Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees to pay over $2.5B

Do you mean the 2019 macbook pro that can't use the iGPU for multiple monitors so it overheats every time I plug in an external monitor? Or do you want the older macbooks that the keyboard would break from dust exposure requiring the entire laptop to be replaced?

Or the airpods with non-replaceable batteries so you have to get new airpods for $49+ a piece every couple years?

They aren't perfect and IMO haven't been in a long time. That said, the build quality is good, and I chose to get a macbook as my work computer as a software developer and don't regret it, but I wish people would stop putting apple on a pedestal as the example of perfection.

They prioritize form over function in their Lightning cables. Inadequate strain relief is a far more consequential problem in an airplane wing. I can't see Apple practices being applicable to mission critical fields like transport engineering (with high regulatory burden). They're different worlds. Apple also simply has a huge amount of money from hardware and software (App store etc.). I suspect they're far looser with resources for their teams than Boeing, whose mechanical/aerospace engineers have salaries a fraction of most Apple engineers.

Edit: Overarching point is that Apple has a focus on aesthetics that is far less important in aerospace engineering, and has no experience on ensuring human safety.

I'm not sure if the years of poor and failing keyboards on the MacBook or the ongoing stage light screen failures due to the poor decision to permanently connect the ribbon to the screen (turning a $5 repair into a $500 repair) bare this out.

> Think about the quality of their hardware products.

I thought about their butterfly keyboards and didn't want to think further.

Is the M1 that revolutionary? It seems more like the culmination of technology that has been around for years. Rosetta 2 is the most impressive part, and even that is kinda the most obvious method of x86 emulation that doesnt suck

I was listening to an interview with AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and I was surprised at how casually she was using technical terminology while explaining complex industrial process optimization techniques her company was working on.

I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock.

But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm.

I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...

The motivation was not perceived cost benefits, but actual costs of their customers. Retraining pilots and qualifying them would have meant new operational costs for airlines operating the 737 Max negating the benefit of the more efficient bigger engines. That pushed Boeing to try to make the Max series fly "like" a regular 737. Problem is that they couldn't hide the fact that crappy software written by $7/hour coders is a poor substitute for an airframe scaled up to match the bigger engine size. Deaths were inevitable when they decided to lie to the pilots about what was actually going on. Done correctly, the software fix could have been workable, but the design of MCAS was piss poor.

Er....?

The implementation sure was. As directed by company management + execs.

Tim Cook has a bachelor engineering degree but he hasn't been involved in engineering work since the 90s. He's been the head of operations, making business decisions like closing down factories and outsourcing production, since his days at IBM. He is a supply chain wonk, which is why he got an MBA (supply chain management is a core part of business school teachings). This is also easily available information. Cook has been "focused on business and profits" for decades, and yet you act like he is an example of a great "engineer" in charge.

You need both. I've worked at places that were all subject-matter and no business expertise. Companies like that fail.

> My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product.

But isn't focusing on business and profits also focusing on safety of your products since you want to make sure your planes don't crash and passengers come to their destination alive and unharmed.

I feel this.

If Boeing's products went down that frequently, I wouldn't fly.

The max was developed and launched by Dennis Muilenberg. Muilenberg was President and then CEO of Boeing for 7 of the 8 years that the MAX was under development and launch. McNerney was only there for 4 of those years.

You can argue all you want about who shoulders more responsibility, but Muilenberg was an executive throughout the entire program, and more importantly, was the CEO who oversaw the decision for the certification of the MAX prior to first flight, which was the critically faulty decision.

Oh, I don't blame him at all. A commercial airliner is a decade long project to undertake. However its clear he was not the leader to lead a company through a crisis.

It seems like the problem with Boeing is that they acquired a failing company (McDonnell-Douglas), but then kept all the executives and let them run Boeing, even though they'd just ruined the last company.

Maybe they preferred that over letting some pleb engineer into the executive aristocracy.

>Sure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering.

Many here have misunderstood you,conflating the the stereotypical MBA type ( who is a essentially a con man) with an MBA degree. A 'mindset' of engineering BTW has to to be explained to the non-engineering personalities. Besides the obvious inclination for technical things, the next best trait is perhaps that of integrity. You really cannot put together a working great product unless there is there is a commitment at several levels, all of which could be loosely lumped under the personality trait of integrity.

All things considered, there is a stark difference between a job whose primary focus is to build a physical thing and a job whose primary focus is to build a digital thing.

Boeing isn’t a remote company, so it’s not a contradiction.

If you read into most of the arguments for remote-friendly workplaces, step one is cultural changes.

One could argue there are differences between us mere code monkeys playing with fancy gadgets and a company in charge of the lives of thousands of people every single day.

I dont think that techies are outlier here. Despite the profession, most people think they can do their boss's job better.

"dlc"? What does that mean

True. But the hazard analysis reported in the Seattle Times showed Boeing listed it a hazardous failure item. Ignoring that it should have been classified as “catastrophic” because of its ability to cause a loss of aircraft, even at the “hazardous” level their procedures made a redundant element required.

Required, not optional if the customer pays enough.

Actually I wonder how having two sensors is a good idea, anyways. There is no quorum of two, if one of the sensors is off, what's the actual angle of attack?

I dont understand much of redundancy of sensors, yet '3' would allow to ignore the 'bogus' reading.

Schedule matters, especially in long lead items. The problem becomes when schedule overrides good judgement regarding safety. My personal opinion is this is largely rooted in human cognitive biases that make us bad at objectively assessing risk. We just aren’t wired to think statistically and then we have multitudes of biases that undermine our ability to make judgement, especially about low probability events.

I wonder if the implication is that being run like an “engineering firm” is no longer able to produce a competitive company culture. What the MBA vs Engineer framing doesn’t do is explain why other organizations run by engineers have had the same type of mistakes. I think there’s a more general through line

The mainstream and most-politically-accepted economics of the day in western countries is state-capitalism (the levels of state vs capitalism is debatable in various countries and is obviously never stable). I think this is what the standard downside of that economic system looks like in practice... plenty of regulatory capture + moral hazards due to low punishments when 'caught' + little if any competition.

Like most things in economics the best route is looking for the least-bad option. We will find out over time if the state-capitalism balancing act really is the best, assuming there are any realistic alternatives and/or the scales/ratios of state vs capitalism are meaningfully measurable.

This experiment is only decades old in the modern technological era and one could argue it has only really peaked in the last two decades, with ever more industries getting merged to this day (which Corona will accelerate no doubt, just like 9/11 did with the US defense industry).

The state/nationalism part of this means these potentially poorly run companies could stay propped up for decades, despite the industry's potential in other forms.

I recently spent time reading about some chartered airline companies from the 70/80s and their stories is probably the best example of this sort of slow march towards industry conglomeration, with plenty of state involvement and protection. It probably provides a good timeline to base this stuff on and at a minimum plenty of analogies.

One example (see History): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Airways

There are some very poorly run companies about the place ...

You’d be surprised how often they do.

This already occurs with SOX, it's definitely a workable model for processes and decisions not just impacting the finical statements.

"Knew or should have known". If you're a C-level exec, and you don't know, it's your fault that you don't know.

Almost. This is not as clear cut as it seems.

Because it's saying "criminal monetary amount" but I'm not sure this refers to all compensations. Maybe it's only compensations in the US?

A lot of talks with customers were confidential and probably did not involve only monetary compensation

Sadly, victims in poorer countries are considered worth less. See also: Union Carbide.

If you ask an average American from either side they will probably agree that white collar criminals should face tougher consequences. If you ask an average politician from either side, they will probably agree on the opposite.

Ideal scenario for free market capitalist.

Low regulations AND low government involvement.

So lots of people can build widgets. Companies that do a bad job find they have no customers.

New companies pop up, do a better job and things get cheaper and or better.

High regulations means that new companies need massive capital to enter the market. So much so that no one bothers.

When only 1 company builds a widget. Well odds are it’s going to be low quality and expensive.

Now this all has to balanced that you don’t massive unsafe planes flying around by companies that have no reputation to preserve.

Whoops, we took out the Golden Gate Bridge, again. We will go out of business and company mark 3 will try again

> most elected US officials are corporatists and not willing to bite (or even upset) the hand that feeds them

This seems like a clear fact, and yet many will call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the obvious. It's probably a symptom of the tribalist aspect of red vs blue. People need to be de-programmed of the team sports to finally realize that their "side" is beholden to corporations and not the people. Only then will we see real action to criminalize white collar behavior.

As someone recently described it to me: lawmakers vote for punishments they can't envision themselves ever receiving.

>Politicians are unlikely to because they can better relate to white collar criminals than the poor.

It also has something to do with plausible deniability and inability to prove intent with white collar crimes.

How would you be able to prove someone intentionally mis-valued assets? Cut costs specifically to bolster one's own income and not benefit the other shareholders? Hired someone in exchange for a favor or possible future favor? Fired someone for stepping out of line?

Plausible deniability is also the reason for "productive" in person lunch meetings and golf outings. Not that there aren't other positive aspects of in person conversations, but lack of a permanent record is one of its aspects, and can easily be used to cause harm.

And what would that solve? White collar crime won't be affected at all

As long as we still punish them enough to make engaging in petty "crime with a victim" not worth it.

None of this SF bull-crap where we basically don't punish the bike thieves, shoplifters and porch pirates but still find people hundreds of dollars for doing donuts in empty parking lots or not obtaining a permit before building a deck on their own house.

I'm fine with not doing squat to deter victimless crime but we can't allow the punishments for crime with a victim to be so low that it's more lucrative than a real job even after being caught many times.

>since it really did kill a bunch of people.

No one can prove a specific Boeing executive's actions caused people to die. There would have to be an email from the executive stating

"I think we should cut costs here and here and I acknowledge this may cause x% of passengers to die".

And they're not going to put something like this in an email either:

"Meet with the guy that used to work for us who now works at the FAA and get him to waive or lower so and so standards so this plane can fly and we'll owe him".

> is it not the generally held belief that VC stands for Vulture Capital?

For what it's worth, I've been reading HN for over a decade, and am a co-founder of a now almost decade old startup and have never seen this phrase

But maybe I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I usually see Vulture Capitalism used more in reference to PE, where mature but distressed firms are purchased, with a focus on "cutting costs," and then chopped up and resold after being ravaged. Venture capital, on the other hand, is almost the opposite, as it cares little about costs in the pursuit of growth by any means possible.

I mean, they very much should be shamed for that when viewed in context with the rest of their awful management.

In a vacuum, sure, it's not a bad thing to return profits to shareholders, but that's only like 1/10th of the story here.

Alright. Then any company that participates in share buyback obviously shouldn't get any stimulus money, then right? Because if they have that much cash on hand, they should give it to shareholders instead of investing in the company or saving it for lean times.

I can't tell if this is a serious question or satire, but why in the ever-loving fuck does it matter their nationality?

It just happened that they were non-Americans. Americans could have had the same fate on 737 MAX. It's not like those non-American pilots were stupid or anything. They were simply hidden some information about operating the plane.

At the end of the day you have to punish a human. And following your suggestion would punish a lot of uninvolved humans.

How would you suspend a company?

It would have to close all offices/manufacturing sites and fire all employees.

Suppliers and customers would have to be compensated, which would also probably result in lots of lawsuits.

It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there.

Suspending is more or less equivalent to just shutting it down.

But yeah, a 2.5 billion fine is not much more than a slap on the wrist for a company with a revenue of 76 billion (2019).

Take a look at the defense fleet that Boeing supports: https://www.boeing.com/defense/

> I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail

Because...it's an abstraction that is not physically embodied and can't be imprisoned.

> a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time?

Suspending a corporate charter isn't equivalent to jail, it's equivalent to a reversible death penalty; the corporate charter is the source of legal existence of the corporation. Without a charter the corporation doesn't exist, can't be subject of legal action, can't own property, etc.

I'm not really convinced that that makes any sense as a punishment (or even that temporary impairment that would be more analogous to imprisonment would.)

People can be remediated by that kind of punishment, maybe, but abstractions like corporations probably cannot. Better to either dissolve them or exclude the bad individual actors from them and let them continue.

Well, "jailing" a company by suspending its operations is more like starving a living thing. That'd be more like a death penalty.

I do believe if we had any social imagination at all we could think of many many ways to materially punish bad actors. Like forcing a negative dividend, punishing/fining executives or board members personally, etc. People who own and control corporations need to have some skin in the game. Fines that are expended (or worse, appealed in court and subsequently never paid) are, evidently, too far removed.