changed. Maybe it's going to take a "plane full of Americans falling out of the sky" fuckup event.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
It's crazy how close that door blowout was to being just that kind of disaster. If it happens later/higher it's a much different outcome.
Because that's clearly been happening the last 40 years?
Can you name someone whose been scapegoated for 200+ deaths recently?
>"if _theres a lot of crooks_, it absolutely just tries to normalize what the crooks are doing."
Correction - a lot of rich and powerful crooks,
I don't think the problem is crooks in the justice system, but crooks throughout the system, which is a monster that feeds itself - with money you buy power with power you can make more money.
This is what you get in a society in which money is the only thing that matters. This is a stupid idea to even write here let alone build a society upon.
This is why people love to hate Elon Musk. Having a despicable character at the head of Tesla is the only thing that makes it possible for people to care about anything that Tesla or his other companies does.
Boeing would be huge news, and would be in much worse trouble, if there was a flamboyant bad guy to hold people's attention. Being dull is an important quality for corporate leadership for exactly this reason.
McDonnell-Douglas culture, which was crashing and burning before Boeing bought them, somehow took over Boeing and ruined it.
By retaliated you mean probably murdered?
Good but I have a feeling this is yet one more of those maneuvers where everyone says their line in the movie but in the end nothing is actually done other than some slap on the wrist for show. Too many powerful people and interests for Justice to work.
And no, unfortunately this is not a tinfoil hat view. There is a long history of Boeing getting away with murder already.
Very possibly literal murder in this case.
CEOs often justify their large pay packets by the massive responsibility they shoulder. I wonder if this would extend to going to prison.
Of course not. That "massive responsibility" is just baloney. Short of very obvious and egregious fraud (and even then, only if you piss off the wrong prosecutor or Congressperson), there's no penalty for being a criminally negligent CEO beyond losing the job (which usually comes with some sort of buy-out, so boo-fucking-hoo).
There are lot of CEOs who went to jail. Here[1] is the list of like a dozen of them.
[1]: https://blog.cheapism.com/business-crime/
I don’t want to company charged. I want the actual humans responsible charged. Can’t put a company in jail.
> I want the actual humans responsible charged
And there are a lot of them to charge. Start with the last two CEOs, add in the CEOs/COOs for Boeing Commercial aircraft, the test pilots, the program director(s) for the 737 Max, the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy, and then move all the way down to the Spirit and Boeing employees cutting deadly corners on the production line.
Let out the engineers and workers. The management always justifies its salaries with their responsibility, then at least when it comes to that, they've got to stand for it. Also it's important that the penalty is no cash fine in any way. They usually got an insurance for the case.
Yes, this might be driven from a punishment thought of justice but it is important that there is an educational correction in the business to no longer calculate human life in terms of money which one may balance against.
No.
"Just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Your manager being a piece of shit forcing you to skip on safety does not invalidate your guilt in skipping on safety.
A whole team circumventing the official process and forgetting to put back bolts they took out isn't something that can be brushed aside as "they were just pressured by management". They made a very serious mistake and all of them deserve at least a suspended sentence for it - it literally could have killed 100+ people.
A whole team of engineers designing a critical system that can crash a plane with optional redundant inputs on inputs that are known to get blocked/fail are irresponsible.
In my experience, large corporations that want to get away with breaking the law have a structure something like this:
* An "everyone was doing it, and everyone knew" layer of junior employees aged 20 or so.
* An obfuscation layer, comprised of several levels of middle manager who regularly shift roles, companies and countries.
* An "I had no idea this was going on, and would have stopped it if I'd known" layer. This is the CEO and suchlike.
If the criminal behaviour comes to light, the top-layer employees pretend not to have known about it; the bottom-layer employees say (accurately) that everyone was doing it and they thought it was normal; and the middle layers split themselves between the two, relying on forgotten e-mails, miscommunications, and placing the blame on people who aren't around any more.
This works for some things, but not for everything
If it was your job to tighten the bolts and you didn't, that's one easy slam dunk coming your way. And they're right.
Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
See the VW emissions case.
Documents get names and signatures for a reason.
> Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
Hell, I'm not anywhere close to aviation, just have an interest in it, and even I know that AoA sensors are prone to failure (relatively, for an aeronautics component), can easily get blocked by external stuff, and multiple crashes and accidents have happened due to that. It's nothing short of criminal negligence to design a system using only one.
That's why aviation has very strict reporting and documentation requirements, everything should be traceable. Of course Boeing failed at that too, with them being unable to say e.g. who actually worked on the famous missing bolts. Send them all to prison for egregious negligence, and maybe the other workers will start refusing to do subpar and deadly work.
Theoretically, I believe, it is not hard to tackle this schema, just don't accept "I had no idea" as an excuse, not from CEO at least.
Yes, I believe the legal criteria is "known or should have known" that it was happening.
If the C-level knew, they were criminally culpable. If they didn't know, they were criminally negligent.
Boeing employees are penalized and threatened for reporting safety and quality issues, and whistle blowers are retaliated against.
In that kind of situation, it absolutely is a management responsibility.
And this is how executives escape responsibility when they are being paid specifically to be responsible. The case against the test pilot goes through court, and the test pilot is convicted and goes to prison, and now fewer people are willing to be test pilots. Meanwhile, the CEO ends up settling with the justice department, maybe has to sell a mansion, maybe wears an ankle monitor for a while.
The trick is to not work at Boeing.
As a licenced professional engineer, I disagree. The whole value of my licence is that I have the power to take responsibility for my work. If you strip me of that power by making excuses for irresponsible engineers, it errodes the value of a responsible professional.
> the test pilots
Test pilots have warned about this issue, we have emails proving it. Specific people have decided to release a dangerous plane, and those are people with decision making power higher up the food chain.
What did the test pilot do?
> the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy,
There is, but it's optional :))))
> What did the test pilot do
Validate the tests while knowing that they shouldn't. It's literally their main job, to confirm that the plane handles as it should.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/explo...
They might have been under pressure (why else would they validate a failed test)? And you can't blame people for not being a whistleblower.
> They might have been under pressure (why else would they validate a failed test)? And you can't blame people for not being a whistleblower.
When your literal job is to test critical safety features, yes, you can be blamed for failing at it. Especially when people died because you knowingly failed at your job.
What's next, not blaming architects for designing an unstable building that crashes down? Not blaming a chemical factory's security inspector for OKing dumping of toxic waste into a river?
Perhaps. But in any case, let them go after management first.
They were convinced it was a non-issue.
From experience with government contracts, aircraft certifications, and listening to directors speak, they will tell people whatever needs to be said to get the airplane to pass a final check to get a certification.
One exchange I overheard with some details changed: >you will get a warning light here but this is the end of the fiscal and we need to ship airplanes. It will break on landing then take one week to get the replacement part and we have the maintenance contract anyways. By then we will do the work to fix the issue before anyone else actually flies this aircraft. You can retest it before final delivery and you will also get a bonus or we have more test pilots who hate being drone pilots.
Some Boeing test pilot was boasting about using "Jedi mind tricks" to mislead the FAA. He was one of people responsible for convincing the FAA to drop mandatory training requirements linked to the MCAS system.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22727244/boeing-737-max-...
It's almost like it's a systemic issue the system can't fix because it's the system that is broken
It's just late-stage capitalism at work.
Not really, it's just bad management, they took unjustified risks for cost-cutting, and the system, both government and market, is punishing them for it at the first sign of something bad happening.
You could argue that the punishment is not harsh enough for deterrence, or not fast enough, but that's an issue with the government, not the market. Furthermore, the main reason why they are not more afraid of market repercussions is because they know the government needs them, they created a monopoly.
The system is mostly working as it should. The malicious players were found relatively quickly, through a mix of whistleblowing and the first relatively minor accidents getting a lot of attention (fourth estate and all).
Don't get me wrong, we need to keep making things better, there's so much work to do. But if the system were not working we would just have not heard about any of this and accidents would keep happening routinely while robber barons get filthy rich (literal violent monopolists, not plain billionaires), like 100 - 150 years ago.
The market can't do much in this case, as within the US, Boeing has a monopoly, and internationally its only competitor is Airbus. And there is a very strong "lock-in" in regards to pilot type rating.
So while there is some competition, the airline industry is very much controlled and regulated by government.
And here in particular there was a lot of failures in particular with the FAA allowing Boeing to self-regulate (when has that ever worked?) and then the DOJ failing to prosecute after the two deadly crashes.
It really seems like a systematic problem, not an exception to an otherwise healthy situation. Time and time again we see a lack of consequences to corporate greed when those actions are literally killing people.
You're quite correct that things are not as bad as during the robber barons era, but that is a pretty low bar. We can do much better.
I agree with all your points. And there is indeed a fundamental systemic issue with how private companies that deliver critical social services interact with the government: healthcare, education, energy, banking, logistics, real-state...
In my anecdotal experience, the EU social-democratic model seems to be the most competent one right now specifically for this problem: more of these should be state-owned. Don't get me wrong, this is a crappy solution too, you are making a lot of sacrifices for it, but generally, these state-owned corporations do seem to be better at delivering critical services, and often (unintuitively) more efficiently than private ones.
My point was that this is not necessarily about "late-stage capitalism" (as I understand it), this was not a case of the open market harming society. Because indeed Boeing is a state-supported monopoly and that's the root of the issue, at least in theory capitalism abhors monopolies.
This happened because Boeing has both the duty to make the most money possible, and is protected by the government because they offer a critical service. There is something fundamentally broken in this incentive model. Either let them play in the open market and encourage competition, or make it non-profit and serve the state directly. A mix of both is a recipe for disaster.
Do you think that issues being discovered in 2018 with 2 planes and 346 people lost and systemic safety issues persisting since then qualifies as "relatively quickly"?
You are right, that is not remotely "relatively quickly", it should have been prevented.
My point was generally that the system (and specifically the current flavour of capitalism) is not fundamentally broken, it has the right shape of components and they are working roughly how they are supposed to, to balance each other. If it was broken, things would be way worse, as we have seen throughout history. But there's so much to improve.
I guess I am looking at it from a too wide lens. Sure things are working much better than they used to a century ago, such disasters were largely accepted as a normal cost of being productive, there was no system to correct them. But that's no excuse, I do agree with you, this Boeing mess was not acceptable, the system needs to do better.
> It's just late-stage capitalism at work.
>> Not really, it's just bad management
I believe the argument being made is that in "early-stage" capitalism a company could not afford that type of management, as it would immediately loose the market due to "true" competition and other "quality" options being available.
I agree. Perhaps I don't have a good understanding of "late-stage" capitalism.
I think that the current version of capitalism is "working" (very relatively), exactly because there is substantial oversight from the government and the media, and there should be more.
An open and fair marketplace generally seems to be good at improving lives at scale. But I don't understand why so many people have this idea that it is a fundamental law of nature, that if you remove government intervention it will naturally become a more open and a more fair market.
An open and fair marketplace is quite artificial and needs so much enforcement to keep alive. Futhermore, even if it is good in general, there are a huge number of exceptional emergent behaviours that are bad and require intervention.
We clearly see from history that without oversight, the economy does not become an efficient market. It consolidates into rent-seeking monopolies, often defended and expanded by violence, controlled by an elite with a self-reinforcing long-lasting hold on power. In other words, different flavours of Feudalism, not always focused on land assets.
To quote the immortal words of every drama teacher and English teacher ever: "Capitalism bad."
It is, and it was, it always decays down to a gilded age. The only golden phase, was when it- ironically was in systemic competition and feared for its life. You need facism/socialism behind a information curtain, to get great capitalism and golden generations. Standalone, its minimal effort and monopolies all the way, decaying to some "medieval aristocratic thats the natural order peasants" state.
If capitalism wants to throw off that reputation, it perhaps should try doing more good. Or at least less bad.
Its not a capitalism thing its a.people under pressure from above thing. Look at the example of the Concord and the Tupolev TU144. The Concord was a great plane the Tupolev was a Soviet knockoff and deathtrap.
But capitalism is structured as a system where people above put lots of pressure on people below. There are other systems that are not so top heavy that may alleviate the people-under-pressure problem. Soviets were very top heavy too.
Perhaps you mean corporatism? Capitalism does not define a hierarchical system.
And yet that’s exactly what happens under capitalism.
As do birthday parties.
Birthday parties are invitation only. You get to choose if you participate. Capitalism is compulsory. Not exactly a great comparison…
There have been no comparisons made, so it is not clear what you are trying to say. The idea that capitalism is compulsory is equally unclear.
Capitalism allows private ownership of capital, just as (to introduce a comparison) you are allowed to have a birthday party, but you in no way have to participate. You can choose to forgo capital ownership entirely, you can hold public ownership with other people who wish to share in the ownership (e.g. co-ops), you can do just about anything you want. Even within the USA, you can find people doing all of those things.
What you probably cannot avoid is trade. I expect that this is what you really have in mind – it is oft confused with capitalism for some reason. Indeed, a human surviving in complete isolation from other humans without being able to share is an incredibly challenging feat, and, frankly, isn't realistic for anything more than a short period of time. Trade is not a feature of capitalism, though. Trade is something else, and is much more fundamental.
I think you are focused too much on theory and hypotheticals and not reality, that’s where I’m at.
In reality, we all participate in capitalism. We all have to deal with this system, you can’t avoid it. It imposes its hierarchy on you from the day you are born, and getting out from under it is a lifelong endeavor. Nothing theoretical about the constant pressure coming from the top down. Maybe it’s not prescriptive of capitalism but you can’t deny it’s an emergent feature of the system, as if it’s an intended consequence. Cant really convince me at this point it’s not, sorry.
No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
> it’s an emergent feature of the system
It is an emergent feature of trade. Realistically, there is always going to be someone who has something you want more than what they want from you, creating an imbalance. Trade and capitalism are not synonymous, though.
Consider the most primitive type of trade humans engage in: Sex. There is little question that the most sexually attractive "at the top" have way more power than those "at the bottom". People will fall over themselves for a chance to please the "hot girl" all while the "homely guy" doesn't even get the time of day. This is the same type of hierarchy that is featured in the larger discussion taking place here...
...Yet is not capitalism. If you do think that kind of sexual hierarchy is capitalism or a product of capitalism, you are not using a definition that aligns with any common usage. Sex appeal is not traditionally considered capital. Capitalism wasn't even invented when these human sexual dynamics came into existence.
> No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
Your words are poorly chosen. I do my best to infer, but there is only so much to work with.
> As do birthday parties.
Capitalism is a birthday party and you're a present.
Yup, in theory, capitalism shouldn't even have hierarchies, but in practice people hate managing capital so hierarchies emerge anyway. We're reminded of that in another discussion that came up on HN[1]. Life is much, much, much easier and more enjoyable when capital is someone else's problem – when all you have to do is show up and give some time.
You'll notice that the capitalism detractors never advocate for greater capital management abilities. It is always to take away such ability so that they can feel less guilty about their choice in not wanting to manage capital. Can't really blame them. Managing capital truly does suck. But it is interesting nevertheless.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787255
Compared to who?
The current reference point.
“Do better” with no extra object specified means the implied subject should improve with respect to itself. Grammar only requires an extra subject in instances such as “Do better than …”.
As a further example, someone talking to me might say “spend less time arguing with randoms on the Internet and performing other pointless pontification” and an listener/reader literate in the language being used would know not to need nor expect an extra subject to be specified.
I don’t understand.
You’re claiming that capitalism is “bad” because there’s a hypothetical you imagined where there could be better outcomes?
Everything is “bad” by that standard.
Eg, “Airplanes are bad because they don’t operate based on anti-gravity warp drives! If airplanes want to shake that reputation, they need to do better!”
…do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
> You’re claiming that capitalism is “bad”
Can you show the court, on the dolly, where dspillett said it was absolutely bad?
IIRC the closest I came to that was suggesting it had a reputation for doing some bad things.
Saying something can improve is not the same as saying it is absolutely bad in all imaginable ways, unless you live in a fantasy world where there is no “meh” only perfection and anti-perfection.
> do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
Not much, beyond a small and rapidly diminishing supply of hope!
Itself, obviously.
Imagine a world where a company /can/ be put in jail.
Companies like to be treated like natural people when it suits them, but then when it comes to liability and accountability things conveniently don't apply.
Need to figure out how to do that without punishing the (presumably) innocent employees.
Putting a real person in jail prevents them from going to work, so jailing a company might be sanctioning it.
The thing is, companies are composed of people, and those people can just go to another company. Real people are composed of organs, but those organs can't just move to other bodies and commit the same crimes.
So, companies are just not people and the whole idea is stupid.
If you have a liver from a serial killer, and commit murder, can you blame the liver?
Asking for a friend.
Corporate personhood is critical because how else can the company enter into any contracts or employ people.
Corporate misbehaviour can be punished by fines, jail time for execs, and revocation of their business license - probably the closest thing to jail time
We could....just define in law that corporations can do those specific things, without explicitly tying them to a notion of "personhood".
I agree that "corporate jail" doesn't make much sense, at least not in a direct analog to human jail. I think the closest you could come to "jailing" a corporation would be for the government to take temporary control of it, go through it with a fine-toothed comb to eliminate the corruption and malfeasance, and operate it for the benefit of the nation as a whole for a specified period of time, then re-privatize it in some manner as long as it wasn't some kind of a natural monopoly or necessity of modern life.
That's basically nationalization, and in many countries people are extremely allergic to a government that likes to just take things.
You need a bulletproof judiciary, that can rule fairly on which companies are taken over and which aren't, and all sorts of checks and balances to ensure that the government can't just abuse this ability to nationalize all the things.
Even though I proposed the idea of putting companies in jail, I was doing it tongue in cheek.
Ultimately fines are probably the only way to go. But the fines must be big enough in order to ensure it's an effective deterrent. It must hurt the company enough that it cannot just be considered the cost of doing business.
If a company is fined enough that it must actually close down/declare bankruptcy, then that's probably the few eggs you need to break in order to make the omelette I guess. A bunch of presumably innocent employees might be hurt by this decision, but overall it's for the greater good.
Are you really trying to claim that the only thing that lets corporations do their thing is a legal fiction that was dreamed up by Congress? And further, that Congress could not have just enumerated corporate rights separately?
That's goofy.
All law is a legal fiction dreamt up by Congress / the legislative body of a country. There's no law in the jungle besides physics.
Precisely, so why is corporate personhood so sacred to your claims?
I wish there were more details. Does anyone know of any reporting that gives more information? That is, the article says this:
> Under the 2021 deal, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute Boeing over allegations it defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration so long as the company overhauled its compliance practices and submitted regular reports.
So, if they want to prosecute, I'm assuming it's because Boeing didn't adequately overhaul its compliance practices or that it didn't submit regular (or truthful) reports. But what are the specifics of how they failed?
I also get frustrated reading these comments here, which are basically "Boeing bad, they only care about execs and shareholders, they ruined their engineering culture." I agree with all of that , but when the government wants to criminally charge someone or a company, they need some specifics (i.e. fraud). It's not enough to just say they had a lax culture or valued profits over safety. Again, to emphasize, not saying that's the case here, I just don't understand how folks can form an opinion on criminal prosecution without even knowing what specific charges are being proposed.
I’d feel better if they start by grounding everything with a Boeing logo first, and then went through whatever years-long legal process this will certainly be.
I might have missed something, but the issue is that Airbus can’t meet demand, and the other alternatives don’t seem to be better than Boeing.
The problem is that a few crashed Boeings could lead to massive distrust of airline travel across the globe. Is that a larger long-term economic drain than grounding Boeings for a year? I'm not even sure how you'd begin to model that. Heck, I'm not sure we collectively know how to evaluate the risk of any given Boeing falling apart mid-air. It's probably still very, very low, but it might not take much to put people off flying completely.
Yes, it's almost like the penalties should be severe
It's already put me off flying completely.
I’d rather not fly, or have to pay more for a ticket on a fully reliable plane, than fly in a Boeing.
If non-Boeing tickets were an optional upgrade when booking, I’d take it.
I must admit I have very little faith in US gov executing on this.
Keep in mind the whole “certify your own stuff” that contributed towards the Boeing mess is a US gov plan
If corporations are people we should be able to give them the death penalty.
I can certainly happen, but it’s highly unlikely with Boeing. They are “too big to fail”, government taking over for a while isn’t out of the question though if this gets much worse. A court appointed CEO whose primary goal is to get QA and QC back into the corporate structure rather than as being looked as only an unnecessary expense.
Revoke their charter permanently?
Sounds good, but what's to stop those responsible spinning up another company?
Okay, sure, prosecute the company. Better yet, zero out the investors and nationalize it. But more importantly, prosecute the executives who made these decisions.
Nationalizing Boeing will never happen in today’s federal courts. Temporary oversight like with the banking disaster? Probably. I think court will require a clean sweep of the board and new executives who “promise” put quality back as a goal for the company. Boeing was fine before it can happen again. I don’t know why this the end of western civilization for so many on HN.
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger
It used to be that companies existed to transfer value to shareholders by doing something. In the case of Boeing it was making airplanes. They build you an airplane, you pay them for it, they had a list of rules to play by in order to reduce the costs of making that plane in order to make a profit.
Boeing's incentives are to transfer as much value as humanly possible to its shareholders. They've made sure that large parts of their C-Suite, managers, executives, etc. are in on this by giving them shares.
Those people have decided they don't want to play by the rules anymore. There's little incentive for them not to. If the Biden administration gets voted out in November, most of these regulatory and law enforcement pushes you've seen here of late (Adobe, TicketMaster, etc.) are going to go away because the people in charge at companies like Boeing have participated in regulatory capture. Thus, there are no more rules.
You have to start throwing those people in prison (or worse) for the rest of their lives and make compensation in unrealized gains illegal if you want this to stop.
I agree, but I think we need to distinguish between the people and the corporation, and stop thinking that the way we treat people (such as the Boeing executives) will solve the system problem. We absolutely need to stop treating corporations like people -- and I'm not talking about taxation. I'm talking about the way we think and talk about corporations the same way we talk about people.
When we domesticated animals, we had to be very cognizant that they were not people. For example, bulls are extremely aggressive and extremely physically powerful. You can allow a person into a room with a baby in a crib. There are exceptions, and they are treated as exceptions. With bulls, you do not allow them into a room with a baby in a crib, by default or by exception. It would be considered criminally irresponsible for a person to say, this bull is an exception, I've had it for five years, it's a great friend, and based on its past behavior I'm going to keep it in the same room with my infant child. You just wouldn't do that.
We have enough experience with corporations to know that we need to start treating them less like humans and more like a species of partly domesticated but still extremely dangerous animal. Based on long experience with them, we should expect corporations to predictably lie, steal, and destroy whenever it is in their financial interest. We don't need to get rid of them (we don't have any good replacement for their role in the economy) but should structure the way we treat corporations around our knowledge of their destructive tendencies.
Our long experience with cattle has taught us ways to protect humans from their destructive tendencies while still extracting what we want from them. We keep cattle out of our residences, we castrate most of the males, and we manage intact bulls in a way that ensures human safety while allowing them to serve their necessary functions. We design fences and other management technology with their aggression and power in mind.
It is long past time to treat corporations the same way. In many small ways we have done this, but always held back by the human metaphor. Corporations are in a sense made of humans, and we feel a sense of respect towards fellow humans that we then unconsciously, and with horrible consequences, extend to the corporations they are part of. We need to consciously and decisively put that behind us. You don't have to be cynical about humans to accept that corporations are greedy and untrustworthy. That is their nature. How you square that with the nature of the humans who run them is irrelevant, as irrelevant as bovine neuroscience is to knowing that we should keep bulls out of our nurseries. We don't have to agree about humans to agree about corporations and stop giving them free reign to wreak havoc in society.
Criminal Neglicence Tax - CNT must be paid
Boeing is the worlds leading supplier of bombs to states that use them to annihilate innocent people. For decades. Every twenty minutes.
There is more to the rot in this company than just domestic customers falling out of the sky.
I would wager that there is a great deal of actual, very real misanthropy throughout the executive structure.
Which states are that?
https://airwars.org/
No they aren’t
https://www.boeing.com/defense/weapons
Yes, they really are.
https://airwars.org/
If you are on a stranded Boeing spaceship right now, this is not news that will bring you comfort.
It’s not stranded, they are running tests. Please don’t exaggerate the situation. They just want to be safe. Stranded implies completely broken.
Watch the bond rating. They're at the very verge of junk right now, and if they slip into BB territory that might trigger a whole bunch of stuff to happen very quickly.
what do you even do at this point?
so much of US flight infrastructure is based around boeing and they're literally falling apart in the sky
nasa wanted competition with spacex so badly that they've pushed boeing to strand two of their astronauts in space
companies that fail due to inherent internal structural and corruption issues need to be broken down and sold off, but we can't even do that because the US is somehow reliant on it
why must we write out our own downfall through corruption with failing companies? i bet there's thousands of upstarts that would take 1/1000th the funding given to boeing for a lot of their important projects that would come up with genuinely innovative solutions to problems we never knew we had if there were actual competition in aerospace
This is what happens when you eliminate consequences for bad behaviour in any industry private or public You can only kick the can down the road for so long.
It’s only going to get worse and in 10yrs we’ll be wondering why it’s even worse than it is in 2024 while people will still defend how necessary it is to national security to prop up a half useless megacorporation, when it’s actually harming it
Let them face risk, let the good/important parts be sold to better leaders, there’s plenty of money floating around to dump into the market to let competition take over the second there’s an opportunity for a new lively major business sector.
It would be less of a problem if the industry had not consolidated into literally two major companies in the entire world.
You want incentives for a corporations to follow rules? Ensure that there is more than one or two of them.
Honestly, we should be at least considering nationalizing Boeing. There's a strategic need for us to build planes, and the corporate leadership continues to show they will not emphasize engineering and safety.
The US military needs to absorb the military side of the business as a state owned enterprise
That sounds like a good idea until you realize that the military does is state owned anyway. The private sector supplies everything. But it's not like the military makes any of its own stuff. They buy all their trucks, guns, body armor, ammunition, radios, helicopters, boats, etc. etc. from private companies.
Yeah, and so does Boeing so own the contractor and cut out a big cost.
Lots of countries own state arms manufacturers. Doesn’t mean the state would takeover the entire supply chain.
I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done. It's that we don't have anything like a state military manufacturing industry currently, so it would be a new and significant undertaking to nationalize a company like Boeing.
Not entirely true https://dnr.mo.gov/waste-recycling/sites-regulated-facilitie....
Look I understand it’s not done enough thus my proposal to do so. It can be done, it should be done but it is not done widely because of $$$
Trillions spent on defense, and there isn't a factory just sitting around waiting to spin up and crank out artillery shells for ukraine?
Carriers, subs, and planes are expensive.
Owning the primary arms contractors would make it easier to shift production into shells, rather than negotiating long term deals before breaking ground to expand production capacity
"In May, officials determined the company breached a 2021 agreement that had shielded Boeing from a criminal charge of conspiracy to commit fraud arising from two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 involving the 737 MAX jet.
Under the 2021 deal, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute Boeing over allegations it defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration so long as the company overhauled its compliance practices and submitted regular reports. Boeing also agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the investigation"
The 2.5 billion sound like a bribe to me, to avoid criminal charges. And Boeing thought that was enough, but it seems they did not assume that the FAA was also serious, that they still need to "overhaul its compliance practices and submitted regular reports".
edit: we are talking about potential manslaughter in hundreds of cases here, because this is what a criminal investigation could lead to, not a fine for violating arbitary regulations
If the executives where smart they would have left after getting the deferred prosecution agreement. That way they could claim that it wasn't in their hands anymore and therefore they are not responsible.
Deferred prosecution should be eliminated and if a company is too big to fail then it should be nationalized and the execs should face prosecution.
> The 2.5 billion sound like a bribe to me, to avoid criminal charges. And Boeing thought that was enough, but it seems they did not assume that the FAA was also serious, that they still need to "overhaul its compliance practices and submitted regular reports".
To be honest it might have been just enough, since nothing was done. If they had been serious before, they would have planned some sort of check or control as a follow up to that 2021 decision, but they didn't.
But then doors started falling from the skies and people started to have questions about what kind of shoddy plane building they were allowing.
That's when the FAA started their investigations.
Doors started falling from US based airlines.
Boeing got unlucky in that sense. Had it been a flight out of Africa or Asia then I suspect regulators would still be turning a blind eye.
Gees I wonder if the federal government would offer Joe Public a second chance if he defrauded them.
That happens all the time. You find a good lawyer, the lawyer goes to the prosecutor and says "this is going to end with a fine of about x, why don't we save ourselves work and my client just pays x straight away?" If the assessment is sound and the prosecutor would rather do something else...
That never happens after an indictment without a plea.
I'm not aware of it ever happening before an indictment, either. People don't always know that they're under investigation, and, even if you know that you're being investigated, many (if not most) investigations don't end with indictments -- they're quietly dropped -- so it can be quite dangerous to do what you suggest, as it makes an indictment far more likely.
I know about it happening in several jurisdictions. A nice big donation to the Red Cross and a quiet chat with a contrite attitude.
Every course of action is risky if you've done something illegal and the relevant authority is aware of it.
If he paid 2.5 billion then most probably yes.
Also, if the government depended on Joe Public for all sorts of military and civilian projects, that would help.
I think it's a stretch to say that a written deal in which a party pays damages is a bribe by that party.
If this payment avoids potential criminal charges about manslaughter, I think it is not.
It's not a bribe, or even like a bribe, unless the individuals on the government side of this deal were personally enriched from this settlement (they weren't.) That 2.5 billion was paid to the government, not to the justice department personnel.
It is definitely possible to also bribe organisations.
The individual members will profit and some members even more.
Also note, that I did not claim it is a bribe, but that it sounds to me like this (as a non lawyer).
Because we are talking about potential manslaughter here.
We regularly use fines to punish businesses, usually in combination with conditions for regulatory or legal compliance. I don't recall people calling it a bribe in these cases. This happens in the EU a lot.
Fines for murder cases are not that common. Boring killed those passengers, a criminal investigation would have looked into that. Sure looks like a bribe.
This isn’t a murder case, it’s a fraud case. There’s zero chance of conviction on murder.
Those people are dead because of Boeing. Corporate manslaughter is a thing in UK.
And let’s not be under illusion that if my actions accidentally resulted in deaths of hundreds of people I would see any fresh air ever again
Manslaughter != murder, thats a difference between 3 years and 15-to-life in prison (not in Norway though).
Also, don't fall under the spell of some absolute fairness of our current societies, of course ultra rich are treated differently than regular Joe (or ie former presidents, prime ministers, olympic gold medalists etc), at least until mass media gets in. And Boeing is a strategic military provider not only to US, more a typical 'too-big-to-fail' category.
But if it would be 3 years per manslaughter, it would add up to life in prison, since we are talking about hundreds of dead people. (but no idea if this is how it would work, I know it is like this with other cases).
And surely we know that society is not fair. That does not mean, we have to accept that.
In Germany, there was a murder case of someone driving a car with over 100km/h through a city and killing a pedestrian. Not manslaughter, murder. Who conspires to maximise profit when putting a new plane design in the air by circumventing safety rules, lying to regulators and pilots, shutting up whistle blowers and in general ignoring safety during construction, aims at killing people. That's premeditated. That's murder.
I would be happy for them to be charged with manslaughter, but that’s not happening either right?
Probably not. _3u10 is right, this is only a fraud case. And Boeing is also providing military hardware, so under full government protection. Trump would pardon them directly, Biden just not foster a DOJ the investigation, while the three letter agencies will do their usual work to keep the civilians at bay. At least that's what I would suspect.
This is what happened in Canada when SNC Lavalin paid millions in bribes to Gadaffi in Libya. They fired the attorney general who wanted to prosecute them.
A certain nation has a lot of earthquakes. They also have a notoriously corrupt construction industry. Bad combination.
Whenever they have a temblor, buildings fall down, and people die.
There’s usually one or two high-profile prosecutions, with a lot of saber-rattling, but the hubbub dies down, pretty quickly, and it happens again, the next time there’s an earthquake.
That is right. It is not murder, but it would be something that could lead to manslaughter charges.
They also straight up killed a whistleblower or two, apparently
They may well have, but the government hasn't proven it.
Criminal charges maybe on the government side too?
Indeed. For a very good book on the subject, read "The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives" (2017)
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What exactly is meant by this comment.
Two Boeing whistleblowers "committed suicide" within a few weeks of each other.
Didn't one of them also specifically tell a family member that if he dies it was Boeing?
A self-described “family friend” said that the Boeing whistleblower (1 of 60?) said that. Also, as anyone who works with mental patients can attest to, “if I die, I didn’t commit suicide” is not anywhere close to as ironclad as it sounds on the surface… (I.e. 99% of those claims were false)
Not quite that, but something like it. It still does not proof it, though.
Contracting MRSA is considered suicide now?
I wasn't aware one died of a staph infection. The other officially died from suicide.
I'd recommend doing cursory research before confidently claiming something as fact on the world wide web.
I learned about the dangers of spreading rumors from Veggie Tales when I was five. We all make mistakes, but there's really no excuse for peddling secondhand information when established facts are an internet search away at all times.
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So you're saying you're here for internet points exclusively? What's the exchange rate of those to USD again?
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The Hacker News platform actually goes to great lengths to avoiding the reception of upvotes as a motivation for posting, and I'd recommend also de-prioritizing the importance of internet points and to instead rely on intrinsic motivation.
And yet, there are upvotes and they’re displayed to the poster. Also, I used the word ostensibly to imply I may personally have some other motivation. But in either cases, the broader point still stands: there are diminishing marginal returns to being more correct.
Such a point of view is depressingly self-centered, and I don't see any merit in discussing anything with someone who is more interested in the attention of everyone other than the person they're actually conversing with, especially when they value imaginary internet points above truth.
Good luck in life.
It’s not self centered at all. People act because there is some benefit to them in their action. You suggested I take an action without providing a convincing benefit. I was actually hoping to help you, by explaining why the types of suggestions you’re providing to people are likely to fall upon deaf ears.
Caring about internet points is pathetic.
wow, 4death4 is the least clinically insane redditor
> wasn't aware one died of a staph infection
You could…correct your comment.
Which had many oddities surrounding it
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"authorities will handle it" is a fallacy that is demonstrated to be wrong in practice. The theory of how societal functions operate is not at all how they're implemented - lack of evidence, corruption, and incompetence all contribute to there being little justice for anyone.
Not sure if you're trolling or just very naive. Knowing and having proof are two different things.
Does Russian journalists and political activists falling out of windows en masse tell you anything? Or would you say they were all experiencing mental health issues because there is otherwise no proof they were murdered?
I'm not trolling, and I'm sorry if it came off that way. As someone not living in the states, I simply had more faith in the US Justice system compared to say, Russia.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
The media are all over it, you may check it, but law enforcement isn't.
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I think enabling Putin is putting a lot more than thousands of lives at risk
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> argue that the US honestly feels bad about that decision
In no small part because it was a strategic disaster. Iraq went from being a bulwark against Iran to, at best, contested ground.
> Iraq went from being a bulwark against Iran
Incidentally, the US knowingly and deliberately assisted Iraq in the use of chemical weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.
Got a source for that?
> Reporter Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post stated that Reagan's administration was well aware that the materials sold to Iraq would be used to manufacture chemical weapons for use in the war against Iran. He stated that Iraq's use of chemical weapons was "hardly a secret, with the Iraqi military issuing this warning in February 1984: 'The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it ... and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.'" According to Reagan's foreign policy, every attempt to save Iraq was necessary and legal.[4]
> According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against...
> Declassified CIA documents show that the United States was providing reconnaissance intelligence to Iraq around 1987–88 which was then used to launch chemical weapon attacks on Iranian troops and that the CIA fully knew that chemical weapons would be deployed and sarin and cyclosarin attacks followed.[263]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Iraq_War#Iraq's_use_of_ch...
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Ukraine is none of our business, and economic sanctions are a bad thing for the world.
Japan in.1935 and Germany in 1939 also seemed none of our business.
Our world is too small and interconnected, and the US is too big and interconnected to the world, for anything to be "not our business", whether we want it or not. Especially a major war in Europe next to our miliray allies' borders.
Regional land grabs are a constant throughout history, including in America’s history. How did we end up with California again?
The fact that there was a war worth fighting 80 years ago doesn’t mean that the US needs to police every border in the world in perpetuity. Your own example proves it. Imperial Japan, alone, wouldn’t have been any of our business had it not attacked us directly. China and Korea could be speaking Japanese today and it would be fine for Americans.
The problem is not even a land grab per se (even though it does cause problems). The problem is that the grabbing party, having succeeded, does not stop, and develops an approach to international affairs that ends up being problematic in the long term. Germany in 1939 did not limit itself to acquiring Alsace and Lorraine, and even to grabbing most of Poland (along with its then-ally USSR), and even to grabbing most of France. Same for any historical empire. (The US in this regard is slightly different, e.g. it did not directly grab Texas, and bought large parts of California. Having grabbed the entire width of the continent, there remained little desire to grab the inhospitable south or north.)
Your logic may work with e.g. Taiwan: I don't think China would go on an expansionist rampage once it grabs Taiwan (or "returns", some would say). Should the US be just okay with that?
I don’t think we have any indication that Russia is more like Nazi Germany than say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the US stealing territory from the Spanish. There are historical reasons why Russia would want to control Ukraine that don’t imply that they would want to keep expanding into Germany and France.
I think the notion that Russia seeks to take over the world is just Peddled by a bunch of Cold War holdovers who don’t have a job anymore. Whats shocking is that many people who should know better have bought into Dick Cheney-ism.
Germany and France, maybe not. But parts of Poland were also historically controlled by Russia, as was Finland, and the eastern Baltic coast, countries like Lithuania or Estonia. All these countries are NATO members.
I don't think that Russia is trying to take over the world, Genghis Khan-style. But I see a strong tendency in the current Russian regime to restore the area of control and influence that the USSR used to have, and it's not a small and inconsequential alteration of the world map.
It’s not anyone’s job to maintain the status quo “world map.” Certainly not america’s. Does it matter to America if Russia takes over part of Poland?
Yes, because USA is a founding member of NATO, and, along with other NATO members, is obliged to protect any NATO members under attack with military force.
(As a homework, consider the consequences if the USA refused to follow on with this obligation.)
That just shows our commitment to NATO is obsolete.
There are historical reasons why Russia would want to control Ukraine that don’t imply that they would want to keep expanding into Germany and France.
But they do imply they would want to start messing with Poland and the Baltics (and Russian leaders have stated as much openly).
I think the notion that Russia seeks to take over the world ...
No one is saying Russia seeks to "take over the whole world". But it is openly seeking to subjugate a country of 44 million people to whatever extent it can get away with, and has issued recent threats to other countries (see above) it has invaded previously, some multiple times.
Why are the Baltics worth spending American tax dollars?
That's a different topic. I'm just making it clear that it's not just about Ukraine.
The Baltics (and Poland) are currently in NATO, which means the US has signed a treaty that states is committed to defending them.
Those countries weren’t part of nato when we signed the treaty. Whatever sense the original treaty made, countries have treated nato membership as a way to outsource their defense to the US, and the treaty makes no sense today.
Then write your congressperson. I'm just explaining the current policy rationale.
Which isn't random, and has nothing to do with Dick Cheney.
Ukraine is our business as it’s a bulwark against invasion of the rest of Europe who are very much our allies. Not standing against wanna be conquerors gets you more would be conquerors. He has no intention of stopping at Ukraine and has stated he want the old USSR back and more as well as annihilation of NATO. We don’t need another Holocaust which he would be more than happy to set up for Ukrainian citizens.
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Careful, you're arguing across ancient demarcation lines there.
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> Who is "we" that gets to decides who gets punished
For starters, everyone that had to get involved the last time a dictator started gallavanting around Europe.
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> Consistency not required
Correct. International relations exist in anarchy [1].
> British media has attacked Indian companies for doing business with Russia, but no one has a problem with Apple doing the same
Uh, India has been given a free pass on Russia by the West. China makes no effort to contain its frustration at the double standard.
> last time a dictator wen gallivanting around Europe I can recall was when Putin invaded Georgia
If you recall, the crux of the debate was whether Georgia is geopolitically Europe. It seems we concluded, once and for all, with no uncertainty, “maybe.” (So we got Ukraine!)
(Side note: “Please don't comment about the voting on comments” [2].)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_(international_relat...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think that’s an example of “bad facts make bad law.”
> that’s an example of “bad facts make bad law”
How? The Allies defeated Hitler and more or less said no more wars of conquest, especially in Europe. That precedent was cemented with MAD and the bipolar world order.
Putin is relitigating that line. If anyone has a say in that (and the firepower to back it) it’s the Allies. (Or at least the ones that survived.)
Hitler was a unique threat that doesn’t justify an overarching global military regime that interferes with regional conflicts. Nazi Germany was used as precedent to justify countless mistaken wars in the second half of the 20th century, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The US has spent trillions of dollars since 1945 intervening in border conflicts that weren’t in America’s interest.
> US has spent trillions of dollars since 1945 intervening in border conflicts that weren’t in America’s interest
I agree. Which is where Europe being different comes into play. Europe has a history of multilateral border agreements with external guarantors, from the Treaty of Westphalia (the actual one, concerning the Holy Roman Empire, not the meme) and Congress of Vienna to the Paris Peace Treaties and Maastricht/Lisbon. It’s also a clear American economic and security interest.
I’m not arguing for or against any specific action here. Just that if there is a group with a precedent of checking imperial dictators in Europe, it’s the Allies.
If Europe wants to check Russian expansion, they can do that. But it’s none of America's business. I don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow.
>But it’s none of America's business. I don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow.
It does affect someone in Ohio if any single government manages to get control the entire European Plain from France to Russia plus the current territory of Russia because a country with those natural resources and that population stands a decent chance of becoming stronger than the US -- maybe not right away, but after a few decades -- so it is good realist politics for the US to try to prevent that from happening. (Americans are significantly more secure than they would be if the US had only the second strongest economy and the second strongest military in the world.)
The reason the US shouldn't spend much money helping Ukraine is that the current Russian government does not want to expand that far (much too risky for its tastes) and that it almost certainly would fail if it tried. (It also should have stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan.)
> If Europe wants to check Russian expansion, they can do that. But it’s none of America's business.
Neither Russia nor China seems willing play by the rules of a rules-based international order. OK, fine, that puts us into power politics — which means we get to make it our business, for reasons we deem sufficient. We're not bad guys for preferring, and exerting our muscle to seek, a Eurasian continent that's not dominated by China and Russia (and Iran), whose governments think it's OK to imprison or defenestrate dissenters or to blow up insurrectionists' planes in mid-air. Does that touch off Russian- and Chinese cries of "unfair" American hegemony-seeking? Tough shit — FAFO.
> it’s none of America's business
It’s as much our business as Hitler was. We didn’t go into WWII to stop the Holocaust, we went into stop Hitler.
> don’t think it actually affects someone in Ohio if the French were speaking Russian tomorrow
Ohio is an industrial and agricultural export powerhouse. 17% of its exports go to Europe, $1.1bn of which to France [1]. Even if we reduce this to a pockebook issue, Paris falling into Moscow's sphere of infuence makes Ohio poorer.
More pointedly: we made a promise to Europe, through NATO and various agreements, to protect it from Moscow. If Putin's in Paris, we're treaty bound to fight him. (And if Ukraine is a borderline issue in America, you know Western Europe won't be. Dithering on Ukraine increases the chances we get sucked into a massive foreign war.)
[1] https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/development.ohio.go...
> It’s as much our business as Hitler was. We didn’t go into WWII to stop the Holocaust, we went into stop Hitler.
Hitler plausibly threatened American security. I don’t see any indication that Russia could do the same. Realistically, Russia can’t even take over Western Europe.
Look, we know where playing world police—treating every border aggression like it’s literally Hitler—takes us. For the last 80 years we have pissed away trillions of dollars and countless American lives defending borders few Americans could find on a map. It’s not worth it, and most of the world (except Europe who gets to free-ride on the security we provide) hates us for it.
> Ohio is an industrial and agricultural export powerhouse. 17% of its exports go to Europe, $1.1bn of which to France
If we stopped dicking around being the world police, why would a Russian-controlled France stop buying stuff from Ohio?
As to NATO—it’s obsolete.
> Hitler plausibly threatened American security. I don’t see any indication that Russia could do the same
How? Hitler wasn’t in Cuba [1]. Putin challenges America directly in a way Hitler never did prior to our entering the war.
> It’s not worth it
I agree in general. Not in Europe, and not with Putin.
> why would a Russian-controlled France stop buying stuff from Ohio?
Same reason Europe and our allies in the Middle East preferentially buy from us. Commercial ties follow spheres of influence. It’s not some random coincidence our trading partners in the Middle East, Africa, Caucasus and Southeast Asia track our military alliances.
> NATO—it’s obsolete
You’d prefer another European free for all? Because again, when that happens, it’s obvious we’d get involved. You may prefer we not. But we would, and then you’ve got a major foreign war on your hands.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-military-warships-caribbea...
Hitler attacked our shipping and then declared war on us.
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> This will go nowhere
As will this comment thread. We saw the same rhetoric on Holmes and Bankman-Fried. Once they were charged it was obvious they’d get off. Once convicted that they’d get a light sentence. Once sentenced that they’d have their sentences shortened, et cetera.
It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right because it feeds into a type of cynicism that has always been part of human nature in every culture since the beginning of history.
>We saw the same rhetoric on Holmes and Bankman-Fried. Once they were charged [...] It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right because it feeds into a type of cynicism
The gp's key argument for Boeing is based on the "Too Big To Fail" idea. I.e. Boeing's deep relationship with the government.
So far in this subthread, nobody has actually engaged with that specific part of his argument. Mentioning Theranos Holmes and FTX SBF who are _not_ deeply intertwined with the government like Boeing isn't really a counter to that.
The cynicism comes from previous "too big to fail" situations such as 2008 Financial Crisis and nobody from Goldman Sachs, etc going to prison for fraud. Fines and financial settlements as punishments -- yes. But jail time for those bank executives -- no.
It points to a subtle part of gp's comment I think replies are overlooking which is "corporation" vs "employees":
- Boeing Inc the corporate entity may be criminally charged and found guilty. The corporation then pays a punitive fine or settlement. (The proverbial "financial slap on the wrist.")
vs
- actual Boeing employees are found guilty and sent to jail. Gp's "this will go nowhere" frustration is based on this scenario which history has shown to be very unlikely to happen.
> Boeing is based on the "Too Big To Fail" idea. I.e. Boeing's deep relationship with government
These are two separate concepts and you’re right, nobody has directly addressed them. Let me try.
Too big to fail “is a theory in banking and finance that asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the greater economic system, and therefore should be supported by government when they face potential failure” [1]. A key part to it is financial institutions can’t meaningfully go bankrupt—they don’t materially have tangible assets, they just fail. (It’s why bad banks go into receivership.)
Boeing is not a bank. It’s not built almost solely on confidence. It, like the auto manufacturers, can go bankrupt without threatening its production. (GM and Chrysler went bankrupt [2]. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean we raze the factories.)
Put succinctly, Boeing is NOT too big to fail.
It does, however, have a deep and diverse relationship with government. Boeing has, by design, employees in every Congressional district. It’s strategically important to the U.S. and its allies and possesses an industrial-strength wheel greaser.
That broad base of employees protects the plants. But as we’ve already seen, financial failure and even prosecution of senior leadership doesn’t blow up the plants. The strategic importance, meanwhile, is a two-edged sword. Boeing has power because it’s useful. Not only is that usefulness preserved through reörganisation, but if someone can claim it’s increased through it, the usefulness becomes a source of weakness. (Nobody cares if Chik-fil-a is mismanaged. They do when Boeing creates a national embarrassment at the ISS.)
The only part that remains is the wheel greasing [3]. In this, Boeing is far from unique. It’s also unprotective against financial failure. Because, again, the wheels stay on if Boeing is reörganised. That may not be true if it continues on its current path.
Especially as we’re lining up for a potential war in the South China Sea, Boeing’s military-industrial ties may be what forces those who’d prefer to look the other way to stare down the problem. We can’t win that war, if we have to fight it, with Boeing a shitshow. And we’re more likely to have to fight it every time Beijing sees it’s a shitshow.
So yes, Boeing does have a deep relationship with government. But that doesn’t protect it from criminal prosecution or financial failure, and in some cases, may encourage the people pining for its reörganisation.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_2008%E2%80%93...
[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/05/revolving-door-lobb...
>Boeing is not a bank. [...] Put succinctly, Boeing is NOT too big to fail.
>[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
Dissecting the origin of "too big to fail" and the wikipedia cite isn't relevant to gp's argument because many journalists/observers in media already use "too big to fail" to characterize companies like Boeing:
https://www.google.com/search?q=boeing+%22too+big+to+fail%22
In other words, the "too big to fail" meme has already expanded beyond banking's original usage.
> many journalists/observers in media already use "too big to fail" to characterize companies like Boeing
Your counterargument is there are memes that say Boeing is TBTF, Q.E.D.?
>Your counterargument is there are memes that say Boeing is TBTF, Q.E.D.?
I wasn't making any counterargument.
I can 100% agree with you that TBTF was originally associated with the banking industry but simultaneously show that this isn't the meaning that others are using for Boeing. This seems like an obvious fact from a neutral viewpoint of seeing how language usage evolves (e.g. see the google examples) so not sure why stating it is controversial.
> this isn't the meaning that others are using for Boeing
But that’s why it’s wrong. TBTF only works because financial institutions are built on confidence. You can’t reboot them through bankruptcy.
Boeing can be put into bankruptcy to facilitate reörganisation without causing ripple effects. (Like GM and Chrysler were.) TBTF as a general-purpose meme fundamentally doesn’t work.
As someone who is starting to work on a defense product, I can tell you that defense products are also built on confidence a lot more than you think. You have to make a lot of claims that your users can't test, so they rely on things like being able to audit your code and testing processes and/or your reputation. You also have to be able to make promises that your products and support (or something compatible) are going to be around for 10+ years.
Boeing has already lost some of this trust with the issues in the consumer aviation sector, but the space and defense side of Boeing is still going strong. A bankruptcy could risk Boeing's space and defense lines.
One big fault here is with Boeing's board. Boards are supposed to control the short-term greed of executives and protect stock value. Boeing's board should do a prophylactic firing of the C-suite (replace the CEO with someone who will fire the rest), putting the engineers back in charge, but I doubt they will do that.
> defense products are also built on confidence
Yes, all commerce involves confidence. The difference with banks is both sides of their balance sheet are not only entirely confidence based, they’re leveraged to the hilt on it.
Boeing can lose and re-gain confidence. (Albeit, at great risk.) A bank can’t; if it ever loses it, even momentarily, it fails. That is a dynamic that has increased as our world grew more interconnected, a dynamic we failed to fully appreciate until ‘08.
> bankruptcy could risk Boeing's space and defense lines
How? Worst case, guarantee BDS’s obligations as part of the bankruptcy.
Put another way: does restructuring threaten their defence line more than the status quo? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a valid question. (I’m familiar with their space lone and am halfway to writing it off.)
> big fault here is with Boeing's board
Totally agree. They seem clueless, more afraid of the bark than the bite.
> Yes, all commerce involves confidence. The difference with banks is both sides of their balance sheet are not only entirely confidence based, they’re leveraged to the hilt on it.
I'll give you that defense is not in the same league as banking if you'll give me that defense is not in the same league as SaaS (even enterprise/F500 SaaS). By the way, defense companies do get a lot of leverage based on their federal contracting lines. It's 2024, a bank can get you leverage on a ham sandwich, and companies are usually pretty big users of it (they are encouraged to be).
> Put another way: does restructuring threaten their defence line more than the status quo? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a valid question. (I’m familiar with their space lone and am halfway to writing it off.)
Yes. Defense contracts in general cannot be awarded to firms in bankruptcy or that have been in bankruptcy in the last 5-10 years. That is because financial solvency threatens acquisition timelines, and in a bankruptcy, anything can happen.
> give you that defense is not in the same league as banking if you'll give me that defense is not in the same league as SaaS
Sure, though I’m not sure what leagues we’re talking about.
> defense companies do get a lot of leverage based on their federal contracting lines
Circle back when they’re financing a $4tn of assets on $300bn equity and $2.4tn of ultra-short term liabilities [1].
> Defense contracts in general cannot be awarded to firms in bankruptcy or that have been in bankruptcy in the last 5-10 years
Is this in statute or a rule? Does the contract officer have any discretion?
> in a bankruptcy, anything can happen
Government contracts are decently protected in bankruptcy, e.g. via the Anti Assignment Act.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JPM/balance-sheet/
That's a rule, not a law, and I am not sure about how exceptions are made. And existing contracts will be fine, but new contracts will just not be awarded.
>Boeing has already lost some of this trust with the issues in the consumer aviation sector, but the space and defense side of Boeing is still going strong.
Going so strong that:
* The USAF really hates Boeing for pulling some Serious Legal Assfuckery(tm) to drop Airbus for the tanker program, only to then fail to provide tankers that can pump gas.
* They've failed to secure all but one fighter program sale, and that was only because Lockheed Martin (F-35) succeeded so hard they couldn't succeed any harder.
* They were laughed out of the bomber program, especially after the tanker failures.
* They keep crashing V-21 Ospreys, their most recent episode resulting in nationwide groundings in the US and Japan that were only recently cleared.
* The Starliner is increasingly looking unfit for human occupation.
The only reason Boeing is relevant in space and defense anymore is sheer inertia.
I think the comment well addresses why this situation is different than the situation with banks - Boeing’s manufacturing and employees would not be harmed by a prosecution of its management.
Indeed, criminally charging upper management hardly counts as the business “failing” at all.
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The real "Boeing is TBTF" list is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Defense,_Space_%26_Secu... ; continuity of supply is why forcing them into real non-operating bankruptcy is inconceivable. Nothing more onerous than Chapter 11.
> Especially as we’re lining up for a potential war in the South China Sea, Boeing’s military-industrial ties may actually be what forces those who’d prefer to look the other way to stare down the problem. We can’t win that war, if we have to fight it, with Boeing a shitshow. And we’re more likely to have to fight it every time Beijing sees it’s a shitshow.
So this is a very interesting question, but it's not clear to me whether it can be resolved until the shooting actually starts. WW2 was a huge driver for fixing broken things (USN torpedoes didn't work reliably at the start, for example, in ways that only appeared under live conditions!). The Iraq war was on the other hand a huge opportunity for grift. Pallets of dollar bills vanished. Someone made a lot of money from non-functional mine detectors.
What's the difference? Well, the Iraq and Afghan wars were completely irrelevant and invisible to the Homeland, just a money and lives sink shown on TV, while WW2 kicked off with a bit of Actual America (Hawaii) being bombed.
The China war will probably have no real effects on the US until the GPUs stop arriving, at which point most of NVIDIA's $3tn market cap vanishes and Americans feel it in their retirement accounts. Then, and only then, will people take it seriously enough to overcome corruption.
> continuity of supply is why forcing them into real non-operating bankruptcy is inconceivable. Nothing more onerous than Chapter 11
Correct. But that’s still bankruptcy. It wipes out the shareholders and lets the creditors, which presumably includes the government, reörganise the company as it sees fit.
(I’d start with cleaving BDS from the rest of Boeing.)
> it's not clear to me whether it can be resolved until the shooting actually starts
Do you have a source on the torpedo story? Hadn’t heard that one before, and it sounds fun.
I recently read about how “the US went into [WWII] with fewer carriers than the Japanese, it was the US that was almost out of carriers in the Pacific in late 1942, and the US that had suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses—not the Japanese” [1]. We still won, as the author puts it, not with “the fleet that [we] started the war with,” but “the fleet that [we] ended it with.” How? Because “by December 8, 1941, the United States had already undergone 3 cycles of investment in only 8 years, with the last being one of the largest peace-time defense investments in US history.”
Put another way, it’s not clear we can wait until the shooting starts. What’s germane to this discussion is less whether that is true, but whether those in government with power over Boeing believe it is.
> China war will probably have no real effects on the US until the GPUs stop arriving
I’m not sure. Unless we try to fight it à la Ukraine, and it’s unclear that’s even an option, I expect the opening moves will involve the deaths of American soldiers. That brings it closer to “a bit of Actual America (Hawaii) being bombed.” (I assume a strike on a CVN would incur similar emotions, though that’s just a guess.)
[1] https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-deterrence-in...
> I recently read about how “the US went into [WWII] with fewer carriers than the Japanese, it was the US that was almost out of carriers in the Pacific in late 1942, and the US that had suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses—not the Japanese”
I don't dispute your overall point, but I don't think this is right.
I couldn't read your source without a signup, so I went looking around. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1353080/wwii-japan-us-ai... the Japanese lost 14 carriers in the war, and ended with 18 in service, so they lost 14 out of 32. The US lost 5 and ended with 34 in service, so it lost 5 out of 39. That's really hard to turn into "the US suffered the larger percentage of carrier losses".
As I said, I don't disagree with your overall point.
As to the torpedo story: IIRC, there were two problems. The torpedoes themselves had an issue. I don't recall exactly, but it may have been that they didn't run at the depth they were supposed to. The second problem was the detonators. They didn't trigger if they hit square on, but only if they hit at an angle. So the better the shot on a ship, the less likely the torpedo was to actually explode. They didn't get consistently working torpedoes until September 1943.
> couldn't read your source without a signup
Honestly worth the sign-up, but here you go in the meantime [1]. (Never mind, Substack got smarter.)
The greater loss ratio claim is limited to aircraft carriers in 1942. America lost as carriers as Japan that year and wound up the year in worse shape, numerically, despite Midway. What got us through wasn’t a decisive naval battle in June of ‘42 but the production infrastructure laid down in the decade prior. We built our way out of the hole, because in attritional war, stocks are less important than flows.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240611165959/https://phillipsp...
OK, if you're talking about 1942 only, I could see it. And the quote I cited did say "in late 1942", so, OK, I should read more thoroughly.
> in attritional war, stocks are less important than flows.
Yeah. And a prolonged war turns into an attritional war. And the US isn't in a great place for that right now.
One good thing about the Ukraine war is that it pointed this out to the US, now, while we're not directly involved.
https://www.americanambassadors.org/publications/ambassadors...
Classic example of "anything inadqeuately tested turns out not to work": the torpedoes were "too expensive" to test in realistic scenarios. So they weren't. That meant a cascade of problems - wrong depth, early magnetic detonation, failed impact detonation - all of which showed up in live fire as "miss", which could be blamed on individual commanders until the problem became too big to ignore.
There's a very high chance that something which is a critical fancy weapons system that has not been used in anger will turn out not to work in actual combat.
Not sure if the last paragraph was sarcasm. One third of global shipping passes through the South China Sea. If war breaks out and it becomes unsafe to ship along those trade lanes, it will be absolutely cataclysmic for the global economy, and while the US will be more insulated from the worst shocks than many other countries, Americans will absolutely feel it hit their wallets on day one.
Apples vs Oranges. In my opinion, there will only be action if the military/security elite think the current boeing leadership is a security risk.
A) they very clearly already do, if you pay any attention to the industry whatsoever
B) it's still lazy learned helplessness
> they very clearly already do
Source? I sort of pay attention to it, and it seems a lot of folks are still hoping it solves itself.
Some of the moves they've been making recently look like an attempt to start rolling back "the last supper"
And I doubt that Boeing will ever be given a cost-plus contract ever again.
My comment isn't coming out of thin air. I'm trying my best to look at the big picture. What I see is that the military industrial complex is bigger than anyone (including myself), can comprehend. They are an immovable force. If they go down, so does our country. It's that simple. This isn't eBay or some couple billion dollar fraud, we are talking about. It's much much bigger. This is trillions bigger.
> What I see is that the military industrial complex is bigger than anyone (including myself), can comprehend
Plenty of people comprehend it, from the JCoS through the GAO.
> If they go down, so does our country. It's that simple.
Sure. The same isn’t true about Boeing going bankrupt. (Bankruptcy doesn’t, like, blow up the factories.)
Part of the system’s vastness is its ability to survive some heads rolling.
You're referring to compartmentalized departments. No one person or internal unit can truly understand the inner workings of this machine. This is by design.
Bankruptcy? There's indirectly trillions of dollars on the line if Boeing goes bankrupt. This is why I'm telling you, nothing significant will happen. Don't be an contrarian, just think about it. "Too Big to Fail", it's a real thing bud.
Bankruptcy means the shareholders and potentially some lenders are wiped out; it doesn't mean the company ceases to exist.
In a Boeing bankruptcy, roughly $100b of its paper money market cap may be "wiped out" (but for the company to go bankrupt that paper money would have to be worthless anyways), but the factories would keep producing. No "trillions" are on the line, even in that extreme case.
The company and its assets don't just evaporate when some executives go to prison.
> You're referring to compartmentalized departments
The Joint Chiefs of Staff are literally above those compartments [1].
> No one person or internal unit can truly understand the inner workings of this machine
But they do! Not down to every nut and bolt. But we can say that about, like, a modern gaming console.
> indirectly trillions of dollars on the line if Boeing goes bankrupt
No? Silicon Valley tends to be naïve on how precise bankruptcy can be. Boeing going bankrupt doesn’t mean every supplier fails.
> Don't be an contrarian, just think about it
I assume you’re also personally familiar with the leadership of multiple Boeing suppliers?
I’m not saying that to dismiss you, but to give pause to your thinking anyone who disagrees with you just hasn’t thought.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Chiefs_of_Staff
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> want to be pro-war, pro-profit, pro-death & destruction
Wat. I said Boeing is comprehensible and able to be held accountable. I also think they should, and will, be criminally charged, and that those charges carry material risk of bankruptcy. You, on the other hand, cast Boeing as a mythical beast unable to be comprehended much less checked.
We’re not discussing war and peace. But between those arguments, I’m not sure how you pull off this pivot.
No part of the discussion was even about this. What kind of statement is this to even make? Bizarre.
isn’t doing nothing actually MORE harmful for this military industrial complex? who cares if boeing is part of the industrial complex if it’s manufacturing junk? garbage in garbage out…
It's not manufacturing junk. It's manufacturing weapons of mass destruction at a massive scale. A few of their planes malfunction, ok. The bombs they produce are a different story. They work, and they fuck up thousands of lives in a short amount of time.
Not just planes, recently there was a problem at the ISS after astronauts docked. Embarrassing.
Anyway i was thinking more along the lines of fighter jets, etc…but then i realized that Lockheed manufactures most of the new advanced jets.
And point taken regarding bombs.
@JumpCrissCross I can't reply to your sub comment, but yes, Boeing manufactures weapons systems. It's their bread and butter. You thought they only built airplanes and partially functional spacecrafts?
> Boeing manufactures weapons systems
If you’re intentionally mis-using the term WMDs your comment is in bad faith.
Okay you're right, weapons of mid destruction.
Trillions?
Military industrial complex takes down the USA?
Stop hyperventilating John Oliver’s talking points and look into the numbers.
Each big military contractor is a public company. You can read their detailed financial reports online, for free, right now.
The big ones range from 50B-120B each. At best they all add up to about 1T - absolutely nothing compared to total US wealth.
That doesn't include their innumerable contractors and suppliers, spread out across the country. In many cases these are the major employers in that region and their collapse would trigger the collapse of that whole local economy. The economic harm of the big MIC companies going kaput would be immense.
> their collapse would trigger the collapse of that whole local economy
Yes, but why would they collapse? General Motors also had a web of suppliers when it went bankrupt. Preserving the value of a struggling company while it reörganises is why we invented modern bankruptcy.
Nothing compared to Apple or Nvidia.
<< Holmes and Bankman-Fried
Not for nothing, but Bankman's exposure was 110 years. He got 25 and that is after a massive public outcry, due to glove treatment resulting in him[2] and his parents[3], apparently, trying to derail investigation. Normally, as I understand it, the system would clamp down on anyone trying to subvert it. So the guy did get a light sentence given the circumstances.
Holmes I had less exposure to so I don't want to rely on just search engine since I am not sure what I am looking for.
<< It’s a lazy learned helplessness that’s always potentially right
I would argue that it shows simple pattern recognition. Some of us are just tired and therefore cynical. Join my podcast to go over trending ww3 news.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/samuel-bankman-fried-sentence... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/27/sam-bankman-fried-tried-to-i... [3]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/11/sam-bankm...
I want white collar criminals to see justice, but sentencing in the USA is crazy extreme. 25 years plus a lifetime ban on securities trading is just fine.
Has it occurred to you that the sense of throw-your-hands-in-the-air, nothing-will-ever-change hopelessness you're evincing here is exactly what they want?
Sometime feeling of hopelessness become a force.
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> Boeing literally has the capability to forcibly mute just about anyone
No they don’t.
> not exactly difficult for them to arrange a Mossad hit on your whole family
Go outside more.
Could you please stop feeding flamewars by continually responding to things like this? I appreciate your more substantive contributions but you're doing too much of this.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
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Obviously you can't post like this here. Since you've done it repeatedly, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Think about it this way, yeah, Boeing is powerful and part of the MIC.
But if you're top dog, would you want your flunkies making bad guns (just an example) when your country is concerned about a potential war with a peer?
No, you'd put them in line.
Does this have something to do with their merger with McDonnell Douglas?
No, there was a downturn in both the defense and the aviation industry that hit Boeing like a double whammy. It laid off tens of thousands before the acquisition and tens of thousands afterwards, for a total of over 100k laid off in the 1990s (Boeing has 170k employees today). They used this opportunity to disproportionately target older and more expensive employees which led to many of their best engineers getting canned.
Everyone likes to point to the McDonnell Douglas acquisition as Boeing’s downfall but the truth is that Boeing executives had already gutted the company.
In fairness, everyone probably likes to point to that because it was one of the primary conclusions reached by investigative journalist Peter Robison in the book "Flying Blind."
eBay was a great company until its McDonnell Douglas merger
Speak for yourself! I like buying F-18s off of eBay.
It’s all bloody Elon Musk’s fault.
eBay got away with it because some of the people involved were CIA officers working to collect data from eBay's customers. https://youtu.be/GnQMuS87gLw
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Judaism is a religion. The people (at least the ones I interacted with) couldn't be more different both genetically and culturally. You are making it sound as there is some kind of conspiracy that the "Jewish people" are executing. Whereas in reality, it just happens that some Jewish people got a shit ton of power.
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OP is simply stating a fact. US MIC and Israel have been in a deep embrace. Nothing was said by OP by "driving the ills of the world". Yours is a tactic to prevent even simple statements of facts if it is against your 'perceived' "collective interest" of a minority.
I am interested in learning more on why IDF has deep ties to Boeing. Such a small country, how is it that it has captured so many behemoths. Should we just ignore this rather strange structural phenomena in geopolitics and national interest (speaking as an American here ..)?
In fact the entire world is curious to know exactly who is the premier "ally" in this strange US-Israel alliance. Who is the boss, an inquiring American wants to learn.
Clinton once asked "Who's the superpower here?". Shortly after he "walked" out of the White House.
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I think it’s fascinating how political criticism of power and corrupt relationships between states has been tagged as “antisemitic”.
I would think that the label would be reserved for statements against the Semitic peoples, based on their heritage and culture? Not the overtly corrupt and often internationally illegal actions of their government?
It’s a very dangerous idea to put a nuclear capable nation above criticism.
Right? I have always thought it's unfair that you cannot criticize a country and the actions of its government because people will label you Nazi or antisemitic.
I couldn't give a damn about the religion or the culture. But Israel government apparatus scares the shit out of me
Unfair in ways including those which result in the death of thousands of women and children and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.
Gaza becoming a humanitarian tragedy on the scale it has is largely enabled by Israel being largely above criticism.
I don’t know what the best solution is to the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I doubt it includes dropping 2000 lb bombs on civilian infrastructure. I support the eradication of HAMAS because I believe they are not only inimical to Isreal but also to the Palestinian people they claim to “protect “.
It’s perfectly clear by now that Hamas is more than willing to sacrifice every Palestinian life to meet their political goals, which are not well aligned with the Palestinian people. However, Indiscriminate measures do nothing to abate the conflict, only to fuel it. Bombing civilians is the best recruiting tool that Hamas has. To bereaved Palestinian families, the war sells itself.
I shudder to think that indeed, the Israeli government knows this. It follows then that this recruitment effect is probably not an undesirable side effect, but rather an intentional goal.
I think this shares some commonality with the trickle-treatment of Ukrainian military support from the USA. We are best served by a slow, agonizing, expensive if not catastrophic defeat of Russian military capability. A quick win would not be a win for America, or for NATO. Unfortunately, this means that Ukrainian soil will be fortified with blood for decades.
I think for Isreal, the situation may be similar. Under the current playbook, “Winning” in Gaza means killing every person that can be induced to fight. This is distinct from breaking public support for HAMAS. It is a genocidal extermination of every person with a will to fight, through what amounts to a systematic process of provocation.
That said, while I don’t agree with the methodology, I do understand the reasoning and agree that the goals can be seen as worthwhile if not necessarily worth the cost of achievement.
Agree
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Because it confidently asserts nothing will happen while citing a case where execs went to jail as proof. It seems logically inconsistent.
>asserts nothing will happen while citing a case where execs went to jail as proof. It seems logically inconsistent.
The gp wasn't being logically inconsistent if you see the rhetorical structure of his comment: anticipate and pre-emptively state the counterpoint and then counter that counterpoint.
- predict other side's possible counterpoint : "But Ebay execs went to jail"
- counter that counterpoint : "Yes but Ebay is smaller company that's not deeply interconnected with the government"
- gp's conclusion: Ebay situation is different enough that it is not proof that Boeing execs will go to jail
Readers' can have 2 different interpretations:
- I disagree with gp that Ebay and Boeing are different situations --> therefore gp is logically inconsistent
- I agree with gp that Ebay and Boeing are different --> gp is logically coherent
>OP is the one who brought that up in the first place, but they are using it to show it won’t happen. Which makes no sense.
Because the OP's reasoning is Boeing's "deep ties to the government" -- is what keeps it from happening.
I don't agree with OP. I'm just explaining what he wrote.
The readers' different reactions to OP's comment basically depends on how whether one buy's into the idea that the government's dependency on Boeing (military, space launches, etc) gives it an unstated immunity. The judgement of "logic" to his argument hinges on that.
Yeah it’s not proof the Boing execs will go to jail, no one said it was. OP is the one who brought that up in the first place, but they are using it to show it won’t happen. Which makes no sense.
I dunno, if it were me making this argument, I’d cite a case where a company was criminally charged and nothing happened. That would be a much stronger argument than using rhetoric.
What they're doing is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman (very common around here)
This is actually pretty dope. I didn't know something like this existed. Sounds like a tactic a natural psychopath or manipulator would use. I'm neither. Maybe I used a bad example out of ignorance. Let me try again.
Boeing will not face any consequences just like no one at Ford Motor Company has ever faced any consequences for dumping toxic waste in New Jersey in the 1960's. This has been a continuous issue for decades, and no one to date has been held to account.
Boeing will not face any consequences, just like no one in the Sackler family did any time for actively promoting opioids as a harmless pain killer. Please google the article, "NY Times 2023 - An Appeals Court Gave the Sacklers Legal Immunity. "
I can keep going. I'm not crazy or trying to trick anyone. There's messed up things companies do, and no one is held accountable. If I was a someone's handyman and hurt a client or a clients neighbor I would be held to the full extent of the law. There are families, companies, and institutions out there doing terrible things, with no consequences. Why? Because they hold all the power. That is a fact.
The real info in this thread is in the flagged and dead comments that were removed by moderation "for your safety". To see those you need to be both logged in and have showdead set to "yes" in your settings.
Let me guess, conspiracy theories?
> conspiracy theories?
Not even fun ones.
This is a huge self-own. Would this ever happen to a Chinese manufacturer?
China is not what I'd call... Lax when it comes to corporate malfeasance. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
With the Boeing 737 MAX, it was actually the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration that first decided to ground the plane. The American FAA was reluctant to ground the plane, and only did so after most of the rest of the world had done so.
This is a case of American regulators putting an American company's business interests above safety. If it had been a foreign aircraft manufacturer, I doubt the FAA would have waited to ground the planes.
How lax they are is more a function of closeness to the powerful factions of the CCP than the scale of malfeasance.
Closeness to power generally seems to be a source of laxness, across many different societies.
I regularly see this kind of logic, that in order to face off China we should let our leaders/corporations exploit workers, pollute, commit crimes and behave even worse than China.
I don’t know what is the name for this faulty programming but it is very disturbing. I guess this is some kind of default behaviour of nationalism?
It's called leveling the playing field. Done by either raising the low parts, or shaving the high parts. Not everybody agrees about the "fairness" of either approach, especially when the goal is to make the playing field "fair".
How is levelling free market if it de-levels the playing field between me and Boeing
The playing field is level. With a level playing field, the multi-billion dollar corporation will obviously trample the individual. They are more powerful than you.
It's a manipulation technique. Not for US citizens, but citizens of other corrupt countries.
Imagine that you live in a country where everyone is corrupt and everyone lies. If you don't lie you're an idiot.
Then you read news about horrible US government failures. If the problems are so large that they cannot possibly keep lying and they openly admit to their failures, then what fucked up things still are there that they don't admit to doing? China at least manages to keep it shush. Therefore, whatever they do, shit at least doesn't hit the fan.
It's very difficult to imagine that a different society might have different standards regarding things such as transparency.
If the US does not get Boeing under control, trust in all US companies will go down further. It makes a ton of sense, just from a self interested financial point of view, for the US to fix Boeing with compulsion - even if it means breaking it up and putting executives in prison.
While my sense of justice would be tickled by executives in prison, it is probably not a required condition to improve Boring situation.
Do you know what happens to Chinese citizens who displease the government/party?
https://www.si.com/tennis/2023/03/29/peng-shuai-wta-principl...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/chinas-sacked-fo...
In China the CEO would be executed by firing squad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanlu_Group
"On 22 January 2009, Tian was sentenced to life imprisonment, while other Sanlu executives received sentences of five to fifteen years. Two other men were sentenced to death"
Changsheng Biotech Vaccine Scandal (2018): The chairwoman of Changsheng Biotech, Gao Junfang, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Kanghui Pharmaceutical Case (2007): The general manager, Ni Chunlin, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical Case (2006): The factory director received a 7-year prison sentence.
Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Case (2007): Two executives were sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment).
Those are much more serious cases though.
They aren't death sentences due to messing up airplanes due to mismanagement or cost cutting, but actually poisoning people on a mass scale or knowingly making bad drugs.
It's not comparable. Those things are more like the Sackler opioid case.
It is comparable. Boeing intentionally and criminally withheld information from regulators. They knew that MCAS would not be approved by regulators, intentionally ignored safety and quality concerns, then released it to the public. It was a criminal act which caused the death of hundreds of people and destroyed the reputation of the largest exporter in the US. If the equivalent happened in China there would be severe consequences. The CCP would not tolerate losing the reputation of their largest export industry. China is run by the CCP, not company executives. The executives would be thrown under the bus without hesitation.
I suppose I shouldn't have said 'not comparable' because everything is comparable, but I still think what the Chinese nationals did to get life terms and executions was much more severe criminality.
A couple of hundreds dead due to bad engineering is better than outright poisoning people by substitutions or killing people on a mass scale with bad drugs.
> A couple of hundreds dead due to bad engineering
In the Chinese cases I mentioned, the executives did not personally kill people. They only committed fraud, which put millions at risk of death when using their inferior products, which is comparable to what Boeing did.
The executives intentionally and knowingly committed fraud, which put anyone at risk when they fly in a 737 Max (millions of people per year). It was not the engineers fault. The engineers and quality inspectors concerns were ignored by management. The executives prioritized stock price over safety. I am not exaggerating when I say the executives committed fraud. That is the view of federal prosecutors.
In total 346 people died, and there would have been more deaths if the entire global fleet were not grounded for several years by international regulators. It's not just the Max. Anyone who flies in any Boeing aircraft is at risk if the company is committing fraud at this scale.
Ask Jack Ma what happens when Chinese CEOs fuck around.
Even though in this case "fucking around" meant not potential manslaughter, but not being 100% under control of the party.