8 ms·

I don’t want to company charged. I want the actual humans responsible charged. Can’t put a company in jail.

sofixa 2y ago
> 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.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  It's almost like it's a systemic issue the system can't fix because it's the system that is broken
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    It's just late-stage capitalism at work.
    - promiseofbeans 2y ago
      To quote the immortal words of every drama teacher and English teacher ever: "Capitalism bad."
      - dspillett 2y ago
        If capitalism wants to throw off that reputation, it perhaps should try doing more good. Or at least less bad.
        zmgsabst 2y ago
        Compared to who?
        drawkward 2y ago
        Itself, obviously.
        dspillett 2y ago
        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.
        zmgsabst 2y ago
        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?
        dspillett 2y ago
        > 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!
        smegger001 2y ago
        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.
        ModernMech 2y ago
        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.
        randomdata 2y ago
        Perhaps you mean corporatism? Capitalism does not define a hierarchical system.
        ModernMech 2y ago
        And yet that’s exactly what happens under capitalism.
        randomdata 2y ago
        As do birthday parties.
        sobkas 2y ago
        > As do birthday parties. Capitalism is a birthday party and you're a present.
        randomdata 2y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787255
      - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
        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.
    - oersted 2y ago
      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.
      - fransje26 2y ago
        > 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.
        oersted 2y ago
        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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Mashimo 2y ago
  What did the test pilot do? > the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy, There is, but it's optional :))))
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > 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/explosive-text-messages-reveal-boeing-knew-of-mcas-aggression-in-2016-and-misled-faa/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/explo...
    - amelius 2y ago
      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.
      - sofixa 2y ago
        > 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?
        amelius 2y ago
        Perhaps. But in any case, let them go after management first.
      - instagib 2y ago
        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.
- rhetenor 2y ago
  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.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - michaelt 2y ago
      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.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > 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.
beAbU 2y ago
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.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  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.
  - nickserv 2y ago
    If you have a liver from a serial killer, and commit murder, can you blame the liver? Asking for a friend.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    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
    - danaris 2y ago
      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.

> 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.

lyu07282 2y ago
It's almost like it's a systemic issue the system can't fix because it's the system that is broken
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  It's just late-stage capitalism at work.
  - promiseofbeans 2y ago
    To quote the immortal words of every drama teacher and English teacher ever: "Capitalism bad."
    - dspillett 2y ago
      If capitalism wants to throw off that reputation, it perhaps should try doing more good. Or at least less bad.
      - zmgsabst 2y ago
        Compared to who?
        drawkward 2y ago
        Itself, obviously.
        dspillett 2y ago
        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.
        zmgsabst 2y ago
        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?
        dspillett 2y ago
        > 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!
      - smegger001 2y ago
        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.
        ModernMech 2y ago
        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.
        randomdata 2y ago
        Perhaps you mean corporatism? Capitalism does not define a hierarchical system.
        ModernMech 2y ago
        And yet that’s exactly what happens under capitalism.
        randomdata 2y ago
        As do birthday parties.
        sobkas 2y ago
        > As do birthday parties. Capitalism is a birthday party and you're a present.
        randomdata 2y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787255
    - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
      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.
  - oersted 2y ago
    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.
    - fransje26 2y ago
      > 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.
      - oersted 2y ago
        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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Mashimo 2y ago
What did the test pilot do? > the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy, There is, but it's optional :))))
- sofixa 2y ago
  > 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/explosive-text-messages-reveal-boeing-knew-of-mcas-aggression-in-2016-and-misled-faa/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/explo...
  - amelius 2y ago
    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.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > 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?
      - amelius 2y ago
        Perhaps. But in any case, let them go after management first.
    - instagib 2y ago
      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.
rhetenor 2y ago
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.
- sofixa 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelt 2y ago
    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.
ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> 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.

beAbU 2y ago

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.

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
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.
- nickserv 2y ago
  If you have a liver from a serial killer, and commit murder, can you blame the liver? Asking for a friend.
- FredPret 2y ago
  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
  - danaris 2y ago
    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.