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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for lunch afterwards.

He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.

He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.

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It didn't hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-joint-reso...

That's post fact. He blew the whistle before and very publicly.

This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.

I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...

If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.

I wish I could say the same for myself.

If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy.

And I can imagine him wondering, as any introspective person would, “what if I’m wrong?” That has to add to the stress.

Is there a hall of fame to put him in not sponsored by Boing?

> I wish I could say the same for myself.

Care to elaborate a little? Seems like your experience could help others in a similar situation.

Nothing remotely close. I'm simply asking, that given the situation, would I have made the same decision? That I could be such a hero.

But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career, who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a huge black mark in many's eyes. I have 2 children, a wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to make ends meet if I can't get a job?

I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.

It's almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of "importance").

The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our society, we have to "earn our living" or be left behind.

Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in place?

I mean I don't disagree with you on principle, but you're almost asking to remove money altogether or any important limited resource.

That's what ultimately makes our society turn. If we could get to a true StarTrek replicator, then I think we're off to a good start!

No need to abolish money, it would be enough to guarantee housing, food, education and healthcare to everyone. Just remove the conditions for people to be blackmailed/taken advantage of.

Your name hints that you had that, just as I had. It didn't work out so well anywhere it was tried, but I'm sure the next time will be different. /sarc

If you refer to the communist dictatorship in Romania, well that didn't work out, but to say it failed because of the will to guarantee the basic needs to everyone, that would be a gross misconception.

Regarding Italy:

We have social housing that is crippled by bureocracy and corruption, you have to wait years in line to get a flat, so I can't really say we guarantee that.

We guarantee education, but we couldn't guarantee the same (good) level of education to everyone yet. Also we don't guarantee post high school education. If you need to work because you're poor and you don't have time to pursue a degree, that's mostly your problem.

Food is not guaranteed either, although we have several monetary aids to partially reduce the issue.

Healthcare is guaranteed, and excluding waiting times that are a bit long, I can say that healthcare really worked well for us. Nothing is perfect, but nobody is left to die because of preventable disease. No matter how poor you are, you will be treated.

So I wouldn't say in Italy we ever experienced what I propose, just a tiny taste of it.

This gets at one of the core beliefs lots of people seem to have about socialism: that human nature means it will be implemented poorly.

It's pretty hard to test that out, though, when one side of the political spectrum is so convinced it will happen that they devote a significant amount of political effort to making sure it happens, preventing us from ever finding out what a well-funded and run socialist experiment would look like in the US.

Sure, the experiment failed everywhere / everyWHEN else, but we're special. /more sarcasm

Don't expect people to take you seriously if you just bring sarcasm tags and no factual arguments to the table...

Pointing out that there have been zero sustainable and non-authoritarian socialist entities EVER is a very strong factual argument, FWIW.

> socialist entities EVER is a very strong factual argument

But it's false.

Vietnam works for example, it even handled covid much better than other turbo capitalist powers.

And every socialist experiment has been characterized by different approaches and circumstances.

Rather than a factual argument, it's more an uninformed generalization, that sounds too close to the propaganda we are pushed on by media/politicians.

Do you want a strong factual argument?

Despite their claims, not a single capitalist nation has managed to solve poverty. And they won't ever, because without poverty there can't be the hierarchy much needed to force people to behave like cogs into the capitalist machine.

Money is a measure of importance. Without it you make it VERY hard to determine what to do next, or whether what you did so far is sustainable.

For example, at the end of the current month I "spent" five chicken and twenty bushes of lavender (I live in the countryside :D) and acquired two dogs and fifty kilos of grain. Was that good? Can I keep doing the same thing next month, or should I change my "prices"?

Do not dismiss money lightly, it's far more important than you might think.

Societies which aren't/weren't heavily monetized (and did most of their transactions in kind) tended to not really understand most of the basic theories of modern economics. Merchants (like you just described) actually tended to be held in very low esteem precisely because they were applying the foundations of ideas like supply and demand - ideas that weren't well understood, and thus it just seemed like merchants were preying on you and providing nothing of value in return. tl;dr you can't just undo monetization but keep everything else intact.

On the contrary, I would say that money is a (admittedly sometimes useful) abstraction that detached us from the real value and scarcity of things.

> Was that good?

Only you can tell. Has your quality of life improved? Do you have what you need to live well? Then it was good, otherwise not. Money won't help you at all to understand this. Only you can tell the value something has for you.

And I'm sure you do this already all the time. How many times were you advertised a great deal (in terms of price/product value) that you decided wasn't necessary?

That was you overriding the value money gives to something. Even though just looking at the price it seemed like a great deal, you realized that maybe you didn't need a third washing machine.

"A married man with a family will do anything for money" - Talleyrand

This is the basic nature of a modern American corporation where the culture of the leadership implicitly believes there is a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to generate a profit.

There is a self-selecting process where people promote other people who make those small decisions in a particular way.

If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a promotion, or become the patsy.

Often you can avoid this (if that's your desire) by frequently and vocally asking about the audit requirements of a particular business process...

It runs deeper than that. Basic human nature throughout history has been to demonstrate loyalty to those giving you your livelihood. Up to and including fighting wars and providing resources to war fighters, and supporting them when they committed what we today would consider war crimes. Progress as a species can be looked at as a progression from more violent ways to organize to less violent ways, and corporations are less violent than what they came from, royal charters.

Whistleblowing is and will always be considered an act of treason, or direct disloyalty, against those who are expecting you to support the enterprise.

Thats our business culture. You don't really get rewarded for doing the RIGHT THING. Hell your stock options will go down if you do the whistle blower thing. You don't get punished for NOT doing the right thing. Precious few CEOs and CFOs in jail.

Ultimately it comes down to your own conscience and being able to sleep at night.

It goes beyond profit motive. Independent of any business concerns, there's a lot of cultural value placed on optimism, and on appearing competent and confident. Which means that there can be great personal shame in saying things like, "I don't know," or, "This might not work out." There's constant pressure to smile, look on the bright side, and, at all costs, avoid doing something that might earn you a reputation as a debbie downer.

I think that's actually a much bigger factor in some of these situations than any profit motive. Profit motive doesn't push rational people to keep doubling down no matter what; there is room for risk management concerns. But a corporation is not a single mind, it's a bunch of individuals acting in their own interest. Individuals' concern for their social capital within their teams tends to be a much more immediate and pressing motive than relatively remote and abstract things like shareholder profit.

We are always free to chose between cowardice and heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to save actual human lives you may want to reassess priorities and realities.

>We are always free to chose between cowardice and heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to save actual human lives you may want to reassess priorities and realities.

Seems like you're trying to say something in a roundabout way.

These tropes make for easy internet virtue points but "just shun all risk" is a terrible heuristic for decision making and it's rarely clear without hindsight if/when/to what extent the risks are meaningfully greater than some previously agreed upon acceptable level. (Challenger blew up because the decision makers didn't understand how risky things actually were during a normal low temperature launch and decided to cut things even closer)

If everyone in the supply chain padded their estimates to reduce risk and cover their ass we wouldn't have space flight.

> We are always free to chose

I heard this sentence so many times, that by now I'm convinced people who believe we are free don't really know what freedom means.

Today, you are free to choose in the same sense that you are free to commit crime. You can kill the next random person you meet on the streets, you can do that as long as you're ready to pay the consequences.

Does that mean we have freedom to commit homicide?

For the same reason, we aren't free to choose between keeping a job or starving our family and ending under the bridge.

Especially in a corrupt economy that relies entirely on people being in debt to live under modern standards.

Abolish debt, guarantee the basic needs to everyone, then we can talk about freedom of leaving a job.

That's an interesting zero sum game. The reality does not match, but it's a convenient excuse to never face a lack of moral character.

You can quit and find a new job. Most would do it in a heartbeat for a tiny change in total comp, but struggle to make the decision when lives matter but might come at an economic cost?

That seems problematic and extremely self serving.

An interesting insight into the tech industry and its lack of 1. moral character 2. engineer accountability in general.

> You can quit and find a new job

If by "you" you mean tech/white collar skilled worker, perhaps. But you're failing to consider the majority of low wage workers who don't really have this privilege.

I also believe in personal responsibility, like you do, but the biggest issue is in the system, rather than in individual behaviour.

Low wage workers do much less consequential decisions. The issue of making unethical decisions for career is very much issue of white collar people who often have choice.

The hard part is when you aren't at all confident you can "quit and find a new job."

It takes courage to take actual risks and make actual sacrifices to do the right thing.

You are right that it takes a lot less courage if you are sure you can just "quit and find a new job" and end up just fine. I'm sure most people would do the right thing when there is no cost to them at all of doing so and they are confident that is so, that's not the issue.

Honestly your confidence that of course you would do the right thing always just makes me think you've never faced a hard decision, or have always convinced yourself that no decision that would involve a significant personal sacrifice or loss was ever the right thing.

The latter is what lots of people do, it's not that they say "oh yeah I'm going to kill the astronauts because my career is more important", all those other people who overruled McDonald convinced themselves that it's not gonna kill the astronauts at all, so they didn't have to face the choice.

(It's also interesting that McDonald did NOT "quit and find a new job" -- he stayed there! Even though he thinks people treated him poorly and it harmed his career. Maybe it wasn't so easy for him to quit and find a new job either).

"That's an interesting zero sum game"

But its not a zero sum game, its a game that ecourages corruption

Most people believe that they'd do the right thing, and yet most people don't do the right thing when the shit hits the fan. It's like how everyone thinks they are above average.

You can always justify it to yourself -- well, I'm not sure the thing will blow up, all these other smart people disagree, do I really want to risk being unemployed and my family living in poverty for it? We have an immense capacity to convince ourselves that doing the right thing coincides with our personal advantage and convenience.

What can do we do to make it more likely that we'll do the right thing when it matters? Only practice. One can ask oneself, when was the last time I risked personal advantage or security to do the right thing, when was the last time I gave up something to do the right thing for others? If one hasn't been practicing it when the stakes are smaller, one possibly hasn't built up the muscle to do so when the stakes are huge.

If a society punishes people for blowing the whistle, then perhaps that society should reassess priorities and realities. Why should I blame any person for choosing their own lives in a society that would see them punished for doing otherwise? People respond to incentives and as a consequence of this the blame should be placed on the cause of those incentives.

When the choice is so black and white, it's easy to make. I hope that no one would willingly condemn someone to death simply for the sake of their job.

What if it's simply a probability though? 1%? .1%? .01%? Look at auto companies. They make decisions all the time that will kill 1 out of 1,000,000 people. Hell, the EPA and other regulators do this math every day. A coal power plant will kill x number of people over it's lifetime. Every time they make a regulation, they do this math and determine that saving a life is worth the economic cost.

Advertisers tell us all day every day that a living should cost us much more than Maslow’s hierarchy would dictate.

And so we mortgage our agency every time we believe them. Advertising was part of the military industrial complex during world war 2. Maybe we should take umbrage at that.

>It's almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of "importance").

This right here is one of the main reasons why I've worked so hard to achieve financial independence.

Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to do something I'm uncomfortable with, 'or else', they've simply been trying to cover the fact that I'm being exploited. Every. Time.

I'm quite happy to have reached a place in my life where I can tell someone 'No' with whatever level of politeness they deserve.

At nigh-on 40 years old, I’ve come to believe that ethical violations are routinely perpetrated on the world because good people who would otherwise speak out ‘have a wife and kids to feed’. As if that life decision to start a family, for all of the happiness and wonder that comes from it, plays right into the hands of the management structure inevitably looming over it.

I once heard an executive react with glee to the news that a senior compliance officer’s wife was pregnant: “Well now he’s going to have to play nice!”

The employee had a reputation for being... particular... before he was willing to sign off on certain things.

> I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.

I suspect that same can be said of most people. In cases like this, it is incredibly hard to make the right decision before the fact since there are only two scenarios in which you will be redeemed: you're ignored and disaster ensues, or you're acknowledged and further inspection reveals the component failure. A successful launch or inspection does not change the fact that it was the right decision, yet it will most likely have a deeply negative personal impact. The bit about being trusted to make decisions is apparently irrelevant.

I had it from his own mouth that Morton Thiokol had plenty of leeway to make his life interesting (read: miserable) before this, and in spite of it.

And yet did anything happen to the evil machiavellian middle managers despite outright lying to congress?

That should be criminal charges.

I wish they would do the same for some of the recent whistle blowers like Vindman.

Why would anyone care about having a beer at lunch? Is that unusual?

In that industry, yes.

Gotta remember, the Americans are extremely prudish.

For a country that introduced the concept of talking in elevators and urinals? I'd say drinking in the afternoon is a lesser evil, if at all.

I guess we're digressing, but I don't think the US introduced urinals. And I fail to see how talking in elevators is incompatible with being a prude (or is there some subtle sexual innuendo that's flying over my head here?)

I think they meant “talking in urinals”

Ah, I'm an idiot – thanks :-)

Case in point: A city clerk near where I live recently made the TV news for drinking a Corona during a Zoom meeting.

https://turnto10.com/news/local/woonsocket-city-clerk-seen-d...

"A bad look", that's so stupid. Who the hell cares if you have a beer? It's not like you're chugging a bottle of whiskey.

Where I work no one would even blink. I typically turn my camera off when eating, but I don't think anyone would care if I didn't.

Seriously, this is a firing offense at my company.

It mostly centers around driving company vehicles in writing but the company makes no effort to hide the religious roots right on the public website.

I've lived all over the United States. The local culture varies drastically. Where I work, no one would even blink if I opened a beer in the office, let alone on a video call. They typically send us DoorDash vouchers whenever we have to do lunch calls.

Gotta remember, some humans will eagerly paint another group with a broad brush due to jealousy, fear or ignorance.

You forget that the US is incredibly heterogenous and the distribution of moral flavors varies widely. I have found Europeans to be prudish in certain domains when compared to mass US opinions (e.g. relatively conservative attitudes toward casual drug use in Scandinavia)

Not in a casual setting, but when you're on lunch break and going back to work/a conference/whatever else you're doing professionally after that, it is unusual (and not only in the US, even the Germans, who love beer, tend to only indulge in it after "Feierabend").

At least in Bavaria, it's perfectly acceptable to have a beer mixed with lemonade ("Radler") during lunch.

Got taken over by a foreign company, first thing was a complete ban on alcohol, second was an attempt to replace all our systems with Windows. We produce software for Linux, our customers run Linux, the first few weeks were not very impressive.

Saw another corporate takeover from another point of view, that of the acquiring company. The company being acquired used Windows, C#, MSSQL etc for everything. At first nothing was changed, they could use their technology and we could use ours (we used free open source technologies). But they weren't very profitable or efficient. They paid large amounts of money for licenses. Some years later they had managed to move some of their stuff to the cloud but they were now in that particular cloud vendor lock in, paying a lot of fees there. Five years later, almost everything there was shut down and development moved to headquarters to be done with almost a blank slate by mostly new hires.

Buying companies is hard. I'm pretty sure this was a big net negative for the buyer.

I accept that it isn't easy and the requirements were lessened, weeks after they tried to enforce them. One of my dev. systems now dual boots into windows, it will probably be stuck in update hell if I ever need it.

In London it seems to be that if the pints get too many and your boss is with you, you don't return to work :)

Because "keeping it reasonable" doesn't scale so BigCos frequently dis-allow drinking during/immediately prior to work as a blanket policy in order to have grounds for firing anyone who does it to excess.

Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.

Well there is safety critical work, it's not hypocritical that we dont allow drinking where we know it kills people.

Whats hypocritical is that safety critical work pays worse than being a useless busybody with an inflated title.

I come from a country where lunch is a sandwich behind your computer. Sounds bad but it means you get to clock out at 5.

Five isn't early though..

It can be.

If it is five in the morning yes. Otherwise early would be earlier than the norm which in most of the world is four (16).

Made me chuckle too. In Montreal or Frankfurt the question would be "Why would you have lunch without your favourite beverage"?

The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)

My team is in Canada. When I visited them (pre-pandemic) it was routine for the group to have a beer at lunch and maybe even two on a Friday. I've literally never seen anyone do that on any team I've worked on in the States and I've heard it both implied and stated directly, depending on the boss, that doing so could lead to termination. I ordered a beer a few times on those trips and it felt scandalous!

Yeah, the lunch beer is gently frowned upon in most places in the US.

Wow. Where can I go to read more about all this? Especially the part about dunking on his VP?

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