US to Criminally Charge Boeing, Seek Guilty Plea, Sources Say | Hacker News Reader

US to Criminally Charge Boeing, Seek Guilty Plea, Sources Say

reuters.com.

57 pointstithe25 comments

One can dream of a system where they systematically seize all related compensation above a generous annual amount from members of the board and executives in these cases if found criminally negligent. E.g. credit them 250k/year and take the rest. A Calhoun or a Sackler wants to live like a robber baron, nobility, or oligarch? Fine, but high rewards means high risk or peasants with pitchforks.

Calhoun or Sackler would use their influence to see a loophole penned into the law where they can be given a salary of $0 and find a duffelbag full of stock options by the railroad track.

I don't believe it's possible with today's laws but I imagine that if something similar to RICO existed it could strip through all that.

Maybe a better approach would be to try to elevate everyone above the level of "peasant" instead.

It would be nice if everyone had a high quality of life or even basic food security/water to start, but how exactly does that solve the issue above where psychopaths and MBAs extract profit above all else? There are externalities like say not killing people with your medications/pollution/planes that fall out of the sky because you cut corners that aren't addressed by what you say and unless there is personal responsibility won't be addressed by corporations. I admit my bias is farther left than that: I firmly think intentionally privatizing the profit and socializing the losses should be a serious crime with lasting personal consequences. Regular people have consequences when they fuck up or run a scam.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-pushes-boeing-plead-guilty-...

Can't wait to see Boeing in handcuffs for everything it did.

I think this would be more effective if they put at least one executive in prison.

Indeed that's the joke.

Good. I just can't fathom how not having basic checklists, cross-checks, and logs on safety-critical parts installation isn't criminal negligence.

Who at Boeing decides if the deal should be accepted? Unlike a personal plea, there doesn't seem to be any interests that directly impact the board or the c-suite beyond some loss in share value.

That poor middle manager who will take the fall and get sent to prison

That middle manager will be many things, but likely not poor after they agree to take the fall.

I don't think the parent comment was implying any sort of voluntary decision making agency on the part of the person taking the fall

For a middle manager to take the fall, it will need to be shown that they acted without their superiors' knowledge or consent. That's pretty tough if the middle manager isn't a cooperative fall guy. If they're high enough up to believably be responsible for the issues, they are high enough up to know where the bodies are buried that demonstrate everyone else's involvement.

If boeing actually killed those whistleblowers, it may threaten the family

For whom the bell toiled? He toiled for thee.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

Link is broken

Not for me. Huh. I'm guessing Firefox can parse the extraneous period at the end of .com correctly.

It's not extraneous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name

Sorry about that. I usually put a dot at the end of the TLD to bypass certain registration/paywalls (which is effective when browsing Reuters in Chrome/Brave).

Dan: the time has expired and I cannot edit the URL, but could we drop the trailing "." after the "com", please?

How does the "." bypass paywalls?

In the cases of Reuters' registration [0,1] and Bloomberg's paywall [2,3], it's traversing an edge case in the authorization logic in the page's script.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-pushes-boeing-plead-guilty-...

[1] https://www.reuters.com./legal/us-pushes-boeing-plead-guilty...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/blackrock...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com./news/articles/2024-07-01/blackroc...

In defence of Boeing, possibly the reason we have not that many large civil aircraft manufacturers is not just because of very stringent regulatory requirements, but a severe inefficiency in the way aviation regulations end up functioning. Nobody will argue that when lives are at stake, strict regulations are needed. But at least here in the EU, I've dealt personally with a lot of avation regulations, and it is really hard for a government to implement it without the whole ordeal being extremely wasteful. By wasteful I mean that a very significant portion of the complicance work has no real value, and that a significant portion of a company's expenses are in compliance work. It would be interesting to back this claim up with numbers (regarding compliance work being a large portion of aircraft manufacturer costs). Resources spent on compliance work, could also be spent on actual engineering, improving the quality and thus reliabiliy of the vehicle.

Despite of that, Boing may still be a broken organisation, my arguments are only to complement that what is being reported.

We used to have many large civil aircraft manufacturers, then there was a long series of mergers that created modern Boeing. Regulations didn't change substantially in that period, just the willingness of the government to block mergers.

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